The Insider's Guide to Marketing Green Buildings

by Jerry Yudelson, 2004. Green Building Marketing, 4727 S.W. Vesta Street, Portland, OR 97219, 503-246-4111. Three-ring binder, 206 pages, $79.95.

The Insider’s Guide to Marketing Green Buildings is a no-frills book that delivers. Author Jerry Yudelson, a professional engineer with a master’s degree in business administration and extensive experience in the green building world, has compiled a wealth of data and advice for anyone seeking to serve the growing demand for green buildings. Indicative of his focus on value to readers, Yudelson has provided—before the table of contents—a page called “How to Read This Book” that guides readers to specific chapters based on their particular needs.

Reliable market studies about the size and growth of the green building industry are notoriously hard to find. To meet this need, Yudelson has mined published reports from several online surveys and supplemented these with surveys of his own. He also relies heavily on data from the U.S. Green Building Council on the growth of it’s LEED

^® Rating System. As a LEED faculty member and former USGBC board member, Yudelson brings valuable insights to bear as he interprets and extrapolates from those numbers.

While

Marketing Green Buildings is full of selling points for convincing reluctant owners, colleagues, and clients, it is not blind to the challenges involved. Analyzing the results of a survey conducted by Turner Construction (see

EBN

Vol. 13, No. 10), Yudelson notes that “Looking at these results from a marketer’s perspective, we can see that green building marketers are trying to sell a ‘product’ or an ‘approach’ that: costs more; does not demonstrate significant benefits to balance the costs; and must be sold to people heavily concerned about initial cost increases.” Yudelson then proceeds to lay out some solutions to this marketer’s predicament, including lowering the costs, relying on case studies and testimonials, financing creatively, and focusing on institutional buyers who tend to be long-term owners of their real estate.

Yudelson has little patience for those design professionals whose “idea of selling is to do a good job and hope someone notices.” Yet in addition to the market data and green building trends, he includes enough “Marketing 101” material to bring even a business neophyte up to speed, at least on the jargon. Whether you’re a green building expert who wants to do a better job selling your services or someone who is new to green building and is curious about the potential of this market, this book is a great resource.

– NM