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San Francisco a Little Greener this Morning

Ater weeks of debate and intense lobbying by green businesses and environmentalists around the Bay Area, San Francisco finally passed the country's most aggressive municiple solar grant plan. As Elsa Wenzel at CNET mentions, this will sweeten the SF pot for green start ups.

This is another example of the considerable movement at the municiple and state levels to drive green adoption. While this is a great thing for green vendors, it makes the job of cleantech PR practitioners and marketers much more difficult, as they are tempted to take a patchwork local-market approach to selling their wares.

While local PR programs are effective (we've been executing them for medical clients for nearly two decades), green is a different market that requires as much nationwide education as it does adoption. This is especially true as the federal climate becomes more politicized in an election year and much of the legislation introduced in 2008 is more about drawing battle lines than about getting things signed into law. That will change in early 2009, which makes national PR programs integrated with government relations even more critical. For this reason and this reason alone, it is important that green marketing and PR organizations not get too myopic.

With all of that said, bravo to San Francisco for taking the initiative to get a program in place. It will lead to an influx of companies setting up shop in the city and create a number of green collar jobs in the area.

It will be interesting if this also helps draw conferences to the city that have to date been the domain of Southern California, including Solar Power 2008 and GreenXchange Expo. Good days for solar are ahead.

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By Jason Morris on June 12, 2008 11:32 AM
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California Drought: Renewable Powered Pumps to the Rescue?

Governor Schwarzenegger has declared a drought in California following one of the driest springs on record. This of course is bad news to the farmers in the state and those of us in the East Bay who want grass for a yard and not a dustbowl.

The majority of the state's water comes from the Sierra snowpack and that pack is thinner this year than in normal years. Some farmers can make up the difference with deep water pumps, but those pumps run on diesel and use 5 gallons per hour, meaning one hour of pumping costs about $26-$30 per hour depending on the cost of fuel.

Conservationists and environmentalists point to global warming as the driver of snowpack reduction, whereas global warming naysayers call the drought cyclical. Regardless of who is right and given the cost of fuel right now, it leads to interesting questions about markets you don't hear much about.

The first market is desalination. This is a technology that has never made sense because of the fuel needed--wood, coal, natural gas--to power a desalination plant. Today, solar and wind, and (longer term) maybe even tidal resources could power such plants and give coastal states (hello drought-stricken Georgia) an almost inexhaustable source of fresh water. Not to mention it would help us deal with rising sea levels (sorry, bad joke).

The other area where renewables could help is deep water pumps. A lot of areas around the country have deep water reservoirs that are expensive to tap and require fuel to harvest. Using wind and solar power would dramatically cut costs for farmers and reduce the strain on reservoirs, rivers and other irrigation options.

If you are marketers in the aforementioned areas, this is a prime time to educate the market and government regulators about the viability of such technologies to generate sales leads and stimulate new investment. It will be interesting to see if either of these areas get any interest at the IDG GreenXchange event or Solar Power 2008. By then, California will be five months into an official drought and no doubt there will be plenty of discussion about the role renewables can play in water shortages.

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By Jason Morris on June 5, 2008 10:43 AM
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Back in the Saddle: Green Breeds Green

After a busy May split up by a Yellowstone trip (and two Grizzly sightings) I am back in the saddle on Renewablog pledging to do 8.3 percent more green posts in Q3 than I did in Q2. Why? Because green gets a premium everywhere these days.

A new survey commissioned by BioCycle (and executed by Schwartz client Marketools) shows that consumers are willing to spend $8.30 more on a $100 product if it is made from recycled goods or helps the environment. This brings the total of such goods to $150 when you also factor in California sales tax. 

All kidding aside, this is a great sign that even during a softening economy people are still willing to open their wallets for greener goods and services. In fact, the survey also shows that seven out of ten respondents are willing to pay that premium, so it is not just a small subset of people throwing off the average.

This is good news for the green marketer.

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By Jason Morris on June 4, 2008 8:13 PM
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Green is in the Eye of the Beholder

NPR’s Morning Edition completed its series on global climate change with a look at Masdar, a soon-to-be-built an Abu Dhabi city that aims to be the first city with no carbon emissions. Claiming to be carbon-neutral is certainly bold, so Reporter Joe Palca went a step deeper examining how, exactly, designers plan to do that.

Toward the end of the story came an interesting quote from Liz Darley at Bioregional, the firm that will calculate the city’s carbon emissions.

"What they're currently doing is deciding where that boundary is drawn," Darley says. "That is, in itself, quite a complex thing to decide on as a project team ... because it could include all the carbon expenditure of flying between Europe and the Middle East the design team is incurring. It could go to the extent of you guys coming here to interview us. Once you start peeling back the layers of the onion, it just goes on and on and on forever."

This struck me as quite interesting since our offices here on Prospect Hill in Waltham have a new neighbor, a building that purports to be the first LEED-certified office building the area. This is certainly a good thing, but I wondered about all this environmental stuff as the large parking lot went up next to it. Not to mention, the building’s design is your standard suburban office variety with no retail on the first floor, so those of us in the complex who may want to have a bit of lunch still have to jump in our cars and head somewhere else. Yes, we have a cafe with outdoor seating, but that can get old VERY fast.

In fact, the marketing copy on the sites proclaims that the building has 716 total parking spaces, certainly fewer than the 893 in our building, but the transportation to both buildings is the same.


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There are those who say that free parking is a major part of the problem. That because it’s so easy to drive and park, we choose to do that rather than find alternative transportation. They have a point. Except that building put up in an office park don’t give people that alternative. The Westin Hotel, also up here on Prospect Hill, recently started charging $9 to park a car overnight. That wouldn’t be so bad, except there is no way to get here EXCEPT to drive. The people who have tried to take the bus often abandoned the concept because it’s so onerous to do so. I try to bike here a few times a week, but the trip up Totten Pond Road brings me just inches from speeding trucks. It’s enough to make even the most ardent cyclist pretty nervous.

So how green is green? Is it better to build a LEED certified building on a hill in Waltham or is it better to encourage businesses to move toward more urban settings with better public transit? Is it better to build an entirely new carbon-neutral city or to take the same technologies and apply them to existing communities?

By Chuck Tanowitz on May 12, 2008 5:12 PM
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Kleiner Raising New Green Round

Great to see KPCB raising another round for green investment. It shows that despite a softening economy, people believe that green is still a good investment. It is probably a good bet since the political climate at the federal level will likely change dramtically in t-minus nine months. Maybe Kleiner's celebrity fund raiser, Al Gore, will play a role in changing that political climate?

Why is this important? Because it feeds the marketing and lobbying coffers of green companies, allowing them to better compete with traditional industries trying to slow green adoption.

It is also important because green marketers need to realize that the market is still going to get even noisier. They need to be pushing their executive teams for additional budget in 2008 and 2009, because the softening economy may have little impact on how aggressive their competitors will be.

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By Jason Morris on April 28, 2008 6:35 AM
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Sometimes Simple Point is Most Critical

When posting on a blog it is sometimes easy to overthink your topic and gloss over some of the really simple topics that are incredibly critical. This dawned on me when reading a post by John Gartner at MarketingShift.

His post is about how Green has reached mainstream levels in terms of buzz according to Nielsen research. He gives some useful information throughout the brief post, but John's simple yet critical point is his last one: "Companies have to develop a marketing message that is genuine and not condescending to the desirable demographic."

This is a critically important point for a couple of reasons:

1) We have reach the second stage in green hype. The first stage was the embracing of Green by hype watchers as the next big thing in business and lifestyle. The second is an age of backlash and skepticism driven by fear that it will be adopted, along with general pushback by media and others who will say that adoption is not nearly matching the Stage-One hype. A lot of the media out there right now is focused on the inefficiency of solar, the negative impact of biofuels and freak windfarm fires. This makes it a prime period of time for green washers to get destroyed by media and the general public. Hence, why John's "genuine" statement is important.

2) People sometimes overlook that communications and marketing can come across as condescening. Look at the presidential campaign. You have the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barrack Obama trying to spin every little piece of information or data their way, to the point that it sometimes gets insulting to the viewer.  An Editorial in the NY Times this week accused them of thinking the American people are a bunch of "rubes."

This is how I feel sometimes about green marketing--that is so superficial and transparent, it does more harm than good. So the simple message is: Be genuine and don't condescend. If you have to fool someone or oversell your greenness, it won't appear green to your audience, it will be transparent.

 

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By Jason Morris on April 25, 2008 6:41 AM
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Earth Day Noise Pollution

We're often asked by clients if the biggest trade show of the year in their respective space is a good location to announce news. We usually answer their question with a question: "What is the goal of the announcement?"

We explain that if the goal is stand-alone media coverage, they might be better off using the event to pre-brief media and announce a couple of weeks later when the market has exhausted its news. If the goal is to drive business development activities, announcing what they are doing at the show to give sales and bizdev a press release to shop to customers and prospects might be the way to go.

The green/clean tech world is relatively immature when it comes to events. There are several that are vying to become the RSA, NRF, Mobile World Congress or JavaOne of their respective markets---such as Solar Power and GreenXChange Expo--but for the most part there is not yet that one event that makes green marketers exhaust their news arsenal.

But unlike security, open source, application development, retail technology and wireless, green does have a landmark "event" that brings every marketer out of the woodwork with a news announcement: Earth Day. I performed a highly scientific research project (40-second searching of Google News by source) and found about 500 commercial press releases from the past 24 hours that mention Earth Day.

My favorite? Purex announced that Jaime Pressly has become its spokesperson for the company's green campaign. I can just see Joy, Randy, Earl and Crabman doing what they can to stop global warming on My Name is Earl.

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But the point is that Earth Day may have officially become the noisiest day in the Green world. The question for marketers then becomes: "Should you announce signidicant news on Earth Day?"

I think the answer would be a resounding "No." Earth Day is much too noisy, especially when you also factor in this year's Presidential campaign, earnings season and just about every other news event that could drown out a momentum announcement, new corporate green initiative or donations to a green charity.

My advice? Avoid Earth Day like the plague and don't contribute to the noise being created by marketers in every sector from detergents to light bulbs. Better yet, follow the advice of my eight-year old daughter who said, "Let's shut everything off today that uses electricity, including the Wii, Webkinz, the TV and the toaster."

Generation Green speaks. Shut off your computer, take the day off and celebrate Earth Day away from the noise.

 

 

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By Jason Morris on April 22, 2008 11:24 AM
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