Responsibility Without Sacrifice

It starts as the typical car commercial. Splash! A shiny silver sedan breaks through a cascading wall of water. Slow motion film of the car racing seductively across the wet pavement. Series of quick cuts to shots of the headlights, tail lights, and spinning wheels as the car rips down an empty highway. Extreme close up of water dripping down the silver letters that read... hydrogen 7.

Hydrogen what!?!

Cut to BMW logo. Tagline fades up under: Responsibility with Performance.

The tagline in one of BMW’s newest car commercials sums up what today’s marketers should know about “green” marketing in America: consumers like the idea of being environmentally responsible, but now if it actually means sacrificing something. We don’t want a hydrogen-powered car if it doesn’t go 0-60 in under seven seconds. We don’t want to give up our giant SUVs, but a hybrid engine would be nice. But it had better not be too expensive.

This is much different than what marketers faced during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Then, American consumers were asked to make major concessions in both their products and behaviors.

Marketers responded in kind with smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Hondas and Toyotas began replacing Cadillacs and Buicks in American driveways.

But over the years our cars have gotten bigger than ever. The GLC has been replaced by the SUV. Our average fuel efficiency has gone from 28 mpg in the 1980s down to 24 mpg today. With an aging and more conservative U.S. population with a larger buying power than ever, we really don’t want to forgo our luxuries.

This doesn’t mean there’s not value in marketing environmentally responsible products. It is a huge and expanding market. But green is quickly becoming the cost of entry. It is now the marketers and not the consumers that are expected to make the concessions.

The responsibility without sacrifice mentality even enters our single most expensive purchase: our homes. In the 1970s, government actions were taken to create new energy codes that required home insulation, caulking and double pane windows.

But despite all the green-speak in today’s new-home market, consumers are reluctant to pay the price. In a recent series of focus groups my company conducted for the house-building industry, we tested a multitude of “green building” concepts with consumers. First-time homebuyers, and retiring “down-sizers” delved into the marketing appeal of five different home construction companies that offered various environmentally conscious building techniques. Happily, we learned that green building and energy saving concepts were all very appealing to consumers. We were right on target, we assumed. But there was one major caveat: “Green is great,” we learned, “as long as we don’t have to give up square-footage.”

In the short term, “building green” will fall somewhere behind the fourth bathroom in order of importance. And only a few lucky drivers will make the expensive green fashion statement with their hydrogen-powered BMWs. For now, it seems the bulk of today’s consumers will expect green to be a feature, not a concession. And as marketers, we must meet the challenge.