Today’s article is a guest post from Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, Senior Editor for Green Options, your home on the web for “Greening the Good Life.” He focuses here on the story of No-Impact Man, who attracted the attention of the New York Times about two weeks ago. For the next year, No-Impact Man and his family are committed to leaving zero environmental impact while living in the middle of New York City.

Let the Seller Beware

Many of us in the Green Blogosphere took note of the New York Times’ coverage of Colin Beavan, aka No-Impact Man. Marketing guru Seth Godin also read the article and, as is par for the course, immediately grasped the big picture: “Zero is the new black.” In other words, simply “buying green” is no longer enough: consumers, particularly the “early adopter” crowd, have latched onto the concept that we must fully account for our environmental impact when making choices in the market. Beavan isn’t an oddity; rather, he’s the herald of a fundamental change in mindset.

If Godin’s right (and he’s remarkably prescient), then we’re seeing a cultural shift towards the question Bill McKibben asks in his new book Deep Economy: “is more better?” More and more, consumers may be answering the question in the negative, and that will likely prove perplexing to most business people. After all, how do you sell to consumers who’ve decided that simply buying things isn’t going to make them happy?

Certainly, consumers won’t stop purchasing goods and services, but smart business people will realize up front that those consumers are going to be asking a lot more questions, and that sellers better be prepared with substantive answers. Calling your product “natural” won’t get it anymore with buyers asking about local sourcing, carbon emissions, recyclability and life cycle impacts.

Let the seller beware: the marketplace of ideas influences the marketplace, and consumers have many more sources of information available to them than in the past. If zero is the new black, then businesses better be prepared to offer “zero”: zero emissions, zero wastes, zero persistent toxins. Anything less may result in zero profits.

You can read more content from Jeff McIntire-Strasburg on the Green Options blog. Jeff also writes regularly at sustainablog and TreeHugger.com.