DESPITE the expense and the occasional back strain, Mary Burnham, a public relations consultant in San Francisco, felt good about the decision she made a few years ago to buy milk — organic, of course — only in heavy, reusable glass bottles. For the sake of the environment, she dutifully lugged them back and forth from the grocery store every week. Cutting out disposable paper cartons, she reasoned, meant saving trees and reducing waste.
“We worry about it,” said Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “We all understand that today’s media environment is an extremely crowded one, and message overload is the order of the day.”
A study by the Shelton Group, an advertising agency and market research company based in Knoxville, Tenn., that focuses on environmental products, showed that consumers surveyed in 2007 were between 22 and 55 percent less likely to buy a wide range of green products than in 2006. The slipping economy had an effect, but message overload appeared to be a major factor as well, said Suzanne C. Shelton, the company’s president.
“What we’ve been seeing in focus groups is a real green backlash,” Ms. Shelton said. Over the last six months, she added, when the agency screened environmentally themed advertisements, “we see over half the room roll their eyes: ‘Not another green message.’ ”
Jen Boulden, a founder of idealbite.com, which sends e-mail messages to its readers with daily tips about eco-friendly living, said that “every conversation I have on the professional level is, ‘If people are going to get green fatigue, we don’t want to become irrelevant.’ ”
Her company has conducted focus groups to investigate the psychological barriers to taking action for the sake of the environment. The activist groups “believe that, surely, if I just gave them one more reason why they should do it, then they would,” she said. “But the fact is, people are not motivated by more facts. That can just reinforce their feeling of helplessness.”
In response to the confusion, the Natural Resources Defense Council last year unveiled Simple Steps, a how-to campaign that broke up advice into three tiers, according to the interest and commitment level of its audience.
People logging onto simplesteps.org can select the depth
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