Green design and green marketing go hand in hand, so why did it take companies so long to make the connection?  In this SLM interview, Eric Park of Ziba, an internationally recognized design consultancy, takes us back to the late 1990s and the beginning of the movement, and explains why marketers’ current concerns over “green fatigue” miss the point entirely.

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SLM: Eric, what inspired you to start the sustainable practice at Ziba?

Eric: The trigger for us, in terms of a single event, was the Natural Step conference when it was hosted in Portland in April, 1999. That's when we understood how market forces were driving business leaders to take a hard look at their brands and really question what they were doing from a sustainability perspective. At that moment we realized that more of our clients would start to see the implications of sustainability.

Our first real client conversation on the topic was a dialog with a global footwear and apparel brand that had committed to training their employees in The Natural Step principles.  At that time, they were working to integrate the Natural Step framework into their corporate culture but had yet to define what it meant for their brand. It was clear based on our interactions with our client that as sustainability evolved into a more consumer relevant trend, our work as designers would become more relevant to leadership brands.

SLM: Tell us a bit about your green design work for that particular client.

Eric: The challenge for our client was to find new ways to drive eco-efficiency throughout the manufacturing supply chain. At the same time, they wanted Marketing to get on board to understand the implications sustainable practices could have for consumers. Ziba collaborated with them to shape an internal pitch, emphasizing some of the market research and the insights that we had about the potential for sustainability to create competitive advantage.

It was clear even then that shifting market trends were making sustainability issues more relevant to consumers. It boiled down to a simple framework - people want high-performance products that also relate to their identity and values. Our client, with its strong design culture, soon realized that if they could design their shoes in a way that connects to the culture of sports and an active lifestyle, they could also design their shoes in a way that communicates consumers' sense of self-identity. The early research indicated that consumers' self-identity increasingly included values such as buying products from environmentally and socially responsible companies. Ziba developed a visual analysis of the trend demonstrating the shift in consumers desires from performance to identity to values, and that our client had the opportunity to respond and connect to their consumers’ values and desires, by developing more sustainable products.  

SLM: It seems so obvious now that using a sustainable approach to product design might translate into marketing opportunities for that product down the road.

Eric: Above all else, you need to be authentic about what your brand stands for. Changing consumer values are really reshaping how we think about what we need and what we desire. Brands are not static in time and space - they evolve along with cultural trends - so it's definitely worth identifying what the connection is between your brand and your customer. That's why there's so much buzz surrounding your Sustainable Brands conference - most leadership brands are realizing that sustainability is gaining relevance among mainstream consumers and they're trying to figure out how to connect to that without using niche words like "sustainability" and "environment" and "green."

The work that we do at Ziba is about innovation to deliver authentic and meaningful consumer experience. This is the greatest current challenge for sustainability: innovating consumer experience in a way that enables consumers to achieve their aspirations to live better. That means being empathetic to the reasons why they may still buy disposable diapers or bottled water even though they know these activities aren't as sustainable. There just aren't better options out there in terms of performance, usability and convenience. The opportunity for design is to create new products that let consumers have it all. We're entering an era in which it can't be "either/or"; it's really all about the "and."

SLM: We just posted a couple stories on "green fatigue" (here and here), the trend by which consumers, increasingly wary of companies' green marketing claims, are supposedly going back to making their purchasing decisions based on performance and price only. Are you seeing designers begin to backpedal on promoting their products' green attributes?

Eric: Actually, I think talking about products in generic terms is part of the problem. It's more important to understand the emotional and self-actualizing needs of the consumers you're trying to reach. For example, there are customers for whom "green" is about status; in that case green attributes should be brought to the fore both in terms of product and user experience. If they're not, then you're not delivering on the consumers' desire to show that they are making a difference. Consider the Freitag messenger bag - it was a different-looking product and the young urban hipsters that adopted it just loved it. The company did a great job of communicating how they were repurposing recovered materials to produce these designer bags.

The fact is, nearly every product that you experience today is differentiating itself along sustainability lines, even if you can’t see it. Think about eggs: They look exactly the same as they did 30 years ago, but the egg carton might talk about "cage free," "vegetarian fed," or "steroid free." The sustainability trend has totally changed the way we produce eggs, even though there's been no change in their outward appearance. These changes have been driven by consumer concerns for personal health, the biggest driver of the organic food movement. There are a lot products whose green attributes are not immediately obvious to the consumer but absolutely influence how they are made and sold.

Hear Eric discuss his sustainable design work at Sustainable Brands ’08!