Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit

CHAPTER NINE

Striving for Environmental Sustainability

Another way to make a difference is to solve one of the biggest global issues of our times: environmental sustainability. Many companies have not started to think seriously about making their processes friendlier to the environment. Some companies felt the pressure and scrutiny and knew they had to do something before being spotted and publicly embarrassed by environmentalists. At the other end were a few companies that felt that they could take advantage of this public interest by aggressively marketing green-related products and services.

THE THREE ACTORS IN SUSTAINING THE ENVIRONMENT

We will present three cases of larger companies that have created big impacts on the environment—albeit each in different ways. From these three cases—DuPont, Wal-Mart, and Timberland—we can distinguish three roles that companies can adopt to protect Mother Nature—the Innovator, the Investor, or the Propagator.

The Innovator: DuPont Case

DuPont, the science company that has existed for more than two centuries, has dramatically transformed itself from being the worst U.S. polluter to one of its greenest corporations today.¹ The inventor of nylon, Dacron, Lucite, Kevlar, Corian, Tyvek, Teflon, and polymer chemistry that would change human lives forever was also the creator of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) to which the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica can be attributed. However, today, the company is one of the main drivers of the U.S. ...