Personal rewards, too

The rules are also changing as to what constitutes personal satisfaction at work. With customers and stakeholders of all stripes, from employees and plant neighbors to legislators and NGOs, clamoring for businesses to embrace sustainability in their products and their processes, smart CEOs know that sustainability offers a rare opportunity to integrate one’s own values and vision into the workplace – and, as demonstrated by the ardor of the Gen Ys for work that balances making a living with making a difference, this is becoming essential in recruiting future generations of capable employees. Sustainable branding helps take that vision to one’s customers through the prism of products that are more in sync with nature and via communications that are more in tune with consumers’ own evolving values – all the while affording the unique opportunity to personally contribute to a brighter future for our children and grandchildren and sustain human life on the planet for generations to come.

Grasping the new rules of green marketing starts with an in-depth understanding of how today’s mainstream green consumers differ markedly from yesterday’s fringe activists in attitudes, behaviors, lifestyle, and corporate expectations. Let’s start by discussing the full range of issues that concern today’s consumers, their green purchasing motivations and behavior, and how this total broad swatch of consumers can be segmented for green marketing purposes – the subjects of the next chapter.