Biz Strategy

The Eco-green Marketing Strategy 

Moving with the growing global trend!

Go green for health, safety and value for money. Green when linked to a healthy eco-system can become a powerful marketing strategy that translates into greater profits for businesses.

 Healthy Lifestyle

The recent debates on healthcare cost in the United States has highlighted an important factor that reduces healthcare cost for individuals – “Prevention is cheaper then cure”. This is a factor that businesses associated with a healthy lifestyle can promote to increase sales while creating a positive image associated with the brand.

Ecology Profits

An ecologically balanced lifestyle means a healthy life. This impacts positively on the quality of living for individuals. Governments can provide the infrastructure to transport people into cities for employment and to enjoy the recreational activities available. An integrated electrical mass transport train system makes sense. This system can transport a mass of people in and out, as well as around the city with reduced pollution. But ultimately it is the companies promoting ecologically sound products and services within the city that generate profits and stimulates the economy.

Worldwide Shift

Worldwide, businesses are shifting to an ecological or green marketing strategy. Reducing the carbon footprint for a greener, cleaner planet is the right thing to do. This creates a feel good for customers of products and services and gives the brand a positive image.   

Economic Value

There are several factors to consider in planning an eco-green marketing strategy. It is not just the form but the substance of the product or service that needs to be associated with the brand. It is necessary to go beyond merely using images such as plants or the recycle logo on the product or stationary. 

An eco-green marketing strategy must integrate the economics of value for money for the customer with good profit margins for the business. Eco-green to be commercially viable is therefore about taking an ecological approach to the economics of sales and profits.

Health of Advocates 

A good eco-green marketing strategy should promote the psychological and physiological health benefits of the product or service. 

For instance, food products that contain no artificial colouring, flavouring and preservatives can highlight these facts. Publishing laboratory test results on nutritional and health benefits can lead to increased customer confidence that builds brand loyalty. Loyal customers can become brand advocates who help promote sales. 

Service providers who use e-mails instead of snail mail can emphasize how this saves trees. An ability to deliver services efficiently should be associated with reducing stress and promoting psychological health.

Wealth of Customers

The fact that the business uses energy saving machinery and focuses on health and safety of its workers should be promoted as customers appreciate that a healthy workforce with quality tools produce quality products cost effectively. Letting the customer know that the business has invested in employee training and workplace safety shows that a company cares about people.

An effective eco-marketing strategy is a holistic strategy. It makes sure ecologically sound practices have been integrated into the entire supply chain from supply of ingredients to manufacture, storage and delivery of product to the customer.

The old adage, “Health is wealth” holds true with a good eco-marketing strategy. The customer gets wealthy with a healthy, positive experience while the company gets wealthy through sales to a satisfied customer who will come back for more.

Siddha Param

International  Business Consultant

Winnipeg,  Manitoba, Canada, North America

Worldwide Business Connection.com
 

Business Strategy

Business Planning In An Uncertain Economy
Advantages of integrating continuing learning into the matrix 

If GM could get it so wrong for so long then what chance do other businesses have in uncertain times?  It is now a global economy and an increasingly borderless world for trade.  We therefore have to expect that there will be suppliers of goods and providers of services who will trade worldwide.  

Increasingly, it is quality and value for money that is shaping markets more then loyalty to traditional national brands. Understanding what the consumer truly wants is critical to strategic business planning.

The business that better understands more of the variables that go into shaping consumer demand will be the one to pull ahead and over-take the competition out there. It has always been the team with the better strategy that wins.

It is therefore critical for a winning business plan to include a process for acquiring market information for analysis as to changing economic conditions. The business plan must set out a mechanism for processing this information into useful knowledge that can be utilized to make decisions on whether the product or service offered meets consumer demand, needs to evolve or be abandoned. Built into the plan must be a strategy for learning from both success and failure that can be fed into future product or service innovation and evolution.

A successful business plan must therefore include a strategy to identify a winning product or service as well as a framework for learning from market responses and an ability to innovate to win based on lessons learnt from such responses.   

It is important to appreciate at the planning stage that since there is uncertainty in the economy, forecasting what will be the market response cannot be done accurately.  In other words the planners have to recognize that they will have to be constantly learning and reworking cost and sales figures as the plan is implemented.  This is the continuing life long learning component that must be an integral part of the business planning matrix. The plan should be, to learn and innovate very quickly at a sustainable cost in order to turn a profit at the end of the process. To do this the learning process must help the business evaluate risk and take advantage of business opportunities that emerge.

In many ways this approach to business planning requires applying the mind set of entrepreneurship as opposed to a more business management approach of doing a market study, coming up with a marketing and financial plan with a profit forecast prior to implementation which is based on fixed assumptions with no changing of horses in mid stream. Entrepreneurs know that you have to innovate as you go along implementing a plan because you never know how deep the water is until you get your feet wet and success comes from a willingness to learn on the job.

In uncertain economic conditions a business cannot afford to make too many costly mistakes as markets shrink and the cost of financing increases.  Many of the assumptions in a booming economy such as easy access to funding based on reputation and past performance disappear. Past profits may have been based on failures being paid for with cheap funding made available based on projected sales figures calculated on an assumption that market conditions will remain the same.  Prediction of impending global economic uncertainty may have been ignored.

Too often, when good times come, behavior changes and too many in business come to believe it will never end. Too much money is spent on expensive lessons and little is learnt about how the profits are actually being achieved.

The key to business success in uncertain times is to create a business strategy unit which will learn lessons from the information generated from the implementation process in a cost effective manner in a very short time frame which can then be fed into innovation that allows the implementers to adapt to the changes on the ground. This approach to planning recognizes that the plan is not based on complete knowledge as not all the information variables are available at any given time of decision making.

Hence, there must be a recognition that figures have to be constantly recalculated and decisions modified with a recognition that all financial targets are approximations.  There must also be an exit strategy built into the business plan that indicates when and how a project should be abandoned to avoid excessive losses and how the knowledge acquired in the implementation process can be utilized for a new venture.

Whether GM evolves into Green Motors or a Genetic Mutation that gives us new innovations in transportation will depend on the lessons that come out of the business restructuring plan now underway. 

Perhaps the lesson all businesses can learn from the current economic uncertainty is, how to prioritize wants and recognize business needs.

Siddha Param
International Business Consultant

WorldwideBusinessConnection.com