Growing Green
By Jon shoulders

With the rise in demand for environmentally friendly products in the marketplace in recent years, it seems that businesses are accelerating their efforts to roll out revamped marketing strategies and new advertising campaigns in the hopes of capturing as many green-conscious consumers as possible.

However, for ARSgroup, the 40-year-old global marketing consultancy formerly known as rsc (for Research Systems Corp.), working in the “green space” is just business as usual.

Since the early 1970s, the company, now headed by CEO Jeffrey Cox, has worked with corporate giants, from Procter & Gamble to Wal-Mart, on a slew of campaigns near and dear to the green consumer’s heart — including reduced packaging, mercury-free batteries, organic-fiber clothing, and fuel efficiency. And with the advent of ARSgreen, a new division focused on speeding the consumer adoption of sustainable products and services through advertising, the company is capitalizing on its decades of experience to take on the task of eco-marketing.

“The transition into the green space is very natural for us,” says Ashley Grace, group president of business development and marketing at ARSgroup. Almost 25 years ago, the company partnered with the industry-based Marketing Science Institute and several academics at Vanderbilt University to develop a coding system for advertisements to track certain marketing patterns. Since ARSgroup provides a performance scoring system based on ROI — the return on investment — for marketing campaigns, this coding scheme and database allows ARSgroup experts to deconstruct the “highest- scoring” campaigns — to better understand what patterns are associated with the most effective approaches. Grace says that as the number of environmental campaigns in the marketplace has increased, the company has been able to smoothly extend this method into green consultation.

But how best to approach such a fast-growing portion of the population as the “greens”?

It’s all about the breakdown. The ARSgreen method separates the green marketplace into five segments based on environmental awareness and involvement, the strongest being the advocate group known as the HASS, which stands for health and sustainability segment. “People joke and say, ‘Oh, those are the granola people,’ but they now account for somewhere between 19 to 24 percent of the population, which is pretty big,” Grace points out.

Next up are the “Impressionists” and “Wholesomes” — slightly more moderate groups who collectively make up the largest chunk of the advertising pie, followed by the “Traditionalist” and “Non-Motivated” demographics.

Tracking the purchasing patterns and demographics of those specific groups helps shape an effective green marketing campaign. “If you have a legitimate green-sustainable message, then you have to make this a unique brand solution and then connect it to the specific target consumer,” Grace says. “We track ads that have some kind of sustainable message in them globally across industries, and the big opportunity is to positively associate individual consumer benefits provided by the unique, green-sustainable brand solution.”

With a database of over 40,000 tests and 16 million consumers that spans 35 years of research, the company pioneered the practice of testing advertising copy on potential consumers. It’s a method of analysis for advertisers seeking to develop a campaign for generating maximum business. ARSgroup has been featured in various publications, including two of the top ten “All Time Classic” articles in the Journal of Advertising Research, and is the only such company whose techniques have been independently verified (in a 1996 publication by John Philip Jones, professor of advertising at Syracuse University and author of The Ultimate Secrets of Advertising along with numerous other books and publications).

With offices throughout the world including Hong Kong, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, and with a clientele including some of the biggest advertising players on the planet, one might be curious as to the benefits of keeping a juggernaut like ARSgroup based in Evansville. But according to Grace, who graduated from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and spent five years in Fortune 200 corporate finance before joining the ARSgroup in 1995, the Evansville headquarters happens to be one of the company’s virtues. “I spend a lot of time between here, New York and L.A., and while we don’t have any local clients, one of the benefits of being based in Evansville is the grounding nature of being close to the realities of the Middle American consumer.”

That’s long been a strong selling point for the company, best known now by its acronym ARS (for Advertising Research Systems). Perhaps this is one factor that has inspired ARSgoup to “walk the walk” — the company is currently in the process of laying out its own sustainability master plans, including a company-wide recycling effort and increased use of eco-friendly paper and ink. “That’s really what you have to do,” Grace says. “You can’t operate in the green space if you’re not trying to be green yourself, so we’re going through that right now as an organization and starting to lay out some goals and hurdles and hold ourselves accountable for improvement.”