You Are Not Green

I don’t care if you use post-consumer paper in your 3-million piece DM drop. I don’t care if your employees are forced to plant trees on their lunch breaks. Recycled toner? Not impressed. Special parking spot for hybrid vehicles? Your mum must be proud. You’re just not green.

Let’s tell the truth here, those are things that make you feel good. (which is no trivial thing; you deserve to be happy at work.) Just like HOV lanes, environmentally responsible acts make you feel self-righteous when you’re using them and slightly guilty when you’re not, but they really don’t do anything for the environment. They just do a little less to the environment.

Your adorable little blue bins, bike-to-work weeks, CFC-free packages and all that stuff are not making you green. You still take way more good stuff out of the environment than you put in. You are not carbon neutral, your vehicles don’t run on pixie dust and your customers are not, for one minute, buying the green fluff you are passing off as a vision for a better tomorrow.  If they are, you should trade them in for smarter customers.

All marketers should be ashamed of the cringeworthy rubbish their colleagues are spewing out in the name of Mother Nature. If she had a decent agent, not one of these companies would get her name on their labels.  Alas, we have something called “Clean Coal” that seems to involve sooty super models . We have organic markets flogging apples from half-way around the world, but feeling quite good about charging a nickel for a plastic bag. We have WalMart telling suppliers to use less paper when they ship their single-use (we used to call that disposable) barbeque lighters from Serbia, and so on.

Even in B2B, where we don’t usually drape ourselves in flags, tree branches and dolphins, there’s an embarrassing amount of greenwashing going on. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has a series of very strange ads in which oil people tell us helpful things about growing up on a farm, which is some proxy for liking trees, which makes it okay for them to be in charge of the oil sands.

Are they kidding? The media buy on this one is equally puzzling since the target seems to be neither consumers nor commercial buyers of oil products. If you represent petroleum producers, why not just sell petroleum? Why the green theatre?

Dow Chemical has a visually stunning, beautifully written series of ads which for about a minute and a half make you forget they’re a steaming pile of manure.  For a while Ford enlisted poor Kermit to do show how bicycles and kayaks are much less fun than trucks. I think the frog resigned. It is easier being not green.

The direct mail business takes its share of shots on the environmental front and has responded by devoting the June issue of Direct Marketing News to the whole green thing. Mostly it’s a collection of helpful reminders to work with environmentally enlightened print houses, scrub our lists to reduce duplicates and remember to turn out the lights at night. Aeroplan contributes an undeclared advertorial on page 8 which seems to be straight out of some consumer-facing newsletter and sits smug-as-you-please across the gutter from an article on the perils of greenwashing. At least we haven’t lost our sense of irony.

Why are so many otherwise smart marketers drinking green Kool-Aid?  I think it’s because we feel the need to do something and our agencies take advantage of our uncertainty to create irrelevant art on our dime. If they applied half as much energy to doing pro bono work for organizations that actually do help the environment, we’d all be better off.

I also suspect our Corporate Overlords and the Hand-Wringers who follow them about are a bit stuck on this one. For the right reasons they want to do something, and they should. Stewardship programs, vast donations, sustainable sourcing and garbage police all  play a role, and to the extent they do the right thing they have the right to say so in public. But just because you should communicate it, doesn’t mean it should be your campaign theme for the second quarter. As with your Little League sponsorship, your quarterly earnings, your Equal Opportunity policy and your OSHA compliance, it’s part of doing business properly.

Unless the president of your organization has chained herself to an old growth forest or flung carnations down the smokestacks at a steel mill, do us all a favour and market your products not some Norman Rockwell version of world that not only doesn’t exist but to which your products can’t possibly contribute.

If you care, the University of Oregon has a fun greenwashing index site.

And the Avenging Librarians have a video on the subject that’s worth watching if only to stay on their good side.

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter