Survey: Consumer familiarity with green products on rise
What do consumers "see" when the word green is used to describe a product? A new survey of 2,000 American and Canadian consumers from biotech company Genencor indicates that renewable materials are the things they most associated with that label, followed by the energy needed to produce the product. That's just one finding of the new Genencor Household Sustainability Index, which also found that acceptance of the term "biobased" is on the rise.
According to Genencor, here's a breakdown of what consumers consider to be green attributes. The responses differ slightly depending on nationality:
American
Made from renewable materials (40 percent)
Uses less energy to produce (38 percent)
Contains little or no harmful materials (37 percent)
Requires less energy when product is used (33 percent)
Uses less water to produce (27 percent)
Uses less water when product is used (25 percent)
Canadian
Made from renewable materials (50 percent)
Contains little or no harmful materials (48 percent)
Requires less energy when product is used (38 percent)
Uses less energy to produce (37 percent)
Uses less water when product is used (33 percent)
Uses less water to produce (29 percent)
The likelihood that a consumer will buy a green or biobased product, if cost and quality are comparable to a non-green alternative, is fairly high at 80 percent. In Canada, consumers were more likely to buy green household cleansers than other products; while Americans were considerably less focused on this category, it was still the most frequently cited product cited by the survey respondents.
The chart below, for example, shows how likely U.S. and Canadian consumers are to buy three different types of things -- biobased ethanol, laundy and dish detergents, and biobased clothing.
One less positive result from the survey: about one-third of those surveyed weren't certain that green products really ARE better for the environment than other products. Women were slightly more likely than men to convinced that green descriptors were accurate. In addition, the more familiar a person was with green concepts in general, the more likely he or she was to have confidence in green claims.
Related posts on SmartPlanet:
- Studies consider the changing face of the green consumer
- No easy target: Another green messaging reality check
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com