The Problem with Green Marketing

The following post comes from my notes for Keeping It Real Green: How to Market Your Efforts in an Age of Greenwashing. I'm expanding this e-book (the new version is currently weighing in at 25 pages and is promising to get even longer), and I find myself still struggling with a number of both philosophical and practical questions.


Genius comedian Bill Hicks liked to call marketers the "ruiners of all things good." He wasn't far off the mark.

Marketing has always been an ethically conflicted business, and the act of green marketing requires us to face this conflict head-on. Marketing has one simple purpose: to foster the exchange of money for something of value (generally a service or product). Marketers, however, have traditionally been relegated to a discrete role within an organization's hierarchy, one that is siloed off from product development, operational logistics, and so forth. The result is that the marketer ends up investing himself not in value but in perception of value.

This difference is critical, because it cuts right to the heart of why marketing has for so long embraced the tactics of smoke and mirrors, rather than the development of true value to the consumer. Marketers simply have never been considered worth including in the value creation side of the equation—and they've been perfectly happy with that. Their job is to sell what already exists, and to do that, they must make the consumer feel a certain way about it, whether or not that feeling is based on the existence of something real.

Whether or not this is good or evil is beyond the scope of Real Green, though. My concern right now is with the implications this focus on perception over substance has for green marketing specifically. If the goal of the conventional marketer is to create a perception in the mind of the consumer—rather than match the consumer to something of real value—then the goal of the green marketer must be to create a perception of socio-environmental value in the mind of the consumer—regardless of whether that socio-environmental value truly exists in the thing being marketed.

This presents an inherent contradiction: if green means socio-environmental value, but marketing means perception over value, how can green marketing legitimately exist?

I believe it can, but I'm wondering if it hinges on changing the definition of marketing to one that moves beyond creating a mere perception in the mind of the consumer. If we accept that the marketer's job is to encourage the exchange of money for value, maybe it becomes an issue of equalizing that exchange. In other words, marketers have sacrificed measurable, demonstrable value and replaced it with smoke and mirrors—because it's a hell of a lot easier than being accountable for the crap you're marketing.

But if we refuse that allowance and instead require marketers to be able to measurably demonstrate the value of what they're marketing, all of a sudden we've created a more equitable exchange (which is what the whole thing is supposed to be anyway).

This would make green marketing a "simple" matter of marketing stuff with demonstrable socio-environmental value. To make this real, of course, businesses would have to give marketers a vested interest in operations and product/service development—so that the marketer is ultimately accountable for the thing s/he is marketing. Easier said than done of course, because nobody seems to want any accountability these days.

In the book Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, the authors call for company-wide cultural change in order to develop products and services with real value:

"The team for creating meaningful experiences should not consist solely of any one profession but should integrate representation of the company's designers, researchers, developers, marketers, and senior executives at a minimum. The right team represents each of these functions and synchronizes their collaboration toward a shared outcome. Rather than one department or function "owning" innovation, the team owns the overall design vision and ensures that its delivery is consistently coordinated across the company...This ability to foster cross-boundary collaboration and to recognize that every major department has a role to play is critical to designing meaningful experiences because it heightens the likelihood that all customer touch points of the experience will be cohesive and consistent. Pursuing this type of collaboration also helps ensure more internal buy-in of the process and its results, typically accelerating development and increasing the intensity of everyone's participation." (Emphasis mine.)

The net effect of this cross-collaborative approach—in addition to the increased buy-in from marketers among other company players—is increased buy-in from customers as well. In other words, real value benefits more people, and more deeply, than smoke and mirrors. Unless the business sector recognizes this en masse, the green movement—and green marketing along with it—will spin its wheels.


I'd love to know what you think about all this. As I mentioned, this post is really a stream-of-consciousness lifted from my Real Green notes. It's a huge subject, but one that needs to be tackled if anything substantial is going to change in the world of business, marketing, and green. what say you?