ABSTRACT
This chapter is designed to help outline the pitfalls of selling or marketing to ethical and green consumers. It begins by looking at how changing productions methods by big companies like Unilever and Tate & Lyle can have big social impacts.
It then explores consumer opinion surveys to understand how the majority of buyers express interest in ethical issues and how this can be further broken down. The next section unpicks the pricing of ‘ethical’ products and emphasises how critical it is for their success, since buyers will usually be looking at price and quality first.
It then looks at how, for many big companies, ethical choices around production are more about risk management than finding a language to market a product, but how selling with prominent ethical claims can perform important campaigning and educational functions.
Subsequent sections look at how an innovative ethical approach can become a differentiator in competitive markets, and how telling a product’s story can be a useful way of engaging customers and staff.
It ends by exploring the use by academics of the idea of an ‘attitude behaviour gap’ which suggests that people buy fewer ethical products than they tell people in surveys.
