Direct Mail Green Marketing

Coalition Offers Suggestions to Decrease Industry Carbon Footprint

Jul 28, 2008

A few companies have developed green guidelines for the direct mail business, but environmental leaders say the recommendations are too vague.

The Green Marketing Coalition (GMC) is offering direct mail companies a set of marketing guidelines that it says will decrease the industry’s "carbon footprint." However, one environmental leader compared the effort to "putting lipstick on a pig."

The direct mail business is under more environmental pressure than any other segment of the advertising business because of the huge volumes of paper it consumes and the waste that paper generates. The biggest environmental complaint against the remainder of the industry is that it sometimes exaggerates the green behavior of some of its clients.

The Green Marketing Coalition was set up by representatives from several large direct mail companies and some of their clients that wanted to establish green standards for the direct marketing industry. The move was headed by Spyro Kourtis, president of the Hacker Group, a Seattle direct-marketing company.

Guidelines for Green Marketing Practices

Answering email questions sent by PR Week, Kourtis said GMC began by establishing benchmarks and then developed guidelines "that will help marketers establish their own green marketing practices." He described the movement as "a work in progress" with limited objectives.

"As new ideas come along, we’ll incorporate them into our practices – as long as it makes business sense. The only way to be perfectly green is to do nothing at all, and that’s not possible," Kourtis told PR Week. He also said GMC would not be trying to referee green noise debates or giving any "green seal of approval."

According to Claudia H. Deutsch of the New York Times, "the vagueness of the recommendations has not endeared the coalition to environmentalists, although many are more amused than outraged by the concept of direct mailers painting themselves green."

Putting Lipstick on a Pig?

The Times quoted Todd J. Paglia, executive director of ForestEthics, a nonprofit organization concerned with protecting forests, saying "the idea of greening junk mail is still a bit like putting lipstick on a pig."

Jeffrey Horton of Kawasaki Motors Corporation U.S.A. told the Times that cutting back on direct mail to save trees is not likely because the return on direct mail investment is "just too high." The U.S. Postal Service estimates that return at $12 in sales for every dollar spent on direct mail.

The New York Times reports that the Postal Service has launched its own campaign to improve environmental practices in the direct mail industry. It has mailed suggestions to about 100,000 companies promising organic cotton T-shirts to those that request additional information.

GMC comprises representatives from The Hacker Group, Microsoft, Washington Mutual, Kawasaki, MSP, Nahan Printing, Inc, Data-Mail, American Recycling, KP Corporation, OptimaHealth, BECU and FastSigns.

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