The Greener the Better: how ‘green messaging’ has revolutionized Internet

The minute I hear the word green, I think: trees, granola bars (original version), Starbucks, Fiat EcoDrive, National Geographic, hippies, General Electric, slimmy frogs.

My point is, you think green, you think nature and anything related to it, at least for the most part. As we have all witnessed in the world today, many major, top-notch corporations are becoming more and more eco-friendly than ever before. Take GE, for instance, and its Energy Smart Compact Light bulbs or Starbuck’s content-recycled cups, which were launched some years back as an effort to reduce environmental impact. Besides corporations, you’ve also got celebrities like Sheryl Crow and Natalie Portman who stand as role models to many for being planet-friendly, and then you have the standard brand bearers of the trend like Patagonia, Trader Joe’s, Body Shop, even H&M, which has garments made of 100% organic cotton.

Some of these we don’t even realize cause they’re more of a social responsibility issue than a ‘let’s make some noise so we can get some extra cash’, issue, but at the same time, it can become a dilemma. In the end, you would want to advertise initiatives of this sort in order to clear the way for other companies to eventually do the same. This big wave of environmental consciousness has been hitting us all, but this time, in all angles.

Take the Internet for example. When you put in the keyword ‘green’ on Google search, the first result after Wikepedia’s definition of green is National Geographic’s Green Guide. The next one up is TreeHugger.com, which has become a popular green site, which has had a visitation reach of 515,000 people as of March 2008, resulting in an 81% increase since 2007. Apart from sites tailor-made for the sole purpose of communicating environmental do’s and dont’s, there has been a great interest in searching information related to how to become greener and lead eco-friendly lives.

According to ComScore, keywords such as ‘ecotourism’ and ‘climate change’ have had a high search query increase since last year, with ecotourism growing 574% and climate change 167% in February 2008. Also keywords like ‘hybrid cars’ and ‘recycle’ have gained popularity with a 48% and 35% growth respectively.

But how can all these statistics come in handy without any recall? The fact is, in a recent Burst Media survey, consumer recall of advertising containing the word ‘green’ is very high, with 37% of consumers affirming they do recall green messaging. The survey also displayed results where 22.7% of respondents claimed they seldom or never believe in any green messaging they view, clearly depicting trails of skepticism regarding the Internet. In my opinion the following figures displayed are those which should be taken well into consideration on behalf of online advertisers. These being:

1. 65.3% of respondents say they ’sometimes’ believe green claims made in ads
2. 12.1% say they ‘always’ believe green ad claims
3. 41.6% of consumers frequently or occasionally research the claims made in green ads
4. 30.1% refrain from any further research

Another important additional figure is that more than 4 out of 5 respondents (81.9%) have incorporated some level of ‘greenness’ into their lives. In the end this online buzz has effectively originated natural search traffic and also increased visitors to the numerous websites existent today, simply for implementing new, eco-oriented products and services.

To read more on this, you can take a peek at this post. Thanks to advertising, brand name management and Internet’s magic, this green movement has become a fad, a trend, which would be superb if sustained, but exactly how long will it last?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply