March 29, 2024

What are your best practices for "recession marketing?"

Okay, so I’m not an “A-list” blogger. But I’ve been at it long enough that I’ve earned the right to call in a favor now and then. My web analytics tell me that there are at least 100 people who care enough to let me into their e-mail boxes before deleting me. So I’m going to go all Chris Brogan on you (I mean that in a nice way) and talk to you directly and ask you to be part of my community and talk to me.

If nothing else, do it because you feel sorry for me. My CEO at ITSMA, Dave Munn is looking for stories about how marketers have come up with innovative ways to actually do things better during these tough times. And he wants me, Mr. Research, to find them. Now we do have some research data about the impact that the recession is having on marketers and actions they are taking. And we have lists of marketing best practices that we can rattle off.

But we’re looking for something more human. We need stories.

I’m taking up your time with this because I’m also looking for these stories to be in context. This has been an awful year for a lot of people. I don’t know a friend who hasn’t experienced some kind of loss—whether it be layoffs or job cuts. (Most of my friends are or recently were in journalism.) So I’m looking for two things: stories about ways to do things better and stories about how you’ve kept your sanity and sense of humor at work during these times.

I’ll give you our working proposition: This recession is part of a trajectory that began in 1999, when the dotcom crash set us on a course of cost cutting that seemed temporary until last Fall. Until last Fall, I think many of us thought that somehow those wonderful days of the 90s were going to return: Fat bonuses, full staffs, discretionary options. But now we know that the sense of the temporary that had us looking back to 1998 for our definition of normal is gone for good. Worse, the fat that existed in 1999 did not exist last Fall when companies made more big cuts on top of all the incremental cuts we’ve seen over the years.

The “new normal” as Dave calls it, is one of very small marketing staffs and a network of offshore support. On the one hand, it’s depressing. But there’s also something perversely liberating about it. We can shake off the sense of limbo that comes with the expectation of regaining past losses. We can stop waiting now. And there’s some comfort in that.

And there’s something positive in the idea that we can view this as a clean slate to do things differently. We won’t have the resources of the past anytime soon, so we can look for new ways to do things.

Social media is one new way. Many of the tools are free so the time we devote to them becomes the thing that we need to innovate on and improve.

How are you doing that? What else are you doing to improve marketing? How are you surviving these times?

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Want to know which social media tool to bet on? Look at their relationship models.

We’ve all been reading a lot about the social media horse race. Will it be Facebook or MySpace? Or will it be Twitter by a nose?

For marketers trying to figure out where to put their resources into social media marketing, the horse race looks more like a crapshoot. These brands all start to sound the same and there are so many variables at play—the usual business stuff like VC funding, marketing, strategy, management, funding, M&A, etc.—that it’s hard to know where to place your bets.

We need to dig deeper to start to make meaningful comparisons. Analysis that looks at the concept of the different social media tools as “technology platforms” adds a little more clarity—as in, Facebook could win because it has the largest number of users and therefore, like Microsoft Windows, it could emerge as the de facto monopoly in social media.

But even this way of looking at it is suspect. People are fickle—especially young people—and all it takes is a shiny new technology or good branding to make an end run around the incumbent technology platform in social media. That’s because unlike Microsoft Windows, all the different social media tools are based on universal technology standards—i.e., the internet—and so linking different tools together or switching outright from one to another is simple and easy. Just look at how quickly MySpace has become uncool vs. a nearly identical competitor, Facebook.

What is a relationship model?
If you want to be able to place your bets more reliably—and I think marketers need to do this, given that social media marketing can be an incredible time sink—I think you need to consider the underlying social models of the different tools. The big question to ask is: How are relationships formed through this tool? I call this the relationship model of social media—it’s the underlying driver that attracts people to use it.

Right now, I think there are two primary relationship models in social media, the permission model, and the viral model.

  • Permission model. This is the model of most relationship-based social media tools today, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. You search for people you know and you ask their permission to start a relationship. Then, and only then, can you begin to figure out their networks of relationships—the people they know that you would like to know (and market to). Then you need to get those people’s permission to build your network further.
    For marketers trying to build relationships with influencers and customers, this is a fundamental roadblock, because the permission model tries to replicate the way we form relationships in real life: Trust needs to be established before we enter into a relationship. For marketers, it’s a Catch-22. How can we establish trust with influencers if we can’t get to them?
    The recent growth of permission-based groups on these sites helps a little bit, but so much of what gets posted on group pages is noise—blatant advertising, desperate job seeking—that it can be difficult for marketers to cut through all that crap and establish trusting relationships based solely on being in the same group as someone else. Only if marketers are starting and participating in meaningful discussions in the groups can they take the next step and try to form a relationship. And that kind of participation takes time—and subject matter expertise.
    Thus, I’m growing increasingly convinced that the permission model is of limited use to marketers. It’s a way to broadcast messages for sure, but you can do that better through your own channels. And the opportunity for real relationship building—which is what social media is supposed to be all about—in this model is limited.
  • Viral model. This model differs from the permission model in that it does not try to mimic the way we form relationships in real life. In fact, in real life we might call it something else: stalking. This model was popularized by the folks at Twitter (others are also using the model, such as Yammer, which is a social network for use inside large organizations), who realized that technology could be an effective substitute for trust—up to a point.
    Of course, by now you know that on Twitter, you can follow whomever you choose and listen in on what they are saying—one of the key benefits of social media for marketers, as I explain in more detail in this post. Because Twitter has written its own rules for relationships and because by signing up for Twitter we all agree to play by those (new) relationship rules, the trust barrier is effectively removed. The brilliance of the people at Twitter was to realize (or at least hope) that we wouldn’t mind if they changed the rules of relationships on us. And we don’t mind. In fact, the dizzying growth of Twitter shows that many of us have been waiting for someone to change the rules of online relationships for some time.
    We are tribal creatures, so we respect group opinions and authority. We tend to accept rules that the majority of those around us follow. Of course, that has good implications and bad implications. But in the case of the viral model, it’s all good—at least for marketers.
    The reason I call this model viral is that following someone is just one piece of the equation. The openness of the model means that once you discover and follow someone, you can then use one of a number of free tools such as TwiPing to discover their followers and add those people to your network. By finding and following just a few key influencers who have well established relationships on Twitter, you can grow your network of relationships exponentially (though not too exponentially, otherwise Twitter may throw you out).
    The nice thing about the viral model for marketers is that we don’t need permission, or even reciprocity, to get benefit from the relationship. It’d be great if your target influencers follow you back (so you can engage them with your messages and begin to build a deeper relationship), but if they don’t, you can still gather valuable information. And because the model is so open, if you post good, useful information (think education, not promotion) then you will inevitably build relationships and at some point, those reluctant to reciprocate will see your stuff being passed along by others that they follow, and they will have cause to reconsider their decision. Content is also viral in this model, passed on and on by people to their various networks of followers, which means that good content producers have another avenue to grow their relationships exponentially.
    And the viral model acts as a nice front end for building a deeper relationship through the permission model. For example, if you start to exchange messages with an influencer, it’s a logical next step to enter into a permission-based relationship on something like LinkedIn.
    Now the openness of this viral model has already led to some problems. Spammers and hackers are slamming away at it, trying to find cracks to exploit. Public figures like football players say things they shouldn’t and are banned. But for now anyway, the model seems to be hanging on.

If you start to look at social media based on the relationship model, I think it becomes a little easier to make decisions about where to spend your limited marketing time. Right now, given that B2B buyers are just beginning to adopt social media, I think the viral model clearly gives us the most bang for the buck. It gives us a shot at accomplishing the three aspects of social media marketing:

  • Monitor. You can follow all conversation.
  • Engage. There is the potential to develop a closer relationship.
  • Manage. Though you can’t control your Twitter community like you would say, a user group, the network of relationships does form a loose sort of community that you can speak to and interact with as a group (e.g., ask a poll question, etc.).

In B2B, there are broad caveats to investing too much in any social media marketing—the major obstacles are outlined in a good post by B2B blogger Kip Bodnar here—and anything you do should be integrated with your other marketing activities. But assuming some of the people you’d like to reach are out there—and ITSMA’s recent survey of 300+ technology buyers says that they are (even senior executives) then the evidence seems to suggest that you should be emphasizing the viral model in your marketing.

What do you think? Is this the right way to place your bets? Have I left out any other relationship models?

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We need an app for that

I’ve been working on a report for ITSMA clients this week about analytics and it got me thinking about the proverbial bigger picture of B2B marketing.

We know from our research that we in marketing don’t do much with analytics—i.e., using data to determine and predict customer buying patterns. Only 50% of marketers in our survey said they had analytics programs, and of these, few were focused on predicting behavior; most were simply reporting past behavior. Even rarer is the ability to carry those analytics all the way through to a sale.

But we need to start doing that. Two of the companies I spoke to for my report use analytics to determine which marketing tactics are working and which ones aren’t. That lets them be more productive in marketing, by focusing effort and budget on the good stuff, and it lets them reduce the time to a sale by giving salespeople better tools to work with. One of them told me that it had used these analytics to reduce the average number of interactions needed to schedule a sales appointment in half.

So what are the rest of us to do? I’ve said before that this isn’t just a problem with the issues that come back to us in the surveys: lack of budget, clean data, and unified IT systems. We also have a cultural problem: numbers and metrics just aren’t in our bones; we’re the creative types, what others might refer to derisively as the English majors (yep, me too).

Make the analytics come to us
This is why we have to automate our way out of this problem. The metrics and analytics have to come to us; we can’t continue to expect to dive in and pull them out because we just don’t do it. The things we do and the content we produce need to be contained within an IT system that can watch what we do and tell us about it. This is especially important as more of our work moves online.

But I don’t think you can just start with an IT system, because we’re not much more inclined to be IT geeks than we are to being analysts. So you have to start with the bigger process picture.

I haven’t seen a better articulation of what marketing should be doing in B2B than Brian Carroll’s marketing funnel concept. He differentiates between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel because so many leads are lost in the handover between marketing and sales—94%, according to this report. The marketing funnel helps focus attention on a number of important issues:

  • Qualify leads. Marketing can’t send every lead to sales, nor can it spend too much time qualifying leads.
  • Universal lead definition. A lead that both sales and marketing agree is ready to be pursued.
  • Lead scoring. You can’t call everybody who downloads a whitepaper. You need a system for determining who is ready to talk. And as I discussed in this post, the qualification process needs to be gradual and non-invasive, what Brian has since christened “micro-conversion.” Steve Woods of marketing automation vendor Eloqua has an excellent list of questions to ask about lead scoring here, but I wonder if they rely too much on making people fill out forms.
  • Lead nurturing. There needs to be agreement on when and how a lead will come back to marketing if sales doesn’t pursue it or if the prospect turns out not to be interested.

But what about the fact that sales and marketing don’t talk to each other?
The key to this process is getting sales and marketing to work together create an integrated process. Suzanne Lowe makes the radical assertion that marketing and sales must be integrated together. Eliminate the silos, imbue people with both sales and marketing skills, and eliminate the problem. Once again, however, we have a cultural issue: Sales and marketing people are just different.

The system we’d like to see
In organizations where sales and marketing are forever destined to be separate, processes and systems have to do the integration work. At its foundation, it is a system that sees that the lead process is a loop, not a linear progression—especially considering the length and complexity of the B2B buying process—and is capable of tracking every interaction with a lead over the course of this torturous route.

The system needs to house every bit of content marketing creates, for both customers and sales, and integrates with the lead management system, so that marketers and sales people can use content, not qualification forms, to gauge progress towards a sale. For example, if sales has visibility into the content that prospects are downloading, and both marketing and sales have agreed on the pieces of content that indicate serious buyer interest, the system can signal salespeople to make the call, rather than waiting for marketing to ship the lead to them.

The system needs to be interactive with both prospects and salespeople so that they can rate and comment on the content. And finally, the system needs to integrate with whatever salespeople use (CRM, most likely), so that marketing’s impact on a sale can be automatically tracked from beginning to end.

If marketers had such a foundational system, we wouldn’t need to “create” analytics programs, all we’d need to do is look at what our customers and prospects are doing.

What do your process and system look like?

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Get Beneath the Surface with "Deep Metaphors"

We often complain that B2B products and services don’t appeal to customers at a personal level. But maybe we’re just not trying hard enough.

Jerry Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, has an interesting theory about how to reach customers below the surface, called “deep metaphors.” In this excellent interview, Zaltman defines deep metaphors as “fundamental frames or lenses that we use to orient ourselves to the world around us. They work largely below awareness or in our subconscious minds and shape and reshape just about everything we think, feel, hear, say, and do. They are almost a secret or hidden language of thought and action.”

As an example of how to reach the subconscious, Zaltman shows a Michelin tire commercial in which a baby is sitting inside a tire that is floating on water during a light rain. Inside the tire, pairs of stuffed animals surround the baby—any resemblance to Noah’s Ark is purely intentional, says Zaltman. In interviews that Zaltman did with viewers of the commercial, he heard Michelin portrayed as the holder of safety for families.

In all, there are seven deep metaphors, says Zaltman. In this article, they are defined as:

  • Balance (equilibrium)
  • Transformation (changing states or status)
  • Journey (as in life)
  • Container (keeping things in and keeping things out)
  • Connection (feelings of belonging or exclusion)
  • Resource (providing survival)
  • Control

Counted together, these seven metaphors account for 70 percent of our inner feelings, according to Zaltman, who helps companies uncover these metaphors through extensive interviews with customers through his consulting firm.

It’s an expensive process, no doubt. But it got me thinking. Perhaps we could use these metaphors to guide some of our programs with customers in B2B.

I think B2B technology marketers should pay particular attention to the metaphor of connection. In hundreds of interviews with technology people, I’ve always noticed their passion for the profession. Indeed, I think technology people are more loyal to their community of practice than they are to their companies. Anyone willing to work for free (as in the open source movement) is fired by passion.

And two of the passions that fire the open source movement are connection and recognition. In survey after survey of open source contributors, they always cite recognition by their peers—as expressed by downloads of their code—as their main motivation.

I think we in marketing should keep this quest for connection in mind when developing our programs and campaigns. What do you think?

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Why I Don't Hate the Term "Cloud Computing"

I see now why they credit old people with having wisdom. If you hang around long enough, you begin to see patterns in the way the world works, mostly through sheer repetition.

I think I’ve been hanging around long enough—first as a technology journalist and now as an analyst—to explain why the concept of cloud computing seems to be gaining acceptance when other descriptions of the very same thing did not.

The evolution of the terminology for cloud computing mirrors what the best software developers are trying to do with computing in general: abstract away the complexity. The more you make the details of computing go away—at least for those of us who have to use the stuff rather than design it—the better off we all are.

Remember MS-DOS and the terror of the blinking C prompt? There wasn’t a day when I confronted that big, blank screen with that cursor blinking impatiently at me when I didn’t have at least a fleeting sensation that I had forgotten the secret code, that I would be struck numb, that the cursor would just keep blinking and blinking and blinking blinking and never stop. That a co-worker would happen by as I sat there staring into the black abyss and say what the aggro-geeks said about us users all the time back then: “Are you so freakin’ stoooopid that you can’t get past the C-prompt?!”

And then the question that allows people to pretend that they’re being helpful but which they know merely confirms your fecklessness and makes you feel like a five-year-old: “What is it that you are trying to do?”

How about kill the questioner?

We know what happened to the C-prompt. Apple killed it—or rather forced Microsoft to hide it. Today it’s like the monster behind a flimsy wooden door—you catch a terrifying glimpse every now and then and when the monster breaks down the door and the blue screen of death appears, well, you just have to run away.

But at least we don’t have to remember what MS-DOS means, or A: or B:, or C:. We have terminology for that now that abstracts away the complexity: Windows, folders, and of course “my computer.” I still feel like a five-year-old when I see “my computer” but at least I don’t have to rely as heavily on the deeply embedded memories in my basal ganglia when I start up my computer now.

But then things got complicated again. When we pulled computing out of the boxes and onto the network, we had client/server computing, which, in terms of terminology, was a lot like the C-prompt. It took many tries before you could absorb the difference between a client and a server—the forward slash alone was scary enough, like if you had to ask what the slash meant you were one of those stoooopid people who needed conjunctions. And the definition leaked like oil from an old British sports car. Did the client hold the entire application? Well sometimes, though usually just part of it. Did the server hold all the data? Sort of—eventually.

Then along came network computing. Ah, here was simplicity itself. The network is the computer. Just to prove it, Larry Ellison came out with a computer. But I thought you just said that… Makes you want sit on the floor and cry, doesn’t it?

To clear up the confusion, we gave up the metaphors and got back to our terminological roots (psychologists would use a slightly darker term: regression)—and came up with an acronym: ASP. An application service provider was someone who managed your applications and data for you.

But isn’t that what they used to call outsourcing? Well, not really, because they do it at their data center, not your data center. But wait a minute; don’t IBM and Accenture have their own data centers that they use to serve clients? Yes, but…

Clearly, what we needed to do in the aftermath of the ASP era was to think bigger. Metaphors weren’t the problem; it was that the metaphors weren’t big enough. We needed to go huge with this thing. So along comes IBM with on-demand computing. Computing was going to be like plugging a socket into the wall. Everything would just flow through the wire like power from the electric company. Except not for a while yet. For now, companies would continue to build their own data centers themselves, or have IBM build them for them, sort of like how companies used to build their own power generators, umm, before … we … had … power … utilities.

In a fit of candor, we then started talking about grid computing. Cause after all, that’s what this thing really was, a grid of computers linked together to create one huge, all-knowing, all-powerful computer somewhere. Except now you couldn’t do little things on the big computer. You had to do big things, like figure out the human genome. The way I understood grid computing, I assumed that eventually someone would come and take my computer and my Internet connection away. The grid couldn’t be wasted on people as dumb and lacking in ambition as me. I cried (again) when I heard about grid computing.

But now we’ve finally broken free with cloud computing. It isn’t just a big metaphor, it’s an infinite metaphor. It’s downright existential. Clouds are everywhere and nowhere, big and tiny—puffy white things from far away and microscopic droplets of water up close. Nothing says that computing happens somewhere else—but relax, it doesn’t matter where or how—as well as cloud computing.

If I were still a journalist, my life would be wonderful. I wouldn’t have to explain the cloud to my readers. There is no loophole in the definition that invites me to delve deeper to understand what it really means and determine whether it’s really a valid description of what’s going on here. The complexity has been completely abstracted away.

I know this all sounds cynical, but in the end it’s probably just as well that the cloud metaphor lets us off the hook of rigor. Like the DOS prompt, it’s not something most people need to know about.

It’s a lesson for all of us. Tech companies are complexity junkies, needing to explain and justify every detail until the marketing becomes as monstrous as the DOS prompt. We could all use a few more layers of abstraction—and some good metaphors—in our thinking and our communications.

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What Habits Do We Want to Instill in B2B Buyers?

In the West, we tend to think of disease prevention as being all about vaccinations. But that’s because we have institutionalized all the other ways of preventing disease, like clean drinking water, sanitation, and regular bathing. In part, we’re safer from disease than people in other parts of the world because we can afford to do all these things while others can’t.

But according to this article in the New York Times, it’s also because marketers have trained us to be clean. It’s a habit, not necessarily a choice. It is one of many automatic habits that constitute 45% of our actions every day, drilled into us by Consumer Packaged Goods companies like Procter & Gamble. Evidence for this is in the developing world, where diseases and other problems caused by dirty hands kill a child every 15 seconds, according to the Times. And the article claims that about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap.

But getting people to use soap is hard. Our regular use of it is the result of hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the CPG companies to find the “subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.” The routines are reinforced, of course, by relentless advertising.

Not all the campaigns work. A Vanderbilt study cited by the Times said that some anti-drug campaigns actually made viewers do more drugs, while anti-AIDS commercials raised the rates of unprotected sex.

The trick in getting people to wash their hands, according to researchers, is to get them to associate a specific action with specific places or moods. In places like Africa, that meant getting people to associate going to the bathroom with “a sense of disgust” that would cue people to wash their hands. Since bathrooms replaced open pits for many people, they often didn’t see the act of going there as disgusting but rather an improvement.

So a consortium of advertisers created a series of ads showing people emerging from bathrooms with purple stains on their hands to build the disgusting cue. It worked. Hand washing went up dramatically.

This kind of story reduces marketing to its most elemental level. But it also makes you think. If marketing is all about cues and habits, what kinds of cues and habits are we instilling in B2B buyers?

I know the habit we want to instill: that buyers associate us with learning. Thought leadership is the cue and an association with learning is the habit. In every interaction with our companies, buyers need to believe that they will learn something about their businesses that they didn’t know before.

What are the cues and habits you are instilling?

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Real Collaboration with Customers

I’m going to dredge up a buzzword that has launched a thousand eye rolls: “Solution.”

Many B2B marketers still use the word in their marketing materials, but my sense is that it is used as a swap-out word for a product or service-the idea being that a solution sounds more valuable than a plain old product or service.

If you’ve hung around with ITSMA for a few years, you know that we take the word way more seriously than that. We think of a solution as a combination of products and/or services with some extra IP stirred in there that helps customize the whole package to a particular business need of a customer. That means standalone products and services don’t cut it; nor do bundles of products and/or services, because they lack the custom fit that customers are looking for.

Indeed, customers have an even tougher threshold for the word than ITSMA. They define it as an end-to-end relationship that begins with requirements definition and ends with post-implementation support and retirement.

No wonder CIOs shake their heads when marketers use the s-word for everything from servers to razor blades.

But I haven’t given up on the word yet. Mostly because I work with a group of 23 different companies that we call the ITSMA Solutions Council—and they haven’t given up on it. I’m going to one of the Council’s semi-annual in-person meetings next week in London. We’re going to present a report that I think advances thinking about solutions quite a bit. It’s based on research from companies that are actually fulfilling the promise of solutions from the customer perspective.

ITSMA research shows that a critical competence in solutions is integration—the ability to integrate products, services, people, and external providers together into a solution that meets the specific needs of customers. But the interesting thing we’re learning is that the level of integration varies quite a bit. Not all solutions require a mind meld with customers and two-year consulting engagements. Some may only need a tiny bit of customization to fulfill the need.

For this reason, the level of organizational integration necessary to back up a solution can vary quite a bit—even for solutions offered inside the same company or even at the business unit level. For example, within a telecom group of one of our members organizations, solutions drive a close integration of multiple, independent P&Ls. The strategy is driven by the buying behavior of telecom customers, who increasingly come from the business side rather than IT. They demand an integrated solution—a billing system, for example—rather than buying individual pieces of software or hardware. Thus, the general manager for the telecom group has a large number of people dedicated to solution integration, and can draw on resources from other business units to deliver components optimized for that industry.

Meanwhile, in other areas of the organization, solutions are at the opposite end of the spectrum. The primary component of the solution is marketing—a small group of marketers backs the solution with a campaign. There is very little customization or integration necessary, so fewer employees are devoted to supporting the solution. Indeed, the organization has the market-leading software in the category and a team of consultants that can optimize the processes that the software controls. The solution consists of marketing those capabilities together so that the consultants can then customize them for each customer.

So you can see there is a big range of possibilities. However, there is one major constant across all solutions: the need to switch the organizational DNA from transactional selling to relationship-based selling. You can’t sell a solution if you can’t figure out what customers need.

We’re working on a maturity model that defines the different levels of organizational integration needed to support solutions. Clearly, a solution is more than an empty marketing term at these companies.

Have you made real organizational changes to support customer solutions like these companies have?

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Green Marketing Is a Crock of…

It’s impossible to market green, because there is no such thing as a green. There are only shades of gray. We all pollute.

So why do companies insist on marketing something that does not and cannot exist? Let’s be clear. I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t do anything about pollution; I’m just saying that they shouldn’t talk about it. It is a no-win proposition.

Green marketing lives a precarious existence that depends completely upon relative comparisons. Since no company can be completely green and have no impact on the environment, success depends on making your company seem more environmentally friendly than your competitors. Does anyone really believe there is marketing gold at the end of a rainbow that depends on convincing consumers that one oil company is somehow tidier than another? Or that a technology company with a 10% more efficient server has a claim to green when those servers are dumped into Chinese landfills, mercury and all, at the end of their life spans just like everyone else’s?

Let’s consider this from an audience perspective. People who think that global warming is an issue have wildly different interpretations of what constitutes green. Indeed, think about what I just said about servers. I bet some of you think that I’m being cynical—that any effort to save energy should be applauded, independently of the bigger picture. Some will argue with my definition of the bigger picture, saying it is too big, or not big enough. My point here is that there will be no agreement, no clear mandate affirming that what you are marketing constitutes green.

People who think that global warming is a crock will simply ignore green marketing. They will continue to pick products and services in the ways they always have.

Green by degrees marketing leaves behind a trail that has a tendency to ferment and smell, and certainly will not stand the test of time. If we really do end up in a climate crisis (and I personally believe we will), the vague, incremental promises we are making today will look disingenuous at best and hypocritical at worst.

Green marketing is also incredibly fragile. Each promise interlocks with all the others and with the company’s overall reputation. When a promise breaks, it puts a crack in the entire foundation.

The cracks are widespread already. Late last year, a market research firm examined 1,018 consumer products with 1,753 environmental claims. Of the 1,018 products examined, all but one made claims that are “demonstrably false or that risk misleading intended audiences.”

There is a big potential for backlash, because green is so misunderstood. Another recent survey found that 39% of Americans consciously try to buy green. But only 22% understood that “green” or “environmentally friendly” is a matter of degree. Some 48% said they thought it meant that the product has a beneficial effect on the environment.

If 45 percent of online consumers are willing to pay a premium of at least 5 percent or more for a product that promotes environmentally-friendly attributes, what happens when they get hip to having spent more for something they thought they were getting but didn’t?

But forget about what your products and services say about green for a moment. Let’s consider what your executives say about it. You’ve probably heard by now that Bob Lutz of GM used the same “crock” terminology that I used in the headline of this post to refer to global warming. After criticism spread around the Internet “like ragweed,” as he put it in a blog post back in February, he responded, “My beliefs are mine and I have a right to them, just as you have a right to yours.”

From a green marketing perspective, it was downhill from there:

“Never mind what I said, or the context in which I said it. My thoughts on what has or hasn’t been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors. My opinions on the subject – like anyone’s – are immaterial. Really. The point is not why and how did we get where we are, it’s what are we going to do to get where we’re going.”

Then he goes on to criticize those who criticized him, polarizing the debate:

“And I think that many of the people who’ve been spewing their virtual vitriol in my direction in the past week are guilty of taking the easy way out.

Instead of simply assailing me for expressing what I think, they should be looking at the big picture. What they should be doing, in earnest, is forming opinions not about me but about GM, and what this company is doing that is – and will continue to be – hugely beneficial to the very causes they so enthusiastically claim to support.

General Motors is dedicated to the removal of cars and trucks from the environmental equation, period. And, believe it or don’t: So am I! It’s the right thing to do, for us, for you and, yes, for the planet.”

Lutz then reminds readers that he is personally in charge of development of the Chevy Volt, a concept car. Now, the press generally doesn’t pay much attention to concept cars—every manufacturer offers some at the auto trade shows each year to give the gearheads and auto trade press something to speculate about. But because the Volt is supposed to run off of batteries (that haven’t yet been developed) its green aspirations have made it perhaps the most famous car that hasn’t been built (it should be noted that most concept cars never see the light of the production line).

The Volt may also be the most criticized car that doesn’t exist. GM’s unclear production timeline, an estimated base price that has crept ever upward, and planned production numbers that have steadily decreased over time have all led skeptics to question Lutz’ and GM’s commitment to green.

Expectations for the Volt will no doubt continue to build as 2010 approaches. Yet GM continues to stoke those expectations on a web page that features the Volt (with a green colored frame). It’s instructive that all the content on the page is devoted to parrying criticisms.

A look at the comments to Lutz’ blog post is further evidence of how controversial green marketing is. His post attracted many global warming deniers, who applauded Lutz for standing up to the liberal thought police. (I can’t imagine GM’s green marketing has much of an impact on them.) Meanwhile, the global warming believers charged Lutz and GM with hypocrisy for saying that his personal opinions have no bearing on his product leadership. From there, the comments descended into the typical right-left ad hominems.

Have you stepped in any green goo yet?

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