It has been well documented that an increasingly vocal minority of Americans (British too according to a recent New York Times article) think that the threat of global warming is overblown, nonexistent, or at the very least, not manmade.

I suppose the headline of this post is a bit of a, “duh.” We all know brands matter … that’s why we spend so much money building and defending them.
In all the discussions and theories, though, around why consumers choose green products, there’s little discussion of brand. And our soon-to-be-published Green Living Pulse study reveals that there is, in fact, a big correlation. There’s also a triumph of brand over initial gut-reaction.

This is a guest blog post by Paul Hannam.

Conscious consumers are shifting to the web even more rapidly than many other market segments. According to a report in early 2010 from Burst Media,

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media are undeniably becoming increasingly important to marketers as more and more people spend increasing amounts of time communicating via them.

There are some questions every sustainability manager or CSO is going to encounter along the way. What’s interesting is that more and more managers are asking these questions of themselves and then are going out to find the answers.

One could make the point that marketing is often about answering the question: “Why would someone buy your product?” In B2B (business-to-business) product marketing, that question is most often answered based on one or more of the following three variables: Cheaper, Faster, Better.

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” – Lewis Carroll

To chart a successful sustainability strategy, everyone in the company needs to know what path they’re supposed to follow – there needs to be a clear goal.

“Green” guru and friend Joel Makower has been known to call sustainable consumption the “elephant in the room” when he talks with corporations about their environmental footprints. After all, for many leading brands, the business case for adopting more environmentally friendly practices is the promise of increased customer preference and loyalty, resulting at the end of the day in…selling more stuff.