The death of green marketing: a summary of comments.

Read the original “The death of green marketing” post here.

I’m not surprised that I’m just one of many people who have a thing or two to say about the death of green marketing. When brand strategist Marc Stoiber posted Joel Makower’s “Green Marketing is Over” to one of LinkedIn’s largest sustainability groups, he ignited a conversation so lively that even Joel himself stopped by to express his surprise. The conversation covered subjects from consumer benefits to greenwashing to systems approaches to the definition of green itself. As diverse as the discussion was, I still saw a few common themes.

What does “green” mean?

One person pointed out that greenwash is a major problem. But, we can’t have a strict definition of “greenwash” until we have a strict definition of “green.” Most of us don’t argue that products or actions could be green if they reduce our negative environmental impact. Instead, we argue about what baselines to compare to and how big the reductions should be in order to count as actually green. That is, we argue over our own environmental values. Giving Barbie a handbag made from recycled materials counts as green to some; to others, it’s still junk whether recycled or not. Or, just mention hybrid cars (speak of hybrid SUVs if you dare) and you’ll get a honking load of implicit value judgments:

“Have we convinced ourselves that, because it got better gas mileage, driving a hybrid car was akin to actually improving the environment? Sadly for us, it turns out that operating an automobile is not actually good for the environment, no matter how many trees are featured in the car’s advertisement.”

Some will agree and some won’t, and we’ll inevitably disagree with each other. I don’t think that we as a society will agree on definitions of “green” and “greenwash” any time soon, just as we’ll never agree on a single definition of the word “good.” Efforts to certify and set standards for greenness will always run into this problem.

Big advertising, big influence?

One person suggested that green advertising from the world’s biggest corporations might move people to change their views on sustainability. I suppose the thinking goes, “well I love this company and it’s doing things about the environment, so maybe I should too?” If that’s the case, then we already have examples of big green moves by big corporations: Walmart and the automakers come to mind first. Have their public efforts moved the cultural needle on the importance of sustainability? I’m not being rhetorical; I’d really like to know if someone has done that study.

Meeting primary needs.

Despite the wide range of viewpoints in the LinkedIn conversation, many agreed that products and services must meet people’s primary needs first. The definition of “direct personal benefit” is itself personal, and not all people think of minimized environmental impact as a primary need. Each of us ranks aspects of price, features, functionality, and reliability differently. I agree only somewhat with comments that state we need to provide people more information about the environmental impact of products. Informing people is important, assuming people even trust the data (a whole other conversation unto itself), but I don’t buy the argument that providing impact information to consumers will automatically push them toward green – that is, providing more information won’t inherently change how people rank factors of importance.

Overall, I support comments suggesting that we need to change the way we look at marketing and its role in business and planet. I do believe that marketing can show us new ways of looking at our relationships with our products and behaviors, which helps shift paradigms: can computers sit in your hand as well as on your desk? Can it be cool to share a car rather than own a car? Finding the overlaps between people, planet, and profit means being sensitive to those personal definitions of benefit. The alternative is to continue looking at green as just another consumer profile, and that won’t speed a transition to a more sustainably abundant world.

Read the original “The death of green marketing” post here.

Photo “Roads of Uruguay” by Gravitywave, on Flickr

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