Green marketing 747
companies, whether or not they are pursuing a
green strategy. Even if a good performance is
unlikely to yield competitive advantage in a
particular market, poor performance can still
represent a strategic vulnerability and lead to a
competitive disadvantage. Analysing product
eco-performance needs to be multidimensional,
since it is influenced by many factors, and it also
should be done with reference to competitors’
offerings. Guidelines for conducting product-
specific marketing audits that summarize the
relative socio-environmental impacts of prod-
ucts are now available to help marketers tackle
these issues (see, for example, Fuller, 1999).
Green product attributes fall into two
general categories. First, there are those relating
to the social and environmental impacts of the
tangible product (or service encounter) itself.
For a car manufacturer, these attributes would
include issues like fuel efficiency, longevity and
safety during use, and recyclability once the
vehicle reaches the end of its working life. A key
new dimension of product management and
design from a green perspective is the emphasis
on the product’s fate post-use. Improving the
post-use eco-performance of products requires
the integration of opportunities for some or all of
the ‘five Rs’ into the product concept:
1 Repair. A modular design approach and good
after-sales service provision can make repairing
products cost effective and extend their useful
life.
2 Reconditioning. In the automotive market a wide
range of reconditioned parts, from tyres to
engines, can be purchased.
3 Reuse. The average dairy milk bottle is used 12
times.
4 Recycling. Products ranging from beer cans to
BMWs are now designed to be more
recyclable.
5 Re-manufacture. Kodak collects over 50 million
single-use cameras each year from 20
countries for re-manufacturing.
The second category of attributes is those that
relate to the processes by which the product is
created and the attributes of the company that
produces it. Conventional marketing talks
about the core product, the tangible product
(which includes packaging and other physical
dimensions) and the augmented product
(including service dimensions). Since green
marketing requires an approach to product
management which incorporates how the prod-
uct is made as a product attribute, it is helpful
to think of this as the ‘total product’ concept
(Peattie, 1995).Creating a total green product:
Ecover
The challenge in developing a total green
product is to improve eco-performance while
producing acceptably comparable levels of
functionality and service, at a competitive price.
This is not an easy task, but one which has been
accomplished by some pioneering green com-
panies such as Ecover within the highly com-
petitive green detergent market. Their approach
involves adopting cleaner technologies that
design out waste in the manufacturing pro-
cesses, rather than using ‘end-of-pipe’ solutions
which inevitably represent an added cost.
In October 1992 in Belgium, Ecover laun-
ched the world’s first ecological factory
(Develter, 1992). Their approach was to ensure
that all processes, products and philosophies
are sufficiently green to meet increasingly close
stakeholder scrutiny. Innovations ranged from
the use of factory bricks derived from coal slag,
to monetary incentives given to employees for
the use of company bicycles. Ecover is also
championing the concept of a zero-impact
business park which produces no, or minimal,
environmental pollution, and has energy effi-
ciency and recycling ‘built-in’.Green packaging
Discarded packaging accounts for a large pro-
portion of waste in industrialized economies
and a good deal of the environmental impact of
many products. Packaging has been an obvious