Eric Block On Responsible Branding

New research from global research firm Radius Global Market Research indicates that increased spending on product development and marketing aimed at environmentally conscious consumers may not be getting through to men.

Managing Director of Radius Chip Lister observed “More and more dollars are being dedicated to green marketing initiatives built to associate brands with environmental responsibility but our survey results show that in spite of this increase in spending, the majority of men are not significantly influenced by environmental responsibility when they make a purchase.”

Radius asked U.S. consumers to rate brand attributes across a broad range of products and services in terms of the amount of influence they had on their decision to purchase.

According to the survey, women place importance on a wider range of brand values than do men. Both men and women ranked the same three issues as having the most influence over purchases: (1) Value; (2) Quality; and (3) Trust. After that, however, men appear to be influenced little by any other brand values.

“We found that the value men and women place on environmental responsibility is part of a much broader pattern,” says Lister. “Men are influenced by a much smaller set of brand attributes when they make purchase decisions. Marketers that stray too far from these core attributes run the risk of not being heard. By contrast women seem readily affected in their brand decisions by issues that could almost be considered ‘bigger’, certainly well outside the more direct or tangible deliverables offered by the brand/product.”

Radius’s study was conducted in the third quarter of 2011 and surveyed U.S. households. The firm’s proprietary Know More(TM) panel represents over 3.4 million households, with over 6 million consumers in the U.S. and over 1.5 million consumers in Canada, the U.K. and Europe, Australia and Scandinavia.