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Fostering Sustainable Products

Introduction

The Role of Marketing in Fostering the Adoption of Sustainable (Green) Products, Minneapolis, 20-22 Oct 2010; Deadline 15 Jul

 : : : Posting

: : call

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Institute for Research in Marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management will be hosting a 2-day conference on the role of Marketing in fostering the adoption of sustainable (green) products, October 20-22, 2010.

The following have already indicated their plans to participate:

    Professor Bob Cialdini, Arizona State University
    U. S. Senator Al Franken
    U. S. Senator Amy Klobuchar
    Marilyn Carlson Nelson, CEO Carlson Companies

Senior executives from several other major corporations including Best Buy, 3M, Kraft, Cisco, General Mills, Unilever and Medtronic, as well as policy makers from the White House, EPA, Dept. of Energy and Dept. of Commerce are expected to attend. This conference presents a unique opportunity to influence policy making at the highest levels of the US Government as well as corporate America.

Tentatively titled “The Sustainability Summit,” the conference will bring together

  • senior industry leaders from major corporations,
  • policy makers from Federal, State and local government
  • academics from Marketing, Psychology, Economics, and Sociology

to document the existing “state-of-the-art” on what we know about the consumer behavior of green products, and what we need to discover moving forward.

This call for proposals asks you to submit a 2-page abstract on current completed or on-going research on the general topic of influencing consumers to adopt sustainable products and practices, broadly construed. We invite academic researchers to submit abstracts of either a completed paper or on-going research for possible presentation at the conference. The work may draw from any of the disciplines that inform marketing and consumer behavior. Analytical work as well as empirical work is welcome. For empirical work, there should be clear evidence that data collection and analysis will be complete by the time of the conference.

Your proposal should be submitted no later than July 15, 2010 via email to rmonro@umn.edu. Please provide a link to your vita as well. Decisions will be made by mid-August.

The Institute’s research review committee will review the submissions and select a small number for presentation at the conference. The Institute will provide travel and conference attendance grants for invited academic speakers. Please let me know if you have any questions about this call. You may e-mail me at arao@umn.edu.

A “concept note” regarding the purposes of the conference appears below and should give you a more detailed flavor of the purposes and goals of the conference.

Akshay R. Rao
General Mills Chair in Marketing
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota

CONCEPT NOTE: SUSTAINABILITY SUMMIT

Synopsis: Roughly 98% of research funding on sustainability issues (such as green technologies, alleviation of global warming and the like) is spent on the development of new products and processes. Less than 2% is spent on developing an understanding of how consumers can be persuaded to change their attitudes and behaviors with regard to the consumption of products and services that are damaging to the environment, and with regard to the adoption of new, environmentally friendly technologies. In this document, I propose an initiative to develop a research program that informs policy makers on how demand for sustainable products and processes may be influenced, so that an increase in the supply of such technologies results in their adoption.

Vision: Attention to the “demand side” would require an emphasis on changing consumer (and customer) perceptions, attitudes and behavior; so that these new products will be readily adopted once they are commercially available. In other words, much like the American automobile industry, we as a nation run the risk of adopting an approach of “If we build it, they will come.” But, as nearly one hundred years of marketing research and practice indicates, consumer and customer demand does not necessarily flock to “good” or “better” products. Ergonomically better keyboards that allowed users to type faster failed. Technically superior video tape technology failed. For a short while, it appeared that the Hummer would be a successful brand.

The discipline of Marketing (and its close cousins, Economics, Psychology and Sociology) has considerable accumulated wisdom on how to influence consumers to recognize problems and adopt appropriate solutions. Whether it is the use of creative advertising to generate preference for Coke over Pepsi, or the intelligent use of incentives to enhance traffic to Target over Wal-Mart, or the imaginative use of social norms to reduce electricity consumption in the home, the discipline of Marketing has an immense amount of expertise that can be utilized to influence consumer preference. It is to garner and exploit this wisdom and to generate additional insights on how best to effect change in the adoption of sustainable technologies that I propose the initiative outlined in this document.

Goals: The issue of sustainability needs to be addressed in an increasingly complex international business environment. Not only are international markets growing, these markets are generating enhanced competition for scarce resources including energy and labor. How should the US – the government and corporations – approach the delicate task of meeting shareholder objectives whilst simultaneously assuring the long-run sustainability of the business enterprise?

The first step would involve a “Davos” style conference hosted by the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Research in Marketing, in collaboration with interested federal government departments and agencies (e.g., Department of Energy); major corporations (e.g., 3M, Best Buy, the Carlson Companies, Cisco, Medtronic, General Mills, Kraft etc.); and academic entities (e.g., the Institute on the Environment and the Center for Integrative Leadership at the Humphrey Institute, both at the University of Minnesota). Given our academic expertise and the presence of thoughtful practitioners in the area, the Carlson School at the University of Minnesota offers a uniquely suitable venue for such an initiative.

The proposed conference will bring together three important constituencies that are relevant for policy formulation as well as execution.

  1. Corporations and practitioners who are already facing pressure from their customers and consumers have begun to experiment with a series of process innovations, new product design and development, and new technology adoption. The learning that these thought leaders have experienced in the field will be an important source of wisdom for further rigorous research.
  2. Academics, who themselves have been conducting cutting-edge research on the adoption of sustainable technologies, and whose research programs are beginning to shed light on the costbenefit dimensions of some approaches relative to others.
  3. Policy makers at the federal and state level who can learn from the extant wisdom and provide guidance on new wisdom that is necessary and thus guide the research agenda that the Institute will then sponsor.
      The conference will be followed up by the possible funding of research projects on a series of topics that emerge from the conference. The deliverables will include a white paper that summarizes the proceedings of the inaugural conference, a series of research reports on the funded projects, and a white paper that summarizes the proceedings of a follow up conference (roughly 24 months later).