High-profile leaders gathered to discuss opportunities in the world of environmental capital at the Eco:nomics Conference, and the identify what the best practices where when applying green marketing. The include: looking for the “low-hanging fruit” for quicker ROI, giving customers reasons to adopt environmentally responsible behaviors, making the message personal by explaining how a consumer’s purchase has direct environmental results, and avoiding a hard sell on environmental benefits.

It’s not good enough to just be green anymore, you have to be great. Your product or service needs to break through the green clutter. It must do its job better, more economically, more efficiently with less ? It must be positioned better, and packaged better. It should communicate its unique promise of value better.

The Journal of Marketing Management is making a call for papers re-visiting Green/Ethical Marketing practices facing the contemporary markets for publication in March 2012.

The enneagram profiling system provides nine profiles/types of consumers based on emotional behavior. It will enable you to quickly identify your company’s customer types and effectively find the best brand ambassadors.

I recently published a post on Triple Pundit that fleshes out the market-facing aspects of a model I’ve been working on with The FairRidge Group. Called the Sustainability Management Maturity Model (SM3), it’s a tool to help businesses assess their readiness to address business sustainability challenges and opportunities. The internal management components were outlined a few months ago on Triple Pundit – Strategy, Organization, Process, Measurement and People – which all relate to an inside-out perspective of the business.

Throughout the years, I have encountered many people who wanted to go green, but couldn’t sell the eco approach to the executive team. I believe most managers are simply not aware of what green marketing is, and why it’s better than traditional, non-green marketing.