What's New | HartBeat While the past 200 years have seen endless fads come and go, the world of health & wellness is here to stay. Check out our Road to Wellness infographic! Launch» September 1, From Eating Occasion to Store Shelf August 25, Oprah, Food and Us August 18, 3 Shopper Marketing Myths

home : hartbeat : 2007-05-22

05.22.2007

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

NOW AVAILABLE»

The Hartman Report on Sustainability

UNDERSTANDING THE CONSUMER PERSPECTIVE

The Hartman Report on Sustainability: Understanding the Consumer Perspective is the first major integrated quantitative and qualitative study to find out how consumers feel about a world struggling to live in balance today for the benefit of future generations.

Click to learn more and to order...




READMORE...

---

For more Hartman Group articles on SUSTAINABILITY, click here...

03.28.2007 "The 'Fiber' of Organics"

01.24.2007 "What Makes 'Local' Special?"

01.17.2007 "A Nano Trend to Start 2007"

05.03.2006 "Transparency: What's Really Inside the Package...and the Company"

07.14.2005 "Is 'Buying Local' the Real Deal?"

04.27.2004 "The Symbolic Power of 'Organic'"

05.15.2001 "Creating the Buzz: Marketing Eco-Products to Today's Wellness Consumers"

Archives »
Click here for an archive of past HartBeat articles

Sustainability: What's Green Now?

History often lays the foundation for the future. In the case of sustainability, its early days of strong environmentalism were the framework for the cultural movement as we know it today. Sustainability concerns have gradually elevated from blue-jean clad activists into mainstream consumers on a never-ending journey to adapt their standard of living to the changes going on around them. As they move forward in this world of social and environmental consciousness, their personal lifestyle choices will act as a springboard into the future and continue to define and redefine sustainability.

Sustainability 2007» This week we debut findings from The Hartman Report on Sustainability: Understanding the Consumer Perspective. Each day, we bring you new information from our first major integrated quantitative and qualitative study on how consumers view sustainability and environmental responsibility. » Stay tuned for tomorrow's Sustainability: The Corporate Tie-Breaker

Shades of Green Consumers: 10 Years Past

In point of fact, the average consumer has been contemplating a maze of headlines, claims, jargon, certifications, and corporate and public interest platforms that make up the complex World of Sustainability for decades. Many cite that the "environment," as a topic of modern concern, rose with public recognition of the ill-effects of industrialization highlighted by the publishing of Silent Spring in the early 1960s, and then gathered momentum with the establishment of groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Federal government's own Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s.

Today, the World of Sustainability is many-headed, and touches on an enormous breadth of products, services and industries. In its presentation to the public, sustainability is typically portrayed by the media, industry and various public interest groups through a variety of emotionally charged lenses reporting on and measuring various attempts to ameliorate a number of largely self-created risks posed to human, animal, plant and global health. Socially conscious terms like "ethical consumption," "sustainability," "environment," "green design/products/lifestyles," "alternative energy/fuels," "corporate responsibility," "locally produced," "organic and natural" and "fair trade" are now so regularly used that they have entered into everyday media use for public consumption.

Interestingly, with so much conversation about sustainability going on among industry, public interest and media stakeholders, seldom do we ever see any meaningful analysis of how consumers themselves perceive the term "sustainability." It is rarely examined with any regularity or depth of methodology by other parties.

The Hartman Group has been exploring consumer perceptions of green lifestyles for many years: Stemming from work we began in the late 1980s in assessing the consumer potential for products like natural and organic fibers and apparel, in the late 1990s The Hartman Group published the first of several now broadly cited reports that examined consumer perceptions of earth-sustainable products. The series, Food and the Environment: A Consumer Perspective, identified that at least attitudinally, 52% of Americans in 1997 were seeking to purchase "earth-sustainable food products." Among this group of Americans were several shades of green awareness:

• The True Naturals, composed of 7% of the population, were already converted to earth-sustainable lifestyles and "saving the planet."
• The New Green Mainstream consisted of 23% of the population, and while deeply concerned about "the environment" and interested in buying earth-sustainable products, also didn't know much about it.

Two other groups completed this segmentation:

• The Young Recyclers (10% of the population), who while youthful and into recycling products, didn't necessarily have the finances or commitment to "live sustainably."
• The Affluent Healers (12% of the population), who while able to afford to live earth-sustainably, were too cynical to translate their beliefs into action.

The 1997 Food and Environment report cited that there was clearly an "increased environmental awareness among consumers with resulting effect on lifestyle activities" and that there was a "growing consumer interest in making environmentally sound purchases (but on terms defined by the consumer)." The report went on to identify that the organic market was rapidly expanding, and that the consumer interest in "the environment" - which included the notion of purchasing earth-sustainable products as a means to protect air, water and themselves - was in a powerful, but nascent stage.

Since the publication of the Food and Environment series in the late 1990s, The Hartman Group has continued to delineate many of the complex fault lines that link to sustainability with studies as diverse as alternative medicine, organic products, dietary supplements and wellness lifestyles: Our current research methodologies used in the creation of The Hartman Report on Sustainability embrace quantitative approaches, such as those used to create the green consumer segments of the 1990s, but now are complemented by sociological and anthropological research methods that seek to get at the underlying "why's" of consumer attitudes and behaviors - in particular how the shades of green hinted at in the 1990s may have evolved into what is now a new era of sustainability.

Green is Organic: 1997 to 2007

One of the important insights gained from our Food and Environment research was that despite a clear resonance among half of the American population toward earth-sustainable products voiced in the 1990s, green attitudes did not necessarily translate into green behavior: While marketers of sustainable products in the 1990s hoped consumers would "vote with their dollars" when purchasing goods and services, it turned out that for everyday shoppers entering a store (or Web site) the top-of-mind purchase driver was not necessarily, "I'm going to buy environmentally today." Interestingly enough, except for the die-hard "core" green consumers, who have never stopped embracing pure green ideals, a vast amount of consumer behavior that coincides with the term "sustainability" has instead focused on what we now understand at The Hartman Group to be a general consumer drive to increasingly ameliorate risks to self and children, and then depending on personal mindset, risks posed to community, country and finally the globe.

This intrinsically human orientation toward sustainability, explored in this report, centers squarely on how everyday consumers seek to cope with what they view as threats posed to their air, water, food, and local and global environment. It has its greatest show of force in the rise of organic foods and the general cultural shift toward health and wellness in the United States in the period 1997 to 2007. Importantly, as we've learned through a decade of research on organic products themselves, the primary drivers leading the majority of today's consumers to organics are not spiritual concerns for "the environment," but instead, pragmatic reactions to events that cause a greater focus on personal and family health and wellness - adding children to the family, being diagnosed with a serious health condition or other triggers.

Sustainability Today: Living Green in an Era of Risk and Uncertainty

Taking the rapid rise of the organic market in the United States less as a barometer of a consumer resonance toward products that are earth sustainable, but more as testament to the health and wellness lifestyle drivers that influence the majority of organic buyers today. We can use such a reading as an indicator toward the general climate that makes up the current consumer perspective on sustainability. Importantly, and as established in The Hartman Report on Sustainability, the term "sustainability" is little used in consumer circles and is not widely understood as a universal concept. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, sustainability is a red hot media and public interest umbrella term used to describe the current cultural movement toward health, wellness, organics, environmental consciousness, fair trade, simple living, buying local, etc. For consumers, "sustainability" is not just about "saving the Earth."

Among consumers, the underlying assumption behind all of these trends is that, if society continues on its current path, systems will break down, resources will become scarce, and public health will be at risk. The Hartman Report on Sustainability specifically identifies how public perception of sustainability affects consumer behavior and addresses how consumer attitudes and behavior are shifting to reflect these key distinctions - improving outcomes for personal health, the community, and the global natural environment, as well as improving outcomes both now and in the indefinite future.

While the results of our research show that among everyday consumers the term "sustainability" is not widely used, not widely understood, and not very useful in terms of consumer product marketing, our findings clearly show that a cultural shift is taking place in terms of consumer awareness, acceptance and practices that relate to this term. Specifically there is a convergence between consumer trends in health and wellness and the broad scale use of the term "sustainability" by industry, the media and public interest stakeholders. From a marketing perspective, the umbrella term "sustainability" may be of little help to selling specific products (most consumers still are not currently going shopping saying to themselves, "I think I'll buy sustainably today"), but many of the concepts found within "sustainability" have the ability to resonate powerfully with certain segments of the consumer market.

The Hartman Report on Sustainability provides insight into some of these key market segments, their relationship with the fragmented and evolving "World of Sustainability," and the pathways consumers typically follow as they navigate through a world filled with a myriad of (often conflicting) "sustainable" information, choices and pressures.

Shades of Sustainability and Sustainability Consciousness

As presented in The Hartman Report on Sustainability, each consumer has his/her own individual model of sustainability, gathered from a variety of different influences and experiences, and these beliefs form shades of sustainability. While most consumers have a limited understanding and usage of the broad concept of sustainability, consumer engagement can be described in terms of varying degrees of what we term "sustainability consciousness." Sustainability consciousness refers to the way people link everyday life to "big" problems (e.g., food, water and air quality). Sustainability consciousness is not just about "eco-conscious consumers" and "the environment"; it is broadly distributed across society, to include "everyday people."

Take Away

The dynamics of sustainability in contemporary American consumer culture are not new: Many of the successful "green" products, services and initiatives that are "working" today stem not as much in their success from environmentally oriented motivations within consumer lifestyles, but instead are the result of consumer reactions to risk translated into behavior at the household and community level.

From the consumer perspective, these dynamics of sustainability are changing and evolving, just as dynamics behind so-called "green" and "environmental" markets are evolving. For those involved with speaking to consumers from a platform of sustainability (or marketing products and services along such lines), we feel that it's important to reiterate that we are experiencing a significant cultural shift in which consumers will continue to adapt their behavior to align with companies, products and services that they find to be relevant to their current lifestyle. For the average consumer, sustainability implies both the existence of macro-level, socially produced risks, as well as various kinds of responses to perceived risks at the personal and household level. Most consumers believe that daily life requires practical adaptations to these risks, if potentially harmful outcomes are to be avoided: The steady growth in markets for water filtration, air purifiers, organics and sunscreen products demonstrate how perceptions of risk have translated into household purchase behavior.

Importantly, beyond such pragmatic buying behavior, there are a broad range of "sustainable" products and services that intersect with both the world of consumers and the "World of Sustainability" in different ways. Thus, there is no boilerplate formula to successfully replicate a single best "sustainable product and experience." This presents retailers and manufacturers of consumer goods with opportunities as well as challenges. A keen understanding of consumer behavior within the World of Sustainability as presented in The Hartman Report on Sustainability is a valuable tool in identifying emerging opportunities and overcoming barriers to succeeding in today's sustainability marketplace.

---