I’m Tim Verras, marketing consultant for difference Design.
The lab asked me to write about marketing in the housing industry and discuss
how greenwashing has changed it. But that’s been done. So I’m going to change
it up and talk about why greenwashing works and what we here at difference
Design are doing about it.
As hard as Mad Men
tries to glamorize the lifestyle, you probably think that marketing is evil. In
describing it, you would use the word “lie.” This is a personal, deep hatred brought
about by one simple fact: marketing works. If we truly felt that marketing was
all about lies, it would never work. But it does, and it does so predictably. Humans are creatures and as
such we are subject to certain behavioral laws. It is these laws that marketing
exploits. It’s not lying. It is the Art of Arousing Human Desire
If that sounds vague sexual, it’s not by mistake. Marketing
works off the same principals as lingerie.
It’s why we find partially clothed bodies sexier than nakedness. The mystery.
The lie of it all. For what is lingerie but elegant lies strapped to our
bodies?
You see, it’s not Marketing’s fault you’ve been lied to— it’s ours. We get sucked in because we want to get sucked in. But when the
blinders fall off, we all feel used. Lied to. So we blame it out loud and curse its name
even as we begin contriving our next desire for a Starbucks.
This is a phenomenon the housing industry is just now relearning.
It wasn’t until the environmental revolution at the turn of the century that
builders decided they could make houses desirable through some means other than
location, location, location, size, size, size. With this new enviro movement,
the builders were gifted with a powerful tool, The Green Lie.
People want homes that are environmentally friendly have
neither the time nor the resources to fact check most claims. Builders seize
the opportunity to leverage this desire by wrapping their homes in a sort of
lingerie. Energy Star, LEED, Gray Water Systems, Solar Panels. Are any of these things bad? Quite the opposite. But they do constitute a system ripe for
exploitation.
In the end, you have McMansion’s with solar panels on the
roof. Look at the elaborate granite fixtures. The triple faucets in the
standing shower. The manicured
lawn. The solar panels themselves aren’t
to blame, they are merely a vehicle for The Lie. It’s sort of the housing
equivalent of getting a diet Coke with your 2000 calorie Five Guys meal. The
dressings may change, but at its core, we are still building the same way we
always have – wastefully.
But we can change that.
Building environmentally friendly houses doesn’t have to be
about racking up scores and certifications or implementing expensive, untested
technologies. Sure these items will continue to be the
playground of the rich, but for the rest of us, they are out of reach. We are
stuck with no recourse but to consume the wasteful structures of the past.
We can change that too.
Greenwashing will work for only as long as it takes for
people to truly understand what building an environmentally friendly home
entails. There are some hard facts to
be faced up to. I’ll give only one
example, but it is one of the most difficult to stamp out: our houses are too big. Way too big.
On a planet slowly cooking itself, it might seem like madness to spend
energy every single minute to heat, cool, and light a bedroom that is used
twice a year when guests come, but try to convince your realtor that you don’t
need that third bedroom and they will look at you like you’re the crazy one.
We hope we can change that impulse to buy the biggest, most
expensive house you can possibly afford, and instead embrace a philosophy where
every element is engineered to maximize impact-to-value ratio. And that’s what
we’re doing here at difference Design — thinking really hard about how to build
truly sustainable homes that you and I can afford and then couple them with
fantastic new ways to educate the owners.
It’s not free of marketing, mind you. It’s just a marriage
of sustainable building methodology and buyer expectations. And like any good
marriage, it needs a bit of lingerie. However you can be rest assured that our
marketing will focus on driving your desires to places that matter. To places
you won’t mind waking up next to in the next morning.
Those places can exist and we hope to build them.
