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You may just find an opportunity to enhance your product's performance and strengthen your customers' loyalty, and eventually command a higher price.

Remember the electric car? Photo-degradable garbage bags? Compact fluorescent light bulbs? All these were doomed to the "green graveyard" for refusing to address one of the key rules of green marketing success: balance environmental issues with primary customer needs.

Keep in mind that for green marketing to work, it is important that customers are with you through five factors.

First, many customers are aware of and concerned about the environmental issues that your product addresses. Many studies have shown that customers are segmented around issues of personal health and wellness, resource conservation and wildlife protection.

Second, customers feel that

by using your product they will

make a difference, as one consumer or in concert with all other consumers. This is called "empowerment".

Third, they want to believe your claims. This is true not only for

businesses in general, it's especially true for "green" businesses, where claims are often intangible and a history of misleading claims has left a negative legacy for legitimate companies.

Fourth, customers should feel that your product will work as well as non-green alternatives. This reflects those misperceptions from the days when natural laundry detergents left clothes dingy, and fluorescent light bulbs spluttered.

Fifth, although some consumers  can't afford premiums for any kind of product, green or not, your more affluent customers can and will.

Finally, consider "green" as an ideal goal achieved though continuous improvement. If you can achieve this, your product will never belong to the green graveyard.