How to Navigate the Green Seas

• 

  Your Email: *

  Your Name: *

  Send To: *

  Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.

  You are going to email the following: How to Navigate the Green Seas

  Message Subject: (Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from GreenBiz.com®

  Message Body: (Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from GreenBiz.com®.

  Your Personal Message: *
  
• 
• 
• 

Businesses large and small are increasingly asking themselves: What is our green strategy? They may not understand exactly what that means, but they do know that they need to get one.

Along this road they are finding both obstacles and opportunities as they navigate through a green marketplace with few hard-and-fast rules, according to Joel Makower.  Joel is GreenBiz.com's executive editor and author of the new book, “Strategies for the Green Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the New World of Business.”

I sat down with Joel to talk about the book and the three keys he offers to help companies assess how well they are doing and answer the question: How good is good enough?

Tilde Herrera: So, Joel, it's been 14 years since your last book.  How has the green economy evolved since you wrote Beyond the Bottom Line?  

Joel Makower: I don't think we really had a green economy 14 years ago. In fact, that's a term that we really only starting to hear about lately.  I think just when you go back even five years, let alone 14, it was just a collection of companies doing things.  There wasn't any real strategy behind it.  There wasn't any sense that this is more than simply doing well by doing good, or doing less bad, or somehow improving the bottom line by being more environmentally responsible.  

And I think that -- we were talking about the green economy -- this is really about how does this go beyond improving the bottom line to how do we actually grow the top line?  

How does green, and all of its manifestations, become a platform for innovation and for new products and services, new business opportunities, new markets, and in some cases, whole new business models?  

And that's where this stuff gets exciting.  That's where this really becomes sustainable from a traditional business point-of-view where this really becomes part of how companies operate and what they need to do to compete.  

TH: So there's no uniform standard for what constitutes a green business.  How do you foresee this changing and what are the factors and who are the players that are going to help create this definition of what it means to be a green business?

JM: One of the things I talk a lot in the book is the fact that we don't have a standard.  We don't know what it means to be a green business.  

We know what it means to be a green building because there's a standard for that. If you think about what green buildings were like before the advent of the LEED green buildings standard, you had any company that could say, 'We've got recycled carpet and low VOC paint on our walls. We're a green building. Or we've got double-glazed windows and recycled concrete.  In effect, we're a green building.”

And those are all good things, but it turns out there was a much broader, more holistic definition of what it meant to be a green building.  

So, too, with green businesses.  We don't have any real standard.  There are some industry specific standards and there are some standards for certifications for smaller businesses like Co-op America's, but we don't really have something that's understood by consumers or B2B customers, regulators, the media and others that says, "O.K. This company is green.  This company has really sort of achieved some level."

I don't know what it's going to take to get there. There's a number of efforts that have been underway, some (are) still underway, to create this standard for a greener sustainable business, but none of them has any chance of getting traction any time soon.  And some of them may eventually do that over a course of years.

So right now, it's really a matter of each individual -- individual consumers and individual B2B customers -- coming up with their, in some ways, their own definitions, their own standards. And that's a problem.  

We don't have really the tools to do that and we don't know -- we don't have that information from the companies themselves to even allow us to make those things.  And unless you're at the scale of a Wal-Mart where you can really command information if they want to do business with you, it's really kind of a free-for-all. And so for awhile, I think we're all going to be on our own.

TH: So how does that lack of uniform standard translate to the challenges faced by companies trying to market their green products?

JM: Well, it's very challenging. As we talk about in the book, I think there's at least as much of a risk of 'greenmuting,' which is to say, not talking about what you're doing, as there is of greenwashing, which is to say, talking about it in a way that's perceived to be hype or even misleading.  

So I think that companies have to figure out how to walk that fine line, how to be telling their stories authentically that says, 'You know, this is what we're doing and this is part of where we're going -- to these bigger goals -- and we're not all the way there. We may never get there and here's some of the stuff we struggling with."

I think we're at a point now -- again, both with consumers and B2B -- where people want green heroes, corporate heroes.  They want businesses to step up to the plate.  At the same time, ironically, (they) don't tend to trust companies when they talk the green talk.  So we need to break through that and we need to help show that this is a company -- we're a company -- that is on the right path.  We're not perfect, no one said we were, we don't claim that, but we're on the right path. That's the challenge that I think companies are starting to face.  

TH: So you just talked about two different audiences that companies are targeting.  What are the rules for marketing your products to consumers versus a B2B business audience or customer base?

JM: Well, in some ways they're similar because you've got to tell the story in an honest and authentic way, but I think most people assume that this is being driven by consumers.  

Share: LinkedIn   StumbleUpon   Digg