Zero-G Creative

Green is the new “green”

Jan 02 2009

In my New Years Resolution post, I recommended that small businesses make positive changes this year towards environmental responsibility. Why? Because being “green” is not only good for the planet, it can also be profitable and give you a competitive edge over larger, slower-moving competitors. It also makes your firm an easy hire for customers that are also eco-conscious and looking to implement their own green initiatives.

I will disclaim up front that I am not an environmental expert… My expertise is in marketing and branding and so I won’t comment on the size of anyone’s carbon footprint or attempt to quantify any impact that your organization can make on our environmental crisis (though I do know that every little bit helps). I’ll focus instead on the benefits to your customers.

Every business is different, but I’ve used my  compiled a short list of small “green” changes that we’ve made in the way that we’ve done business that have a positive impact on our position in the marketplace:

We don’t use presentation boards. This is actually a big deal. When I was running a corporate MarComm department for a consumer products company, I had a closet in my office literally FILLED with thick black presentation boards from various outside design firms that we had hired, with exactly one design idea on each one. And then in our production room downstairs I had a whole other closet filled with boards that we had used to present products to retailers. Using boards is expensive and extremely wasteful. By contrast, at Zero-G we present all of our concepts on a computer screen, whether online via conference call or in person. From a marketing perspective it’s a significant cost savings to us which we can pass on directly to our clients, and the use of technology makes us look savvy. And I hope we are, by the way

We send proposals via email. This isn’t original, we’re definitely not the first firm to do this, but it’s important. I’ve received some VERY fancy agency proposals in my time, hand-bound on an expensive paper stock, cut to unconventional “creative” dimensions and delivered wrapped in tissue paper inside a custom box. I never went this far, but I did print and bind multi-page proposals and present them to clients in person early on in my entrepreneurial career. And while I was never as prolific a proposal-maker as some of my big-agency counterparts, it was wasteful and time consuming nonetheless. Our email proposals come on a simple format, easy to read (it’s a true HTML email, not a PDF attached to an email) and easy to create. From a customer benefits standpoint, there are savings in cost and sweat equity, but I think the biggest benefit is that doing business this way has allowed us to turn proposal requests very quickly, showing the client that we’re committed to customer service.

We manage projects online. In my experience as a client, I had lots of meetings and conversations with outside firms that I really didn’t need to have. Managing the process online in a transparent fashion helps eliminate some of that wasted time for us and for the client. As an additional benefit, it makes the project available to the client even when we are not: in the middle of the night, early in the morning or on weekends, for example, when a lot of small business owners are focusing on their marketing initiatives because they didn’t have time during the business day.

We also do a lot of little things, like foregoing a traditional fax in favor of an e-fax, allowing people to work with us remotely, resisting the urge to print emails, maintaining paperless processes wherever possible, etc. But not all of these tie back directly to a significant client benefit so we don’t talk about them as much.

I hope this doesn’t come off as tooting my own horn — the moral of this story isn’t supposed to be how wonderful Zero-G Creative is. Truly, none of these things I’ve mentioned are all that interesting or all that innovative. But hopefully it shows that if you really examine your business and the “standards” in your industry that you might follow “just because it’s the way we’ve always done things,” you may find a few things that are actually worth changing. Inefficiencies or wasteful processes that cost you money, are environmentally irresponsible and have LITTLE OR NO REAL BENEFIT to your customers.

Truly, if you can create a value proposition that either saves or makes your clients money in a down economy and with a significantly reduced environmental impact, you’ll have a great story to tell next time you’re making a sales pitch.

Published by Erik Wolf under Branding,Random Thoughts,Strategy