Book Review: "The Green Marketing Manifesto" by John Grant

We are currently eating, sleeping, and breathing a newfound religion of everything ‘green’. At the very heart of responsibility is industry and commerce, with everyone now racing to create their ‘environmental’ business strategy. In line with this awareness, there is much discussion of the ‘green marketing opportunity’ as a means of jumping on this bandwagon. We need to find a sustainable marketing strategy that actually delivers on green objectives, not green themes. Marketers need to give up the many ways and approaches that made sense in pure commercial terms but which are unsustainable in the long run. True green marketing must go beyond the ad models where all it matters is to make a brand “look” good; we need a green marketing that “does” well and does good. Hype won’t do any longer; when people buy “green” they want to know they are making a real contribution to solving global environmental problems.

“The Green Marketing Manifesto” by John Grant provides a roadmap on how to organize green marketing effectively and sustainably. It offers a fresh start for green marketing, one that provides a practical and ingenious approach. John Grant recreates the field of marketing for the new “green” era with ingenuity and verve. In order to give an indication of the potential of this route, the book offers many examples from companies and brands that are making headway in this thorny arena, such as Marks & Spencer, Sky, Virgin, Toyota, Tesco, and O2. So, “The Green Marketing Manifesto” leaves the readers with a meaningful set of tools for formulating and executing their own projects. John Grant creates a ‘Green Matrix’ as a tool for examining current practices and those that the future needs to embrace. This book is intended to assist marketers, by means of clear and practical guidance, through a complex transition towards meaningful green marketing.

Take-aways from The Green Marketing Manifesto

•  Consumers increasingly want their purchases to count toward solving global problems.
•  Reducing consumption and making a profit need not conflict.
•  Web 2.0 networking has inspired new ways of thinking about business.
•  Green products have to compete based on traditional benefits to customers.
•  Market your company’s commitment to sustainability by creating policies from which new standards and ways of doing business flow.
•  Promote your company’s green commitments by partnering with a charity.
•  Educate customers on how specific products fit into a more sustainable lifestyle.
•  Use enduring quality, classic design, shared excitement for an offering and other attributes, as well as environmental benefits, to position your green product.
•  Sometimes creating “new cool” must-have fashions can also work for green ideas.
•  Reshape cultural myths and assumptions to pave the way for big lifestyle changes.