“Tell me why, I don’t like Ma han day’s, tell me why I don’t like Ma han day’s”, Boomtown Rats 1979, I’m sure you remember the song. It fell to my mind tonight speaking at this event called “Green Monday”, and I certainly do like “Ma han day’s”, particularly tonight.
The topic I was covering was about how to position green products into specific markets, for example, the difference between consumers (B2C) and businesses (B2B). The business I work for has been working towards environmental objectives for about twenty years, however it was 1993 before we developed the worlds greenest printer. At the time, it was a monumentous effort, taking huge resources and passing very stringent tests. We were confident that it would be a winner.
Opening tonights session, I spoke briefly about some of the key lessons I’d learned over the years about positioning or selling green products. Let me share them with you: -
Lesson number 1. Businesses won’t pay a premium to go green. Consumers are more likely, providing they have the disposable income. This was a harsh lesson as we thought everyone would share our philosophy of doing the right thing. When it came to it, the money talked. I call this “ECO-nomics”, that is, you have to make a sound business case with clear return on investment (ROI) or return on objectives (ROO).
Lesson number 2. It shouldn’t inconvenience the user. If it means someone has to do something different it puts them out, then you’re likely to see objections raised or resistance to a proposed change. Try removing people’s bins in your office for a week and see how eco-friendly their prepared to be when they have to get up from their desk to use a waste bin.
Lesson number 3. It must be a “no-brainer”. Take all of the guessing out of it. Same price, easier to use, sexier than the non-eco version etc. The more you make people think, the harder it gets to convince them to change a habit.
Hard as this is to say, the world is suffering from ECO-fatigue. Recessions are killers for green investments, the age of austerity might put back sustainable procurement and people are more concernnd with their personal worlds, than the world (massive generalisation I know, however it is a generalisation). Now it’s about protecting your job at all costs and doing things that make you look good in front of your boss or feel happy in a miserable economic environment.
We’re living in a disposable consumer age. Consumption and one-upmanship trump eco-ness any day of the week. Example. Apple i-Pad. According to Greenpeace, they only rate 4.9 out of 10 on green issues in their Guide to Greener Electronics. Who cares? They’ve made a sexy gadget that everyone wants, no one looked at the eco-label, far from it, buyers were more interested in being first, bragging rights and making their lives easier.
So, this is what the green market is up against. You have to play in the same backyard as everyone else. Don’t think people will pay more, they expect you to be green as a hygiene factor, but that still doesn’t mean they will buy your product, you’ll just be considered. If it’s green and a monstrosity, forget it.
There is reason to be positive however. There are a growing band of businesses and individuals that continue to lead the charge and show leadership in this area. The businesses attending tonights Green Monday conference are all great examples of this and I’m pleased to air my views that it’s still a tough road. Corporate CSR brochures and Corporate procurement are still disconnected, boardroom rhetoric and actions are still distanced, no-one said it would be easy, but the world won’t wait and we have to all be good Corporate citizens and get on with it.
There’s lot of challenges to making your business lower carbon, particularly in the depths of a global credit crisis and recession recovery. You’re battling for Time, Attention and Trust, keeping your head above water and winning business. People are distracted with the here and now, their own problems in their personal bubble. Speaking to a roomful of businesses interested in the idea of a Greater Manchester Low Carbon economy this morning, I outlined some of the challenges with getting things going (see this link for some of the slides I used).
Civic leaders have had every report possible done. The opportunity is clear. The risks are clear. The next steps for business are not. Greater Manchester has lots of commissions and passionate people, however, I feel it is lacking “The Big Idea”. i.e., What one thing could we mobilise a whole city region behind, in order to improve the lives of the people within it? Whether that means cleaner air, better business, infrastructure or living environment. The newly established Greater Manchester Chamber Carbon Reduction Groups aims to tackle that.
I gave a couple of examples today of great things that I’d seen. One was about a City in France that has a huge balloon floating about the City Hall, connected to the power grid. It glows red when high demands are being made on the grid, allowing everyone in the City Region to instantly visualise and take action. That alone forced behaviour change, started people thinking about the things they could/should do. It’s not always about telling people what to do, but motivating them to do something.
I also spoke about a clever little piece of software called Powerman from a company called Ergo Computing (details here) which actively monitors energy consumption of IT on a network. A simple yet highly effective way to reduce carbon and costs. Straight to the bottom line and ticking everyone’s boxes.
For business, you have to balance the economics of carbon reduction with the economics of running your business. I gave the example of having a large external salesforce, who are very motivated by cars. We choose to offer a benchmark car with an industry leading CO2, yet still good enough to attract the right talent. We then offer further financial incentives for them to go even lower on their CO2. Around 25% of drivers choose this route, so it’s a way of still balancing our need for talent, with the need to be as efficient as we can be with our carbon. If we offered a fleet of electric cars, we wouldn’t get the right people, that’s hard to swallow sometimes, but a fact of life, so you need to accomodate it and save additional carbon in other ways.
It’s not all easy though. Going green can be an inconvenience to people because it requires changes in our behaviour, particularly when it comes to re-cycling. When you’ve been running a sustainable business as long as we have, you have to search for the continuing wins, like squeezing a sponge. That’s when it begins to hurt a little more as it becomes much more focussed on the individual doing different things rather than the organisation. Levels of kickback increase when you reach this points, however, you get over the humps in time.
Behind the landscape of all of this, you also still have the disconnect between green dollars (procurement) and green ideals (CSR). If it were a game of Top Trumps, the economic buyer always trumps the sustainability department. It would be great to see organisations resolving this and having a more holistic view to their overall footprint, some businesses achieve this brilliantly, others not atall. These are the simple steps that business could take to get on board.
Whatever happens, you have to do something as a business. Public sector procurement and large companies expect you to be able to demonstrate your credentials when tendering as a supplier, we want to deal with suppliers with the same ideals. If you don’t get on the (electric) bus it will leave without you! Notwithstanding the fact that in Manchester that there is a £4bn economy to go at, see that made you sit up!
I could write a lot on this issue, I’m passionate about it. However, taking my own medicine and wanting to keep my blogposts short(ish) so that they get read, I’m going to now hand back to you to go and do something amazing in your own business. Start small. Make it Easy. Make a difference.
Bit of a rant tonight. I’ve received two mail shots in the past weeks from businesses wanting to do business with my business. Both will fail. Why? Because they sent ridiculous pieces of marketing to me which completely rub against my values of ensuring minimal waste. Item 1). was a balloon in a box. A fully blown up balloon, sent in a huge box by a marketing company that clearly thought it was original and quirky (sorry, been done before).
When opened the balloon simply floated out and I then had a very large box to re-cycle. Item 2) was a cheap calculator, in a blister pack sent by a petrol company to motivate us to use their fuel. I don’t think so. I took one look at the item and promptly donated it to my Head of CSR who was equally as flabbergasted as me at the CSR own goal the company in question had kicked (she has since found a new home for it). These are both classic situations – in my view – of organisations wanting to try and stand out (fair enough) but completely missing the point when it comes to deployment/CSR issues.
I can think of far more creative ways to make the point, to grab attention or to make an impact. In these times, where natural resources are becoming scarcer and the whole world is battling with carbon emmissions, surely someone, somewhere, in these organisations should reviewing the deployment of such activity? One of the Megatrends I talk about is REDuce. That is, Green buyers seeing RED at suppliers that don’t take environmental issues seriously. So, if you don’t want an unintended consequence and your marketing to do more harm that good, take a step back and consider the wider picture.
I sat on a panel at Business North West today in Manchester to represent the view of a local business on the issue of climate change. Joining me on panel were a number of public sector people, directly involved in the area. Here are some of the bullet point factoids that I threw out today: -
- The global market for low carbon = £3 trillion.
- UK market is around £106.5bn.
- 1000 tonnes of CO2 are being released into the atmosphere every second.
- It’s taken 250 years to undo the last 650,000 years of civilisation (in terms of carbon emmitted).
- Around 488bn tonnes of CO2 have been emmitted since the industrial revolution.
- Failure to act could cost around 5% of GDP. Acting could reduce this to 1% of GDP.
- Business is expected to contribute around 9% of CO2 reductions under the Governments Low Carbon Transition plan, which you can read here.
- Envirowise estimate that UK businesses could benefit by around £6.4bn worth of available savings if they got smarter around carbon.
- We have around 86 months before we reach a point of no-return in terms of carbon emmissions before the damage is irrecoverable. Check out the clock here.
- The government is driving for cuts of 50% of CO2 by 2020 (compared to 1990 levels).
Speaking in Manchester tonight, Leader of the Council -Sir Richard Leese – spoke of Manchesters target to reduce its CO2 footprint by one million tonnes, by 2020. The output of the
Mini-Stern report and the
Manchester Indendent Economic Review (MIER) place the importance of being a low-carbon economy high on the civic leaders list of priorities in the City Region. Business is an important part of that. Presentations were given by three of the key players in the region – Arup, Bruntwood and The Co-Op – in support of the carbon reduction challenge. My contribution is that we need to remember that 99.8% of UK enterprises are SME’s. Many of them don’t have the luxury of resources and dedicated carbon reduction managers. They just want simple solutions which can save money and aren’t difficult or time consuming to implement. When big things are launched, there’s a danger that multiple delivery agencies get involved and it just becomes confusing. A big issue like this just needs one set or targets, one set of deliverables and one agency delivering it for everyone. Another vote for City Region status in my view.
Technology. Love it or hate it, it continues to ramraid its way into our lives. Today I participated in a tele/web conference with 14 people in four different countries. All dialled in, all seeing the same things on the screen at the same time, in real time. It’s really cool, very simple to use and saved a stack of airmiles and cost. Yes, it’s not the same as a face to face meeting, that’s obvious, however for simpler stuff that doesn’t necessarily need a F2F, it’s a godsend. As software becomes even more intuitive, the usual excuses for not using this kind of technology are slowly dying down. In addition, with greater pressure on carbon emmissions, it makes sense to only make the essential journeys. So, dive in and have a go, it might take a few attempts to get used to it, but when you do, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. Perhaps the MP’s could have it instead of London flats?
Today is an important day for a number of reasons. 1) It’s the first of May, a day we call “May Day” in the UK. A time when traditional Morris dancers do their stuff, children dance around the Maypole and we look forward to some summer weather with the cold winter behind us. Happy times ahead. 2) It’s Prince Charles May Day summit where he engages businesses in conjunction with
Business In the Community to take action on climate change. Hugely important we are still do our bit, however small. You can watch is streamed live
here. 3) It’s the day after
Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce’s annual dinner. Met some really excellent, intelligent and lovely people and was just amazed at how many of them regular readers of this blog. Thank you all for the generous feedback, it was really appreciated. So, for such a significant day, I’ve taken the day off of work and will invest all necessary resources in making sure it’s as brilliant as it promises to be.
More examples of how business communications are really speeding up. Today
, I moved office. I’ve been in it for a good five years and have managed to hoard all manner of items in a very large cupboard behind me, primarily as I wanted to keep the office looking clean and tidy. The moment in time came today when I needed to clear it out. I sent a couple of Twitter messages out offering items from the cupboard and hey presto within a few minutes, I’d found new homes for them, nothing being wasted, ever so simple to do.
That’s powerful. Here’s another. Next week I’ll be attending the
IoD NW 2009 Conference. I e-mailed the regional director and asked him to set up a discussion group on
Linkedin so that people who are attending could easily review the profiles of other attendees and also connect/pre-network on-line. It was set up in five minutes, people are already joining the group and two people have already asked to meet up.
Speed, convenience and new contacts as a result. A direct business benefit for a limited time investment which is what businesspeople want. So, don’t sit on the sidelines and think that social networking isn’t relevant to business,
make it relevant.
Visiting Cumbria on Friday, Lord Mandelson praised the North West for acting as an emerging hub for low-carbon businesses. He rightly pointed out that the region must “act now” to take advantage of the opportunities that will be created from the low-carbon industrial revolution.
I’ve been banging on about this for ages. The birthplace of the industrial revolution is the fitting place for a new green-tech economy, creating new jobs, attracting skilled workers and potentially being a world leader in green-tech manufacturing.
But we need to get things moving, put some rubber on the road, get out of the meeting rooms and into the market. Like a developer for a new home, get building it, move the buyer in and get snagging later when the money is in the bank! Things aren’t happening fast enough for my liking and the word “emerging” is always a give away clue to try harder.
Passion is wonderful but useless without action. The North West needs to follow its forefathers, learn from their lessons and get on with it.
Yet again, the UK economy collapses as the weather takes a turn for the worst. As usual, we seem under prepared for the cold spell and the wheels of industry have stopped turning. At a function in Germany this week, the English were rightly the target of many a joke on the subject.
The impact is up to £1.2bn for each day we have severe weather, according to the
Federation of Small Businesses, just what we need when were in the beginning of an economic downturn.
However, on the upside, technology should now allow us to counteract this phenomenon. The arrival of broadband, laptops, Blackberries, 3G cards and home-office printers, now mean that captains of industry can continue to run their ships.
The Martini way of doing business (anytime, anyplace, anywhere) has born a new type of worker, the “freeworker” or someone who can stump up an office pretty much where they sit. Whatever the weather, wherever they are, business will carry on.
