As ‘green washing’ continues, consumer radars are becoming more advanced in seeing it.
Last month, the Advertising Standards Authority received 93 complaints about 40 ads making green claims, when for the same month last year, it received 10 complaints about eight ads. New research from IPSOS MORI also highlights that consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical about 'green' claims, and four in five Britons now believe that many brands pretend to be ethical just to sell more products.
Why? Advertisements such as Citroen's, which reference being 'a low co2 producer' without any substantiation, or information on the website, don’t help.
Paul McCartney once said that "if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian", and as discussed here, the same principle can be applied to good and bad ‘green’ communications.
The success of sustainability marketing depends on its ability to communicate green initiatives or business processes that are not necessarily visible. By transparently telling the story behind our products and services, we can overcome skepticism and distance ourselves from other brands, and create almost an entirely new sub-segment of ‘green-washers’.
A good example of ‘transparent sustainability’ is Ben and Jerry’s Climate Change college TV and Cinema ad. Maybe it doesn’t overtly talk about processes or sustainable ways that Ben and Jerry’s makes ice-cream, yet its classic activation of something that mass audiences wouldn’t be ordinarily aware of. 
Another non-‘green’ example could be Skoda. Albeit a mythical factory, by allowing us in to see the factory workers etc. we explicitly get that workers love the brand so much that they put the same care into making cars as they do a cake. 
Of course for ‘green’, the cake probably needs to be mixed with a little more realism and substance :-)
Tuesday 2 October 2007
Green-washing now on the consumer radar
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1 comments:
Good stuff Luke - very zeitgeist
I'd say eco issues define the political and social landscape, as a result marketing is catching on. Marketing has always served company profit. The future of marketing is defined by consumers being in control - this creates tensions within the capitalist machine: whether traditional fat cat operations will recognise these changes and 'let consumers in' remains to be seen. In the short term I imagine companies will montior the bottom line and 'act' within this space - as a result we should expect as many Citroens as B&J's. In the long term, if governments still fail to find solutions, people power will push companies and marketing solutions into more rewarding and worthwhile areas - real stories, real connection, real issues. On many level it's dead exciting - everyone getting what they want - profits, consumer control, global healing. Whether marketing utopia exists remains to be seen...what it does mean though is that advertising has the potential, for the first time since its inception, to do more than just flog people things they don't really need.
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