Decarbonizing the Green Marketing process

"73% of millennials say they are willing to pay more for products that contain sustainable or environmentally friendly ingredients." Nielsen

“Green marketing”, as a buzzword, is gaining popularity among brands and marketers. 

Green marketing is the process of promoting products or services based on their environmental benefits. These products or services may be environmentally friendly in themselves or produced in an environmentally friendly way. 

As most surveys and literature indicate, consumers have growing expectations about brands' performances when reducing their carbon footprint and offering more eco-friendly products. 

Brands must create more environmentally-friendly products

For brands that provide physical goods, the majority of efforts have been made in implementing and practicing sustainable business methods: 

☠️ Not containing toxic materials or ozone-depleting substances

♻️ Produced from recycled materials or able to be recycled

❌ Made from renewable materials, not making use of excessive packaging

💚 Designed to be repairable 

Business processes towards sustainability

In addition to "making" the products more environmentally friendly, brands have also turned to the business processes such as replacing gas-powered vehicles with electric transportation and switching from carbon-intensive energy sources to green energy. We are even seeing repatriation of some manufacturing to minimize transportation logistics. 

While the products that are marketed are “green” themselves, existing marketing efforts have been quite generic and are not directly relevant to marketing while offering little change :

🗑 Paperless office and promotional materials 
🚗 Remote work or telecommuting to reduce gas emissions
💡 Use power-saving light fixtures and bulbs
🛠 Buy remanufactured ink and toner
🧪Use green-friendly cleaning products

At nfinite, we are directly tackling the carbon footprint generated from the marketing process, or more specifically, the promotional part of that process.

As brands seek to differentiate themselves and grab consumer attention in a crowded digital space, they need more content, more creativity, different formats for a greater variety of digital/ social channels, and a greater need for personalization.

All this means more visual content

In the past, brands achieved production of such visual content through photo-shooting of physical products, which is relatively carbon-intensive, to begin with: 

✈️ Transportation of goods and decor
🌍 Transportation, Room, and Board for related personnel
🖼 Production of physical set and setting
📸 Re-shoots for different backgrounds and product variations

This still makes sense when brands had to follow this method for a few high-margin products. But on a grander scale where products sold on digital platforms have been growing at an exponential rate, the logistics would be a nightmare, and so is the impact on the environment. 

Our solution is to replace cumbersome processes and logistics through product visual digitization.

We call this new method : eMerchandizing.

We do that with a turnkey 3D/CGI imaging technology that enables a few basic photos of all your products to be taken, which we then convert into 3D assets. After that, you can place those assets into any contextual backdrop of your choice.

Integrating a lifestyle product into a country cottage setting or an urban high-rise ambiance is only a few clicks away, without waiting hours to transport the products and related personnel. This innovative approach removes the carbon from the process and allows the production team to save time money, and reduce unforeseen logistical risks.

You can learn more in our last article about this revolutionary new method of visual creation.

Armed with this new solution, marketers can freely promote their brands' environmentally-friendly products. They can do so with the confidence that their promotional processes also consider the environment.

To be recognized as a responsible member of modern society, many companies apply for certifications set forth by third-party organizations for their products such as: FSC (paper, wood), Energy star (electronics appliances), Rainforest Alliance (food, beverage, personal care), and many others. However, these remain industry-specific certifications that focus on the products themselves. Discover on our last article how to relieve CMOs’ pressure to drive sustainability agenda.

We have not seen any certifications that recognize the green marketing process's effort to reduce environmental impact further. With nfinite, we can make it possible!