Bringing in the new year with new customers would be great! Here are some guidelines to market your dry cleaning business to help bring in customers without greenwashing. It’s important to build trust with your marketing messages.
What is greenwashing anyway? Greenwashing is an ethical issue when companies overstate their sustainable business practices or make an unsubstantiated or misleading claim about the environmental benefits of a product, service, technology, or company practice.
In simpler terms, the Cambridge dictionary defines greenwashing this way, “an attempt to make your business seem interested in protecting the natural environment when it is not.”
Greenwashing becomes a legal issue if dry cleaners and other small businesses don’t follow the FTC Green Guides. [Bookmark them here]
The Green Guides say, “Marketers should not make broad, unqualified general environmental benefit claims like ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly.’ Broad claims are difficult to substantiate, if not impossible.”
So how can you market your dry cleaning business? Here are a few tips to make sure you’re on the right track.
1. Make sure that you’re using the proper terminology to talk about your services and the products you use. Avoid using vague terms like organic and green.
2. Ask your textile chemistry partner if you can use terms like sustainable or renewable if you’re using their products.
For example, say this: “Dry cleaning with Kreussler’s SYSTEMK4 uses renewable resources such as corn to create the bio-based formula.”
Don’t say, “We use a green, organic product called SYSTEMK4 to clean your clothes.”
Share facts with the science behind them: corn is a renewable resource, and SYSTEMK4 is bio-based. You can’t prove a product is “green.” To be marketed as “organic” products require certification and must comply with specific guidelines.
More positive ways to market your dry cleaning business:
3. Be familiar with all your products so that you can share your knowledge with your customers.
4. Make product choices that are environmentally sound if you want to be able to use environmental marketing to entice customers.
5. Educate your customers on the sustainable choices you’ve made for your business.
6. Create a sustainability plan for your company to reach more goals in the future like Starbuck’s goal to phase out all plastic straws.
If you work with a marketing agency or have someone executing your social media for you, make sure that they’re in the know with the FTC Green Guides and market your business properly.
We’re here to work with you on your products to help you meet the goals you have for your company and to help educate your clients on your practices as they pertain to our products.
Here’s to attracting new customers in the new year!
