Do Consumers Care If You're Green?

From over at AdWeek comes a long and measured look at green marketing from the only angle that ultimately matters: Do consumers care? The answer, depressingly, is: Eh, not so much. From the story:

When it asks about specifics of green behavior, polling tends to confirm that mainstream consumers have learned to talk the talk but are still in the baby-steps phase of walking the walk. A new TNS survey found just 26 percent of Americans saying they "actively seek environmentally friendly products." In a global poll by Nielsen (Adweek's parent company), about half the respondents said they'd forgo packaging provided for "convenience purposes" if it would help the environment, but only 27 percent would give up packaging designed to keep products "clean and untouched by others." More broadly, in a Gallup poll fielded prior to this year's Earth Day, fewer than one-third of respondents (28 percent) claimed to have made "major changes" in their own shopping and living habits over the past five years to help protect the environment.

So if consumers are unwilling to make lifestyle changes in their own buying habits, how much goodwill will you generate for carbon credits or all those solar panels you just threw down on? Turns out the value of green marketing is not so much reaping the goodwill, but avoiding the ire of consumers who perceive an actively environmentally negligent brand:

None of this, however, means consumers will cut much slack to companies that are conspicuously neglectful in their behavior. The irony, as noted in a recent report by BBMG (a New York- and San Francisco-based branding and integrated-marketing firm that works with "values-driven" companies and organizations), is that consumers are more demanding of the corporate sector than of themselves. Think of it as a case of individuals outsourcing environmental responsibility to big business. "We do see a 'green-action gap,' where consumers expect more from companies than they actually do themselves," says Raphael Bemporad, a founding partner of BBMG. And that leads to one of the asymmetries in consumer attitudes: People who are tepid about rewarding virtuous companies could well be energetic about punishing the unvirtuous. A Cone poll last spring found 85 percent of Americans saying they'd consider switching brands due to "a company's negative corporate responsibility practices."

Perhaps the most dispiriting takeaway is that the most hardened of hippies, who should theoretically be the most sensitive to corporate environmental initiatives, are instead highly resistant to green messages:

The most obvious market for green marketing efforts is people who are already attuned to environmental matters and to corporate social responsibility in general. But this is also an especially tough audience. The TNS study cited above segmented consumers by "shades of green," and those classified as Eco Centrics (i.e., among the most highly concerned about the environment) were described as "generally scornful of companies' green efforts, viewing corporate green initiatives as nothing more than marketing tactics."