The chapter discusses the growing importance of sustainability, and it notes that companies and consumers increasingly consider other costs in addition to financial kinds when they decide what to sell or buy. One of these cost categories is damage to the environment. How can marketers make it easier for shoppers to compute these costs?
The answer is more apparent in some product categories than in others. For example, American consumers often are able to compare the power consumption and annual costs of appliances by looking at their EnergyStarTM rating. In other situations we can assess the carbon footprint implications of a product or service; this tells us how much CO2 our purchase will emit into the atmosphere (e.g., if a person flies from New York to London). The average American is responsible for 9.44 tons of C02 per year!49 A carbon footprint comes from the sum of two parts, the direct, or primary, footprint and the indirect, or secondary, footprint:
1. The primary footprint is a measure of our direct emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, including domestic energy consumption and transportation (e.g., cars and planes).
2. The secondary footprint is a measure of the indirect CO2 emissions from the whole lifecycle of products we use, from their manufacture to their eventual breakdown. Although many of us are more aware today that our consumption choices carry unseen costs, there is still a lot of confusion about the best way to communicate the environmental costs of our actions-and in many cases consumers aren't motivated to take these issues into account unless the costs impact them directly and in the short term. What other metrics would you suggest that might address this important measurement problem?