The annual spring bloom of consumer polls and surveys is upon us, another colorful bumper crop telling us what Americans think about environmental issues, green shopping and the like. The surveys appear each year in the run-up to Earth Day. For whatever reason, pollsters and market-research firms seem to believe that interest in the topic wanes the other 11 months of the year.
I’ve just finished wading through the latest harvest, as has been my custom for several years (see 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011). It’s a mind-numbing task to comb through 100-odd pages of research data and commentary from a dozen or so different sources — and those are just the executive summaries! But someone’s got to do it.
I’ll forego some of the lighter-weight stuff — that 6.1 percent of Americans say they are willing to reduce their use of toilet paper, according to a survey conducted by TNS global on behalf of Nitro — as well as all the findings about Americans’ attitudes on global warming, fracking and that old chestnut, the energy-versus-environment tradeoff. Instead, I’ll focus on the bread-and-butter marketing stuff: consumers’ attitudes toward green purchases and habits.
Herewith are four takeaways I’ve gleaned from the exercise.
Source: GreenBiz
By Joel Makower