[Editor's note: In this exclusive excerpt from Joel Makower's new book, "Strategies for the Green Economy, we look at the easy steps to tell your company's green story. You can read a previous excerpt here.]

How do you create a green strategy that is pitch perfect and tuned for long-term success? It's not easy, based on the efforts I've seen. Companies executives -- and their advertising, marketing, and public relations partners -- are prone to make broad, sweeping statements about their environmental commitment or the green attributes of their products or services, statements and claims that often pose more questions than answers.

In other cases, companies simply seem uninspired. (How many more times can we stand yet another takeoff on Kermit the Frog's plaintive proclamation, "It's not easy being green." Kermit first crooned that song lyric in -- Would you believe? -- 1970, and nearly four decades later it still seems to be the best copywriters can come up with. (In mid-2008, I conducted a Google search of the phrase "easy being green," which yielded 1,570,000 returns. By contrast "til death do we part" yielded only 17,500 returns, while "check is in the mail" garnered 20,500 returns.) Moreover, each new slogan or press release quoting or paraphrasing Kermit seems to revel in its cleverness, as if its creators were the first to have thought it up.) Is it any wonder that the public is skeptical about companies' environmental commitments?

It's not just Kermit, of course. Too many green strategies, and the messages behind them, are variously vague, vapid, or vacuous.

How do you avoid this fate? To answer this, I turned to my colleague Andrew Shapiro, founder and CEO of GreenOrder, the sustainable business strategy firm with which I am affiliated. I've learned a lot hanging around Shapiro, managing principal Nicholas Eisenberger and their team for the better part of a decade, but what sticks most is GreenOrder's framework for crafting green strategies and messaging that work. It's called CRED.

GreenOrder -- whose blue-chip clients have included Allianz, BP, DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, Office Depot, and Pfizer -- isn't the first consulting firm to come up with a multipart strategy acronym. Over the years, as I've encountered or worked with some of the leading consulting, PR, and marketing firms, I've seen my share. They all have value.

CRED evolved from GreenOrder's experience working on C-suite executive strategy and implementation, including creating the metrics companies must use to measure success and make their environmental initiatives thoughtful, effective, and believable. After all, it's no use having a green strategy and message if they don't work or if they don't drive value and fit with a larger vision -- the story the company would like to tell about itself, both today and over the longer term. And telling a green story that isn't rooted in real-world accomplishments amounts to little more than arm waving.

This is only part of the problem. An equally vexing challenge is how to stand out in the crowd, to be heard amid the growing cacophony of green messages. Therein lies the green-strategy paradox: As green becomes increasingly mainstream, it gets harder to be heard. The louder the noise, the more people tune out. And the more companies boast, the greater is the risk of backlash.

GreenOrder's CRED strategy is aimed at mitigating this risk. It is comprised of four key parts: Credibility, Relevance, Effective messaging, and Differentiation. Let's take a look at each.

CREDIBILITY

Why should people believe you? To be effective, your strategy and messages need to be convincing. This means that they must be backed by facts and figures. This is not to say that everything you say on the topic needs to be laden with dense data. Far from it. But you need a solid foundation of proof points, if only to have in your back pocket.

Credibility also begs larger questions. Does your company's performance match its green rhetoric? Can you prove it? How does your company or its products compare, whether with competitors' best products, the installed product base, what the government requires, or even the historical performance of past generations of the same product? You'll be credible if you can show that you've done your homework. It needn't appear in ads, product labeling, or point-ofpurchase information, but it should be available somewhere, whether on product fact sheets, Web sites, customer service lines, or some other place. "GE has done that well with ecomagination," says Shapiro. "They've had very detailed information about the environmental and operating performance of ecomagination products on a dedicated Web site, even though the advertisements on television, for example, haven't overwhelmed consumers with factoids."

The volume and nature of data may depend in part on your sector, as well as on how well your company is regarded from an environmental perspective. An eco-hip and well-regarded brand such as Patagonia, the maker of outdoor apparel, or Method, which makes cleaning products, may have a lower burden of proof than a company that lacks a green image or history. (Then again, maybe not. Informed, eco-conscious customers such as Patagonia's and Method's can be among the toughest audiences in the world in terms of questioning and challenging green claims.) Business and institutional buyers likely will have much deeper information needs and may not spend a lot of time hunting it down. Also, you may want to dial up or down the amount of information to reflect the importance you're placing on a product's green attributes and how aggressively you want to promote them. Sometimes, less is more.