For decades, marketers have leveraged product placement to influence consumers. The idea is quite simple: leverage media to showcase a product or service being used as part of everyday life in order to shape consumer brand perception and impact purchase behavior. Put a product in the hands of a celebrity and consumers will interpret this as a de facto endorsement. Such placements have been embedded across all types of media including television, film, video games, books and music videos.
The digital channel has upended this traditional approach by enabling marketers to go well beyond simple product placements to create meaningful experiences for engagement. ...
Today, many executives, and especially those working in carbon-intensive industries, are grappling with how future carbon regulation may impact their businesses and industries.
To deal with uncertainty regarding such strategic issues, many corporate executives turn to scenario planning or even game theory to think about how the future competitive environment may unfold and how it may impact their companies. By doing so, corporate executives are, in effect, peering into the future to get a glimpse of what may come.
Given its contribution to climate change, expected growth rate and evolving regulatory environment, the commercial airline industry presents an interesting case study to learn how competitive dynamics may change in...
Last week, the green movement received endorsements from some very high places. Religious leaders that represent the two largest Christian denominations in the US - more than 66 million Catholics and 16 million Southern Baptists - declared that environmental protection has religious significance.
For Southern Baptists, "any damage we do to this world is an offense against God Himself";...
An Interview with thepurplebook Founder Hillary Mendelsohn
With the exception of a few select product categories, growing consumer interest in green has not yet translated into substantive changes in purchase behavior by mainstream consumers. Like many nascent categories, green faces many barriers to widespread adoption.
In many ways, product adoption in the green space is a classic chicken and an egg problem: uncertain demand leads manufactures to limit the number of products they launch. Limited products and product choice, in turn, curtails demand. However, this only tells half the story as there are many reasons why demand is limited.
Even with those receptive to a green message, marketers are challenged by low familiarity with green products. This,...
Marketing Green contends that this celebrity status is likely to increase with time: as content continues to proliferate, consumers will look to those they know and trust to help them cut through the cutter.
Today, many online influentials are building a following of their own. Some sites understand this and are now actively recruiting participation by influentials on their site, and promoting this association directly to consumers.
As such, Marketing Green believes that marketers should continue to seek new ways to leverage the celebrity status of online activists in support of or as...
Today, dozens of social news sites exist where users bookmark content for the site's community to view and rate. Specific content related to the environment is available on both general news sites such as Digg, Newsvine, Propeller (AOL) or Reddit and green vertical sites such as C2NN, Hugg, Five Limes and plant change (Aus). Squareoak Media provides a fairly comprehensive
One of the most effective ways to syndicate content is by activating power users on sites such as Digg. Quite simply, "Diggers" uncover and bookmark interesting content - news articles, images and videos - for others to view.
Top Diggers are known for frequently submitting content that is deemed compelling by the Digg community. If others users like the content, they may "digg" it as a way to recommend it to others.
Why should marketers care about whether an article submitted on Digg becomes popular or not? Well, "popular" articles create their own viral effect. Not
only are more people likely to be interested in articles that come
highly recommended, but more people are exposed to them as well. On
Digg, popular articles tend to... Traditionally,publishers have viewed websites as content destinations, challengingmarketers to drive traffic to specific websites in order to engageconsumers with relevant content. Today, the model has changed.Increasingly, publishers are uncoupling online content from its hostsite; marketers are learning to syndicate this content online orencouraging others to do so virally. Jupiter Research has defined this trend as "website deconstruction". Moreover, emerging andestablished content platforms, including news aggregators, videosharing and social bookmarking sites, enable content to exist on itsown in the online world and allow users to have greater control overits distribution. Today, a two-step process has emerged for marketers to facilitate content...
While
many corporations leverage the Internet to distribute information about
environmental initiatives, a few companies are going much further by
facilitating two-way dialogue with stakeholders.
Some
companies may view such dialogue – via email, web forums, chat rooms
and video - as risky, as it may open them up to public scrutiny. Moreover, this sentiment may be especially true today for those brands that compete in carbon-intensive industries.
Nonetheless, companies that are bold enough to enter into a dialogue tend to find that the rewards outweigh the risks. Dialogue
creates a direct channel to stakeholders that can be used to gather
feedback, build credibility, and engender more loyalty by showing a
more human side of the...
As
companies plan their green investment strategies for 2008 and beyond,
they should take into account that caps on carbon emissions are all but
inevitable in the future. In fact, it is highly likely that caps will be in place in the US within the next few years. The 187 nations that attended the UN climate conference
last month in Bali (including the US) agreed to negotiate a successor
agreement to Kyoto by the end of 2009. Perhaps more importantly,
Congress already has several climate bills under consideration.
How aggressive will carbon reduction targets be? A recent
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