Going Green – In More Ways Than One

I just came across a study on so-called “green marketing”. The complete study costs $479 but there is an executive summary that has some interesting findings.

33% of respondents said green marketing was more effective than normal, 7% said it was less effective, and 60% said it made no difference or they didn’t know.

DIDN’T KNOW? What percentage didn’t know whether the money they spent on advertising was effective? If you can’t track the results, don’t spend the money – a rant I’ll save for another post.

Smaller companies with advertising budgets less than $250,000 spent over 26% on green marketing, larger companies (> $50 million ad budget) spent just 6% on green marketing.75% of the respondents spent advertising money on the Internet, just 7% on TV ads.

Plus, 44% of the Internet marketers said people were willing to spend more on green products.

So, the lesson here is that smaller, green companies or products do well when advertising on the web.

Actually, the study tried to set little “traps” to find out if companies were really green or just using it as a marketing ploy and found that the green advertisers were really green, not just faking it.

So don’t “greenwash” plain old products to try and get them to sell, but do look for or highlight green products in your online business, and your business will make more “green” as a result.