May 1, 2008 - Think you can't go wrong amping up a hot-button environmental issue like global warming? Think again, according to a new survey from Conscientious Innovation (Ci), a green-marketing firm. Turns out consumers are much more interested in personal and social issues such as community engagement, fairtrade, and buying local.

Ci's latest SHIFT Report survey of 5,000 consumers identified four "pillars of sustainability" - personal, social, environmental, and spiritual, finding that personal and social sustainability issues consistently outranked environmental concerns.

"While this insight may seem to complicate the challenge of marketing sustainability," says Ci CEO Kierstin De West, "it actually opens the door for much more opportunity to communicate more accurately and successfully to a marketers audience."

The Message Gap

Seventy-two percent of North Americans say they want to know about the socially responsible behavior of the brands that they buy – yet the majority of the population answered “I Don’t Know” when asked to identify specific companies as socially responsible.

Enough Bang for the Buck?

Big spending on green marketing doesn't necessary translate to green visibility, even among well-known companies, according to the report. For example, Wal-Mart and General Electric have spent heavily in a bid to communicate their environmental and social initiatives, but only 19% of respondents identified both Wal-Mart and GE as socially responsible companies. And only 6.5% of respondents identified Bank of America – another big-spending marketer - as a socially responsible company. (In fact, heavy green promotion may work against a brand if consumers perceive a gap between the message and the company's action, according to another recent survey.)

Telling Your Best Sustainability Story

Consumers are looking at a broad range of brand characteristics to determine whether a brand is socially responsible or not. Sixty-five percent of North Americans looked to product design and lifecycle as an indicator, 64% used packaging, and as many 57% looked to see if it was produced locally or sold by a local business. While not at the top of the list, affiliation with a not-for-profit or charitable cause is important factor as well, cited by 41% of respondents.

"A lot of companies jump on the green bandwagon when often that isn't their most powerful sustainability story," De West says. "Maybe they're doing a lot of powerful and interesting things in fair trade and employee engagement."