Green tech ideals slowly penetrating consumer consciousness
Once upon a time, in the pre-bubble days before the time of the great Y2K switchover and the dot-com implosion, giant high-tech companies scrambled to portray themselves as the biggest, best-est e-something-or-others. In these modern times, they can't paint themselves green fast enough with oodles of paper green being spent on branding.
A new survey by marketing research company Ipsos provides insight into whether that money is being well spent. Answer: Not so clear. At the very least, it needs to be redirected into exposing solid green features rather than on fuzzy branding that is full of sound and fury, but really signifies well, not so much. (Apologies to Will Shakespeare.)
The U.S. consumers participating in the Ipsos survey were asked to rate the importance of six different green issues in their purchases of technology. Close to 60 percent said the presence of the Energy Star label would "definitely" or "probably" act as a purchase influencer, followed by the manufacturer's declared commitment to get rid of old technology in an environmentally responsible way.
Other purchasing influence factors considered in the survey were the vendor's ability to meet Environmental Protection Agency standards for product disposal, green energy policies for production, the use of recycled materials, and corporate contributions to environmental causes. (Offered in descending order of influence.)
This is the even funner part, though.
When asked to indicate which brands were "greenest," the roughly 1,300 survey respondents picked Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Dell most often, followed by Apple, Kodak, Sony, Gateway, IBM and Motorola.
An interesting statistic: More than 55 percent of the respondents said they perceived NO brands as green. What's more, none of the top-ranked players were named by more than 19 percent of respondents. Three big names you'd expect to see higher up the color spectrum, Intel and Cisco, were close to the bottom of the 18-company list, with AMD coming in last.
Seems like there's plenty of room for improvement.
Talk to me guys. I'm dying to tell your REAL story.