The perils of being green | A chat with the proprietor of a new environmental marketing firm, who advises some clients against touting their products' earth-friendly attributes

Like many Mainers, John Rooks formed his own company to create a job for himself in Maine. A Cumberland resident, Rooks had been driving every day to Portsmouth, N.H., where he was a partner in the advertising agency Yellow Steel. Weary of the commute and looking for a way to put his experience to work closer to home, he recently launched Rooks Communications, a marketing and public relations firm that specializes in environmental communications.

Rooks, 34, has a master's degree in cultural studies from Clarion University in Pennsylvania. He describes his studies as an attempt to figure out why people do things in groups, a skill he says naturally parlays into a career in marketing and advertising. He learned the language of environmental businesses at Pennoni Associates, a Philadelphia-based engineering and consulting firm where he was the regional marketing manager for three New England offices, and followed that with a year in sales at Portland-based Terralink, a hazardous waste software company.

Most recently, Rooks spent four years at Yellow Steel, where he worked on advertising and marketing campaigns for Paradigm Windows, Alcoa and Guardian Industries, among others. After a year of planning, he combined his experience in environmental sales with his background in advertising and launched Rooks Communications with two partners in January.

Mainebiz recently talked to Rooks about the pros and cons of green marketing and the brand called Maine, among other subjects. Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Mainebiz: Why would a company need your services rather than those of a traditional advertising agency like Yellow Steel?
Rooks: There are two main reasons, and I don't know that one is more important than the other. When you're selecting an ad agency, you want to select an agency that you feel comfortable with, that has a passion for what your cause is, whether it's selling software that helps the environment or trying to get more paid memberships [for] a nonprofit. So having an agency that has that passion ˆ— and all they do is capture that passion ˆ— is beneficial. The second reason is that we've been on the technical side of it, so our ramp-up speed is really quick. Engineers don't need to explain to us what a phase one is ˆ— we understand a lot of the terms.

What is a phase one?
That's a type of environmental site assessment. When we have our first meeting and they start trying to educate us as they would a traditional agency, we're able to cut through that clutter really quickly and say, "We already get that." That helps us get to solutions quicker. Ultimately, it saves the client money because they don't have to spend the time educating us and we don't waste time coming up with faulty ideas.

The founders of environmental companies are often scientists, engineers and inventors ˆ— people with great ideas who don't necessarily know how to communicate them.
We see that a lot, specifically in Maine because there's such an entrepreneurial spirit here. There are a lot of startup companies ˆ— people with a great idea, whether it's something that's going to capture oil quicker from a spill on the sound or a new way to harness a type of energy. They can prove that these are great ideas scientifically, but it can end there because they don't necessarily know enough about branding a product or they don't know the channels to do the research to say, "What do consumers really want out of a product?"

I think a lot of times people start up environmental companies because they have a passion for saving the environment ˆ— a bog or an estuary. They assume everyone else has that passion as well. So when they go to market their product they lead with, "Hey, this is going to save the bogs." When, in reality, that may not be what motivates the consumer to purchase that product. That product may not be a physical product ˆ— it could be a service, it could be a nonprofit. With a little bit more understanding and experience, we could come at it and say, "Well, maybe consumers would want to buy this product because it saves them money, and the secondary message may be that it's good for the environment."

So stamping yourselves as "green" may not be the best marketing strategy?
I think that the brand of being green is in rough shape right now; I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.

Why is that?
It's been confiscated by a very liberal market, a Greenpeace-type market. To say that "I'm green" doesn't necessarily mean environmentally sustainable ˆ— it means politically motivated.

Credibility is why people buy things; they know that you have the lowest price, they know that your widget lasts longer then anyone else's widget. And when you start labeling yourself as "green" ˆ— and you probably always have to put this in quotes ˆ— you start risking the associations that people want others to think of as being green.

Is there still room for green branding to be successful?
It's not always a bad idea. The point is, maybe someone wants to buy your widget because it is well made, and the fact that it's produced here locally in Maine is secondary. I just had an article come across my desk a couple of days ago about a professor of forestry out in Oregon who took two stacks of plywood to Home Depot ˆ— he convinced Home Depot to do this [experiment], and good for him. One of them was labeled as coming from a company that uses sustainable forestry; the other was just regular plywood. When they were sold at the same price point, the green-labeled lumber sold much, much faster. But as soon as they raised the price on it, the sales went over to the regular plywood.

What that tells us is that people are willing to spend some money on eco-labeled forestry products, but not more money then they would on something else. So when these great thinkers and inventors that we have here in Maine start talking about their technology and their new product, they may have that myopic view that people may buy this because it's going to save the bogs, where in reality there may be other compelling reasons to get people to buy it.

So part of your job is to help people brand their products not only in terms of environmental sustainability, but also those other marketing strengths the product might have.
Absolutely, because an environmentally friendly product that doesn't sell is worthless to everybody. That's something that I often bump into resistance on ˆ— [a client will say,] "No, no, no, the main thing is that it's environmentally friendly," and we have to stop and say, "Okay, what if you could sell more by branding as this or that, wouldn't that be more important in the long run?" The answer, typically, is yes.

What are you working on now?
We just signed a contract to manage promotions for the Maine Department of Agriculture's Get Real Maine account. We'll do TV, radio and print ads, public relations and event planning and marketing.

Have you looked at it enough to have any comments about how effective it is now and how you might broaden it?
Not yet. That specific campaign's biggest issue is teaching people how to shop for Maine produce. Hannaford does not always have it, Shaw's does not always have it. It's not convenient. So what we need to do is retrain consumers on how to buy local from farm stands, farmers' markets, [community-supported agriculture operations]. So we'll start there.

Who are some of your other clients?
I don't know how specific I want to get in terms of names of accounts. In broader terms, we work with engineering firms, construction companies, green building ˆ— that's a movement that's latched onto the word "green."

How do you define green building?
Green building is the use of environmentally friendly products in general building practices. Using sustainably grown lumber, recycled plastics, new technology in window glass that can regulate the temperature inside more efficiently so that you have to burn less energy to heat or cool a building, recycled roofing products, solar power ˆ— all these super-cool technologies that are out there.

The ultimate goal is to create a building that does not consume energy but actually produces energy. What that means is that the company that owns that building is making money by operating it. That's a great example of companies getting together and making environmentally smart choices for financial reasons.

Do any money-making green buildings exist?
I don't know [of any] to that extent. I don't think we're at the point where buildings are pushing energy back into the grid, but people are working towards that.

What are other growth sectors?
There's a lot going on in the energy sector that's environmentally driven, and the two are intrinsically linked. There's wind power, though that's sort of a political hot potato right now with the two developments that are going on [in Mars Hill and Redington].

Maine's also one of six states that's being looked at for a wave-energy site [that would harness the motion of waves to generate electricity]. There's going to be a talk on wave energy [on June 22 at Preti Flaherty in Portland] that is going to be very interesting.

You're sending out a survey to 300 companies in Maine and New England within the next few weeks. What are you looking for?
The intent of the survey is to get an understanding for how environmental companies are branding themselves ˆ— where are they placing their brand importance? Is it, as we discussed earlier, "The most important thing about my product is that it will save the earth," or is it something else? Is it that it's from Maine? Is it technologically superior?

I want to find out what these environmental companies are saying about themselves, how they are branding themselves, how they are going to market. I don't know how much information I'll actually get deep down, but I think [when it comes to] high-level branding I'll actually pick up quite a bit. I'll probably try and drill a little bit into whether they're branding themselves as Maine businesses as well. I think the result will be some sort of white paper that talks about the state of environmental communications in New England.

Why do people need to understand environmental branding?
Here's my sort of soapbox ˆ— any time I get a chance to, I force this conversation with politicians or whoever. There's a brand of Maine ˆ— Maine is this great, idyllic outdoor escape. There are a lot of companies here leveraging that in their sales efforts. L.L. Bean names their shorts Acadia. There's Tom's of Maine. This is not unique to Maine, by the way, but we're here so we talk about it.

So what happens when the environment of Maine starts to deteriorate, becomes less pristine somehow? Those changes affect the brand of Maine, and therefore [they also affect] tourism to Maine, exports from Maine and all these little companies out there called Mainely Vinyl and Mainely Dolls and Mainely Kites. I don't see enough being done as a unified voice to say, "Hey, we need to be careful of this."

It came up at the Blaine House Conference on [Maine's Natural Resource-Based Industry]. There are people at MEBSR [Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility], a group that's working to promote companies that are making sustainable choices. There are a few areas where people are talking about the brand of Maine and what happens to the brand of Maine when the physical environment suffers.

Whenever I have this discussion, I start sounding a lot like an environmentalist. I guess I am, but that's not why I talk about it. I talk about it because of the brand [of Maine] ˆ— that's where my passion is. My passion is L.L. Bean's got a great brand. What happens if they can't leverage that anymore? That's probably an exaggerated example; I think smaller businesses would see it first.

It hurts small businesses when there's a beach closed because of red tide. In western Maine, we had a hiking trail closed a few years ago because the family that owned it decided to harvest the timber on the land where the trail's located. How do you resolve the tarnish those kinds of events create on the brand of Maine?
Maybe it's not resolution that should be the goal here. Maybe the goal should be acknowledgement that, yes, this is an issue for Maine's brand. It's too early to say it's in jeopardy, but acknowledging [the possibility] will make people think a little bit differently. If someone came to me and said I want to brand my company on how much beautiful land there is in Cumberland, that might be a good idea now, but in five years it may not be true.

But isn't there a lot of environmental doom and gloom? Do we do a good enough job of trumpeting our environmental successes, or do we dwell on the problems and thereby tarnish the Maine brand?
That's a great point. I'm not really affiliated with any of the tourism marketing that goes on in the state, but I do think they do a good job of trumpeting successes. The question is, how do you balance the two? How do you balance economic growth with sustainability?

Again, I start to sound like an environmentalist here, but that's not my intent. But the one thing that we can control is what our brand is. What happens if we don't fulfill the promise? Maine has a promise. That's Maine's brand ˆ— that's what a brand is, from my perspective. This is the experience you're going to get. If the promise is exaggerated, do you start to lose customers? Visitors?

So what you're looking at is helping people identify a brand that's an obligation that they can live up to.
Exactly. And it's not just about Maine ˆ— we work with companies in Vermont, and we're definitely a New England-focused company. It's not all about Maine, but it is all about environmental technologies, causes, products or services. That's the linking thing between all of my clients. They all have a product, service or cause that is somehow environmental.

When would a traditional company, one without an environmental mission, need your services?
Well, we typically would not market ourselves to that group; we're very focused on the environmental side. But I could very easily see a polluter coming to my company saying, "We've got an environmental issue, we need public relations to help us control our message." That company could very well be a client of mine.

Is that something you'd be comfortable with?
As long as it was factual, absolutely. I'm not politically motivated in my company. I'm not out here to try and save the planet. I just happen to know and love a lot of stuff about the environmental side of business.