The Grassroots are Greener:
A Community-Based Approach to Marketing Green Power
Part II: Community-Based Marketing: How It Works
As initially conceived and articulated in a 1997 paper, the cornerstone of a community-based marketing approach is a partnership between the green power provider (often a for-profit electric supplier) and a nonprofit environmental (or clean energy advocacy) group.8 Ideally, the nonprofit partner lends credibility to the product and the marketing message and uses grassroots organizing techniques to reach a broader set of potential customers cost-effectively. At the same time, the larger, for-profit supplier provides a boost to the grassroots approach by using more traditional marketing channels such as paid advertisements, direct mail, and bill inserts.
Given this core partnership, additional relationships can be built with key governmental, nonprofit, and private entities. These secondary partnerships can act as drivers for public policy and private actions that can create market pull for green power. The strategy is to use pre-existing relationships and networks to educate customers cost-effectively about the environmental and economic implications of their energy choices.
On the public side, governmental entities at the local, state, and federal level can choose to purchase green power and help generate media coverage. They can also provide staff time and funding support for the grassroots campaign, and can use their own outreach networks to facilitate the education process. The idea is to encourage governmental entities to take a series of marketing and public policy actions in support of the green marketing campaign.
Likewise, the core partnership can enlist support from the private sector. Not only can business and nonprofit institutions purchase green power directly, they can also educate their employees by providing information and incentives to encourage them to purchase green power for their homes. And the partners can work with prominent business leaders to promote green power through chambers of commerce and other business associations.
The hallmark of the grassroots approach to marketing green power is broad-based, community-wide involvement in the promotion and purchase of clean energy resources. There are other benefits as well. First, grassroots marketing partnerships can potentially provide a low-cost or more cost-effective means of building awareness of and demand for green power. Second, alliances with groups with good environmental or public interest credentials can help establish credibility for green power suppliers and their products.9 And third, grassroots marketing can yield long-lasting partnerships among key industry stakeholders and customers, helping to maintain demand for green power over the long term.
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