Gunther Pauli Cleans Up

Now, as we move into the mass market, it also means we have an identity, a track record. Credibility. We don't need to bribe our way onto supermarket shelves with slotting allowances. We don't need to bribe customers with endless promotions. We stand for something.

We have a different strategy for the industrial market. We are economic thinkers. We want to make the maximum contribution with the minimum investment. We go where pollution is most highly concentrated.

Where is that? Oil refineries and coal mines?

No, office buildings and hotels. They are industrial society's great silent polluters.

Think about the numbers. Four million people work in office buildings in Manhattan. That's 8 million toilet flushes a day, 3 gallons of water per flush - 24 million gallons of water being pumped through office buildings just for flushing toilets. Now think about the toxic products used to clean those toilets, and the concentration levels they're used at because of health regulations. The impact is just unbelievable.

How different are the two markets?

The mind-set challenge is the same: How do we persuade the people responsible for purchasing to persuade their boss to consider "green" products, which they assume are overpriced and underperforming?

The answer is different. We use eco-audits. We take samples of all the cleaning products at a hotel. We verify the volumes, we look at the type of water they get discharged into, we look at the concentration levels. Then we make a report to purchasing and the top executives. They are horrified. We are doing that to the water? This is happening in our hotel? What can we do?

SAS Hotels are a good example. These are five-star hotels, great management, Scandinavian, very environmentally oriented. We just did an audit for them. We discovered that their shampoos include a chemical ingredient called alcohol etoxilates. It's incredibly toxic. In the course of a year, at their 33 hotels, they will use 3.5 tons of this toxin. Each hotel will drain 25,000 gallons into the water system.

We make shampoo from sugar derivatives. Our product is a thousand times less toxic than what SAS has been using. No added cost, no loss of performance, vast reductions in environmental damage. And that's just shampoo. This is going to be a big business for us all around the world.

Don't you risk turning people off? Life is complicated enough. Now you want us to worry about poisoning children when we wash their socks or killing fish when we shower at a hotel?

There is a high "information content" to our business. We have to appeal to people's brains. We have to persuade them to ask questions they've never asked.

But we never get solemn or preachy. We're serious people. But we also want to be fun, youthful, energetic - different. We want to be as pioneering in our marketing communications as we are in the R&D lab.

We know we have to advertise to build brand awareness. We also know people believe in recycling. So why not recycled advertising? Last spring, we organized a contest for young artists in Antwerp. We bought a whole bunch of billboards that carried ads from our competitors. Then we asked the artists to tear them apart, reassemble them however they liked, and create billboards for us. They created some remarkable billboards - colorful, cheerful, provocative, real pieces of art.

We put them up all around Antwerp. We held a press conference, introduced the artists, and got great coverage. Then we organized walking tours. People would go out, 10 or 20 at a time, and look at the billboards as if they were an art exhibit. Can you imagine, billboard tours! We got so much attention that an art collector offered to buy all the billboards from us. We said no. Instead, we auctioned them off and divided the proceeds among the artists and environmental groups.

At some point, if only to achieve scale, don't you have to play the ad game just like the big boys? Can you use guerrilla marketing and still create a global presence?

Globalization is not about standardization - selling the same bottle of Coca-Cola in the same way all over the world. It is about flexibility. That applies to everything - from the product to the packaging to our marketing message. We are not a niche marketer. We are a niches marketer. We have to take all the issues surrounding our products - performance, price, the message - and translate them into the worries and dreams of real people in real markets.

That's what we're doing in Amsterdam. The water in the City of Amsterdam is unusually stable. That should be an important piece of information for this industry. You can customize detergents based on water properties. Softer water needs fewer ingredients than harder water.