MARCH 31, 2015 — Sustainability strategist, green marketing pioneer and founder of J. Ottman consulting firm, Jacquelyn Ottman will inspire us to make sustainability part of our work and play during the Earth Week 2015 keynote address on April 22.
Ottman will recount her personal journey of integrating sustainability into her marketing career and offer ways students, faculty and community members can do the same.
“I’m excited to hear the keynote because she embodies the connection of business and sustainability, a topic I really care about and one that needs more attention,” said Hannah Schlacter, President of ActGreen, a student organization empowering future green business leaders.
“We hope she will reach out to a variety of students and lead more Illinois students to get involved with sustainability and environmentalism in a more active way,” added Students for Environmental Concerns (SECS) Earth Week Planning Committee Co-Chair Allison Steffens, a sophomore studying Earth, Society, and Environment.
The keynote begins at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 22, in Room 149 of the National Soybean Research Laboratory (1101 W. Peabody, Urbana, IL 61801).
Immediately following the keynote will be an awards ceremony for iSEE’s Certified Green Office Program, Greeks Go Green, and Campus Conservation Nationals (Eco-Olympics).
The Earth Week 2015 keynote address is made possible by support from ActGreen, Students for Environmental Concerns, the Student Organization Resource Fee (SORF), and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE). More information about Earth Week, including the tentative schedule, may be found here. Our Facebook event post is here.
More about Jacquelyn Ottman from greenmarketing.com:
Ottman started her career learning the marketing ropes from the likes of Procter & Gamble and Ralston Purina. Then, sparked by awareness for the role of consumer goods in environmental issues, in 1989 she founded J. Ottman Consulting, Inc. and pioneered green marketing. Her goal: bring the same disciplined approach to strategy and message development, consumer insight gathering, and new product concept generation and evaluation used by the pros to the development and marketing of environmentally preferable products and services.
Over the past 24 years, Ottman and her team have applied their learning, and have learned from, over 60 Fortune 500 sustainability leaders. They have advised several ecolabels including the U.S. EPA’s Energy Star and the USDA Certified Biobased. Ottman has written four books, including “The New Rules of Green Marketing” (Berrett-Koehler, 2011), which has been named by Cambridge University (U.K) as a top 40 Sustainability book.
She blogs at Jacquie Ottman’s Green Marketing Blog. and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, TriplePundit and other websites.