Indeed green marketing is no different than traditional marketing. Emotions and price are the big influencers, with incentives encouraging trials and repeat purchases. The product category will determine most of the messaging, with the target audience filling in the details.

One of my main points is that potential business can be vastly expanded if we enlarge that target audience and turn-down the green messaging. Explain the inherent benefits (performance, cost, “value”) and tie them to customer desires through emotions. Regardless of environmental/social benefit (sure it has to be substantive), the more the messaging is customer-benefit oriented, the better.

The same psychological triggers (emotions) that hold true for other industry marketers should hold true for green marketers. The emotional triggers listed above are ranked lower than other types of emotional triggers so first it is necessary to rank these emotional triggers. For example, fear is the most powerful emotional trigger. In this case, you would create a marketing message that pings the readers/listeners fear portion of the brain. A subset of fear is anger. So let’s talk practical application.

Emphasizing the bad things that are going to happen if you don’t purchase my product is much stronger than emphasizing the good things that are going to happen if you do. This is just human nature. We more easily go to the negative side of things than we do to the positive side. So to exploit this, you can create a marketing message that shows planes running into the World Trade Center and re-invokes the fear associated with 911. Show lots of people screaming and crying in terror. You then show government research that links the funding of the terrorists that attacked America comes from oil sales. You then show something like, “We Must Break Our Dependency on Oil or Die”. You then show a family laughing and playing together with solar panels and a windmill in the background with your 1-800 number of website GoGreenNow.com or whatever at the end.

Controversial marketing? You bet. Complaints will flood in. But your message will have gotten out there and it is a sticky message that will stay in peoples heads long after they see it.