Years and years ago I was doing some consultancy work for the producer of a really good green product – one which managed to substitute benign natural materials for a highly aggressive and dangerous chemical. Our project was largely technical, but my main contact, the Business Development Manager, was constantly complaining about his difficulty in selling the product beyond ‘The Green Niche’.

The product was sold in bog standard white plastic bottles adorned with a black and white label which looked as if it had just come out of a cheap inkjet printer, because it just had. Across the label were the words “ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY” in crude bold lettering with the actual function of the product in a smaller font underneath.

I ruminated on this for a while and put together a presentation for him (for free = mistake) based on some academic work about the development of green markets and the barriers to the mainstream. The conclusion was that mainstream customers saw ‘green’ as the third or fourth ‘button’ when making buying decisions, usually after performance and price. I recommended they promote the health & safety benefits of the product above the ‘environmentally friendly’ tagline as their target customers take their employees’ safety very seriously – and get them printed properly.

The BDM nodded his way through my talk and said “I couldn’t agree more. That’s what we’ve been doing for years.”

In my naiveté, I didn’t yell “No it isn’t! That’s your problem! Your product might be great, but it looks like complete crap!”

It would have cost peanuts to get the labels redesigned and professionally printed, but the BDM preferred to keep blaming the buyers at his prospective customers for ‘not getting it’. Nothing changed and the product failed to break into the mainstream.

The lesson here is the same one I preach about using Green Jujitsu to engage with employees – you MUST take the blinkers off and put yourself in the other guy’s shoes. You may be massively proud of your green product or service, but outside the green niche, ‘green’ is seen as one of a number of attributes rather than the prime one.

If you want to break into the mainstream, you’ve got to compete on performance, price AND planet. If you find yourself blaming the people you expect to buy the product, you’re on a hiding to nothing.