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Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 341 | March 22-28, 2024
Strategy & Business Model Section | 3
How to Market Sustainable Products
By Frédéric Dalsace and Goutam Challagalla | Harvard Business Review Magazine | March–April 2024 Issue
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When companies market the sustainability features of their offerings, they often overlook a fundamental truth: Social and environmental benefits have less impact on customers’ decisions than basic product attributes do. With any purchase, consumers are first trying to get a specific job done. Only after they find something that will help them do that job—and only if sustainability is important to them—will they look for a product that in addition confers a social or environmental advantage. No one decides to buy a chocolate bar to, say, improve the working conditions of farmers on the Ivory Coast. People buy chocolate, first and foremost, because they want to indulge in a small pleasure.
Missing this critical point, many marketers overestimate consumers’ appetite for sustainable products. Because of that, in recent years companies have flooded the market with sustainable offerings that consumers are slow to buy, particularly given the price premium such products typically command.
Marketers often imagine that sustainability features simply layer additional value on top of an offering’s traditional benefits. But in reality they can interact with a product’s primary attributes in three ways: independence, having no impact on traditional benefits; dissonance, diminishing traditional benefits; and resonance, enhancing traditional benefits.
The manner in which social and environmental features interact with traditional attributes significantly affects a product’s appeal to different consumer groups. Three categories are: Greens (or if your marketing department prefers to use personas, “true believers”) place a high value on sustainability, actively seek it in their purchasing, and may sacrifice performance or economy to get it. Blues (or perhaps “agnostics”) place a moderate value on sustainability and, if they don’t need to sacrifice much (or ideally at all) on price and performance, tend to prefer sustainable offerings over alternatives. Grays (“disbelievers”) don’t care about sustainability and may even view it with skepticism. Each kind of consumer requires a different approach. A customer—whether an individual or a company—may shift consumption profiles from product to product, nevertheless.
Brands need to segment their customers by attitudes toward sustainability and tailor their messages accordingly. At the core of successful sustainable offerings lies innovation; there’s no substitute for it. Thus the real battle for sustainable products won’t be waged through advertising or public relations stunts; it will happen in research-and-development labs.
3 key takeaways from the article
- When companies market the sustainability features of their offerings, they often overlook a fundamental truth: Social and environmental benefits have less impact on customers’ decisions than basic product attributes do. With any purchase, consumers are first trying to get a specific job done. Only after they find something that will help them do that job—and only if sustainability is important to them—will they look for a product that in addition confers a social or environmental advantage.
- Sustainability features can interact with a product’s primary attributes in three ways: independence, having no impact on traditional benefits; dissonance, diminishing traditional benefits; and resonance, enhancing traditional benefits. The manner in which social and environmental features interact with traditional attributes significantly affects a product’s appeal to different consumer groups. Three categories are: “true believers”, “agnostics”, and “disbelievers”.
- The real battle for sustainable products won’t be waged through advertising or public relations stunts; it will happen in research-and-development labs.
(Copyrigh lies with the publisher)
Topics: Strategy, Marketing, Sustainability