With the consumer population steadily growing in environmental consciousness and “green” activity, marketers are presented with a new set of values and methods for building customer loyalty and optimizing campaign efforts. GreenAware^SM is a first-of-its-kind segmentation system that defines four distinct green segments by consumer buying pattern, lifestyles, opinions, attitudes and media use. It allows you to better understand and identify consumers based on their level of green activity – and in turn – convert them into profitable customers.

The race for green appeal

GreenAware is a targeting segmentation tool that is now available on Experian’s comprehensive INSOURCE^SM consumer demographic database. According to a recent Simmons^SM study, the number of Behavioral Greens – consumers with the most environmental attitudes and behaviors – has increased by 7.3 million since 2006. These green consumers now consist of more than 34 million adults and represent 31 percent of the population. As a result, companies and organizations have ramped up their market offerings to find the best way to identify and convert this increasingly influential consumer value into a positive bottom line impact. GreenAware effectively streamlines this process for marketers.

The critical distinction between attitude and behavior

An ongoing challenge when marketing to the green marketplace is that consumers’ pro-green attitudes often do not translate into buying behavior. For example, based upon the Simmons Spring 2007 national database, 58 percent of consumers make a conscious effort to recycle. However, only 37 percent of those consumers would pay more for environmentally-friendly products. By understanding both the attitudes and the actual behaviors of consumers, marketers can more effectively define everything from product offering to target audience, message and channel selection.

Take a deep dive into consumer green behavior

GreenAware enables you to understand four distinct consumer segments based on environmental mindset:

• Behavioral Greens (34 million households in INSOURCE): Think and act green, hold negative attitudes toward products that pollute, and incorporate green practices on a regular basis.
• Think Greens (24 million households in INSOURCE): Think green, but do not necessarily act green.
• Potential Greens (36 million households in INSOURCE): Neither behave nor think along particularly environmentally conscious lines, and remain on the fence about key green issues.
• True Browns (14 million households in INSOURCE): Not environmentally conscious, and may have negative attitudes about the green movement.

The many benefits of marketing green

As applied to the consumer population, green knowledge is marketing power. The insight from the four distinct segments GreenAware provides can be applied to product development, messaging and campaigns in a green marketplace estimated at $500 billion in 2008. With GreenAware you gain:

• Better targeted campaigns
• An optimized marketing spend with higher response rates and revenue gains
• Increased customer loyalty due to your green products and messages
• Reduced production costs on items that don’t appeal to green customers (such as catalogs and monthly statements)