The false gospel of green marketing

The false gospel of green marketing

The companies that are the heaviest resource depleters are often the first to declare how 'sustainable' their practices are

A lot of multinational companies jumped on the environmental boat with the wrong intentions. Their main priority was to earn more money instead of benefiting brand equity. This was starting to take part during 2007-2008. For instance ‘Fiji Water’, known as one of the best-selling water brands, advertised with following quote: “every drop is green”. Every rational human being knows that shipping water for thousands of miles isn’t very ‘green’.

Being green is more than putting the word green in your brand or marketing quotes. The most challenging part of being green is the underlying structure of that company, in particular, how they manage to be green. That’s what being green is all about. It isn’t about packaging chicken in recycleable materials but to farm (organic) chickens in a sustainable environment. We call those companies “Greenwashers”.

Companies often ignored the complexity of sustainability. There are 4 co-equal streams: social, economic, cultural and environmental. Most of the time their focus lies on one of these pillars, while the neglect the rest.

On the other hand there are companies that aren’t aware of their sustainability impact. Ebay for instance sell used products on the net and they don’t even play the “green” card.  An other example is, Xerox, a manufacturer of paper and ink, uses for more than 80% of recycled or reused parts. The remarkable thing is that Xerox, the largest paper seller in the world, tries to convince their customers to stop using paper and use Xerox digital services instead.

"Green" is an aspirational destination that no brand or processed product will ever reach. Those brands that are truly on the journey towards having a positive impact on the natural and human environment are far too humble to pound their chest and declare their verdance. Instead of swathing a product in a coat of green paint and streaming out into the trenches like Woodrow Wilson called for in his speech in 1916, marketers today are better off putting the effort into reinventing their products.

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Adam Werbach

guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 October 2011 17.42 BST

Julie Deweerdt 2MA01