I think all marketers pay special attention to the ways they are marketed to. I personally get a huge thrill out of polls, focus groups and guerrilla marketing. (Just ask anyone in this office who endured by my play-by-play recap of the Microsoft AdCenter focus group I recently participated in.)
I often find myself a member of someone else’s target audience just walking the streets of Brooklyn. This morning, for the second time this month, I found Zipcar set up near the F train passing out postcards.
Zipcar had staked out parking spots in front of the uptown and downtown subway entrances. I didn’t get a good look at the car on the downtown side, but the uptown one was a boxy Scion decked out in Brooklyn Cyclones wrap. (I wonder if you can rent that one? Might be fun.)
The car’s windows were down, and some funky — think K.C. and the Sunshine Band funky — instrumental music was wafting toward the commuters. The head Zipcar guy made a self-effacing comment about the song selection, which made me chuckle. He and the rest of the team were decked out in lime green polo shirts with the Zipcar logo and were handing postcards with coupon codes out to anyone who was game.
All in all, a reasonable promotion that was effective without being completely in-your-face. But what struck me more than the attitude of the promotion was its green theme. Zipcar had held the same guerrilla marketing campaign in my neighborhood in 2006. I remember because I kept the postcard and its generous discount on my fridge for several months (though I never used it).
While last year’s postcard had been all about branding Zipcar, this year, Zipcar took it up a notch. Their marketing team is now making a concerted effort to establish Zipcar as an environmentally-friendly choice.
My first thought: Isn’t that a little…weird? How can opting to drive a car be “green”?
Using my ‘hood as the site for their promotion is a great idea. Like many people in my zip code, I don’t have a car, and I’ve only begun to toy with the idea of getting one. But where Zipcar’s previous marketing encouraged me to drive instead of walking, Zipcar is now encouraging me to drive their car instead of driving my own car.
How is that green? How can you ask someone to tap into their environmental consciousness, but only so much? “Sure, we recycle…our paper plates.” Seems like a dangerous bit of logic to me.
That said, it’s a well-done promotion, down to the NYCLEAN coupon code and mentions of Minis and hybrids in the postcard copy. I’d love to get a source for the claim that “each Zipcar takes around 20 personally owned vehicles off the road,” though.
Lately, everywhere I look, I see green marketing. The September Fast Company cover story — which I must admit I haven’t read yet — details environmentalist Adam Werbach’s move to Wal-Mart. Like me, you have probably read about Wal-Mart’s ability to lure progressives into its PR lair, and even their energy-saving lightbulbs push. I’m interested to read Werbach’s story. (Incidentally, FC’s August issue had Al Gore on the cover.) eWeek’s Storage Goes Green feature also comes to mind.
While we’d love to get our clients into some of these green conversations, we intend to do so in a less eyebrow-raising way. Many of our clients’ technologies have very environmentally friendly applications. For us, it’s not a matter of just mixing blue and yellow (pardon the metaphor). It’s a matter of highlighting the true green-ness of what they already offer.
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