Green products

Organizations that practice green marketing try to ensure that their products are helpful to the environment or at least cause little or no harm. BMW is developing cars that can be easily taken apart and recycled. The Real Goods catalog offers products that use renewable energy sources, such as a solar-powered alarm radio and rechargeable batteries guaranteed to last forever.

 Product Development A "green" product strategy often influences the process of product development. For example, when a product is developed or modified, a group is assigned to make sure the product is environmentally sound.

Levi Strauss recently teamed up with Crane & Company, a Massachusetts-based maker of paper goods, to recycle Levi's denim scraps. Levi Strauss sends the scraps to Crane, which processes them into a "denim paper." The paper was first used internally at Levi Strauss for various needs, including all the company's stationery. Eventually, Crane's offered a line of denim paper to the public. According to the paper company's Tim Crane, the new paper "is the first and only closed-loop recycling of textile waste into paper products." And none of the denim scraps at Levi's Albuquerque jeans fac�tory are going into the trash anymore, saving garbage collection fees and about 8,000 trees a year.

Packaging Green marketers are also seeking to package goods in ways that have less impact on the environment. This may mean using recycled packaging or simply less packaging.

The choice is not always a simple one, however. For example, containers made of recycled plastic are more likely to break, so the manufacturer has to use more of the material, making the containers heavier and requiring more energy to transport them.

According to packaging experts, marketers can also encourage recycling by making recyclable materials look recyclable. To convey this image to consumers, glass and plastic containers should be clear, and labels should be removable. Then there's the next step in environmentally friendly packaging: making packaging that is returnable, so that the manufacturer can reuse it. Of course, to older consumers who remember glass bottles of milk and soda pop, this concept doesn't sound so new.

 �Green� Pricing Green marketers have learned that making a product friendly to the environment does not mean they can charge a higher price. According to a study by Syracuse University's School of Public Communications, 93 percent of adults said a product's environmental impact was important to them in making purchase deci�sions, but two-thirds said environmentally friendly products should not cost more. Fortunately, "green" product development need not be costly.

Some marketers have been able to combine an advantageous pricing strategy with green marketing. Super concentrate laundry detergent, such as Ultra Tide and Ultra Cheer, costs consumers more per wash than standard detergents. For example, an industry analyst determined that the cost per wash of Tide powder with bleach was 37 percent higher using the super concentrate formula. Producers are able to enjoy this price advantage because differences in the sizes of the packages and the measur�ing scoops they include make it almost impossible to shop by price. Furthermore, today's consumers tend to run big loads of laundry and pour in generous amounts of detergent; a little scoopful just doesn't look like enough in spite of the manufacturer's recommendations. Thus, making detergents that require less packaging and less energy to ship has also turned out to be more profitable.

 �Green� Channel Strategy "Green marketing" seeks to ship goods with a mini�mal amount of energy and to reuse packing materials. Merck AgVet, featured in "Creating Customer Value," is committed to using as little packing and packaging mate�rial as possible. Patagonia tries to ship its outdoor clothing in recycled and recyclable plastic. Furniture maker Herman Miller used a waste prevention team to evaluate its shipping practices. The team determined that 80 percent of the products could be shipped in movers' blankets rather than the complete cardboard and plastic packaging that had been used. The Home Depot works cooperatively with suppliers to help them find ways to use single-material packaging, which is easier to recycle than pack�aging that combines, say, paper and plastic.