Sturdy Roots Blog

It seems like 1998, all over again.

Ten years ago, the clamor was over the Internet. Marketers scrambled to determine best practices for using it to attract consumers to new products and services, or assure consumers’ continued satisfaction with the brands they already prefer. Overcoming early resistance, the Internet, and the opt-in email marketing, search-engine optimization (SEO), and mobile channels that followed, are no longer novelties favored by early-adapters, but, paired with traditional direct marketing (direct mail, DRTV, telemarketing, etc.), are now essential components in the broader multi-channel or integrated marketing mix.

And now, in 2008, marketers are embarking on a new revolution: this one, green. From the largest multinational brands to the smallest entrepreneurial companies, marketers are turning green by becoming eco-friendly, reducing “carbon footprints”, using or manufacturing more materials or merchandise comprised in part or entirely of re-cycled (post-consumer) content, and becoming good corporate citizens by facilitating green practices and programs in their communities.

We are witnessing a green paradigm shift.

Where the advent of the Internet ushered in the Information Age, now, thanks to heightened consciousness from films like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to mainstream religious communities’ broad-scale adaptation of green-practices, both business and society are quickly coming to the realization that the earth and its resources are in peril. Crude oil, the single-most-important natural resource fueling the world’s economic engine -has been trading at inflation-adjusted record-high prices. Never again will this commodity be affordable, plentiful, or taken for granted.

As a successful 25-year veteran of the direct marketing industry, 10 years of which have been as an executive recruiter for direct and interactive marketers and consumer insights gatherers, I am blown away by the sudden and profound changes in the attitudes and work-motivations of marketing executive talent. Over the years, I have interviewed thousands of candidates for marketing executive jobs. Most ascribed to conventional career motivations: need for success, money, recognition, etc. But now, and quite all of a sudden, our marketing executive candidates’ motivations are changing. Often the answers to the question, “What is your career motivation?” are like these:

I want to work for a company that is a good corporate citizen.

I need to know that my new employer is reducing or eliminating its dependence on oil, coal, and other natural and non-renewable sources of energy or raw-material.

The place I would most like to work manufactures or markets goods that are made in part or entirely of recycled materials, or, are bio-degradable.

I have to be able to look my child in the eye and tell (her) that I have been a responsible corporate citizen, that I’ve helped make the world a better place.

I want to – I NEED TO – work for a green company!

Similar responses have also been gathered by senior talent recruitment executives at financial services powerhouse JPMorganChase. They are finding that, now, the best (most-talented) hires are overwhelmingly motivated by social-conscience and environmental responsibility.

Too, I am a dedicated social and environmental activist. And by working at the forefront of the green marketing revolution, I know I am doing my part to connect green-committed executive candidates with equally-committed hiring companies.

Yet, I know turning green is not easy.

There are talented marketing executives eager to work for green companies, but finding such hiring opportunities – especially during these early (hurly burly) days of the green revolution – takes an inordinate amount of time and effort. Conversely, there are companies looking to establish and fulfill green goals, but most have yet to offer the kinds of work assignments, environments, or practices attractive to green marketing executives.

In particular, the direct marketing industry which I help staff, now comprises a whopping ten percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) – that’s one dollar for every ten spent. And traditional direct mailers and catalog companies consume a huge amount of paper, and petroleum-based ink, to promote and market their goods and services. Yet now, most are considering market research insights – such as a study by global video-conferencing leader Tandberg -indicating that 53 percent of consumers favor merchandise or services from so-called green companies.

Simply stated: green is good for business. Companies that wholeheartedly adopt green-practices will benefit; those that do not will be left in the dust.

For marketing companies committed to going green, the challenges that lie ahead include dramatically reinventing how:

• their products are designed and manufactured;
• the marketing campaigns they employ to sell their products are executed;
• and, their merchandise is packaged, shipped, and delivered.

This green revolution is transforming economics and society in ways we have yet to fully-understand. Recruiting, hiring, and retaining top executive talent, to fulfill noble green marketing objectives, is Corporate America’s most-important challenge.

Featuring the insights of thought-leaders at the forefront of the green marketing revolution, this blog, Sturdy Roots, intends to be a guide for companies and their hiring-managers looking at going green. 

It will be a highly-useful guide for marketing executive talent ascribing to green principles, or, that have yet to recognize their unconscious “green” work-motivations. And it will illustrate how any company – large or small – can facilitate its green transformation by hiring appropriately-minded and motivated marketing executives.

To share evolving green best-practices, we will reach out to executives from organizations, such as:

• Services companies (marketing agencies, printers, manufacturers, distributors) providing both best-practice and materials for green marketing and carbon-footprint reduction;
• Direct and multi-channel marketers (traditionally big consumers of paper and other natural resources, that have transformed their selling and distribution methods to satisfy their green marketing goals;
• Large U.S. brand marketers (e.g., “Dow 30″ companies). Chief Sustainability Officers and other senior-level green marketing executives describing how they helped transform their companies from environmental eye-sores to green agents-for-change; 
• Cause-related non-profit fundraisers (e.g., one fundraiser leverages biblical text to drive its green marketing initiatives); 
• Companies with workplaces turned into to eco-friendly laboratories where lush gardens reside on roof tops to trap heat, where rainwater is collected for irrigation purposes, etc.; 
• Firms that have discovered that they are green (e.g., internet marketers and services providers) or that took a previously environmentally-toxic product or process and reinvented it, to make it green.

Like the green marketing revolution, this forum is a work-in-progress.  We are all learning, discovering, and inventing as we go.  Thus, it is our hope that the information provided here will be immediately helpful.

If you have a green-marketer success story you think is worth sharing or if you are a hiring-manager or executive candidate eager to go green, we would like to hear from you. Call us at 703-835-9900 or email us at green@dansmolen.com.

Now, let us establish Sturdy Roots!