The BusinessGreen webcast on customer behaviour went really well on Monday. The recorded version will be online soon and I’ll put the link in the comments below. I’m not going to summarise the sessions in detail here as you will be able to watch it, but instead I’ll pull out some key messages from the participants.

Sophie Flak of hotel group Accor (Sofitel, Novotel, Formule1) emphasised the need to use facts rather than following the crowd or to “think twice before acting” as she put it.

Carmel McQuaid of Marks & Spencer emphasised that the green message must be fully integrated into mainstream marketing. So M&S uses the same models (Danii, Twiggy et al) for their green campaigns as their normal advertising – and they sync their “clear out days” to promote the recycling of clothes with their seasonal changes in stock.

My main point was to put yourself in the customers shoes. You need to make green behaviour as frictionless as possible while adding friction to the less green behaviour – exactly the same principle to promote green behaviour within your organisation.

We got some great questions, too.

One was about the message you use. All the panellists agreed that preaching was counterproductive. I suggested that humour was a good option, such as replacing the po-faced “Consider the environment before printing this e-mail” with a wittier version like “Printing this e-mail will make Al Gore cry.”

Another was along the lines of “is greening products enough or do we not need a different type of economy?” My response was that it was already happening in certain areas – music, books, movies where people were increasingly buying the service rather than the equivalent physical artefact, but that in others it was difficult as  many people see a product such as a car as a sign of status – which is why many car clubs are targetting the second car rather than the first one.

The most worrying was about the ‘cost downside’ of doing all this. I was quite blunt and pointed out that study after study had shown that companies who took sustainability seriously were doing better in the downturn than average (acknowledging that cause and effect weren’t completely clear).