environmental marketing

Jan

2022

Don’t Just Quote the King, Embody His Message: The Formula for Making an Impact

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led an entire era. What made him a powerful and effective communicator was that he educated, engaged, and motivated people into action. In fact, to this day, his words continue to ignite and spark new generations to action that continue to face oppression.

One significant difference between MLK’s era and today is that many more people are leading companies with the heart and power to drive an impact, both environmentally and socially. Inspired by impact investing, these companies higher on the social and environmental spectrum are investing in a cleaner, more equitable future. Whether that be educating on and implementing workplace diversity, helping reduce waste, proliferating renewable energy, cleaning up water supply, you name it. It’s not a winner-take-all capitalism game for future-proof businesses. Because of that, there are a lot of lessons that young environmental entrepreneurs can learn from MLK’s impactful strategies, emotional metaphors, academic writings, stories, and speeches.

Dr. King’s tactics can be effectively adopted by today’s disruptors, innovators, renewable energy knights, and organizations adopting solid social and sustainable initiatives. His approach could be used to introduce and motivate people to make better environmental choices which ultimately impact all members of our society. Dr. King understood the interconnectedness of everything – as he once said, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Here’s how environmental companies can adopt the formula of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to improve their measurable impact on the planet.

Education

“A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit, in many instances, do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Education is a vital aspect of helping our society turn the corner on new, healthier initiatives. We cannot make an educated shift if we aren’t given the information and the tools necessary to do so. The lesson here from Dr. King is that if we are delivering a solution to one or more of the issues this world faces, we must incorporate education on the issue and the solution we’re presenting.

People are now accustomed to having answers at their fingertips. And if we aren’t providing an in-depth, relevant, and transparent explanation – our business and its offerings can be seen as mildly irrelevant – not part of the conversation. These conversations and educational efforts can be executed IRL, online, social media – perhaps the metaverse. Enlisting the power of engagement can be helpful when delivering our education. It’s what Dr. King did. Why wouldn’t we learn from what worked?

It is an especially important time for environmental companies and organizations to claim their role in society and accept a new level of social responsibility. When creating educational content, remember that your organization was created to make an impact. That means it also needs to improve how marketing is done and what it does for people – helpful, transparent, and educational is where we want to be.

Collaboration – supporting and leveraging other movements

MLK was fighting for social justice, but he also deeply understood the interrelated components of all movements and the importance of actively supporting many issues that ultimately shared the umbrella of injustice. Dr. King knew in order to achieve social justice; environmental justice must be achieved. Healthier living environments for every community and access to clean air, water, and soil all led back to racial equality and voter rights.

Dr. King leveraged and supported many movements and organizations in order to reach the overall goal of social justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized how many great movements of his time were linked. Environmental organizations and companies can realize this as well. Many movements could be stronger with collaboration and recognizing how interdependent they are.

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? This is the way our universe is structured; this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

For organizations solving environmental woes, let’s think about the movements or companies we can partner with to get more reach and grow our impact together. Without bastardizing a cause, how can we genuinely support our community on important and interrelated issues? How can we use our marketing dollars or combine our marketing dollars with others on education to shed light on significant problems we’re solving? Make an effort to collaborate and form deeper connections with our people and demonstrate our organization’s genuine desire to solve, educate, uplift, engage, inform, and create great and lasting changes in the world.

Political Engagement and Involvement

Dr. King spent much of his life meeting with politicians, leading marches, speaking, writing, and organizing political activism campaigns that were instrumental in the changes that occurred. Green companies are uniquely positioned to learn from King’s past and apply it to create a better future. Most organizations are involved to some degree in policy influencing, whether that be having a lobbying arm in the company, being part of an association that lobbies for a particular industry, or getting individuals to sign environmental petitions. We are amidst many environmental changes affecting our daily lives; while the old powers are trying to cling to their stagnant seats in the market, a shift is happening. Environmental brands are positioned to adopt with ferocity and approach political engagement tactics for the issues our green brand represents, just as Dr. King did.

Consumers are hungry for truth, transparency, and political action on the environmental issues they support. Environmental companies who wish to have long-term staying power in their industry will rally the support of community members and consumers and sway political agendas in a better direction. Dominant sectors like petrochemical, plastic, and non-renewable energy companies have used the power of lobbying for decades. Environmental companies might not have the same sizable budget necessary for a lobbying firm retainer; perhaps utilizing the same principles of lobbying firms and incorporating them into our content marketing strategy is the alternative action. Combining communication, education, and collaborations can help fuel political campaigns our community wants to support.

Storytelling and Engagement – Lead with a positive outcome

There was no doubt when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke; we knew he understood and deeply empathized with the people he spoke for. He painted a picture of the final step of success. He delivered an idea, a goal to attain – a dream. He lifted hope from a riverbed by drying it off and holding it up as a vision. In our communications, be like Dr. King – paint a picture of the promised land first and foremost. What does success look like for our people in particular? How will they know when they’ve reached the finish line? What hopes can actionable steps be drafted from?

From a world with cleaner water to communities with optimal health and excellent air quality, whatever our team and our company is solving, let’s be sure to paint the picture of success in our content.

Visibility – P.R./Advertising/Social Media Marketing

Dr. King was impressive with garnering media attention and capturing a nation, whether in print, radio or on television – the imagery and sound continue to live on. The brutality and horrors that occurred, and still do today, as everyday life for black people in the United States, he knew, had to be seen by everyone to make a difference and change minds. Dr. King made sure this was the case every chance he got. The media played a big part in the civil rights movement. Environmental companies can note Dr. King’s use of the media and press to activate imagery about the need for change.

Green public relations and content dissemination are about relationship building and content sharing around a collective effort to address environmental issues. Green PR builds an ecosystem around our social and environmental solutions. More than building a green face to maintain a positive image, Green PR seeks to align with community members and media to exponentially increase the impact and efficacy of campaigns, content, and agendas.

Takeaways from Dr. King

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. listened and genuinely connected people in a movement. Expanding our environmental impact and protecting the most vulnerable people from the worst catastrophes requires all hands on deck. In today’s world, it involves the action of environmental companies and organizations. We all can do more than quote Dr. King; we can take his strategy for real change and adapt the same formula for expanding our reach and impact on the world – people and our environment. For those that hate the idea of marketing but know it must be done, consider how our solutions in the world will benefit people the bigger our movement can be. To instill new ideas and solutions, we need more organizations on board to take action and:

Educate
Collaborate
Politically Activate
Create a vision of success
Be visibly doing it all

Don’t just quote the King, be one by working with our team to improve your measurable impact. As the first environmental content marketing company owned by women of color, A.R. Marketing House offers a unique perspective and expertise in combining environmental science and marketing tactics to drive sales and impact. Our team is dedicated to using our skills and passion for sustainability to help sustainable businesses achieve their goals. Take action and make an impact today with your content strategy.

If you need help developing content and building content marketing strategies, we can help. Contact us today.

Resources:

https://www.thesca.org/connect/blog/dr-king-civil-rights-and-environmental-justice

https://biography.yourdictionary.com/articles/martin-luther-king-progress-civil-rights-movement.html

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/purpose-education#fn1

Nov

2021

What is Content Marketing for Sustainable Brands?

How to leverage education-based environmental marketing

For many years, brands have used storytelling and the delivery of helpful content to create value and attract customers. The ultimate goal, of course, is to create a community and promote products and services with a solution to community issues.

When we explore the question – what is content marketing? We’re exploring a history of creativity and a future of opportunities to make humans better through education. A long-standing leader in content marketing is John Deere. They developed a magazine for farmers called “The Furrow” and printed articles that resemble the Farmer’s Almanac. To this day, the John Deere brand educates and delivers incredibly helpful information to assist those that would use their farming equipment, inadvertently building a community and brand loyalty.

In this post, we will answer the following questions:

What is content marketing, and how does it work?
What are the main components to make content marketing efforts effective?
Why do you need a content strategy as an environmental company?
What are the various forms of content marketing?
What is content marketing for beginners?
What are the benefits of content marketing?
How to get started adding education to your content marketing efforts?
Top content marketing books to get you started.

What is content marketing and how does it work?

100 Renewable Energy Content Marketing Stats & Facts | how to engage with your community

Content Marketing is a type of marketing that involves creating and sharing online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2019

Green content marketing is a type of content marketing that includes environmental education and awareness as an integral part of a marketing campaign aimed to raise the knowledge level of average consumers about environmental issues, not greenwashing. –Denise Anderson-Rivas

How Content Marketing Works:

Get your brand on the mission of the consumer, making your brand a powerful advocate for things your consumers believe in, want, and need for improving their lives.
Helps to start a politically motivated campaign that aligns with your consumers’ beliefs and gets them on board for a cause that aligns with everyone’s mission.
Propels your word-of-mouth factor and educational content as consumers grow to trust your transparent way of educating. Brand enthusiasts happily share and promote your content with their network – the most trusted form of information delivery, peer-to-peer.
Increases trustworthiness.
Increases reach to new and broader markets.

What are the main components to make content marketing efforts effective?

To make your content marketing effective, you have to step into the shoes of your ideal customers. Here are some main points to follow.

Know who you are – documented brand identity guidelines.
Know who you serve – target personas and their journey.
Have a solidified content mission statement – to guide your team on the purpose of creating content and who your content will serve.
Serve beyond the sale – deliver helpful, insightful content that’s not geared toward the sell but toward the tell.
Deliver and promote content where customers hang out – if you have a TikTok resistant team, but your customers are moving their time to that platform, speedily get your content on TikTok and be a part of the community. Look for relevant communities to be a part of, like #earthtok.
Be consistent– have an optimized content production process that works like clockwork and is agile.
Plan ahead – with a content calendar and a schedule.
Deliver content as a long-term strategy – not only for a few months or a year. The payoff is usually longer, but the ROI is greater.
Be transparent – admit where your company and industry lacks and where you’re making improvements. We live in the age of transparency, and your customers will appreciate your honesty. It makes you stand out and makes you authentic.
Collect data – weekly, monthly, and quarterly data collection to guide content decisions.

Having a Content Mission Statement is important for every environmental company delivering helpful information. It will tie in the most critical aspects of your team’s content creation for your brand’s community. Your team should never get off track if they read the content mission statement before creating every piece of content, no matter the format. When you add new team members, this statement will quickly help them know what to create and who to create it for. Here’s a formula you can use:

[Name of Company/Organization] is dedicated to delivering [types of content] on the topics of [list content pillars] to achieve [goals for your customers].

A.R. Environmental Content Marketing House’s content mission statement:

A.R. Environmental Content Marketing House will consistently produce content for CEOs and CMOs of environmental companies on environmental content marketing topics to help grow their business, accomplish their mission, and increase their measurable impact on the planet.

The biggest secret to content success is staying consistent and continuously improving based on new findings and relevant trends. Check out the secret to successful environmental content marketing by clicking here.

If you’re looking to get started on a content strategy or your marketing team could use support, send us a message info@armarketinghouse.com.

Why do environmental companies need a content marketing strategy?

Why do you need a content strategy as an environmental company? | A.R. Environmental Content Marketing House

You’ll want a strategy to connect with people in a meaningful way. Your team will need customers to know that you’re part of the problem but that you’re working toward solutions. Take a lesson from Patagonia. Having a content strategy prevents your team from creating content for the sake of content.

Starting with your customer’s goals (and yes, you should definitely find out what they are through engagement social surveying), your marketing team will want to find the right way to support their efforts. Whether that’s through environmental legislation, arming customers with the knowledge to be better stewards, or bringing out environmental research that often stays locked in academia. Your brand can use its marketing dollars to do the right thing and deliver the information lacking in the public sphere.

Transparency is golden – admit your company isn’t perfect but aims to be the best solution. Since most big brands are lower on the sustainability spectrum and have greenwashed messaging, you can help customers make the best decisions through re-education on important environmental issues. This means creating educational content, delivering company transparency, showing proof, referencing scientific studies, and doing all this through enticing engagement on critical issues.

Environmental Content Marketing Funnel | A.R. Marketing House

The Secret to Successful Environmental Content Marketing

What forms of content marketing fit best for your sustainable brand?

What are the various forms of content marketing?

Most companies know they need a content marketing component for their product or service to reach more consumers and get those consumers to buy and commit to their product. Sustainable brands need to incorporate education to get people to “make the switch.” Here are some examples of content marketing tactics your brand can leverage.

Environmental Educational Content. Consumers demand authentic information. People are spending more time on their smartphones communicating, researching, and people want immediate answers to the questions they have — hint: sustainable brands aren’t leveraging this need nearly enough. At the same time, there is a disconnect between scientific studies and delivering academic information to the masses in a coherent, accessible way. The breakdown from science to public knowledge is the same juncture where environmental educational content meets marketing strategies. The premise is that to connect people with the backed-by-science information they’re looking for. Environmental companies are in a unique position to use their marketing dollars to do just that — environmental content marketing. In the same vein as filling a gap in the consumer market with a green product, environmental educational content fills a market gap of knowledge.

Environmental education is a highly valuable measure that leaves your company with assets in the form of content that can look like any mix of the following:

Documentaries
Short-form videos
Podcasts
Voice/storytelling
Articles
Stats and Facts Microcontent
Email marketing
Photography
Study and science-backed articles
Infographics
Speaking events
Online presentations
Webinars
Online course creation
Magazines
User-generated content
NFTs (non-fungible tokens)

And the content format list goes as long as the imagination.

Political Involvement. Green companies are uniquely positioned to connect with consumers on an authentic level that major brands like Chevron or Coca-Cola will never be able to. You can uncover any company’s values when you a) follow the money and b) follow the politics. Most companies are involved to some degree in policy influencing, which is why environmental brands must adopt the same ferocity when approaching political engagement for the issues their brand represents. Content comes into play here by having your content team develop educational tools and messaging for political leaders and policymakers. You can contact us to learn more about this!

Advertising your content. The advertising industry isn’t going anywhere because of the increase in content marketing strategies. In 2018, advertisers spent 376 billion dollars, and that number is expected to grow 41% over the next three years. With the increase in access to analytics, ROI discernment of where advertising dollars can and should be spent, the focus will begin to shift toward creating content, new strategies, and new ways to offer experiential marketing to people. Whirlpool failed to execute education and learned this lesson the hard way. Had they taken the educational-content route, they would have seen that consumers would pay a premium for a CFC-free refrigerator but didn’t because Whirlpool failed to educate them on what CFCs were. -Abramovich, 2018.

What is content marketing for beginners?

For green businesses just getting started on content marketing, the best advice is to decide now if you will take a slow and steady approach, or if you want to dive in fully. Be cognizant of the demands of a full-scale content strategy. Because the last thing you want to do is start too big and not be prepared or start too small and realize you should have planned a much larger strategy. Either way, you want to have a team supporting your efforts and delivering to make your company part of meaningful conversations.

Let’s not forget, sustainability investors are on the rise. Consumers, especially younger consumers, are paying more attention to climate change effects. Their demands and purchasing choices are proof. Every large conglomerate, big-box chain, and many major brands are aware of the growing awareness of climate change and are adding ESGs to their business plans and marketing endeavors. Companies low on the sustainability level will eventually be forced to make major changes for the better, and environmental companies like yours can push the inevitable even faster through effective communication and content efforts.

Environmental content marketing is growing companies by delivering high-quality, reliable, well-researched content that informs and engages communities on the environmental issues their product or service solves. Everyone wants to be a part of the solution. The goal is to always support people with your marketing efforts and solutions. This is done by consistently leveraging substance to your content marketing and advertising efforts.

What are the benefits of content marketing for sustainable brands?

While ⅓ of consumers actively seek out sustainable brands, there are ⅕ waiting to connect with brands they believe are doing the things they claim on their packaging. Content marketing provides consumers the right to have truthful information, to deeply communicate, educate, and inspire them into action and a joint-effort relationship.

Content Marketing benefits include:

Offers an opportunity to educate on the environmental problem your company is trying to solve.
You can use your marketing dollars to do good by educating.
Use content marketing to educate lawmakers.
Influence policy and start a movement around solving an environmental issue.
Increase sales.
Cost savings.
Attract better customers who have more loyalty.
Content as a profit center.

13 Benefits of Educational Content A.R. Marketing House

There are benefits for sustainable brands that produce tailored, educational content:

Build brand awareness.
Build your brand as a leader, teacher, and change maker.
Teach the topics people need to understand for change and buy-in.
Grow a committed following that promotes your brand’s environmental solution.
Support sales and B2B efforts more effectively and intuitively.
Supports B2C customers along their learning and buying journeys.
Supports social media organically.
Open up PR opportunities organically.
Attract like-minded partners to join your cause.
Improved SEO.

Steps to start adding environmental education to your content marketing efforts

Here are some steps for getting started on adopting a content marketing strategy for your environmentally conscious brand.

Set a goal. Set one clear goal and small subset goals for your educational content marketing plan. The goal could be to remove x amount of plastic cutlery in the world by selling x amount of my reusable traveling cutlery and getting 10,000 people to sign my petition to ban single-use plastic cutlery in my state or country, whatever makes the most sense for your brand’s mission.

Determine what is needed for your industry to advance. Take a hard look at the last significant advancements in your industry, address where your industry currently is, and the environmental damages the status quo has caused in your industry. Then, determine how you can use your product/service to advance the industry toward a sustainable future.

Locate the biggest supporters of your brand or solution. Determine what groups of people are genuinely excited that your sustainable product or service exists.

Build a strategy around your supporter’s educational needs. Learn what needs they have and what gaps in knowledge exist to truly understand the underlying environmental issues behind the solution that is your product. Often, customers will love the idea of your product just because it’s “green.” However, it will never be enough to sell a green product by merely making unsubstantiated claims. Do good and use content marketing to increase brand integrity by uncovering the environmental education that customers require to act. Then develop the educational strategy necessary for customers to understand your solution in long-term ways. Finally, execute the educational strategy so customers can commit to the advancement of your solution and together you can make a measurable impact.

Our favorite content marketing books to get you started

Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute

Content, Inc. by Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute

Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson

Using content to educate on the climate crisis

Consumerism will not stop climate change. However, we are standing at the precipice of our climate crisis, and there’s so much we humans collectively need to know to move forward. As we witness devastating effects of climate change on our homes, health, air, food, and local weather patterns, the time has come for an all-hands-on-deck approach to environmental literacy. So what is content marketing? It’s really about what content marketing can be. Content marketing for organizations and businesses that are tackling some of our biggest environmental problems is imperative. Why? Because our educational system cannot catch up to teach everyone what they need to know to make better choices. Better choices in their voting decisions, their purchasing habits, and in lawmaking.

Need help with your environmental content? For more information on how you can successfully grow your business through educational marketing, contact us or check out other articles here!

Resources:

https://www.deere.com/en/publications/the-furrow/

The Secret to Successful Environmental Content Marketing

https://armarketinghouse.com/tag/green-marketing/

Epic Content Marketing

Content, Inc.

Guerilla Marketing

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnrampton/2016/10/02/5-key-components-to-a-successful-content-marketing-campaign/?sh=77ac337a5ebc

What is Environmental Content Marketing?

7 Powerful Reasons Why Everything Begins with Content Strategy

https://armarketinghouse.com/tag/environmental-marketing/

What Is Content Marketing?

Blog

Jan

2021

The Secret to Successful Environmental Content Marketing

Innovate, don’t imitate — how CEOs of Sustainable Brands can leverage tailored content & turn Green to Gold

Have you noticed the number of people concerned with the planet continues to grow exponentially? Even if they don’t completely understand what’s going on, they know something needs to be done. Research and public polling back this observation up — 90% of people from the U.S. believe the government should act on climate change by planting more trees. What’s more, 77% agree on prioritizing renewable energy technologies rather than increasing fossil fuel production.

So yeah, it’s official, people care. And while our world might feel chaotic and polarized right now, it’s great to know that a public shift is taking place. In my glass-half-full vision, we will continue on this path until we have course-corrected some of the most significant human-caused planetary problems – I mean, what are the other options, really? As you can imagine, there are many intersecting reasons why this shift has occurred. Some of those reasons include everyday people seeing extreme weather events in their backyard, witnessing high rates of cancer amongst friends and family members, the evolution of respiratory diseases like SARS-CoV-2 pushing human life to the brink, and environmental injustices where people in sacrifice zones pay the highest price for corporate profits — our lives. We’ve moved away from the debate on whether environmental issues are a “sexy” enough topic to cover. People want to talk about the facts, beyond doom and gloom — and from my experience, most people want to learn and do better, whatever that means and looks like for them.

The great thing is, so many innovative environmental entrepreneurs feel the same way, which is why we’re seeing a race for innovation to solve things like plastic pollution, water shortages, dirty energy, contaminated food supplies, and climate change. Yay, innovation. And folks are ready for no-brainer switches to more sustainable, responsible ways of being. The only set back is… Trust!

Years have been wasted on aggravating corporate greenwashing, which of course continues to this day. Well-intentioned people without a background to discern are led to believe there are redeeming qualities in things like “waste to energy via incineration” and “plastic recycling.” For the record, unfortunately, there is not. These “innovations” are more like bandaids to more significant issues requiring in-depth solutions. While greenwashers abound flashing 100% plastic recycling, many more genuine solutions to preventing plastic waste are being created. The only thing is… people need help differentiating, they need trusted information from our green leaders out there. Environmental Industry leaders can’t do things the way they’ve been done before – doing good deeds quietly. As corny as it sounds, we’ve got to walk hand in hand to the future, together, loudly praising and educating on enlightened solutions that go mainstream. That’s where Environmental Content Marketing comes in.

In this post, you will learn:

What Environmental Content Marketing is
Why sustainable brands need a tailored Content Marketing approach
The benefits for sustainable brands that use Content Marketing
A new take on the standard sales funnel adapted to Sustainable Brand Content Marketing
How your sustainable brand can develop a unique strategy
Producing quality information and environmental education to win & keep customers while growing your environmental impact
Personalization and relationship building for green brands

So, what exactly is Environmental Content Marketing?

Let’s start with a definition. Full disclosure, there is no standard definition of “Environmental Marketing,” let alone “Environmental Content Marketing,” so we’ve developed a working definition from our vantage point on the curve, and it goes like this:

Green Content Marketing is a type of content marketing that includes environmental education and awareness as an integral part of a marketing strategy aimed to raise environmental literacy of consumers, constituents, business to business professionals, and decision-makers about environmental issues through content creation, dissemination, and engagement; not greenwashing.

Do Sustainable Brands need a tailored Environmental Content Marketing Strategy?

Mostly Yes, but a little No.

The yes part. To steer clear of unintentional greenwashing it is best to adopt a tailored approach to content marketing for green brands. Here’s the deal, most people feel like they’ve heard it all before — that’s your enemy, a ‘been there, done that’ attitude toward most sustainable solutions. Damn those decades of greenwashing. Marketing agencies, PR agencies, website developers, and most if not all types of agencies have painted environmental products and services with the same set of brushstrokes. Banking off of a tried and true delivery method of making people feel better, happier about their new green choice – be it real or not. But we’ve come further than baseless claims and feel good campaigns. While making people feel good is nice – your claims must be based on truth, or well, that’s not very nice at all. Your brand will reflect the falsehood once customers scratch beneath the surface. But the great thing here is that you don’t have to be perfect; you just have to be transparent and plan toward achieving greater sustainability milestones with your product or service – “we’re working on that” clause but you have to mean it.

The no part. When it comes to educating on the environmental topic you are solving, people want you to stick to the facts, the science, the studies. So you can be a little more general when educating on, for example, water contamination – all the ways that water becomes contaminated and ways to filter it. There shouldn’t be fluctuation if you’re sticking to the truth. In this sense, you don’t need tailored content per say because you can share facts and stats, studies, science-based infographics. Here’s where you want to adhere to agreed upon science for the topic you’re helping people learn more about. Your job here is to make information understandable and accessible. Like with digestible facts & stats that put realities and hopes into action, like the example below.

Now for more on the yes (tailored content) part.

Why does a tailored strategy matter for Sustainable Brands?

Let’s use an example here. If you’re selling non-sustainable shoes, really your biggest concerns are appealing to emotions, aesthetics, and particular feelings depending on who your brand of shoes are made for. Ultimately you’re pitching based on what owning those shoes will feel like to the wearer, not a calculable impact on the environment. A sustainable shoe brand has this opportunity to do that and much more if they want to convert people to a new way of wearing shoes. To help people “make the switch” from unsustainable shoes to sustainable shoes, they have to connect with one major thing, their why! And to connect with the why for sustainable brands means reeducation through tailored content. What does it mean to wear shoes? What can I expect from an aspirational shoe brand? What’s so bad about non-sustainable shoes anyway? If a sustainable shoe brand solely appeals to their customer on a coolness factor, that will eventually fade. Not to mention, a sustainable shoe brand won’t shine if they don’t grab the opportunity to be different and stand out, rather than market the same way as a non sustainable brand. To harness lifelong customers engaged in a brand’s mission means to bring them into a more in-depth understanding — educate on the shoe industry, compare brands, longevity, the sustainability of materials, fairness and treatment of workers, the distance of travel from factory to foot. These are all tailored topics for the sustainable shoe brand to rise to the occasion. So how will this shoe brand go about telling the stories and delivering education on these topics?

Developing a tailored content marketing strategy will require a creative approach. Often this is where a specialized agency can be outsourced to determine what that unique approach will be. Content Marketing is a long-term commitment. While the use of various content formats might vary depending on needs, the overall strategy will need to embody the brand makeup and take customers on the journey to a better life, even if that means a better life for your feet and the planet.

Maybe your sustainable brand is unsure what would best serve customers in the education and relationship-building process – you don’t want to alienate anyone, right? Experimentation and social surveys are a great way to uncover what customers want to learn about, how each customer wants to be engaged, and how they can get involved with your impact-driven brand in a way they feel fits them best.

Benefits for Sustainable Brands that produce tailored, educational content

Build awareness for your brand as a leader, teacher, and change maker
Teach the topics people need to understand for change and buy-in
An opportunity to deliver transparency in a unique way
Connect through the most effective, relevant content formats and platforms
Grow a committed following that promotes your brand’s environmental solution
Support sales and B2B efforts more effectively and intuitively
Supports B2C customers along their learning and buying journeys
Placing ads on content vs. products reduces ad spend and is seen as helpful rather than salesy
Supports social media organically
Open up PR opportunities organically
Attract like-minded partners to join your cause
Improved SEO

How is Content Marketing different for Sustainable Brands?

While ROI is the name of the game for any company or organization, a sustainable brand’s measurable impact is inextricably tied to this ROI. For sustainable brands that have embedded their success into their impact on the planet, there’s no escaping that education through content marketing will aid on this mission. Helping customers “switch over” and convert their friends and family to, for example, toxic-free laundry practices, reusable coffee pods, investing in solar panels, etc. For sustainable brands that have a B2B market, it also takes education to help B2B buyers update their supply chains and truly understand your solution’s entire lifecycle and how your solution will help their company’s triple bottom line, or ESG (environmental, social, governance) goals.

Based on the premise of a typical sales funnel, we’ve created an Environmental Content Marketing funnel that gives context to each stage in relation to the advancement of an environmental solution. Starting from the top of the funnel:

Stage 1 involves reeducation, which is the awareness stage. Hey! Teach people something new, right? That’s the idea here, to get people to think of concepts related to your solutions in ways they’ve never thought about before. Here’s where the reframing and new metaphors come in, take the topic, and rework how people think of it, whether through metaphors or using a new language. Linguist George Lakoff calls this “framing,” and you can learn more about it in Framing: 6 Lessons for Marketing Teams of Sustainable Brands.

Stage 2 is typically called the consideration stage; for sustainable brands, this looks more like transparency, social proof, and everything you have to lay out on the table to build trust. If there’s an aspect of your product or service that might stir up confusion or isn’t quite as green as you’d like, here’s where you can come clean and discuss it rather than tucking it away like a nasty little greenwasher, eh? You’ll build trust with your followers for calling out the things you’re working to improve.

Stage 3 is the a-ha moment for your new customers. They’ve “made the switch” and see your offering as a solution.

Stage 4 is the proof that you’ve done your job educating, and they see your solution as long-term, something they can’t turn back from now.

Stage 5 is the “why doesn’t everyone know this” stage. At this point, you’ve successfully guided your customers along the knowledge journey to take action, and they can’t believe others are not doing the same. Now is the time to give them the tools to make an impact on the lives of their business partners, friends, and family. Here is where your ROI and measurable impact become exponentially powerful by helping your customers take promotional action, i.e., becoming the teachers.

Looking at the sales funnel in this context, you can start to ask, just how is your community supported along each stage of the journey toward a better life and planet?

Environmental Content Marketing is not only about a campaign, it’s a commitment that deserves its own Mission Statement (yep!)

While all marketing strategies have their place, content marketing is not a one and done marketing model. Unlike PR campaigns, ad campaigns, product promos, etc., that are produced once and the benefits are acutely measured and analyzed for success, content marketing is more like an asset that you can continually draw from. Campaigns can be supported by content, but your environmental content strategy will continue to support your efforts even if it shifts in format over time. Whereas once an ad has completed its deadline, stellar content can continue to draw traffic, shares, and awareness for years to come, as long as you continue to strategically disseminate and promote the content, keeping it fresh and relevant.

The commitment for sustainable brands is really in the educational and entertainment aspects. Emphasis on the educational, there are wild myths that still exist around environmental topics. Here are just a few:

The damage is done; there’s nothing we can do
Nature and ecosystems are “out there” and not relevant to me
Plastic is recyclable, so I don’t need to stop using it
Climate change isn’t real, it’s naturally occurring, and there’s nothing we should do

There are so many other myths, and in all fairness, as science is continually evolving, it’s our job as educators and problem solvers to deliver updates on these topics. The fact remains, there’s still so much knowledge sharing to do if we’re to course-correct toward zero-waste, renewable energy, clean equitable water access, sustainable food, and reforestation.

Education can’t just be for customers; we need all hands on deck where content marketing is concerned. When the level of environmental literacy is lifted in your particular sector, you will have knowledgeable, confident stakeholders, employees, c-suite executives, investors, and partners. Knowing not just how to change but also why a change is needed helps solidify those learning moments and make the learning curve a bit easier.

Now time for that Environmental Content Mission Statement. Having a mission statement for your content will tie in the most critical aspects of your team’s content creation for your brand’s community. The winning formula looks something like this:

[Name of Company/Organization] is dedicated to delivering [types of content] on the topics of [list content pillars] to achieve [goals for your customers].

To see this example in context, here is the A.R. Environmental Content Marketing House content mission statement:

Overcoming pain points and barriers

It’s easy to say, “Yah, I love content; let’s get some blogs and videos going – what eco topics do we want to cover?” But having a passion for content and delivering a winning strategy that covers all bases while elevating your eco brand to the next level are two different approaches. Especially with environmental topics, there are some hurdles to cross. Por ejemplo (that’s Spanish for “for example” ):

It’s not always easy for everyone to readily understand the science, or the need for your environmental solution, and that’s okay. The sad reality is whether your product or service is B2B, B2C, solving water issues, taking climate action, or tackling waste, most people have not received the environmental education necessary to make a sound, un-greenwashed decision. They need reliable, fact-based information delivered to them in comprehensive ways to move forward to incorporate genuine sustainability.

Everything is connected, which is why including a multidisciplinary approach when discussing environmental topics in your content is powerful. To properly discuss, for example, the plastic crisis, tie in multiple issues that affect its current state like fossil fuels, photodegradation, the endocrine system, oceanic food chain. Leave the doom and gloom behind; taking a multidisciplinary fact-based approach to explaining topics respects your customers’ intelligence and helps them understand how systems are related.

Focusing on the right kind of engagement. Engagement is all about participating in a dialogue that your community wants to have. So you put your ears to the online forums and social media conversations to see what questions are being asked. Search what misperceptions are being spread, and start creating content around these complex topics by simplifying them and facilitating conversations across your channels.

Preaching to the sustainable choir. Love the choir; they’re great but don’t stop at preaching to people who are already believers; your brand likely needs new leads and nudges over those on the fence. Delve into your buyer personas, make sure they’re not too narrow, and craft strategies that reach beyond the heavy believers. They’re going to want more proof, more science, more effort from your content team. And you’re going to give it to them because that’s how you’ll make an impact while increasing your growth.

How do you create a unique Environmental Content Marketing strategy?

There are many steps to take in developing a unique strategy, enough to write an entire eBook on (hint drop succeeded) — when it comes to sustainable brands, here are a few factors to consider. Remember, you’ll want to dive into these questions while thinking of how you would connect and deliver content that addresses these questions’ answers in unique, compelling ways.

What is your unique solution? What sets it apart from other solutions? Why is it superior, and what are the big selling points? How are you saving the planet? What proof can you show? When you think of the answers to these questions, consider the creative ways you can express these features, how would you describe them, how would you represent them without words?

Who are your target personas? Do not start your Environmental Content journey without knowing precisely who you are trying to reach. When exploring your buyer personas, make them as real as possible. Give your buyer personas names, talk to them in real life, and learn what they care about and their values. Beyond the usual demographics, which may or may not be helpful (they might just be stereotypes) — talk directly to people who embody your mission and brand. Learn where they hang out online and offline, and find out about those key points that had them make “the switch” to your brand or solution. Rinse and repeat until you have about 5 personas. You don’t need much more than 5 core personas; if you have more, you may find that they overlap in very subtle, unimportant ways. Spend more time intimately getting to know the 5, rather than creating 15.

Producing quality environmental content

Now that your strategy is locked and loaded, you’ve narrowed down your personas, you have a tailored approach with some content pillars and an environmental content mission statement, it’s time to set up your content management system and get to creating—some pointers before getting started.

Take your unique strategy and make stellar content. Don’t settle for cheap, poorly researched written blogs, blasé downloadables, or half-cooked content ideas. Aim high on the quality of your content whether you have an in-house team or you get outsourced help, use a brand editorial and content style guide and make sure all content creators know your content mission statement intimately before creating content.

Invest in your content as an asset for your brand that will continue to deliver and grow. Some companies like Disney are built on content as assets. That’s because they’re high quality and have a high value. The mindset of investing in the content will garner more ROI and impact your brand in the long run.

Measure your Environmental Content and understand your long-term ROI. Quality content might cost a little more upfront but pays hands-down for getting the best ROI. On the other hand, lower budget content or content lacking a strategy may actually hurt your brand, and you could risk losing customers if they find your content to be subpar, as it reflects your products and services.

Going beyond – environmental content personalization builds relationships

The experiences that you give your customers are the imprints that will stick with them. When it comes to environmental education, you want to make sure customer voices are heard, their questions thoroughly and honestly answered – you know, kind of like a bff. You want to have the right content and the right CRM software in place so that each customer feels like you’re speaking directly to them across the channels they prefer. Weaving environmental content into communications is an ongoing process. Never stop the conversation, and never stop making an impact.

Denise Anderson-Rivas is the Director of Environmental Education & Co-founder at A.R. Environmental Content Marketing House. Denise helps clients successfully merge the mutual needs of Environmental Content Marketing and Environmental Education. Powered by her multi-disciplined background in science, business, marketing, and natural resource conservation, she is committed to raising the level of Environmental Literacy for all, improving quality of life and decision making on sustainability and environmental justice topics.

Oct

2020

A Brief History of Trash

The evolution of our waste issues

We, the people, are communal animals. There is no denying that. We are also creators of waste. As we came together in larger and larger communities, the need to manage waste grew more complicated and more expensive, of course. Waste management has long provided work for some, and benefits to society such as health and even soil improvements. Waste is one element that we often want to keep out of sight and out of mind – NIMBY (not in my backyard).

In this age of uncertainty and distraction, we sometimes overlook basics. Waste management is one of those basics. Above is a rendition of life during the black plague, when waste was not properly managed. Knowledge seemed to come and go about managing waste. Some ancients made sure they had clean environments. Others, not so much. Some even figured out that keeping things clean helped people’s health, as embodied in the Shinto religion, cleanliness is godliness.

Urban growth seemed to dictate innovation in this area, but it wasn’t organized as we know it in a municipal effort until the 18th century. As a historical note, the Han Dynasty (2000 BC) had records of “fertilizer recipes,” and the Minoans (1500 BC) had evidence of dumpsites outside of the Cretan capital of Knossos.

In ancient cities, wastes were thrown onto unpaved streets and roadways, where they were left to accumulate. It was not until 320 BCE in Athens that the first known law forbidding this practice was established. After the fall of Rome, waste collection and municipal sanitation went into serious decline. “Scavengers” eventually were given the job of moving waste to dumps outside cities around the 14th century.

England decided that every city had to have its own “Scavenger,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1714.

For many of us, Waste Management consists of those weekly pickups of our garbage and recycling bins. Keep them coming, and all is well. Yes, a variation of out of sight; out of mind. Some rural types haul theirs to the local dump or landfill and are a little closer to the land and the need to handle the waste properly.

Waste Management has evolved. Here are a couple of fun historical attempts by communities to handle waste:

Charleston W.V. 1834, hunters were prohibited from killing vultures because they helped consume the city’s garbage.

Worcester, MA, from 1872-1932, used up to 8000 pigs to take care of the city’s garbage. The city’s “piggery” employed these diligent public servants to good measure, consuming over 10 tons of garbage daily. These poor porkers received room and board only despite their dedicated service.

50s plastics = Throwaway Society

In Life magazine in 1955, an American family celebrates the dawn of “Throwaway Living,” thanks in part to disposable plastics. Single-use plastics have brought great convenience to people around the world, but they also make up a big part of the plastic waste that’s now choking our oceans. Photograph by PETER STACKPOLE, LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

In Life magazine in 1955, an American family celebrates the dawn of “Throwaway Living,” thanks in part to disposable plastics. Single-use plastics have brought great convenience to people worldwide, but they also make up a big part of the plastic waste that’s now choking our oceans. The composition of waste has changed over the years, and the days of the cart moving waste to noxious incinerators, rivers, ocean fronts, and old fashioned garbage dumps have mostly disappeared.

Technology improvements like motorized vehicles lead to things like garbage trucks and organized waste collection in most American cities. Increased mobility, supermarkets, an explosion of packaging saw many changes to our society, and a wave of waste. From celluloid to plastic, was it inevitable that our distancing from the natural world would lead to the Throwaway Society coined in a 1955 Life Magazine article “Throwaway Living”?

The 1985 article, A Paean to Plastic, was also a hallelujah to housewives’ chance to free up time, which would have been used for cleaning plates, towels, diapers, ashtrays, etc. But, of course, for every action, there is a reaction.

The problem was that these unnatural conveniences didn’t go away. No, they might have been burned and polluted the air. They may have been piled into a landfill and, as we now know, breakdown over 400 plus years. They might have fallen into rivers finding their way to the sea, sinking into the depths of Marianas Trench.

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9UtaVgnPMY ” width=”540″ autoplay=”yes” mute=”yes” title=”Deep In The Heart Of The Mariana Trench…Is A Plastic Bag”]

Before the birthing of western environmental consciousness in the 1960s, waste was usually burned on-site in barrels or pits. Waste sent to landfills was likely to be dumped in “open burn landfills.”

Then in the 1960s, public health experts started sounding the alarm about our handling of waste in its many forms. A 1963 conference screamed about the dangers to health that improper handling of waste could cost. By 1965, the Solid Waste Disposal Act (SWDA) gave birth to solid waste’s first nationwide regulation. Moving at the usual government speed, Congress passed the Federal Resource Recovery Act in 1970. This act amended SWDA to require the Federal Government to step in and set National Guidelines for Waste disposal.

Trying to fix the growing volume of municipal and industrial waste, congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) in 1976. The act banned the dumping of waste, taking lessons learned; it also recommended national goals for conservation, human and environmental protection, and environmentally-sound waste disposal. Hazardous waste was to be controlled, as well as passing the Toxic Substances Control Act.

Waste trends have been exploding since 1960; the U.S. generated 88.1 million tons of waste or 2.96 lbs. That is per person, each day. By 1970, that number jumped to 121.1 million tons averaging 3.25 lbs per person on a daily basis. In the year 2000, we generated 243.5 million tons of solid waste, jumping up to 4.74 lbs per person each and every day. In 2017, 267.8 million tons were generated with the average lbs per person at 4.51, according to the U.S. EPA.

U.S. Congressional efforts to tighten environmental damage has, of course, complicated the handling of solid waste. Recycling came to the rescue – at least for metal, glass, and paper. The same cannot be said for plastic recycling; on that front, it’s official – we’ve all been lied to. But over time, certain wastes became commodities. And for every commodity, there’s always a conservative, corporate raider lurking. Jeez, guys, can’t we have anything nice?

And at last, we have the explosion of public service privatization. You can spot these people as haters of the New Deal who brought us concepts like “Breaking Municipal Monopoly” Emanuel Savas. Sounds like the Hollywood phraseology from Ronald Reagan: “Government is not the solution to our problem, the government is the problem,” which we’ve all come to learn the hard way via COVID-19; this is simply not true.

Gone are the open burn pits, yes, but demonizing of public workers and desperate, financially strapped communities blasted with little more than propaganda about how privatizing and shrinking the size of government would be so wonderful – NEWS FLASH, it’s not…

Lobbying exploded in this time period, as well. Of course, this followed a long history of money, finding easier access to halls of power.

When a municipality seeks to outsource its solid waste services, the bidding process encourages competition among the private waste sector, which in turn encourages fair pricing and good service.

From 1996 municipal revenues from waste have shrunk while private and public company participation has skyrocketed. Let’s break this down:

Municipal = A city or town that has corporate status and local government. These communities collect various types of waste and then send it off to their disposal sites.

Private = City contracts with a privately owned company to handle the waste. Owned privately, usually meaning the founders, management, or a group of private investors.

Public = City contracts with a publicly owned company that handles the city’s waste.

A Public company is one that has sold all or a portion of itself to the public via an initial public offering (IPO), meaning shareholders have a claim to part of the company’s assets and profits.

[su_quote]TALKING POINTS From The National Waste and Recycling Association: – The private sector can help reduce costs and improve efficiency while freeing municipalities from having to maintain their own removal and disposal services. – This, in turn, allows governments to focus their limited resources on core services such as recycling education, first-responders, education, and infrastructure. – Governments are likely to benefit from privatization through better protection from market risks, better safety records, faster adoption of more efficient technologies, and less debt. [/su_quote]

The talking points are a privatizer’s dream. In the end, who paid? Did recycling, composting, waste-to-energy cover the costs of the operation? I suspect the contract called for the municipality to take care of that part of the equation.

It is common practice in this alternate world of post-reality economics to blame costs on government regulations, unions, and various other improvements to society that get in the way of excessive profits. When it comes to privatization, what really must occur is making sure the contracts benefit the taxpayers and be very careful of the fine print. I’m sure the 1996 $41 billion revenues shown above jumped to $70 billion for various reasons, but the transition does parallel the industry catching the mergers and acquisitions bug. The dedicated scavengers of old flipped the tune to bottom lines first and foremost. Of course, they were joining a general business tone that permeated those years.

You will note from above that in this 20 year period, municipal governments dropped from taking care of 35% of the waste to only 20% in 2016. Over the same period, massive companies began sucking up smaller ones creating “economies of scale.” They jumped from covering a third of the industry up to nearly 60% and growing.

Taking care of waste is a massive challenge. You eat, you drink, you buy. Things get old. Clothes, furniture, car batteries, and appliances eventually need replacing, and these old items must go somewhere. There are three main roads that our waste usually travels down: sorting and recycling, landfill dumps, and some might work their way into an incinerator to produce energy. And this is just the solid waste side of the issue.

The evolution of waste management has come a long way from the days of pigs munching on organic waste. Gone is the appointed Scavenger. Today recycling must follow the rules meant to keep our environment safe and clean.

The debates between privatizers like the National Waste and Recycling Association and Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), who represent more public sector types; agreeing on some things and disagreeing on others, looks a little like this:

Bruce Parker, CEO of NSWMA (private sector-oriented): “There’s no black and white between privatization and public,” Parker says. “You can always find examples of each and where it hasn’t worked.” He characterized waste collection as a commodity business, which some believe makes it more suitable for privatizing. “Garbage is pretty simple,” he says.

John Skinner, CEO of SWANA (public sector-oriented) “Solid waste is a public service,” Skinner adds. “That is the critical issue. Shortsighted governments that get out completely, with no control over costs in the future — that is very poor policy.” Skinner also points out that solid waste is a public health issue, and therefore, the government should at least maintain oversight control.

It is curious to note that Mergers and Acquisitions like to claim “efficiencies.” That’s the reason or partly that Municipal Waste Landfills went from 7,683 in 1986 to 6,326 in 1990. By 2009, the number had dropped to 1908. In the recent year of 2017, there were just 1,269 left.

SDG Goal #12 – Sustainable Production & Consumption

The world has reached a tipping point on waste, which is addressed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG #12.

At last, natural resources should be conserved and waste creation avoided at all costs, and I suggest we follow the EPA’s formula:

365 Waste Stats & Facts for Social Media

After that short journey on waste, it’s time to educate your community on waste. That’s why our researchers have curated 365 important facts about plastic waste, food waste, e-waste, and recycling to support your social media, blogging, and other content needs with science-based, triple fact-checked stats & facts on waste. Don’t stop believing! Waste education can be easier when you plan ahead with one year’s worth of factual information to share. Power up your social media with 365 facts and stats here!

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Jul

2020

6 Lessons for Marketing Teams of Sustainable Brands

Stop Calling it Environmentalism

Environmentalism: The natural world is being destroyed and it is a moral imperative to preserve and reconstitute as much of it as possible as soon as possible. If only the environmental movement were framed so simply in the public’s eye (or traces of neural circuitry, rather). – George Lakoff

The human brain thinks in terms of frames, according to Cognitive Linguistics Expert George Lakoff. Our brains’ ability to make rapid assumptions based on a few words makes our brains open up or shut down. When we hear a frame we agree with, we listen; when we hear a frame we don’t agree with, our brain quite literally shuts out information. When we hear frames that we’ve never heard before and that don’t fit into another frame we already have, we LISTEN!

As we embark on many new ways of life, it’s time for us to start building new frames for discussing vital topics, that impact our health and everyday life. The advantage of discussing these deeply bi-partisan topics in new ways is that we all profit in terms of health and financial gains. If we can all agree that we’d like to live a long life and build wealth while doing so, it’s high time to make new frames. Here are six lessons we can take from communications expert George Lakoff as we develop communication strategies for sustainable movements, brands, and policies.

Lesson #1 – What exactly are frames?

All thinking and talking involve framing. Frames are more than words; they are building blocks of understanding a particular topic, which we use as quick reference points for understanding. As a subconscious force, frames dictate how we think and talk. They act as concepts and metaphors working with our emotions to create narratives that our brains cannot avoid.

“Moreover, many frame-circuits have direct connections to the emotional regions of the brain. Emotions are an inescapable part of normal thought. Indeed, you cannot be rational without emotions. Without emotion, you would not know what to want, since like and not-like would be meaningless to you. When there is neither like nor not-like nor any judgment of the emotional reactions of others, you cannot make rational decisions.

Since political ideologies are, of course, characterized by systems of frames, ideological language will activate that ideological system. Since the synapses in neural circuits are made stronger the more they are activated, the repetition of ideological language will strengthen the circuits for that ideology in a hearer’s brain. And since language that is repeated very often becomes “normally used” language, ideological language repeated often enough can become “normal language” but still activate that ideology unconsciously in the brains of citizens—and journalists.” – George Lakoff

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpIa16Bynzg&feature=youtu.be” width=”600″ height=”400″ responsive=”yes” autoplay=”no” mute=”no” title=”” class=””]

Lesson #2 What activates frames?

While frames are not words, frames are activated by words. One word can act as a frame or a metaphor, and once activated, bring up an entire system that the frame is in. Over time, as frames are built within the brain’s network of understanding, words quickly fire up the relationship from one neuron to another.

Frames act on a hierarchy, according to Lakoff, whereby moral frames are at the top. Any frame below that can activate everything up to the top. Yes, one word or phrase can communicate entire ideologies, and the person hearing will only allow through what matches their current “frame” of reference.

The frames working in the human brain challenge sustainable communicators and marketers. It is the battle of discussing highly essential topics in a polarized political landscape. For sustainability communicators, this piece of knowledge is vital. What we do with this information is create new frames or new pathways of understanding. We omit old frames that, while yes, some people might align with, they leave out the massive amounts of people that also must be brought to the table.

In his book “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” Lakoff explains the two models of morality working in a highly polarized U.S. One he calls the “strict father” and the other the “nurturant parent.” The strict father mindset is associated with conservative moral thinking and the nurturant parent with more liberal ethical thinking. There are a host of words and phrases that evoke each. Navigating these modes of morality with new sustainability communications means knowing who you want to talk to, and speaking to them in that language. It also indicates where new frames must exist; you must create them to surpass the current mindset.

Lesson #3 The dangers of environmental framing

The framing of health, economy, food, security, and trade as “environmental” has removed a large swath of people from the conversations that must be had. Everyone is affected by environmental issues; however, the word itself shuts down brain synopsis in many people who see the word as merely a liberal topic. Nothing could be further from the truth when cancer has no party lines. Everyone needs to take part in conversations and policies that affect health outcomes. Some established conservative frames have removed people’s ability to learn new concepts and apply new discussions, new ideas, and innovations to collaboratively solve some of the issues around health, economy, food, security, and trade.

Exceptional framing offers people new modes of learning that directly impact their quality of life and help tackle topics like contaminated drinking water or carcinogenic plastic consumption. The dangers of framing topics as “environmental” remove a person’s ability to participate in their own health and wellbeing. Environmental frames keep conservatives detached from problems that are quite literally killing them. The solution is to go around those barriers and create new frames they haven’t worked with that fit into a conservative mode of communications.

Lesson #4 Successful vs. failed frames

Framing is all about creating worldview building blocks that go beyond language, but that triggers those ideas through careful word selection. In the U.S., conservatives have been incredibly successful with a long-term strategy of framing thanks in part to 30-years of wordsmithing from strategist Frank Lutz. Lutz is responsible for the reframing of the following concepts for the purpose of owning the topic.

The purpose of reframing these topics was that conservatives knew that they should own the language of hot-button issues. When anyone with another viewpoint comes to speak on these issues and uses the vocabulary and thus framing of the other side, it brings to point the title of George Lakoff’s book “Don’t think of an elephant.” That’s because the first impressions you have on the topic now are associated with the other side. Instead, when discussing hot topic issues, never use the language of the other side. Stick to the values and higher-level features of the issues.

You would think protecting resources that we all use would be equally important to everyone. That assumption has largely been the downfall of environmental communication. Those who wish to communicate about the environment assume it is important to everyone and use the same tired frames that many ignore. While conservatives have had decades to build successful frames, topics that have been driven by a more progressive wing have only recently started to create some of these frames.

Lesson #5 Emerging environmental frames

In the last five years, there has been an acceleration of elevating environmental communications beyond old frames and into a place that supports Environmental Literacy for more people than just “environmentalists.”

Significant numbers of sustainability leaders are exploring new ways to discuss and design sustainable supply chains and the business proof for the existence of sustainability in all areas of life. Below are some promising frames that have emerged in recent years that we should look to promote, create content around, and use in our everyday interactions on environmental topics.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The Regulated Commons
Sun-Based Food vs. Industrialized Oil-based Food
Overall Wellbeing Indicator

And moving from frames like these that shutdown communication:

Climate change
Environmental
Propaganda
Manipulation
Capitalism

Take a moment and feel the difference in each set of words above. What does your framing system do to evaluate each of those framed topics? In the newer framed versions, you might notice that your mind begins to ask more questions and be more open to new pathways of understanding. The older frames you have a predetermined understanding of, maybe even some judgments of your own. So how do you create these new, more effective frames? Let’s learn what Lakoff says about creating new frames.

Lesson # 6 Rules of engagement

Creating new frames is vital but must be done with extreme care. More than just using new words, creating frames can be detrimental when not considering all aspects and outcomes of the new frame. According to George Lakoff, here are some considerations to make before engaging in creating new frames.

Talk at the level of values and frame issues in terms of moral values. Distinguish values from policies. Always go on offense, never a defense. Never accept the right’s frames: don’t negate them, or repeat them, or structure your arguments to counter them. That just activates their frames in the brain and helps them.
Provide a structured understanding of what you are saying. Don’t give laundry lists. Tell stories that exemplify your values and rouse emotions. Don’t just give numbers and material facts without framing them so their overall significance can be understood. Instead, find general themes of narratives that incorporate the points you need to make.
Context matters: be aware of what’s going on. Address everyday concerns. Avoid Technical jargon; use words people can understand. The messenger matters. Visuals Matter. Body language matters.

Sustainable brand marketers and communicators are tasked with the high-level objective of going beyond preaching to the choir. Sustainability efforts are weak when we don’t have all hands on deck. For sustainable brands, communicating the need for your product, service, or policy, must go beyond corporate “green teams,” if you’re looking for making a considerable impact. Environmental Literacy for adults is no small task; however when understanding some basics about how frames and linguistics work, you can begin to build a communications roadmap to broad audiences.

When it comes to dismantling old environmental frames, it takes creativity for replacing them with new, more inclusive ones. These lessons from George Lakoff demonstrate why Environmental Marketing is vital and must be handled with precision and care.

Resources

https://www.thoroldnews.com/local-news/beyond-local-the-power-of-talking-about-energy-change-2285491

https://theieca.org/resources/environmental-communication-what-it-and-why-it-matters

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17524030903529749

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2018/10/15/measuring-well-being-its-more-than-gdp/#1196149c4eaa

https://www.businessinsider.com/political-language-rhetoric-framing-messaging-lakoff-luntz-2017-8

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/george-lakoff-green-marketing

https://armarketinghouse.com/what-is-environmental-literacy-and-is-it-missing-in-the-workplace/

Jul

2020

What is Environmental Literacy and is it Missing in the Workplace?

The word environment is defined as the natural world in which people, animals, and plants live. Environmentalism is the concern about our natural environment and how to improve and protect it. An environmentalist is a person interested in the natural environment and who wants to improve and protect it. The natural world is defined as all the components of the physical universe — atoms, plants, ecosystems, people, societies, galaxies, etc., as well as the natural forces at work.

Once we begin to understand that everything is connected, it’s inevitable for us to start thinking about the environment as not something “out there” but as something that impacts the world around us and, more personally, our workspace, our homes, our health. Moreover, interconnectedness helps us critically think about the world we interact with every day, such as how the products we love are made, where they come from, and where they end up once we’re done with them. Do employees from Fortune 1000 companies understand how the pollution from coal-powered boats bringing in our clothing, food, building materials, furniture, etc. affect the air we breathe, our water, our health, the economy, and entire ecosystems? How would corporate sustainability decision-makers benefit from environmentally educated staff? So that we may pave more impactful sustainable pathways, investing in employee environmental literacy will be a vital next step.

For successful corporate decarbonization, employees will need to understand society’s heavy reliance on finite resources such as fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and manufacturing. Also important is making it clear the transition to a decarbonized economy can easily be made with a diverse array of innovative sustainable materials. When we educate employees on sustainability initiatives, we deliver a bigger more well-rounded vision of our company to them, whereby we go far beyond immediate monetary profits, and into long-term profits that include health of people, pesticide-free organic foods, reduced pollution, properly managed waste, well-managed resources, increased biodiversity, and cleaner oceans that supply the oxygen we use to breathe.

At this point in human history, everyone needs to have a working knowledge of the natural world, to make valuable short-term and long-term decisions for building sustainable foundations and protecting natural resources and ecosystems. This requires basic environmental literacy, so we know how to value resources and organically create a circular system, as we see in nature.

Companies with environmental solutions and sustainability initiatives have a window of opportunity to educate about environmental stewardship, impacts of our environment on health, and how all of these factors tie into taking action in the workplace. Educating employees about environmental solutions is a way to fill the knowledge gap and help build a more engaged workforce. Many Fortune500 companies invest in employee environmental literacy, to give muscle to the entire company, rather than solely relying on the efficacy of the company’s green team. When you charge your workforce on sustainability, initiative success is cranked to the max, which is essential for long-term business development.

Education is the new marketing

Until environmental science and climate change are mandated curriculums throughout global educational systems, many environmentally conscious companies who solve environmental problems will have to deliver knowledge gap information via marketing efforts.

At A.R. Marketing House, we have a running motto; education is the new marketing. That’s why we make sure that our marketing team has the environmental background knowledge, they need to see communication opportunities, accurately interpret science, and in general, outperform in their roles of promoting sustainable solutions.

As the stakes for cleaning up the planet grow, we see innovative companies in LED lighting solutions, plastic-free choices, reusable packaging, air quality monitors, etc. worthy of top-shelf ranking, but unable to make the mark entirely. One significant factor of this communication shortfall is companies not knowing how to communicate sustainability in a helpful, full scope way to their community of customers and employees.

A silver lining of such a horrible infectious disease like SARS-CoV-2 has become a time to reflect, learn, improve, and incorporate new environmental initiatives, plans, policies, educational platforms, and ventures.

What is Environmental Literacy?

We define Environmental Literacy as the ability to understand and recognize the conditions of our surroundings, where we operate and where we live, and the impacts our individual, community, and corporate actions have on the entire system that sustains life and commerce.

Why we need employee buy-in for sustainability initiatives and business growth

In a Nielson study, 81% of global respondents feel strongly that companies should help improve the environment.

When employees are educated and engaged through company-wide sustainability initiatives, it has been shown to increase environmental programs’ success. It is a win for energizing your workforce by connecting them with matters they care about. Improved employee performance is another benefit gained from engagement on environmental issues, and will generate long-term economic value for staff and c-suite leadership. Ultimately garnering employee support through environmental literacy proves to be a value to the immediate community and society as a whole. Companies who partake in environmental literacy see an increase in employee loyalty, efficiency, productivity, and engagement on company sustainability initiatives. These factors all help to improve company HR scores.

How employee buy-in impacts the success or failure of sustainability initiatives

“When employees understand environmental issues and their impact on health and quality of life, they act in allegiance with initiatives that serve the planet, business, and their personal life. People make smarter buying decisions, and know the difference between genuine sustainability and greenwashing” – Denise Anderson-Rivas, Educational Director & Co-Founder of A.R. Marketing House

Employee Brand Loyalty

When we support employee buy-in on sustainability initiatives, we see an increase in brand loyalty. Part of the reason for this is a concept called psychological ownership. Psychological ownership of a job or organization by an employee is a feeling of having a stake in the entity as a result of commitment and contribution. Psychological ownership leads to greater job satisfaction, engagement, productivity, and profits.

If given a choice, most people would choose to eliminate disease, cancer, and premature death. When empowered with the right tools and knowledge, they can participate in environmental change by taking action on air pollution, smog, and poison plastic that deteriorates health. When a company provides communication and engagement around environmental solutions, they fill voids of the absence of knowledge and miseducation around sustainability and important climate action. Environmental literacy is the litmus test for environmental commitment. With newfound knowledge, the people who work for you become closer to the company mission; their newfound learning and efforts serve as an extension of the good that can be produced.

For example, do you remember your favorite K-12 teacher? Did that teacher make you feel special and remind you of your unique place in the world? Did they help you rise to your best self and help you recognize your purpose? You may likely have adopted some values that your favorite teacher thought were important. Perhaps that was gardening, eating healthy, picking up litter, becoming politically active, or simply being a more conscientious, caring person.

When a company takes on sustainability initiatives and invests in educating, you embody a similar role to our impressionable teacher. People who work at your company become better, more well rounded employees as a result. That means a happier, more fulfilled workforce with improved productivity that delivers toward broader business objectives.

Environmental literacy vs. Environmental illiteracy

What does environmental literacy and engagement mean for a company with sustainability initiatives? Unfortunately, environmental science is not a staple in our education system (we hope to see this change). Without the understanding that everything is connected, it is hard for anyone to relate to the overwhelming word, environment. The environment becomes just a word out there and framed only for “tree huggers” and “environmentalists.” While nothing could be further from the truth, environmental literacy can mean the difference between life and death for an individual and the success or failure of a company.

Starting with a company’s initiatives, education around the who, what, where, why, and how employees are connected to actions that impact air quality, water, health, and food systems. Communicating on environmental education means connecting people to the systems they rely on for sustenance and how those systems relate to sustainable initiatives. Initiatives become a springboard for improving employee health, wellness, longevity, and wealth. Delivering reliable, relatable environmental training makes for a more informed employee base who will make better choices for the company at each step throughout their workday and beyond into their personal lives, which becomes a societal WIN-WIN-WIN.

Environmental illiteracy is a current disease of humanity; it holds us back from making educated decisions and taking action on essential measures like climate change. We need to commit to eradicating environmental illiteracy because our lives and our businesses depend on it.

What does environmental illiteracy mean for a company with sustainability goals?

Currently, there is a lack of substantial, relatable education about climate change and the major environmental issues society faces today. Many media outlets copy and paste watered down information based on imperfect interpretations of scientific studies. Environmental news has become a regurgitation and a dangerous game of telephone. When misinformation is widespread, it creates doubt within people, and the result is a lack of care for the future. In turn, this indifference leads to poor decision making at work and personal decisions that could be detrimental to life and the environment.

Distrust and frustration that emerge from a lack of foundational knowledge on environmental issues make people easily fall victim to greenwashing, believing unsubstantiated claims that set back the scale on important workplace initiatives. Without a strong commitment to employee development on sustainability, employees will not have a foundation of knowledge and will lack interest in the company’s sustainability initiatives. We want employees to adopt new ideas, and your company initiatives could offer a successful framework for understanding. A lack of literacy means a lack of actionable adoption for company sustainability goals.

Employees properly educated in sustainability adopt sustainable measures across their personal and professional life

Three years ago, our Environmental Content Director decided to run a company contest to see if our team could go the entire month without buying any single-use plastic. We started on Earth Day, and most of us quickly realized how difficult this challenge was. Most of us refilled our glass and stainless steel reusable bottles. Ernesto, one of our fantastic graphic design artists, found himself on the road parched and looking for water at a convenience store. He looked for an aluminum can and was pleased to find a reusable aluminum bottled water at 7-eleven, which he kept for at least a year before recycling it.

The plastic-free challenge was a big realization that while many plastic-free choices exist when you do a simple google search, in a pinch, those options are far fewer on the shelves. The challenge also proved another point, the importance of having enough knowledge to choose the best materials for something as simple as a bottle of water. That requires some background in material recycling and the importance of seeking reusable options first.

Teaching employees skills in sustainability helps them know what to look for when seeking alternatives to environmentally damaging products. However, employees that don’t have this background won’t know enough to make a better choice or will flail and rely on marketing tactics by less than sustainable companies that greenwash.

The NO single-use plastic bottle beverage initiative still stands at A.R., and we continue to educate new members of the team on the importance of sourcing more sustainable beverage containers like reusable glass and aluminum.

Building personal frameworks are the success cursor for teaching Environmental Literacy

Environmental learning initiatives cannot help but be personal if you’re looking for genuine adoption. For example, if we want staff to stop wasting plastic, we have to teach about the toxicity plastic packaging has on our family’s health and food systems. Topics become a part of conversations, seeping into the psyche. We become aware of how one issue of plastic packaging affects our quality of life on a grander scale (affecting air, water, food, farming, and short- and long-term health). Environmental literacy as a staple part of your company’s culture makes for an even more significant impact on bottom-line measures.

Be the change that sparks a revolution

One of the most effective and empowering measures of environmental literacy is that when we train staff, they take their lessons home. It’s especially impactful when you see the fruits of environmental literacy seep into your company’s culture. When businesses take their sustainability initiatives seriously, they take education on those initiatives seriously, and we see that play out in employees, their families, and their civic engagement. A commitment to providing employees with Environmental Literacy is the spark needed for impacting real world shifts on sustainability and is the direction for businesses that plan to be around for decades to come.

Next steps to implementing Environmental Literacy Certification for employees

Linking employee values to sustainability breed long-term success. Bridging the gap in knowledge for those with little exposure or knowledge of the environmental issues we face today can make all the difference to explosive success for company-wide sustainability initiatives.

If you’re looking to start the journey and increase the Environmental Literacy of your staff, we invite you to connect with the A.R. team.

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Resources

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/environment?q=environment

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/environmentalism?q=environmentalism

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/environmentalist?q=environmentalist

https://undsci.berkeley.edu/glossary/glossary_popup.php?word=natural+world

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/mql_sars-cov-2_-_cleared_for_public_release_2020_05_05.pdf

https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2018/global-consumers-seek-companies-that-care-about-environmental-issues/

https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-comprehensive-business-case-for-sustainability

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/ethical-practice/pages/employeesandsustainability.aspx

https://eom.org/content-hub-blog/psychological-ownership

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1059601104273066

https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/bottled_water_factsheet.pdf

CB Bhattacharya, Sankar Sen, and Daniel Korschun, Leveraging Corporate Responsibility: The Stakeholder Route to Maximizing Business and Social Value, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/engaging_employees_to_create_a_sustainable_business#

https://hbr.org/2018/02/how-to-make-sustainability-every-employees-responsibility

https://www.thomsonreuters.com/content/dam/openweb/documents/pdf/corporate/Reports/global-500-greenhouse-gases-performance-2010-2015.pdf

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/ethical-practice/pages/employeesandsustainability.aspx

https://www.neefusa.org/sites/default/files/assets/elr/NEEF-EnvironmentalLiteracyReport-2015.pdf

Jun

2020

How to Increase Your Brand’s Measurable Environmental Impact with Education

Help staff and customers increase their environmental literacy and exponentially impact your target sustainability goals

The SEAL Awards are given out every year to the most sustainable companies in the world. Determining winners depends on their “measurable contribution” to making a positive impact on environmental issues. Honing measurable contributions for sustainable brands goes beyond “pat yourself on the back” talk, it’s all about calculating the true impact of sustainability initiatives. For example, it’s great to say you reduce plastic waste, but making a measurable contribution means you actually achieved a calculated goal without replacing one bad material for another. Measurable contributions are of great importance for assessing genuine environmental impact and the overall goal to push for better solutions. One thing that can drive those measurable results is educating your customer and employee base. Gone are the days of greenwashing, as we say hello to merit and walking the walk when it comes to sustainability initiatives and measurable outcomes.

Your customers care about your sustainability initiatives so you have to make sure that yours are genuine. Let’s start with some facts, according to Forbes:

68% of millennials bought a product with a social or environmental benefit in the past 12 months

88% will be more loyal to a company that supports social or environmental issues

87% of consumers have a more positive image of a company that supports social or environmental issues

87% would buy a product with a social and environmental benefit if given the opportunity | A.R. Marketing House

88% of consumers will be more loyal to a company that supports social or environmental issues

87% would buy a product with a social and environmental benefit if given the opportunity

88% would buy a product with a social and environmental benefit if given the opportunity

92% will be more likely to trust a company that supports social or environmental issues

How conducting environmental education increases your brand’s impact

Studies show that environmental education leads to many positive outcomes, including enhanced critical thinking, the development of life-building and problem-solving skills, community engagement, civic engagement, and leadership. We are bringing people together for pragmatic solutions to the climate crisis and other environmental issues. And while most of these studies look at students, our entire world is on an environmental learning curve. The global community will greatly benefit from the same unbiased, transparent environmental education. Having a working knowledge of environmental issues helps us step up to the plate; employees and customers make more informed decisions. When we arm our communities with the knowledge they need, in a friendly, helpful, empathetic way, we can start making real changes and grow a much-needed sustainability revolution.

We have found there are three key benefits of using education in marketing efforts both on the ground and digitally for environmentally-driven companies and organizations. They are simple, and they are human-centric.

3 Benefits of adding education to sustainable brand marketing

Education creates a deeper understanding of the environmental issues we are solving

As a human race, we are on a learning curve not just to understand but to solve some of the significant problems that we have created in the world i.e., plastic pollution, climate change, and air pollution, to name a few. Some of these issues are easy to see; some are invisible like air pollution. Radical innovations are emerging every day to solve environmental problems, yet we live in a world where education on these harsh environmental realities is lacking.

We have taken a leadership role in educating about environmental issues and raising the level of environmental literacy for the communities of the brands we work with. We come to people where they’re at, at their level of understanding, and share how brands with environmental innovations are solving some of the adverse effects on our health, on the planet, the ocean, and wildlife. This creates a deeper understanding of the huge issue we are working to solve but can’t do alone.

Connect your community to solutions for environmental issues your brand is working to solve

Going one step further, we’ve seen that using education in a funnel style not only gets students and adults to understand environmental problems but also helps them to connect where they fit into the picture of solving the issues within their control. For us, that usually means helping people learn about, adopt shifts, and demand policies that support solutions like solar energy, a reusable bottle, sustainable laundry products. Helping others means teaching them to see their place in the shift; adopting better habits and demanding policies that squash the environmentally damaging alternatives like fossil fuels, plastics, harmful chemicals, etc.

Connecting people, for example, to the issue of plastic waste in a sensitive non-blaming way helps people feel like they can easily do some things within their power to be a part of the change. Educating through our marketing communications helps people know where they fit into the bigger picture as well as how and when they can take action.

Creates actionable opportunities for our community to get involved

When we lead a movement, we have to guarantee an end result, real change. I have found that just as soon as we take on an educational campaign, individuals, businesses, and non-profit organizations are ready to sign on for the solution and engage politically. We used to wonder how much people care about the damaged environment that directly affected their health, and whether or not people were even concerned about climate change or plastic waste. Maybe people were overwhelmed, couldn’t see a solution, or felt that they did not have enough influence to change the problem. But we’ve learned that when you present someone with an easy-to-replace solution to things like plastic waste, it’s one small, actionable step that most people are ready to take. Then you can introduce them to petitions and political solutions, now that they feel empowered and connected to the solution they just committed to.

These three benefits are the result of the strategies we use to help brands make a more significant impact. Educating, creating, and connecting are exponential efforts that work together to fuel great change. The more environmental education we conduct in the world, the more people sign on for our efforts and political change, they then share their enthusiasm and education with others and it becomes easier to see how we can create a cleaner planet. When we do justice to the educational efforts, we help the movement grow exponentially with every new person indoctrinated into the solution. Taking on a component of education for marketing requires honesty, planning, and above all, it takes leadership.

Leadership: what are the best practices for brands that want to lead on genuine sustainability?

We’ve learned a handful of best practices both for educating on sustainable solutions in various industries.

While there are many new eco-alternatives on the market, they span across a spectrum of dismal greenwashing to genuine solutions. From this perspective, we’ve learned that people deserve transparency to make the best choices. The more you educate about your process, purpose, and how it stacks up to the other options, the deeper you can connect with more people on the issues that matter, and on solutions. While some people are okay with a sustainable tagline and pat on the back, more often than not, people want to make an actual impact on the problem.

The same can be understood for any sustainable product. If we had to list the best practices, they would include but not be limited to the following:

Be impeccable with your sustainable solution.
Be transparent with your process.
Offer education to elevate the baseline knowledge on the environmental issue you’re solving, and make this a constant team effort.
Create a community of game-changers to build momentum.
Collaborate on policies on the local, state, and global levels that solve the problem your initiative addresses.

Our team shares sustainable best practices through our website, environmental educational courses, via our environmental content, social media engagement, and public relations teams.

Awards are wonderful milestones, educating a community to take action for a greater impact is even better

While recognition like the SEAL awards is a great way to mark milestones for sustainable missions, some of the most significant rewards are the communities we build and the actual impact we make. It’s our goal to see measurable environmental impacts increase every year. We don’t have time to wait. In our teams’ experience with educational campaigns, a tremendous way to increase that measurable impact directly relates to education and marketing efforts. It’s vital that efforts are genuine, transparent, and engage people at every level of sustainability to shift for our future.

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Resources

https://armarketinghouse.com/do-consumers-really-care-about-the-environment-survey-says-100-yes/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/11/21/do-customers-really-care-about-your-environmental-impact/#5035649c240d

https://www.neefusa.org/education/benefits

May

2020

2020: The Future of Environmental Marketing SlideShare

2020: The Future of Environmental Marketing | A.R. Marketing House

Feb

2020

Environmental Marketing 2020: Updates for Sustainable Solutions

It’s a new decade, and that means ~3,650 days (minus leap years) of opportunities to make an impact, teach people, influence policy, collect that data you’ve always known was important, develop new research. Above all, it’s a time to make it all matter with some community engagement and marketing.

Marketing for businesses that are working to improve our environment – looks much different than a typical business. It takes commitment to bigger causes and insight beyond common knowledge and misconceptions on environmental topics. It takes environmental expertise, new marketing insights, and the right strategy to see your 2020 impact flourish.

Environmental education-based marketing strategies are rewarded continuously with every update. Here are some beneficial educational content marketing practices to follow and start the new decade off with an inspiring bang.

7 Content Marketing Changes for 2020

Content Marketing WINS as the most robust Marketing Strategy for 2020. For Environmental Companies, this means creating high-quality content to market and be ahead of the curve to keep your momentum going throughout the new decade. Here are 7 Content Marketing updates that you will want to adapt to your 2020 Content Marketing strategy.

#1 Video content will need to bring higher quality

Hands down, people love video, that’s why popular video platforms are beginning to drop organic reach in favor of increasing ad spend. This means a change-up to how you will want to publish your videos. A great solution is to multicast, release one long video, and chop it up into chapters to be published in unique snippets to each platform you share on. Another strategy is to go live at least one time per month and release the recorded video in snippets tailored to each platform that leads to the larger format video.

#2 Content that educates will always be king

Educational micro-content is continuing to rise fast as a major strategy that covers many bases at once. Research continues to prove that people want to be the smartest person in the room, and the more they know about your solutions, the more they will be engaged and share that knowledge. Educational engagement turns curious people into leads, solid customers, and, ultimately, loyalists. You want people coming to your business, not just for your market solution but also to learn the significance of your innovation(s). Educational microcontent is extremely valuable and a great long-term strategy for brands promoting environmental solutions.

What is educational micro-content?

Educational interactive microcontent and imagery in smaller formats will be the best strategy to focus on for 2020. High-quality, helpful content is what people are responding to the most on social media. This strategy is key to increasing awareness, education, and engagement on your solution; it’s also the very reason A.R. Marketing House was founded 😉. Creating and sharing content that is ultimately educational and interactive will be the marker to success for green business marketing.

#3 From mobile search to voice search traffic

Search traffic will continue to decline on mobile, 13% to 5% in fact. It’s important to make sure you optimize your website for voice search. This means creating copy that is educational and adding schema markup for your answers to be found by people searching via voice search.

Why is mobile search declining?

Alexa and Google Home products are becoming increasingly popular. This means you need to break down your solution effectively, and thus the educational content around it into bite-sized clear and helpful messaging so Google will rank your answers. This means everything for environmental solutions that want to be found. It’s important for your marketing team to always keep this in mind. You will want to hire for the perfect mix of Environmental Expert & Content Marketing Sage. Make sure your team stays well informed and properly educated on your market and your solutions AND environmental reasons the world needs your solution(s).

If your marketing teams could use some support on how to discuss complicated environmental topics in ways people can relate to and learn, we are the only agency that offers this specialty service, and we’re here to help! Remember, we want more adoption of sound environmental solutions, and it’s our mission to help you accomplish this.

#4 Google & Amazon want your traffic on their sites

Google and Amazon are competing against each other, and YOU, to get people to stay on their respective platforms. What does this mean for you? It means you’ll want to optimize your website content and blogs to generate preview snippets and, if you have an Amazon Product, increase the content and education on your Amazon page to increase your ranking.

#5 Increase influencer reach

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter have all lowered the organic reach of influencer profile pages. This significant decline in reach means that if using influencers is right for your business, it’s time to get creative by leveraging influencer marketing, as the spend in this category will decrease. You can now go after quantity as well as quality.

#6 Leverage “Close Friends” to keep up with Instagram stories’

Leveraging “Close Friends” on IG is a new social hack to communicate directly with your closest followers, influencers, and evangelists to increase reach, sharing, and engagement. This will be the year to really dive into education that will incite likes, shares, and increase your followers as you keep your most valuable players informed. There will also be more ways of enhancing virtual shopping experiences this year.

#7 Gaining authority by building trust

Google has already updated once in 2019 to rank authority over SEO tricks. The days of keyword stuffing and black hat tricks are over – things we’ve always advised against. Google and search engines make most of their profits from paid advertising. Businesses spent less money on paid advertising in 2019, and search engines and social media want to bump up educational content. Anyone else with less helpful content will be charged a “pay to play” fee if they want to increase their reach. This requires a focus on high-quality content and less on the quantity of posts. Messaging and content need to be fact-based and highly-authoritative while highlighting your expertise. Google will reward the most trusted, well-researched, educational content. HINT: This is fantastic news for environmental companies that are ready to educate through their marketing efforts.

Increased content personalization will be very important, as well. This personalization will lead to higher rankings, which is excellent because this falls in line with creating more dynamic content. Personalizing content requires finding out what various groups in your audience are asking, gaining clarity on their needs, and precisely delivering the information they’re looking for. This is how we strategize ranking – by having the most relevant, helpful website sites. Bye, Bye, SEO tricks, and hello to serving people & the planet!

Conclusion

We hope these tips for 2020 have confirmed your current strategy is off to the right start. If you don’t yet have an education-based marketing strategy in play for your environmental solution, we’re happy to help your team get on the right track. Make it a monumental decade of growth that impacts our planet for the better.

Don’t just make content. Make an impact.

The A.R. Marketing House team is sure that brands that provide products and services with a sustainable mission will bring about infinite success and provide abundance in many forms for the new decade. More than 60 countries have introduced measures to limit single-use plastic waste. This is happening through policy agendas, bans, implementing fines, levies, as refill stations and reuse services become some of the more popular solutions. This knowledge and keeping up with these quick-changing agendas help our clients stay ahead of the curve and make an impact in 2020. We’re unlocking our expertise and have officially added Environmental Marketing Consulting Services and Tailored Environmental Marketing Plans that you can now hand over to your marketing team with specialized A.R. guidance. We want everyone to have access to the marketing tactics it takes to spread the adoption of much-needed Environmental Products and Services in 2020 and beyond, and that takes expertise!

Feb

2020

7 Circular Economy Innovations that Solve Food Waste

Raising awareness and education for solutions to food waste

Creative minds are seeking opportunities to make things right when it comes to the absurdity of food waste. Some social entrepreneurs are looking to implement efficiencies as they come across waste in their particular areas of concern. Others are looking for solutions to waste issues that they stumble across and feel a calling to solve.

At A.R. Marketing House, we work with companies making a difference with much needed innovations that seem so obvious; you wonder why you didn’t think of it first. Their ideas allow for unique ways to profit from a mission to reduce waste and help the environment in various ways.

Here are some food waste solutions bringing real change to our world.

Food Waste

LOOP Mission are the creators of cold-pressed juices and unique beers. They also supply high fiber pulp residue that eventually becomes doggy snacks.

LOOP works on the concept of capturing blemished, stock imbalanced, or rejected vegetables and fruits to create a variety of juices that are put through a process called pascalization (sterilization via pressure) rather than the common use of pasteurization (sterilization via heat). Oh, and they even use day-old bread for making fruity spirits and sour beers.

The components for LOOP products are collected before companies like Mucci Farms in Ontario and Courchesne Larose in Montreal, Canada is forced to send perfectly tasty and healthy yet imperfect looking produce to landfills.

LOOP Mission is based in Montreal, Canada. LOOP is a favored name for other companies using similar concepts regarding circular economic business models and concepts. So keep LOOP and Mission together when searching the company. These entrepreneurs saw the massive waste in the agricultural industry and came together to do something about it. Thus was born the “Rescue Squad” looking to save those fruits and vegetables that food banks couldn’t handle and turn them into cold-pressed magic.

The creative minds at LOOP Mission and their “Rescue” concept are having a positive environmental, as well as an economic impact. Older shared statistics show LOOP Mission’s impact as follows:

2,580 GHG emissions avoided
271,160,022 liters of water saved
835,466 slices of bread rescued

Now LOOP is rescuing potato scraps to make a lime and ginger gin as well as soap from, guess what, “rescued” overstocked vegetable oils.

This is an idea and a company that needs to spread across the Americas and the world.

Solving Social Waste

Wize Monkey is based in Vancouver, Canada looking to resurrect and spread the use of coffee leaves to make a healthy award-winning tea. Their waste is more socio-economic than the usual waste saving model that we generally think of. Wize Monkey’s project revolves around rescuing human lives, minds and stabilizing those many coffee farms where we get that nice jolt of joe.

Wize Monkey found a wonderful surprise – coffee leaves make a tasty, healthy beverage. Coffee with leaves? Not exactly, these are leaves being brewed to give a variety of wonderful flavors like tea like Jasmine, even Earl Grey. You get a nice subtle kick. But you get more with Coffee Leaf Tea, and we don’t mean just an AWARD Winner, you get a concept that keeps workers in the fields year-round. You get stomachs saved from near starvation as families migrate, looking for ways to put food on the table when the coffee harvesting season is over. Children get a chance to grow in a stable home and have more fulfilling lives. Best of all, you support help reduce waste and “stabilize” economies in coffee-growing countries.

Wize Monkey started in 2014. They now have customers in 35 countries. Not bad for what actually started as a business class assignment.

They are based happily in the wonderful city of Vancouver, Canada. How do they get coffee leaves in Canada? Good question – Wize Monkey currently teams with a major coffee grower in Nicaragua in Central America. From this farm, the plants are grown, cultivated, processed, and then the leaves are shipped off to Vancouver.

After discovering the benefits of using the leaves from coffee plants for tea, Wize Monkey is looking to turn the seasonal nature of coffee farms into year-round operations, stabilizing life for farmers and the workers who supply this valuable bean to the world. Now, this innovative product can help overcome fluctuating prices that coffee bean growers regularly encounter. Putting the leaves to use gives the farmers a new source of income, adding an important socio-economic element to this struggling country.

Next comes getting the 25 million coffee farmers worldwide on board. Imagine if they too had flat rates for their leaves? Imagine if these producers and workers got a fair share of their piece of the action? Imagine drinking one of their tasty teas and thinking healthy thoughts. For more info, refer to the Wize Monkey impact page.

Repurposing and partnering with Nonprofits

Big Wheel Burger. What a great thought, french fries that fuel. The name is not an indication of the size and shape of their burgers. It’s a reference to something much cooler – the company’s fryer oil that gets converted to biodiesel by another local company Cowichan Biodiesel.

Actually, Big Wheel’s main point of pride is making delicious food. They have taken a hint from the climate crisis and look to have a positive impact on the environment while still making great fast food.

From their home on Vancouver Island, the influences of trying to create a circular economy are strong. Big Wheel Burger refers to itself as Canada’s first carbon-neutral fast food restaurant. Their quality classic American Cheese Burger comes with a twist. They try to surround it with compostable containers and a commitment to keep their area trash free. They have partnered with Food Eco District (FED) that works with local restaurants to reduce their impact on the environment. They try to see that those pesky single-use items get to become compost in the FED garden.

Big Wheel Burger was committed to becoming carbon neutral from its inception. Their kitchens were set up with high-efficiency appliances, fryers, and fridges.

A tasty operation. Check out their site. Tell me, could your city use a sustainable and innovative burger business that helps fuel vehicles?

Upcycling an East Asian winner

Renewal Mill is an Oakland, California based company looking to introduce the American public to a flour that could be termed a Superfood. Yes, they want to reduce global waste by upcycling the soybean pulp left after tofu and soymilk are processed. Okara, an ancient child of the soybean, so prominent in East Asia, has long been given a second life. Renewal Mill is looking to take this poor cousin and turn it into a variety of tasty and nutritious items with multiple levels of benefit. How about that? Upcycle what might be waste and bring on a healthy impact while you are at it.

Renewal Mill captures and dries the pulp left in the tofu process and makes a healthy, flexible flour that challenges the food waste syndrome and upcycles the former burden into a valuable product.

Farmers, the original creators of the circular economic system, never let anything go to waste. Renewal Mill has captured this concept to find a sustainable use for this “shell” (pulp) and repurposes the pulp of the soybean by drying it out and converting the Okara into a flour.

Renewal Mill is looking to expand on this ancient East Asian product and other products that can be salvaged from the waste stream and turned into a valuable and healthy benefit to society. What is most unique are the plans to grow and spread this concept of repurposing food by-products. Starting with a partnership with another Bay Area company Hodo Foods; spreading the idea of how good their flour is with Chocolate Chip Cookies and looking to spread a business model, Claire Schlemme founder and CEO of Renewal Mill calls “co-location” which is a “plug and play model” with tofu makers around the country. Watch next, for pancake mix and pasta hitting shelves near you.

An Upcycling Team Member

Hodo Foods, a partner of Renewal Mills, is an organic tofu maker and pulp supplier for Renewal. They are known for their top quality organic plant-based hand-crafted food and as masters of wonderful tofu.

Like Renewal Mills, Hodo hopes to save 100% of their raw material and have this burden turned into upcycled tasty edible alternatives. This Oakland, California neighbor was giving 5 to 10% of their leftover pulp to Renewal Mills, and that should grow since Renewal Mills pays far more than they get for animal feed at local dairies.

Check out Hodo and their great tasty plant-based foods. They are strong supporters of a circular economy and look to put quick, tasty food on your plate via upcycling a concept that needs to grow.

Repurpose and Upcycle

Regrained is a product that blossomed from a couple of adventurous and some creative minds. No doubt, they said, “whoa” when they found that the grain used in the brewing process to make beer takes out the sugar—leaving behind protein, fiber, and micronutrients that could be made into a flour called “SuperGrain+” and incorporated into snack bars. Repurpose. Don’t waste. Upcycle.

Yes, Regrained is a great concept. Their nutrition bars are as they say “upcycled grain” that crushes food waste. Grains leftover from the beer brewing process get made into healthy, tasty, and delightfully flavored bars and puffs.

These young food entrepreneurs, discovered as college-age home-brewers, that researchers had found brewer grains actually had wonderful nutritional value. Imagine all the breweries creating a magical supply ready to be rescued “ left-overs” or as they like to imagine “harvested.” Another upcycle winner. The beer-making process leaves 1 lb of nutritious grain for every 6 pack.

This company from California’s Bay Area grabs those spent grains from the beer brewing process and turns those fibers into a food source that just happens to promote digestive health.

Regrained got help from the USDA and an innovative patent-pending process that creates flavorful, nutritious snacks. Regained is finding a way to reduce waste while handing out a Superfood to those interested in keeping the old gut happy.

A Needed Rescue Operation

Copia is a company looking to make hunger, history. They strive to make healthy food more accessible to people in need before it ends up getting wasted. In their eyes, food waste is a logistics problem, and they are there to help businesses and nonprofits redistribute high-quality excess food to people in need.

Copia takes a slick approach to find food for those in need. Copia says we waste three times more food than there are mouths to feed. This is shocking. Their game is rebalancing food distribution. Organizations have banquets, meetings, etc. and extra high-quality food is left unused. Copia’s unique idea is executed via a Mobile APP. The donating company or organization contacts Copia when there is excess food, and Copia ensures that perfectly good food gets to nearby nonprofits. Technology helps to make amazing things happen when driven by companies like Copia.

At its core, Copia rescues food from going to waste, but they actually do much more. The technology can help what tax deductions might be available from their food donations. Restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and even corporate cafeterias can link with Copia to see their donations efficiently transferred to areas of need.

They have been centered in the San Francisco Bay area, but are hoping to take their model nationally, even internationally.

Copia is a for-profit, conscious business that hates waste like the rest of us. Copia was created to smooth the way to reduce waste and hunger by seamlessly feeding communities in need.

Conclusion:

These are just a few companies using ideas to solve concerns and go far beyond a profit motive.

Marketing sustainable solutions through education are incredibly important to the promotion and implementation of food waste solutions. The more we educate on various waste issues we face today, the greater we open the creative gap for innovations to be sparked and supported. When people are more informed on these key environmental issues, the more influence important companies such as these will have. There is power in education and power in the numbers that are educated.

As a team of environmental science and marketing professionals, we carefully vet and partner with environmental solution-based companies high on the sustainability spectrum. Having a hybrid of experience in understanding the science behind environmental solutions coupled with a marketing and education perspective we discovered that marketing for green businesses looks and feels different, and when put into action brings environmental content marketing approaches bringing ROI to a higher level and can open doors for new innovation and industry change.

Looking for support for your marketing team, breaking down your solutions to add power to your message, we’d love to chat.

References:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/03/15/470434247/these-27-solutions-could-help-the-u-s-slash-food-waste

https://www.refed.com/downloads/Restaurant_Guide_Web.pdf

https://www.refed.com/?sort=economic-value-per-ton

https://medium.com/social-good-of-silicon-valley/introducing-komal-ahmad-copia-poverty-9c61589a181c