Capturing Your Hard Support to Focus Your Green Marketing Efforts

In today's market, growth no doubt remains the top priority. However, by definition, a recession means most business-to-business (B2B) and consumer categories are seeing fewer purchase occasions. This places an enormous emphasis on customer retention, while being more targeted than ever to acquire new customers with fewer resources and smaller budgets. These challenges are even more pronounced in green marketing. Many companies don't understand who their core customers are (much less green customers) and what motivates them, so they market to the masses. The result is often vague or irrelevant product and brand positioning, or even worse — greenwashing.  

A targeting framework we've used for more than 20 years to help leading companies focus their positioning and drive growth is the hard and soft support model. As recently observed from the field of politics, campaigns are won and lost with the strength of the hard and soft supports. This is the core that not only provides the base volume, but also generates the momentum needed to convert a significant portion of the undecideds.   

We recently helped one of the world's largest consumer goods companies completely re-orient their commercial approach around their hard and soft supports. We found these 13 percent of their consumers were driving 65 percent of their revenue, yet they were positioning and pricing to the undecideds, leaving significant profitability on the table. They stopped pricing to the undecideds, started focusing on what it takes to get "one more purchase" from their hard and soft supports and then began to understand what positioning will really motivate an increase in loyalty from within the undecideds.   

What we've observed from green marketing is no different. Most companies are watering down their positioning as it relates to green because they're chasing the undecideds. Undecideds switch between brands, they buy on price and availability, and even come and go from the category. Instead, what companies should be doing is first going to their hard supports (who are often soft supports of green) to find out what really motivates them to buy from you. Beyond the obvious benefit of providing the most profitable base volume, they'll also help you understand from a green positioning perspective what it takes to convert a significant portion of their "twins" within the undecided camp.  

There are three fundamental steps to driving retention and ultimately growth from your hard and soft supports:

    1.    Identify – Don't stop at segmentation, you must target. Segmentation is a key input to strategy, but it's passive. Targeting takes segmentation and makes it actionable by identifying where your most attractive sources of volume originate, profiles who they are, and hypothesizes why they buy more from you.
    2.    Understand – With these hypotheses in place, it's now time to validate them. Determine what benefits really motivate buying behavior vs. those that are just cost of entry to doing business. We've found time and time again, what customers say is important and how they actually buy are two different things. We've seen this to be especially true as it relates to green.
    3.    Activate – Now that you know who your hard and soft supports are and what motivates them, your positioning in the market should be clear. With the right positioning in place, now it's time to activate -- the right targets, the right messaging, the right pricing, the right channels, the right offering.   

Many of our clients in the last 12 months have asked us to help them understand how to leverage green for growth. As we've told them, don't isolate green from your core business and positioning and start with your hard and soft supports. It's a highly disruptive opportunity that creates a new platform and dialogue to engage customers, but must come from your core positioning with your core customers.   
 
Mike Fleming is a principal in the Atlanta office of Core Strategy Group, a firm that specializes in the Insurgent Principles of marketing and strategy to help its clients drive profitable growth.

Image CC licensed by diothenese.

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