• Rainforest Alliance Certified Coffees are winning 100% annual revenue growth

• Green household cleaners have achieved 229% revenue growth since 2005

• In 2009 Organic Apparel/Home Textiles achieved 35% revenue growth.

Two key market segments driving this revenue growth are the Millennial Generation and their moms, Concerned Caregivers, that are searching for products that offers “on me, around me, in me” solutions. This “Awareness Customer” market segment has $10 billion of annual buying power!

There is a “Secret Green Sauce” to building business success with the Awareness Customer. The first key ingredient is price. Market research has documented that 85% of consumers will buy the more sustainable good or service versus the less sustainable alternative IF their prices are the same. The companies that are achieving explosive revenue growth have a pricing plan that is driving their product toward price parity with the less sustainable competing product. A great example is solar roof top market segment that has achieved approximately 50% price reductions over the last four years with the most successful companies deploying an ongoing efficiency plan for reducing costs down to electric utility price parity.

The second key ingredient is “Prove It, Conclusively” branding. Market research has conclusively documented that customers are confused on what to buy and who to buy from. This opens the door to revenue growth success for an early stage company that can win brand positioning as being genuinely sustainable in their business practices and their products’ or services’ authenticity. The classic example of success in this space is Clorox’s Green Works, the first green consumer product to reach $100 million annual revenues. Green Works aligns with SIX different third party affiliations to convey a “Prove It, Conclusively” credibility alignment their targeted customers.

The third ingredient is the ability to connect with the experimenting, learning and then buying decision-making process being used by Awareness Customers. The adoption of sustainability is a maturation process where consumers begin by buying lower cost and lower risk products like CFL lights or concentrated organic laundry detergent. Then these customers use their experiences to move into more expensive sustainable goods and services. This is a “Know it, Embrace it” marketing path that is enabled by the Awareness Customers’ use of social media. Apple and Timberland are two of a growing number of companies that are developing social networks around their products that draw-in via social networking a growing number of new customers.

From serving as Entrepreneur.com’s Green Business Coach I have developed an international network of companies that are developing best practices for growing green revenues. I have captured key profiles of these best practices in my book, The Secret Green Sauce, outlining how to price, brand and market into the Awareness Customer market segment to win double digit revenue growth results!

Bill Roth is the founder of Earth 2017 and author of The Secret Green Sauce that profiles best practices of actual companies growing green revenues.

I work with businesses across the country and I can confirm that the fear of being tarred with greenwashing is a motivating force firmly in place inside Corporate America. However, I am also beginning to see evidence from my national network of going green businesses that the fear of being branded as greenwashing is also slowing sustainability’s adoption. The following paraphrases something I heard three times from within my network of companies that are going green: “We don’t want to advertise what we are doing for fear of being labeled as greenwashing by environmentalists.”

Do you remember when the Sierra Club endorsed Green Works, the home cleaning product from Clorox? Charges of “sell out” were hurled at the Sierra Club. In hindsight, my market research suggests Green Works is often the first green product purchased by a consumer experimenting with the concept of “going green.” So did Sierra Club sell out or were they helping pioneer the first sustainability adoption-steps by consumers? Also Green Work’s achieving $100 million in annual revenues has demonstrated to the rest of corporate America that green can be mass marketed.

Market research is now documenting the process Americans are using in adopting sustainability. A recent Harris poll found that 63 percent of those surveyed had purchased a higher efficiency CFL light bulb during the last year. Yet only 2 percent of cars sold are hybrids. The American consumer is in the process of making a transition through learning and experimentation toward a sustainable lifestyle.

This brings me full circle to the issue of greenwashing and the feedback that is surfacing from within my network of going-green businesses. Like their customers, America’s businesses are also moving along a path of learning, experimentation and then adoption. But many of these companies are not telling their customers because of fear that the dark-green leaders of sustainability will brand them for not doing enough. This fear is retarding the marketing connection between companies attempting to build a profit-proposition for going green and consumers that would buy from a less than dark-green company as part of their own path for going from light to darker green. Another telling lesson learned from the market research on Green Works is that a major reason why consumers did experiment with buying this green household product was because of Clorox’s credibility for selling effective household cleaners!

So what am I suggesting? What I am not suggesting is that our dark-green advocates back off. Holding all of our feet to the fire is a hugely important role if we have any hope of achieving a 350 world.

What I am suggesting is that businesses going green must overcome their greenwashing fears and connect with their customers. “Authenticity and trust are what customers are looking for,” explains Steven Addis and John Creson of Addis Creson , a company that contributed toward Kashi’s growth into a national brand. And what Addis and Creson suggest is that companies adopt “transparency” as a marketing path for telling their story.

The feedback I gave to my going green business friends that confided their greenwashing fears to me was that social media offered a them a path for establishing authenticity, trust and transparency. Cone Research just reported that over half of Americans use social media and 78 percent of them interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools. In the The Secret Green Sauce I call this use of social media to enable a collaborative learning, experimentation and then procurement process “Know it, Embrace.” The use of social or new media through Web 2.0 tools is an emerging marketing best practice successfully being used by companies growing green revenues through an alignment strategy with customers searching for trustworthy, authentic green companies and products.