Marketing green buildings - well structured process or forgotten minor detail? Evidence from Finland

Previous research has shown that buildings have a significant impact on the environment and small changes in their sustainability can create major improvements to the current environmental impact of the whole society (Eichholtz et al. 2009; Junnila 2004). The technology needed to build environmentally efficient buildings and the knowledge about their benefits is available, however, the ways of marketing these benefits to the public and customers and through this increasing the amount of green buildings, has not been a subject of much research. The aim of this article is to examine the current marketing situation of green buildings from a Finnish real estate developerís perspective and deepen the marketís understanding on this subject. The theoretical part of the paper is conducted through an extensive literature study and for the empirical part; three different building development projects were examined. Great amounts of marketing material provided by the real estate developer were studied and interviews were made with their specialists on the green building field. Results indicate that the environmentally efficient characteristics of the buildings are not considered to be their major selling arguments but simply something that is expected in todayís market and thus the green marketing actions of the real estate development company were quite ineffective and subtle. Based on the results of this study, it seems that at the moment, the marketing of green buildings lacks green ambition and not all are equally convinced about their differentiation potential. If the building market will end up in a situation where having a certification is enough in terms of being environmentally friendly, the development of a more sustainable built environment will fail, as no developer will be motivated to be innovative and more sustainable. However, by increasingly concentrating on the different benefits of green buildings and effectively communicating those to the customers, greenness can be made into a truly competitive marketing argument. The question is about being innovative and finding ways to compete differently than the competitors.