Tag: greenwashing

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Greenwashing, language, localism/locavore, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

Nostalgiawashing: pretending that you represent the “good old days” of small-town, small-business artisanship while actually running a large, highly mechanized operation.

Although I just invented the term (zero relevant hits on Google), nostalgiawashing’s been a thing for decades. Think about Jack Daniels or Pepperidge Farm. Or nostalgia-driven experience-based companies like Cracker Barrell and even Disney. (Disney is a bit schizophrenic on this, because it markets both nostalgia (for example, Main Street, USA) and its opposite, which I’ll call “tomorrowism” (for example, Epcot). All these companies try to bring us back to a simpler era, when nearly all the figures of authority were straight, white, middle-aged, able-bodied Christian men, and when the upper class could mostly avoid contact with the “masses yearning to breathe free”: immigrants and locally-born alike in the lower classes. Of course, that era never actually existed!

I’m not going on the warpath to eliminate nostalgia-based marketing, even when I think it’s deceptive enough to be called nostalgiawashing. But at least don”t insult our intelligence with it!

This is inspired by a mailing that did insult my intelligence. It was a card that offered “warm winter wishes” on the outside and then offered me a discount on replacement windows and “one of my favorite holiday recipes” (included on a separate index card). I have been a customer, getting replacement patio doors from them a few years ago, so I’ll give them credit for at least keeping in contact. Here’s why it didn’t work:Four-piece mailing from the window company

  • The envelope used a very nice handwriting font, but a return address sticker without a name, just an address…a first-class presort stamp and a sprayed-on barcode. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that this was bulk mail, though I thought it was from a charity.
  • The card is in a different handwriting font, even though it purports to be from the same person who addressed it. And they even positioned the text so it slants up the page–but uniformly on every line??? Come on, people, do you really think you’re fooling anyone?
  • I understand why the recipe card, on what pretends to be an old-fashioned index card, uses yet a third handwriting font–because, of course, the manager’s “Aunt Amy” wrote it. But at the end of the second side (not shown), it has a copyright notice in the name of the company. And the recipe itself is something I personally found disgusting. I can’t imagine wanting to make a dessert out of a whole sleeve of saltines, and Heath bar bits.

Of course, I don’t happen to be in the market for new windows anyway. Even if the mailer had been brilliant, I don’t need what they’re selling. But if they were a client of mine, I would have not only used a completely different approach, but recognized that not a lot of previous customers necessarily need four more windows right now and provided incentives for referrals.

 

 

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Green Marketing, Greenwashing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Yet another company has gotten in trouble for greenwashing. Raz Godelnik writes in Triple Pundit about cereal giant General Mills’ legal woes: multiple lawsuits over deceptive packaging, claiming for example that its Nature Valley brand of granola bars is “all natural” when in fact it’s highly processed and contains such ingredients as maltodextrin.

You’d think by now companies woud have caught on that honesty really is the best policy.

Of course, it would be nice if the word “natural” actually had a legal definition, and thus some teeth. But it would also be nice if a company that claims to be strongly guided by ethics would do a better job of walking its talk.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, propaganda Tagged with ,

The word “greenwashing” is only a few years old; the practice, unfortunately, goes back much longer.

This morning, for some reason, I woke up thinking about a loaf of bread I saw in the supermarket some time in the early 1980s. This line of bakery products was very clearly marketed to the customer who wanted natural foods, and even back then, that included me. The packaging copy was all about wholesome whole grains, natural growing practices, and such–until I got to the ingredients list.

And there I saw the deal-killer: “calcium propionate added to discourage mold.” Back it went from my hands to the shelf!

I was so deeply offended to see this very common bread additive in a bread marketed as wholesome and natural that I can still recall the exact wording. In fact, I remember telling several friends how corny and false this company was, trying to disguise its use of chemicals by saying “discourage” instead of the more typical, and harsher sounding, “retard mold.”

And that got me thinking about another early greenwashing offender: nuclear power. As a child in the 1960s, and one who was impressed by the promise of technology, I was enchanted by the idea of clean energy that would be “too cheap to meter,” as one prominent nuclear bureaucrat famously put it.

This enchantment didn’t stop me from getting involved in a local group that was questioning the wisdom of a proposed nuke two miles from New York City, but back then, all we knew about was thermal pollution. Thank goodness the utility abandoned that plan!

Two years later, I chose as a college research topic the pros and cons of nuclear power, and started reading in depth. Turns out, thermal pollution is the least of nuclear’s problems. Factor in these:

  • Potential for catastrophic accidents that could make Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island look like a romp in the park
  • Deeply subsidized limited-liability insurance that means if there is a catastrophe, private citizens aren’t going to collect on their losses without a massive infusion of billions of dollars of government money (this is a US law, the Price-Anderson Act, but many other countries have similar provisions)
  • A long and sordid history of literally hundreds of small accidents that could have become big very easily–this link with pictures and descriptions of the nine worst shows that five of the nine were AFTER Chernobyl
  • A 250,000-year pollution problem in the need to isolate extremely deadly wastes from the environment for a quarter of a million years (think about how few artifacts remain from even 5000 years ago, and almost nothing of human origin exists from even 30,000 years ago)
  • Huge inefficiencies that lead one analyst, John Berger, to conclude that nuclear–counting the entire fuel cycle–had actually consumed five times as much energy as it produced, so all this risk is for NO benefit (I have the full citation in my book, Nuclear Lessons)

And you wonder how any environmentalist (and several very prominent ones have) can endorse this terrible, deeply flawed, and very UN-green technology.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

Great discussion on Green Biz between Green business expert Joel Makower and emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman, on the roles of informed consumers, “radical transparency,” and social media in eco-friendly consumer buying patterns. Start with Makower’s post, click over to Goleman’s response, and then read the comments on both pages.

This was my comment:

I don’t see you really at odds. Joel says the eco-friendly products have to show a clear advantage–but couldn’t that advantage be something idealistic like lower carbon footprint, especially if it’s combined with, say, a health benefit from avoiding toxic chemicals?

Daniel puts a lot of faith in social media, particularly for the generation coming behind ours. And he’s right. Social proof is in the process of leapfrogging in importance.

I find it interesting that Daniel looks to the Internet, considering he and I both live in the Northampton, MA area, which has very strong offline culture in favor of eco-friendly purchases. Offline cultures, too, can provide social proof.

In the research I’ve done for my books, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and my forthcoming eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I found that consumers will indeed choose the better choice, the choice more in line with their values, all things being equal. They will even pay more for it. The challenge then becomes to make Green products as good or better than the choices that don’t align with values, and then choosing the better one becomes a no-brainer. Examples abound, from organic food and bodycare to hybrid cars. The danger, I think, is if people find out they’ve been greenwashed (hybrids being an example), the new habits may not stick.

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