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The Evergreen Effect: How to Avoid a Marketing and Business Trap

By Carol Ingley
president, reBrand 4 businesses

Key Words and Phrases: evergreen, always green, fast lane, Hollywood, fresh angle in marketing, Progressive, Netflix, State Farm

What is Evergreen?

Evergreen is something that is always green. That is essentially what the business definition is. More specifically, in an evergreen business and in a career, a product or service’s demand is ongoing with no end in sight. Silverware is an evergreen product, as an example.

Clearly, it’s going to be a lot easier to run a business if it’s filled with products and services that are evergreen. Here’s a product that wasn’t evergreen: the DVD. The DVD was replaced by streaming video. (More on this later.) By contrast, flour and sugar are both evergreen products.

Evergreen, it should be noted, is not necessarily a growth market. It is simply an area that will always have demand.

It’s Flourishing…or Not

Having a fabulous career or being in a business that is flourishing can be quite a fun ride. But, in many instances, the evergreen effect will kick in.

The evergreen effect is very simple: your career and business can be protected from radical changes if you are in an evergreen environment. If it’s not an evergreen environment, you or your company can go from life in the fast lane to life in a perpetual traffic jam (or, in the extreme, be completely stalled out).

Products and services are either evergreen or they are not. So is marketing.

Creating Marketing: Taking Evergreen into Consideration

Look what Hollywood does. It takes evergreen seriously. In showing the beginning credits to a movie, the copyright date shows up at the very end. The copyright date is not in numbers but rather in Roman numerals. Hollywood was and is aware of being dated. They don’t want to advertise how dated a film might be. And sometimes the copyright has already been issued and the release of the film is delayed, just another reason to keep the copyright date close to the vest.

Another way that Hollywood takes the evergreen effect seriously is producing movies that will stand the test of time. This might be one of the reasons for so many rom coms. They are not easily dated.

It might be that you sometimes remember a catchy tagline for a company from years ago. And then wonder why the company doesn’t go back and use it. While taglines can be seen as evergreen, they are also tied to a particular era. Therefore, companies may not want to reach backwards in fear of not seeming like a forward-looking company. In short, marketing can get dated. It always needs a fresh look.

Taking a Fresh Angle in Marketing

Marketing must always have a fresh angle. What has developed effectively are marketing campaigns around one theme or a variety of themes at the same time.

The company Progressive has been very successful with its themes and players in its TV advertising campaign. State Farm is another company that has created compelling characters with thematic storylines.

Themes, storylines and strategies are what can keep marketing dynamic without reaching into a bag of tricks that were historically successful.

Businesses Thrive in a Growth Evergreen Market

In making the choice of a career or a business’s choice for its product or service, keep the evergreen effect in mind. Netflix, when it started as a mail-order DVD rental company, knew that the DVD business was not evergreen. The company madly scrambled to be the first successful subscription video-on-demand company, slowly phasing out its DVD rental business. In other words, they had an evergreen plan in place – it just wasn’t their initial business.

To evergreen or not to evergreen? The answer: evergreen wherever you can.

About the Author: Carol Ingley, president, reBrand 4 businesses, is a branding and marketing consultant.