Frito-Lay’s SunChips green branding campaign was an award winner again this month, adding Warc’s prize for Ideas and Evidence in marketing to its war chest of win’s. It’s not surprising.  It took green marketing to a whole new level of excellence.

They started with a remarkable capital investment in making their product in a more environmentally friendly way.  They added a 50-acre — that’s right, acre — solar plant to their factory so that SunChips could be made with solar energy.  That was followed with the launch of the industry’s first compostable packaging.

Most of us would think that level of clear, purposeful commitment to sustainability would be enough to make SunChips an instant market success. But not so fast.

This was all happening in a recession.  And as the director of The Futures Company, Fran Walton, has noted, “the inconvenient truth has gone to the background…as consumers turn away from fears about the future of the planet and towards more everyday, domestic worries.”  Manufacturing and packaging innovations are removed from the more “me and my world” issues driving consumers’ purchase decisions. The innovations had to be made relevant for people.

They achieved this by making the innovations “tangible” with some very unique creative executions; utilizing “solar power” in a newspaper ad that had to be held to the light to read it completely, or showing a time-lapsed video of the decomposing bag in a tv advertisement; and by leveraging two important best-practice learnings in the campaign messaging:

1) A healthy purchase (or action) equates to a healthy consumer, a healthy family, a healthy home, and a healthy planet. People increasingly understand and appreciate that a product can be good for them and good for the planet too.  Their definition of “health” has expanded.

2) Value, even in a recession, isn’t based on price alone. Consumers get value also from buying products (or taking actions) that align with things that are important to them; things they believe in. Marketers can add value by aligning with strongly held core values and beliefs common to a target audience.

We believe these learnings apply to social marketing as well as brand marketing.  Instead of encouraging the purchase of a product like SunChips, social marketers provide motivation for difficult behavior change.  In environmental campaigns, for example, that could mean aligning the health of you and your family to environmentally friendly behavior and action.

Secondly, social campaigns need to worry about closing the “value action gap” between a strongly held belief or value and the realization that one’s behaviors may not be living up to that value.  Many social marketing campaigns can be effective by demonstrating to a target audience their “value action gap,” raising some level of cognitive dissonance over the inconsistency between their behavior and what they hold important, and then leading them  to a positive resolution.

So congratulations to Frito-Lay and Juniper Parks!  And for those who want to better understand how to develop social marketing messaging with the SunChip best practice lessons in mind, please visit Noral’s PSA page.