Green Leaf Report

After more than a decade of working in various engineering and technology management roles, I’m tired of the argument that a great technology is its own marketing and sales team.  This is especially a problem when recession fears start cropping up, and the knee-jerk reaction of many leadership teams is to cut marketing and sales teams because the ROI is so difficult to quantify: who can prove that one extra trade show actually brought in more clients, the advertising captured additional eyeballs, or the larger sales team helped land the bigger deal?

In environmental markets, this sort of behavior can be even more catastrophic, because green industry marketing has been weaker than the technology norm. EcoAlign has released a study on consumer perceptions of green products that is eye-opening; too many within a cross-section of 1000 online (technologically savvy?) respondents thought of green products in negative terms (thank you for the great summary Cleantech Group):

Asked to rate cleantech products, most non-adopters considered the products expensive (53 percent), difficult to understand (72 percent), and difficult to maintain (76 percent).

Cleantech adopters surveyed agreed with these assessments, though their negative scores were 10 percentage points lower.

60 percent of adopters also said they found the technology reliable, but only 44 percent considered the products beautiful.

“It is almost as if consumers are holding their noses to take medicine they perceive to taste awful but is necessary to bring the fever down,” wrote report author Dana Cogar, EcoAlign’s Research Director.

With the exception of small wind turbine installations, over 70 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t be concerned should their neighbors plan to install green products such as energy efficient lights and solar panels. Those who were concerned about such installations cited noise, appearance and property values as their reasons.

It’s time to correct the misconceptions about clean technology, and to support the great technologies with more educational marketing and broader sales techniques.  Otherwise, too many consumers will stay with the devil they know and we’ll be on coal and oil until it’s no longer possible.