Game Theory and Green Consumers
Joel Makower has a thoughtful piece on green consumers and why there's such a gap between green concern and actual buying habits. The gist of his answer is that green products are marketed wrong. I'm oversimplifying a bit, but basically Makower thinks that the average consumer won't make a product choice strictly on ecological concerns, and therefore marketers have to translate green choices into "healthier", "more efficient", or "higher quality" choices. In the political realm, this is the thinking of the Apollo Alliance -- their premise is (again, oversimplifying) that voters will never vote green, so we have to translate green into jobs and security.
As an activist, I think this is fundamentally wrong. It's not that I think Apollo is a bad idea, or that it would be terrible if people bought compact fluorescents just because they save money. But I do believe that we will not market our way to sustainability. If people don't actually "get it", then we will never make the enormous changes we need to make in the tiny amount of time we have to do it. That's why education is a cornerstone of 2People's strategy.
On his side, Makower can point to decades of evidence showing that people don't buy (or vote) green. But he omits some crucial factors in analyzing this evidence. We as consumers have lousy information. Is this product truly green, or is just hype? How much of a difference will product A make versus product B? Is anyone else buying it, or am I just a lone actor making an idealistic statement that no one hears? For heaven's sake, my neighbor asked me the other day if "organic food" was safe, because he heard that people got sick from the manure!
At the same time, we as consumers always have one signal that's crystal clear: how much does it cost? In the absence of good answers to the good questions, the rational thing to do is to pay more attention to the information we have that's most reliable. And that's what we do. And that's why we're in a race to the bottom. Better marketing is not going to create a race to the top; reliable signals about cause and effect will.
As an activist, I think this is fundamentally wrong. It's not that I think Apollo is a bad idea, or that it would be terrible if people bought compact fluorescents just because they save money. But I do believe that we will not market our way to sustainability. If people don't actually "get it", then we will never make the enormous changes we need to make in the tiny amount of time we have to do it. That's why education is a cornerstone of 2People's strategy.
On his side, Makower can point to decades of evidence showing that people don't buy (or vote) green. But he omits some crucial factors in analyzing this evidence. We as consumers have lousy information. Is this product truly green, or is just hype? How much of a difference will product A make versus product B? Is anyone else buying it, or am I just a lone actor making an idealistic statement that no one hears? For heaven's sake, my neighbor asked me the other day if "organic food" was safe, because he heard that people got sick from the manure!
At the same time, we as consumers always have one signal that's crystal clear: how much does it cost? In the absence of good answers to the good questions, the rational thing to do is to pay more attention to the information we have that's most reliable. And that's what we do. And that's why we're in a race to the bottom. Better marketing is not going to create a race to the top; reliable signals about cause and effect will.
posted by Phil Mitchell at 6:46 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home