The Virtual Battlefield Five Ways Brands Can Captivate Eco-Minded Shoppers

As COVID-19 continues to drive the appeal of digital shopping and has some retailers considering, implementing or continuing store closures, consumer-facing brands search for marketing strategies to captivate consumers and appeal to shoppers’ personal values. Shifting through the best practices for brand marketing and driving online sales during the pandemic, five marketing strategies stood out.

Empower brand fans with a double-tap

Powerful social media campaigns combine simplicity, clarity and shareability. Tentree, a sustainable clothing brand, incorporated these tenets to create one of the most successful digital campaigns on Instagram’s platform using five words—Double-tap to plant a tree. These five words resulted in 15.5 million likes and more than 400,000 new followers over five days during Earth Week. True to its name, planting trees is a core faculty of Tentree’s brand messaging—for every product sold, it plants 10 trees. Building upon the appeal of the double-tap messaging, Tentree’s audience was captivated by the immediate value created by two clicks on a screen, and they were eager to share the message across their personal social media.

Similarly, social enterprise rePurpose Global created a sharing-based social media campaign for World Oceans Day that sponsored the removal and recycling of 1 ocean-bound plastic bottle for every share. (Full disclosure: I am one of the co-founders of rePurpose Global, which I’m proud to say is the world’s first plastic credit platform.) The campaign was shared across social media platforms and incentivized the removal of plastic waste through the effortless act of sharing on a post or story.

The marketing potential for such socially minded campaigns is exponential. They raise brand awareness, all while benefiting the planet. These campaigns help brands engage with shoppers with similar values and can help form the base of a brand’s environmental strategies. Implementing such a socially minded campaign can help a brand discover the unique value it provides to a targeted audience and force the brand to communicate through simple, clear and easily shareable messaging.

Using eco-affiliates to scale your online audience

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Eco-affiliate campaigns rally your consumers to work with you and for you, promoting internal audience growth and supporting a worthwhile cause. Allplants, a vegan meal delivery platform, operates a Refer-a-Friend program, which pledges to plant a tree and give store credit for every successful referral. The platform is more than a referral program; it optimizes an eco-friendly lifestyle. By creating a shared sense of identity with its consumers, Allplants is incentivizing consumers to become brand ambassadors and its customers are proud to do so. While the newly planted tree and product discounts serve as the foundation for the promotion, the true catalyst is the consumer’s satisfaction when creating social bonds. They want to show friends and family that promoting Allplants is far more than a fashion fad; it is a lifestyle that fosters environmental stewardship.

Creating a value-add that aligns with a brand’s customers’ morals and values is the underpinning of a successful affiliate campaign. The American Marketing Association found that the relationship between consumer and companies “is strengthened by the presence of a third party who is connected to both… creating higher margins and retention combined into a customer lifetime value that was 16% to 25% higher.” Incentivizing consumers through eco-referral programs also connects a brand with its customers’ social network.

Enabling climate action at the
point-of-sale

Consider empowering shoppers to take climate action by making their purchase plastic neutral. The concept of plastic neutrality begins by measuring the unique plastic footprint of an individual person, company or organization and then sponsoring the reuse and recycling of as much plastic waste that you or your brand creates.

I’ll tread lightly here because of my affiliation with rePurpose Global, but I need to include our plastic credit platform because it is a free-to-brand platform that easily embeds climate action into brand experiences using a point-of-sale integration that appears as an opt-in checkbox at the end-of-sale. A grocery delivery service, Trice, adopted rePurpose Global’s point-of-sale integration and experienced a
70% opt-in rate. By employing this easy addition to its e-commerce platform, Trice not only empowered shoppers to offset the plastic footprint of their purchases for often less than $1, the brand also was able to measure sustainable consumers’ sentiment, which can inform future marketing to that target market.

Growing your audience
through radical transparency

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It can be challenging to ensure your operations align with your brand’s sustainability standards, as many supply chains are incredibly intricate and complex, but it’s also important. The pursuit of sustainably focused marketing has to contend with “greenwashing.” Brands that advertise unreliable environmental footprint reduction claims mar the climate actions of companies actively engaging in climate solutions.

Radical transparency can differentiate a brand by sharing its unique footprint with consumers through dashboards and product information. Sourcemap is an excellent resource facilitating end-to-end supply chain mapping to ensure ethicality and transparency. It recently developed mapping to “ensure leather is responsibly sourced… ensuring best practices and monitoring for external risks.” Sourcemap aims to give brands the ability to “keep tabs on incredibly complex supply chains without additional effort, or costly audits and certifications.”  They accomplish this task by utilizing a dashboard that can be integrated into a brand’s digital platforms. The dashboard allows a brand to differentiate by cutting through the noise to disrupt baseless sustainability claims.

Reformation is a fashion brand pioneering ethical practices. It keeps track of virtually every environmental indicator: water, carbon, waste and have made Reformation’s operations 100% neutral—minimizing where possible and offsetting the rest. Every product displays its unique footprint and offsetting statistics. Reformation’s traceability allows its consumers to quantify how much waste ethical fashion products create, setting a much-needed industry standard. Reformation has invested in the future and has given consumers peace of mind by taking radical action to create a world with less waste. As consumer sentiment is growing toward environmentally thoughtful ideologies, provide your audience with the satisfaction of knowing your brand’s offering is transparent and ethical.

Design an environmental
user experience

Microsites are a great way to creatively invite shoppers to learn more about a brand’s sustainability initiatives and generate community engagement. Apple’s environmental microsite expands upon its digital presence by creating a storytelling narrative highlighting the environmental attributes of its products and operations. Apple uses its microsite to take the user on a journey, creating a compelling experience.

Every Last Drop is another example of an influential microsite that showcases the unique facets of the brand’s ideology. Every Last Drop uses clever web design to create a compelling narrative explaining the importance of minimal water usage. Every Last Drop’s microsite hopes to create enough intrigue, so the viewer watches the associated documentary. Both microsites utilize beautiful design to connect with its audiences.

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Using storytelling to enrich a brand’s Web content can drive consumer engagement and connect your branding strategy to your environmental efforts throughout all of your platforms. Some best practices include using your microsite as an environmental landing page connecting to all of your digital arenas and expanding your brand’s messaging and plug into your target market’s ethos. Although creating an engaging microsite can be time-consuming, your brand fans will benefit from the experience and connect to your brand further. Taking the time to evaluate and design your brand’s environmental strategy can facilitate a position of thought leadership.

In essence, all of these strategies are enabling ecosystems—creating a tribe of like-minded thought leaders
pursuing a world with less waste. COVID-19 might have
necessitated more physical distancing in our society but,
as a society, we can redefine community in a digital world. Focus on how your brand can better the planet, and strive towards those goals every day—your consumer will notice. Evolve your brand’s message to meet the expectations of your audience and solidify your online presence to captive
eco-conscious consumers.