Taking a Green Initiative

These 3 entrepreneurs are taking advantage of green marketing

tactics the right way.
According to the American Marketing Association, the term "green
marketing" came into prominence in the late '80s and early '90s.
Since that time, the concept of becoming sustainable has gone
from an afterthought to top priority for many companies.

"When we started eleven years ago, we were helping some

companies and government agencies with their environmental
marketing. However, we would never have envisioned the
explosion of interest that we've seen over the past 18 months,"
says Kevin Tuerff, president and co-founder of Enviromedia, a
marketing firm in Austin, Texas. While Tuerff has seen a wide
range of environmentally sound success stories, he's also seen
examples of greenwashing, a way of misleading consumers about
a company's environmental benefits or practices.

"We're on a crusade to encourage people to avoid such

businesses," Tuerff explains. "A lot of businesses have been
scrambling to do something and oftentimes they're a little
misguided, trying to find the quickest, easiest solution so they can
take advantage of this tidal wave of interest from customers."
Along with corporate leaders, like Wal-Mart, who have been
trendsetting over the past few years with their environmental
initiatives, many small and midsize businesses are taking the time
and effort to get their house in order before spreading the word to
the media.

For New Belgium Brewing, the concept of a "natural" business was

born when Jeff Lebesch and his wife Kim Jordan opened a small
brewery in 1991. "They hiked up into Rocky Mountain National
Park with a notepad and homebrew and wrote down the core
values and beliefs for their company, many of which were
surrounding environmental stewardship," explains Greg Owlsley,
the vice president of marketing for New Belgium. By 1998 the
company had switched from using electricity to wind power. From
there the brewery continued with sustainable business and
building practices such as daylighting to reuse heat in the
brewery.

It wasn't until the surge of sustainable marketing erupted in

recent years, however, that New Belgium began to tout what
they'd been doing all along. "It dawned on us that we were
underselling our sustainability from a branding standpoint and
that if people found out about our investment in the environment,
it would make them want to drink more of our beer," Owleley
says, adding that he prefers the term "marketing sustainability"
over the more commercial "green marketing."

Despite the fact that New Belgium now sells more than half a
million barrels a year in 18 states and employs more than 300
people, the company's marketing does not feature flashy hype or
fanfare. Instead it focuses largely on spreading the word by
drawing CEOs and representatives from other companies to tour
the facility and learn how sustainability can be accomplished.

For Curtis Packaging, a 163-year old luxury packaging company

based in Sandy Hook Connecticut, the move to sustainability was
a conscious initiative. "About five years ago we decided to look at

trying to green the business and be more environmentally friendly

while remaining luxurious, so we dubbed ourselves luxuriously
responsible," explains Don Droppo, Jr., the vice president for sales
and marketing.

Some five years later, Curtis Packaging has committed to

purchasing a total of 4,524,800 kilowatt-hours of renewable
energy per year--enough to cover all of its energy usage--while
also becoming the first packaging and printing business to have a
100 percent carbon neutral footprint.

As part of the packaging industry, Curtis Packaging not only

needed to improve their in-house environmental policies but also
needed products that would environmentally translate to their
high end-clients. "In luxury packaging, people use foils, and that's
not recyclable, so we came out with a product called Curt
Chrome, which is an environmentally friendly alternative to foil.
It's metallic based ink and 100 percent recyclable," Droppo
explains.

The marketing for Curtis includes reaching their customers

through trade magazines such as Global Cosmetics and Package
Design Magazine. "I've also been giving a ton of presentations at
sustainable packaging forums, and places like the Health and
Beauty Show to get the word out there," Droppo says,
acknowledging that a lot of marketing is done by word-of-mouth
between companies. Additionally, Curtis passes along the
message to end consumers by having clients put green messages
on their packaging, such as "carton made with wind power" or
"carton manufactured in a carbon neutral facility."

Is it all paying off? Apparently. "Over the last five years our sales
have gone from 20 to 50 million," Droppo says. "It's a huge
increase and having environmentally friendly proprietary products
is a major reason."

Unlike the natural roots of New Belgium or the successful

transformation of Curtis Packaging, Pangea Organics was
conceived during the current era of global concern and
environmental sustainability. "I wanted to start a company that
could be a role model for the different processes that you could
put in place to become a profitable company, but do so by
respecting your employees, the people making your products, the
planet and the end user as well," says Pangea CEO and founder,
Joshua Scott Onysko, who left school at age 16 and took odd jobs
for eight years, while traveling the world and learning firsthand
about environmental concerns. Onysko started Pangea in 2001
and launched the first brand in 2005.

"We're basically integrating people, profits and the planet into

everything we do," Onysko says. The company sources
ingredients from 52 different countries and supports 80,000 acres
of land where organic agricultural products are grown. Pangea
even has a 3,000 square foot garden that is operated by the
employees and feeds the whole staff seven months out of the
year.

Package design has also been used to generate interest. "Boxes

are made out of 100 percent post consumer newspaper with no
petrochemical in the process," Onysko says. In addition, Pangea
uses viral marketing by putting product demos into the hands of

people and the press. The results are impressive as the $10
million company will double in size in the next year.

"It's more than changing your logo from blue to green," Tuerff
says, acknowledging a far more environmentally savvy consumer
base. "Businesses that are proven to be sustainable are the ones
that people will respond to and not those that are simply
promoting themselves as green because they've changed their
light bulbs."