Go Green to Make More Green

I am an environmental mercenary. I live in Canada, so I’m all for Global Warming™, even if it means sacrificing Mexico. Seriously, I want to spend my winters on a resort beach in Thunder Bay, Northern Ontario, soaking up the sun and the margaritas. Save the Global Warming™ guilt for the people in California. That’s right, Frisco, they’re gonna get you first. If I truly believed I could make this barren, snowy wasteland warmer by driving my car, I’d leave it idling outside my house all day long.

That said, the climate, the environment and Global Warming™ are big business. Al Gore won and Oscar and a Nobel Prize in the same year, for heaven’s sake! Eco-fear, like other marketing, is a multi-billion-dollar industry. And what do freelance writers do? They write marketing copy!

Fear sells. If you can write copy that a) scares the hell out of people, b) makes them feel insanely guilty and then c) tells them how they can alleviate the guilt and sleep better at night, you are going to make a mint.

One of the first (and one of the best) copy writing jobs I had was for a company that provides an environmentally safe and efficient way to clean up oil spills. I was like a kid in a candy store writing copy for that. Big Oil™, that much maligned boogeyman, has a lot to atone for. What better way to atone than by using a clean bio-fuel source to clean up their nasty fossil fuel messes? (as an interesting aside, the company also sells a private-label version of their product to the Israeli military and police for cleaning up blood in bomb blast zones. seriously.) By tossing the “green” label around for this product, the business increased sales. And by purchasing the product, companies could say they were doing something positive and responsible for the environment.

It’s a win-win.

Going in, I didn’t know a thing about the product or its environmental benefits. What I did know is what I said earlier: Fear sells. So I began there and fleshed out page after page of glorious marketing prose. As I reviewed company documentation, I also saw there was a cost-benefit to the product, too. That way, the rare person (such as myself) who doesn’t self-flagellate daily over the destruction of the yellow-breasted-tit nesting habitat could still see the benefit in purchasing product from this company.

Whatever your writing niche – be it medical or cosmetics or coupon clipping – find a way to slap a green label on it and you will generate more income. And somewhere out there, you’ll be helping an anxiety-ridden person sleep better. How cool is that?

No paper was used in the writing of this blog post. This story is 100% recycled, as I told it at a dinner party last month.