Do you know what “sustainable”means?
Is the environmental trend “sustainable”? To be so, marketers mad about the mantra might want to make sure their customers know what it means to maintain.
In conducting its Project Green study, BuzzBack, New York, found that only about one in three people were “familiar” or “very familiar” with the term sustainable and its meaning.
“It’s this huge buzz term, but it’s such a client term,” said Carol Fitzgerald, president of the market research firm. “So maybe there’s a disconnect with consumers.”
The Project Green study was conducted among 1,141 U.S. and U.K. respondents “to uncover behavior, attitudes and emotions” about environmental concerns. Overall, BuzzBack didn’t find many differences among the peoples living across the pond: A little more than half of U.S. and U.K. residents agreed that “the environment is the most important issue” (55% vs. 51%), and 19% of each said they are “willing to make sacrifices (convenience, comfort, cost savings, etc.) in order to support the environment.” U.K. residents were more into recycling paper and walking rather than driving short distances, while Americans were more obsessed with buying recycled paper and hybrid cars.
U.S. vs. U.K. consumers who:
• Recycle paper: 71% vs. 87%
• Purchase recycled paper: 55% vs. 47%
• Walk rather than drive short journeys: 36% vs. 56%
• Own or lease a hybrid: 4% vs. 1%
In a creativity-enhancing exercise, participants were asked to choose from 120 images to build an “e-Collage” to illustrate their personal vision of what it means to be green. According to BuzzBack, this tool helped respondents be more articulate and personal in describing their feelings: Those who used collages were more than twice as wordy/expressive in their answers than those who were not given the visual prompts (37 words vs. 16 words on average), while comments from the latter group tended to be more succinct and literal. The images picked most often to represent “being green” included pictures of eco-friendly icons (such as the Energy Star logo gracing efficient appliances), unspoiled environments (a la forests) and animals (pandas and baby seals).
By Becky Ebenkamp