Green Marketing

Seattle credit union encourages green consumers, fudges only slightly

Reflecting a greening trend among financial service providers, Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union (SMCU) promotes its environmental credentials and products of merit. In the Pacific Northwest, the choice of the theme image with an owl sitting in a tree is a little unfortunate. Just this week, we heard that the administration is relaxing regulation for protection of the endangered spotted owls. Even with full-strength protection in place, it's not clear whether spotted owls can stay around for a while longer or are about to join the fast-rising tide of species extinctions. I'm sure the SMCU designers and copywriters are aware of this context. And the writers definitely show awareness of green marketing fatigue:

"But there are some fads that are just too cool to ignore. Yes, we’re hopping on the Green bandwagon. Why not? It’s a win-win proposition. Green practices are better for our members and our community, and they save money and resources."

The green loan products offered by the SMCU include:

Car loans for hybrids, diesel, or gas-powered vehicles that can at least perform at 25mpg in the city. Not a high bar to overcome, but consider what rolls on our roads.

• Home equity loans for home improvements that boost thermal efficiencies or draw from renewable sources, such as solar energy, or change the landscaping to require minimal watering. Note the detail in defining the criteria for qualification. The financial context helps the lender and consumers stay true to verifiable accomplishments that follow industry-accepted metrics.
• Home loans for environmentally sound residences. I consider this a bit of a fudge by the SMCU. The loans themselves are what they offer to their members ("customers") in the regular course of business, but for loans on homes that are certified to the standards of LEED, Energy Star, or Built Green, they give a discount of U.S.$400 off the closing costs.

Our Seattle politicians and public occasionally overreach in striving for green perfection, especially if they get the sense they compete with San Francisco or Portland. The SMCU deserves praise for enabling and encouraging its members to take reasonable, worthwhile steps in helping the environment and improving the way they feel about it. On the page introducing the green loans, we also find mention of Feel Good Checking, just a tad out of context. That checking account may be a decent deal, but the only arguably green feature is electronic statements in form of PDFs, introduced earlier this year with quite a bit of leaf rustling. With electronic banking and real-time account management available online at all times, both PDF and paper-based statements are not very helpful anymore, and usually are outdated by the time they are available. And let's not even talk about the credit union members who print out the PDFs for their record, nor get into the controversy whether electronic documents (by the time you consider power, cooling, cables, storage, datacenters, servers ... ... ...) are really "greener" than statements on paper, which one can recycle or use as mulch.

Do your own offsets

Seattle-based provider of power management software, Verdiem, now offers a free product for individual technology users called Edison. You can download it from the company's Web site and try it out. Edison requires a slim 7 MB of hard drive space (the download itself is 28 MB), runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and displays in your Web browser. Verdiem states that Edison helps PC users "set their schedule" for energy usage, "save a little or a lot," and "see your savings." The claim is also that "With one little click, you can start saving energy and fight climate change."

Maybe that's all that sophisticated consumers need to know to gain the motivation to give Edison a try. Considering that the product is free, maybe Verdiem didn't want to provide more information than absolutely necessary. But image telling a business manager the same thing, even about a product that doesn't cost anything except some time and attention is not good enough. Just as Verdiem does on the page dedicated to Surveyor, its main business product, you need to offer proof points and metrics, and describe how it works and what you can reasonably expect. Of course, businesses pay to implement Surveyor. But consumers are also ahead of businesses in how fast they can make decisions and how educated they are in terms of understanding environmental issues and the urgency of action.

Take a moment to recall all the information and thought involved in even making sense of a statement like "With one little click, you can start saving energy and fight climate change." You need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of where electrical energy comes from and how its production impacts the environment and our lives. You are aware that climates are shifting, largely because of what people did and do. You feel responsible, or at least interested. We may have forgotten, but it took years of education and consideration to get us to a point where we might believe that a software product could help us address environmental issues.

Albert Camus, who told us that we should imagine Sisyphos happy, would be proud. But would he try out the software, write about it in his blog, or tell other people about it in an essay?