UL Environment
At a Glance
Industry
Professional and Technical Services
Project Type
Engagement and Behavior Change
Year
2021
Location
Marietta, GA
Summary
Alicia Levine identified UL’s main challenges and market opportunities for existing or potentially new market-facing environmental claims/ecolabeling programs.
Goals
UL delivers trusted third-party testing, inspection and certification services to businesses worldwide, often using their technical expertise to determine the viability of a client’s claim. Wanting to better understand the market for claims they validate, UL’s Retail and Consumer Products group (RCP) brought on Alicia Levine to complete a market research project exploring market acceptance of new and existing environmental claims, certifications, and labels.
Solutions
Market acceptance of environmental claims and labels has been little studied, and the space itself is constantly in flux. To better understand the landscape, Levine conducted academic journal research, desktop research, and interviews with UL customers, retail partners, environmental claims, and industry experts. She was able to distill what she learned and create a report with four main parts:
- A competitor analysis revealing relevant programs competitors have launched that help UL understand their own position among themu.
- A landscape analysis of the various factors at play that affect UL’s business activities—the political, legal, economic, social, technological, and environmental.
- A segmentation of customers using models from value proposition design analysis.
- Recommendations for labeling programs and future research to pursue.
Potential Impact
This project complemented the RCP group’s market research process and underscored the importance of including different foci of market analysis in UL’s future feasibility assessments.
More and more, UL’s customers need insight into what claims and certifications are more acceptable in the market, insight a technical report can only offer to a certain extent. Levine’s project serves to inform and fulfill a UL customer need. Her findings could possibly be addressed in a White Paper published by the UL RCP group at a later date.