The Green Bundle: Pairing the Market with the Planet

I used The Green Bundle in my Sustainable Business course this fall. Students loved it! It is very readable, and challenges their preconceptions about what drives consumers to buy (or not buy) environmentally conscious products. I had students work in teams to use the Green Bundle concept to evaluate a green product and think critically about what aspects of the green bundle helped consumers decide to adopt that product. This is a gem of a book that really can help us all think more critically about how to get customers actually to buy green products.

I've been involved in marketing a small eco-friendly company for a number of years. The first thing I learned from The Green Bundle is that the use of "eco-friendly" to position a company, as my client does, may in fact, be a detriment to the brand. The Green Bundle goes into detail about how to persuasively introduce the benefits of my client’s product, the value of storytelling and the role of empathy, the need to present my client in a prosocial manner, to build an authentic voice to establish a relationship with the client’s target audience, and hopefully motivate the convenient environmentalist (you’ll need to buy the book to learn about these consumers) to trust the benefits of the client’s product. To move consumers from green aspiration to green behavior will not be easy to implement but Magali A. Delmas and David Colgan present a clear roadmap to do so. The Green Bundle is certainly an eye-opener for those wishing to succeed in the green space.