Case Study: The Toyota Prius
Lessons in marketing eco-friendly products
Introduction
"If you owned [a hybrid car], you could feel good about using less gasoline and being a trendsetter, but you couldn't expect the fuel savings to make up for the thousands of extra dollars that the hybrid cost. There was no financial reward for environmental virtue." (Leonhardt, 2006)
This quote neatly presents the tradeoffs in marketing a green product like hybrid cars; often they are not competitive by themselves in terms of prices or features. So how do you market a product like this? Can you convince a lot of people to forgo features or pay more money in order to be
eco-friendly?
In general, the answer is no. While certain market segments will show a preference for eco- friendly products, those attributes alone are not enough for a product to gain widespread acceptance (Power, 2008). The Toyota Prius provides a concrete case study of this truth. While the biggest product differentiation of the Prius is a fuel efficient, hybrid engine, most people don't buy it because it is eco-friendly.
Attachment:- prius_marketing_case_study.rar