Green Branding

Green branding is a difficult concept to define. What is a Green Brand? Is it defined by the product, the business or the consumer? Are popular “green brands” like the Prius or Clorox Green Works truly green?  What are the criteria for the rankings? It’s interesting that Wal-Mart has a high green brand ranking and that BP, in the days of Beyond Petroleum, was getting a lot of plaudits from the environmental community.

We at Bright Green Leadership are committed to helping our clients build effective green brands, and especially online. Social Media, blogs and videos offer an incredible platform for building a green brand. A lot can be learned from the launch of the Ford Fiesta in Europe through the social media campaign “Fiesta Movement”   In green business  Method Cleaning products provide a great case study of how to integrate online and offline green branding, and their People against Dirty campaign is very cool and also very effective in communicating their message.

A successful online Green Brand will use social media to engage its market, and conduct open and honest dialog with its community.  Conscious consumers demand this level of authenticity and transparency, and their perception of a brand is based on much more than how sustainable their product is or its carbon life cycle – important as they are.

Green Branding is about style as well as substance. It’s about the way a business communicates and its perceived level of social responsibility. This is much more than clever marketing tactics and requires a genuine commitment to the triple bottom line.