Will We Be Green in 2009?

I mentioned a month or so that we were looking into the relative importance of sustainability, CSR, green and the whole environmental debate for our clients. We were hearing in the media that 2009 will be all about thrift and as such our green consumer values will go out of the window. We wanted to see if this was true.

So with this in mind Gyro has just completed research with close to 2000 consumers and over 150 Marketing Leaders in 8 countries. The objective behind this 2 pronged research was to understand the above question and also to discover whether the people behind the brands fully appreciate the buying motivations of their customers. The results show a considerable disparity between what brands are communicating and what their customers actually care about.

A selection of highlights includes:

- Marketing Directors significantly underestimated the role green issues can play in the purchase decision of consumers. Even in current economic times.
- People see themselves living increasingly green lives over the next 24 months.
- The UK significantly lags other major European countries in green attitudes.
- Around half of consumers do not trust the claims of green brand advertisers.
- People want to see evidence of companies’ progress in ‘green R&D’. They are not interested in hearing about car sharing schemes. This is about real technological efforts and breakthroughs.

We jointly hosted a roundtable with The Times this week to discuss the results. The Shadow Environment Minister and representatives from P&G, Coke, HP, Shell, BT, Adobe, Google, Nokia Siemens Networks and The Carbon Trust all contributed towards a really interesting debate.

Drop me an email - richard.mabbott@gyrointernational.com - and I’ll be happy to send you a copy of the report.