As many of you know, I did my summer internship at Change Advertising, a cool sustainability branding and innovation firm in Vancouver, BC. A couple years ago they published MapChange 2008 – a brand map study that showed (visually on a perceptual map) the difference between consumer perception and brand reality with regards to sustainability. In other words, which brands were getting credit for doing green when they really weren’t and which were doing green but weren’t getting any credit for it.
During my internship I worked on and wrote the report for the 2nd edition, MapChange 2010 – a study that looks at brands’ actual and perceived sustainability across 12 different consumer sectors like banking, shipping, food products, apparel etc. The results were really interesting. Brands that are truly green were not necessarily perceived that way by consumers and brands that aren’t green benefited from a positive halo effect that often surrounds popular brands like Apple for example.
The information in the study is valuable for brands because they can see what their consumers think of them, how they stack up to their competition and how they could do better. It’s also useful for consumers to see the truth about their favourite brands and be introduced to new, greener ones. Check it out on Change’s new website http://getmapchange.com/
