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Daniel Pink is a keynote at the ULI Multifamily Trends Conference that Micah and Steve are at today.

Here’s something I pulled from an article he wrote for Wired, “The Rise of the Neo Greens”.

Hybrids as Symbols of Identity
Reporting on a UC Davis study on consumer motivations for buying a Hybrid, lead by Ken Kurani he writes…

They discovered that the cars were “symbols of identity.” Buying a Prius or Honda Civic hybrid was less about careful economic reasoning than about self-expression and self-understanding. “People construct their identities as a narrative. The project of our lives is to tell a more interesting story about ourselves,” says Kurani. “In large part that’s what we see happening with hybrids.”

For most buyers, the goal wasn’t fuel economy. It was to produce fewer emissions, to minimize external harm - and to let everyone else know that they’ve made a deliberate choice to do so. “Lower resource consumption is part of an identity people are constructing. They want to be seen as someone who’s concerned about the world around them,” Kurani says. At the same time, “they want others to see that they’ve done this, so that others might see themselves doing this.”

Researchers have found similar motivations for the early adopters of that other staple of the neo-green movement, solar power.

Apple Application?
While there’s nothing really strange about a car as a symbol of identity, the integration of the eco-sensibility into this mix really strikes a chord with me.

Another company I admire, Apple, has long aligned itself as a symbol of identity”: look no further than its “I’m A Mac” campaign for telling evidence. Perhaps this neo-green identity is the social pulse Apple was tuning into when it recently announced its “Greener Apple” policy. The graph at the top is theirs and represents their past, present and forecasted percentage of weight recycled as a percentage of past sales.

What About Houses?
Makes me wonder how this plays out with home buyers? Thus far, research about green building has indicated that home buyers respond first and foremost to the bottom line question of energy-efficiency and value/cost benefits, followed by “health” benefits and lastly “preservation” issues. However, I’ve always wondered if these variables adequately describe why people make eco-related decisions. Perhaps there’s more going on than current research about home buying indicates…

Jason