Green Conscience: Making sustainability certifications transparent and accessible for consumers
With sustainability becoming a more pressing matter, consumers are asking for more transparency in respect to businesses environmental practises. Third party certifications navigate and filter these practices; however, simple information on what these certifications really mean and how they are applied is not easy to find.
Green Conscience will provide a non-biased independent platform that compiles information of all certifications in one easy-to-use place and sorts products accordingly. This will help consumers make better value-based purchasing decisions and allow businesses to promote their sustainable products and grow with the sustainable consumer. Certifications will be compared across the board based on the seventeen sustainability goals established by the United Nations General Assembly as a global measure to be achieved by 2030.
Consumer NZ is a well-trusted popular platform for consumers to compare products based on quality and price. In partnering with Green Conscience, you will address the demands of a changing market, around the want to live more sustainable lives. Green Conscience will amplify your goal of “working for positive change”. Like you, we are a not-for-profit, unbiased organisation, with the same overarching ideals. Currently available to consumers are platforms that either compare products without considering sustainability, or consider sustainability, without comparing products.* We have identified this gap in the market that Green Conscience partnered with Consumer NZ will fill.
Based on our survey results with 34 respondents, we have identified two main groups as part of our target market. In our presentation we discussed ‘Rachel’ and ‘David’. Rachel represents a mid-twenties target market with a moderate income, and she is interested in sustainability but overwhelmed and confused. The second group we have identified, would be for example, David, a busy suburban parent who wants to live a more sustainable lifestyle for and with his children. According to StatsNZ, these target markets have approximately 450,000 consumers. Initially, we would be looking at reaching 10% (45,000 people). We see Green Conscience as a great asset to Consumer NZ, with the ability to reach your target market through shared advertising channels, and expand our combined user base.
As a small business, we will have a flat organisational structure, running with eight staff initially. Three staff members will be hired outside of the current ideation team. Ideally, we would like our start up costs, of $245,000 over a six month period, to be invested in by Consumer NZ. Our monthly running costs of $38,200 will be covered by click through purchases. By receiving ten percent of the retail price of any products sold through linked websites, we would require a minimum of 9000 consumers within our consumer base to spend $9.80 per week through our website.
As a not-for-profit organisation, any excess income would be used to expand the business, or support other sustainability focused organisations. Once our platform is up and running, the database will be completed within 5 years. Our goals for expansion over five years would also include looking at adding an app, and customer accounts that allows personalisation of value preferences. As well as this, we will begin to consider non-verified certifications in our comparisons.
We believe that together with Consumer NZ, Green Conscience’s consumer base will make better choices which in turn will encourage companies to become more sustainable.
*see positioning Matrix on other side
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