Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Education Channel Partner

Is Green the New Gold for Education Marketers?

By: David Nagel

8/19/2008

Bookmark and Share

Manufacturers are clearly keen to promote green. But green just isn't a purchasing priority for customers in the private sector yet. While sentiment seems to favor environmentally friendly technologies, the case has not yet been made--despite all the recent hype--to the point where large numbers of business customers are shelling out hard cash just to reduce their carbon footprints. But is the education marketplace different? Some recent indicators suggest that the sales opportunities are there for smart education marketers.

The Picture Outside the Education Space
Earlier this summer, IT hosting solutions provider Rackspace released a cross-industry survey showing that while IT professionals with purchasing power favor environmentally friendly technologies, they are not willing to pay for them just out of the goodness of their hearts.

The report, called the Rackspace Green Survey (PDF), polled 3,000 of the vendor's customers to gauge their attitudes toward the environmental impact of their operations. What it found was that while respondents expressed concern about their environmental impact, few were willing to smother those concerns with cash. And, in fact, the numbers willing to take a hit to their wallets or to their server performance in order to reduce their carbon footprints were actually lower this year than when the survey was first conducted in 2007.

For instance, 48 percent of respondents indicated that they are "[c]oncerned and looking for ways to reduce the impact my company has on the environment" in 2008. That's up 12 points from the 2007 survey. But only 9 percent indicated that green vendors are central to their organizations' strategies, down 5 points from last year. Sixty-four percent indicated that green vendors are important (but not central) to their strategies, up five points from last year.

Nevertheless, the will to pay for cleaner, more efficient technologies isn't there. While 71 percent indicated they would choose a green vendor over a non-green vendor if prices were the same (down four percentage points from last year), 46 percent said outright they would not be willing to pay a dime more for a green vendor.