You Gotta be Careful When Making Green Marketing Claims

When TerraChoice's Six Sins of Greenwashing report was released last fall, it brought with it whispers of green fatigue, and raised the specter of Big Business Bullsh--. Could it be that corporate co-opting of sustainability had led to a market full of misleading claims and outright lies? Go figure. But as the public's sustainability discussion moves along, governments are getting involved in an attempt to curb the marketplace. So if you're one of the many companies offering up green claims, it's in your best interest to start paying attention to what you can and can't (or should and shouldn't) say.



The Six Sins of Greenwashing report analyzed over a thousand green claims made by businesses, and found that only one was legitimately honest. The rest committed one or more of the following sins:

1. The sin of hidden trade-offs
   Focusing on one environmental benefit while ignoring other essential issues.
   
2. The sin of no proof
   Lack of third-party auditing to back up any claims.
   
3. The sin of vagueness
   Using words and claims with broad or multiple meanings, resulting in an essentially meaningless claim.
   
4. The sin of irrelevance
   Making a green claim that is already inherent to the product or service being marketed, as though there's something special about this one.
   
5. The sin of fibbing
   Outright lying.
   
6. The sin of the lesser of two evils
   Making claims within a product category that is inherently environmentally damaging (i.e. no matter what green claims are made, the product is by definition bad for the environment).
   

The PDF report (also available here) offers recommendations for both marketers and consumers. The ultimate goal is to prevent consumers from becoming so jaded by misleading claims that they give up on green or sustainable businesses altogether.

In addition to TerraChoice's recommendations, both the U.S. and Canada have issued their own guidelines. Our neighbors to the north go beyond the legal requirements for Canadian labeling compliance, offering fairly in-depth recommendations for businesses who make particular environmental claims. The PDF report is a useful tool no matter what country your business operates in.

Our own government also offers guidelines for environmental claims in advertising. Regulated by the FTC, the bulk of these guidelines are legally binding, although I haven't done the legwork to determine just how frequently and under what circumstances these laws are enforced (keeping up with the marketplace's now ubiquitous green claims would certainly pose a challenge for any organization). An even more detailed guide is available on their site, but be aware that the FTC is in the process of updating these in response to the rise of the green marketplace.

Addressing Your Own Green Claims

Though boning up on the federal regulations is a must for any business flirting with green claims, it's not just the government's ire you need to worry about. Speaking the truth is essential to ensure credibility among your own customers. So, once you understand what you can and can't say, you ought to take a look at what you already are saying. At the very least, you need to ask yourself:

• Are my claims specific?
• Are my claims clear and understandable?
• Are my claims verifiable by a reputable third party?
• Do my claims accurately represent the purchasing issues a customer might face when buying my product?
• Do my claims provide enough context for the customer to make an informed decision?

And remember, if you're not sure you can back up what you claim, don't bother saying it. For more information about gauging just how green a business is, see The Case-by-Case for Sustainability.

Headline Hilarity, or Giving the Vag the Respect It Deserves

The SF Chron is often accused of being a rag, and headlines like this one don't help dispel such a reputation. The play on words shown below is, while hilarious, a little too much personal info for my taste. Nothing's funnier than a nice play on words, but please mind the images you conjure up!



I also feel the need to point out that such a headline seems to reinforce the lack of respect given this particular body part. The headline manages to completely ignore the actual point of the article: Eve Ensler's visit to the Bay Area in support of V-Day, a campaign to stop violence against women. The sad truth, too, is that a headline about an anti-violence campaign is likely to draw in far fewer readers than the cheap joke that ran.

Six Word Memoirs Summarize It All

My sis sent me a link yesterday to Six Word Memoirs, a new book from Smith Magazine. It's exactly what you'd think: a collection of memoirs only six words long. Have you ever attempted to summarize your life in six words only? It ain't easy.

Go ahead, try it.

Like many of the examples on an NPR feature about the book, my initial attempts tended toward the philosophical:

The world confuses me – always will.
Wonder when I’ll figure it out?
Fear is powerful—love more so.

These kinds of creative exercises are important to any writer, because they make you focus on word choice, on intention, on voice. They force you to decide what exactly you're trying to accomplish - am I summing up my entire life, or just my views on life? Should I take a single moment and spend six words describing it and what it meant to me in the grand scheme of my more-than-six-word life? This was the list I ended up with:

The memories are mixed – mostly good.
Angry early on; I’m calmer now.
Over time, life became about love.
Never thought I’d be a writer!
My family is nuts – me, too.
Boston born...California bound...home soon?
I don’t see my nephew enough.

I found that with just six words to spare, there's room to convey only a single emotion, or expose only a single moment or sentiment. You have to choose between silly or solemn. I suppose that's fitting, like life.

How does your six word memoir read?

Inside the Mind of a Type Designer

I am a sucker for process. I drool at the thought of reams of artist sketches, I love the behind-the-scenes letters sometimes exhibited in museums to accompany a given collection, and I absolutely, positively get a kick out of reading the how of a what. So I owe a big thanks to Kris Sowersby for exposing the shadows of his type design process to the light, for all to read.



Kris doesn't just provide a behind-the-scenes how-to. He also reveals his own personal approach to designing typefaces, and he gives us a little hint at just how much work goes into something as "mundane" as making letters. This is such a great example of how the ever-so-slightest details, imperceptible to most non-designers, are the be all and end all for those of us who spend our time making things that look nice actually work.

The Utterly Brilliant Limerick Database

Yes, I am a dork. But I have a deep love of limericks for no good reason, other than that I am a dork. Thanks to Coudal, I now have a huge (though sometimes hit-or-miss) repository to distract myself with.

From the Limerick Database:

Famous books rewritten as limericks: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
In PJs, no planet, oh poo!
What is the last earthman to do?
In despair with no tea,
he's now forced to flee
as his brain now explains 42
---

, ` & #
$ @ | + . -
8 7 6 5 4
" * _
? ; ! AS;DOFB2

(Comma tick ampersand hash,
Dollar at pipe plus dot dash.
Eight sev'n six five four,
Quote star underscore,
Question mark semi-colon bang MASH.)
---

A woman in liquor production
Owns a still of exquisite construction.
The alcohol boils
Through magnetic coils.
She says that it's "proof by induction."

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No comments from the peanut gallery!

How Word Choice Influences Behavior: The Hotel Towel Example

If you ever need to influence people's behavior, you might consider Dr. Robert Cialdini's approach. Cialdini has conducted numerous studies exploring how different types of messaging impacts the public's actual behavior. One such study focuses on those cards in your hotel bathrrom urgng you to reuse your towels. As it turns out, how those cards are worded makes a big difference in whether or not guests pay attention:

"In this series of experiments, Dr. Cialdini and his colleagues created four cards asking guests to reuse their towels. Three cards contained a pro-environment message, while the fourth informed guests that the majority of hotel guests reuse towels when asked. In rooms with the fourth card, towels were reused 34 percent more frequently." [from the Inside Influence Report [note: link broken, try the home page, emphasis added]

There are several conclusions that can be drawn from this research:

1. Word choice matters...a lot;
2. People are more likely to act (or not act) based on what they think others are doing (or not doing);
3. It is possible to realize dramatic behavior change with very low investment.
   

So the next time you're trying to get someone to do something, think carefully about how you deliver your message.

Sorted Books Project by Nina Katchadourian

This is so up my alley. Artist Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project groups titles to create a flash of meaning between texts. Each arrangement is intended to reflect the library from which the books were pulled.



I'm tempted to see what my own bookshelves say about me...

[via Swiss Miss]

How does your language define your future?

The Aymara language reverses past and future by referring to forward-occurring events using language denoting the past. Huh? Simply put, Aymara speakers do not subscribe to the same past-present-future tenses that almost the entire rest of the world does.

Just imagine what it would be like if your future depended on your past, and the only way you could communicate "will" or "want to" was to speak as though you already "had" or "did."



When we communicate with one another—be it in words, pictures, or hand gestures for that matter—we make some basic assumptions. We assume the other person is parsing our message the same way we would. We assume that the other person believes in a chronological past-present-future, connects the dots the same way we do, implicitly understands what the hell we are talking about.

But this isn't always the case and our assumptions often cause our messages to fall not on deaf ears, but simply different ears. Or eyes—let's take another example: about 10 million people in the U.S. have difficulty distinguishing red from green (a simple form of color blindness). What does that mean if you are a mapmaker and you color two neighboring countries red and green, respectively? Or if an architect uses these two colors to signify where load-bearing columns should go? These are unlikely examples, of course, but they demonstrate how imperative it is to consider our assumptions about the viewer.

While most of us don't encounter many folks like the Aymara, we still must carefully consider our messages and how we deliver them to others. Whether we're exchanging pleasantries with the coffee shop clerk in the morning, talking our way out of a speeding ticket on the freeway, or teaching surgeons how to handle a scalpel, the words and images we use to convey meaning may have a much different effect than we anticipate.

So don't let assumptions about your audience ruin your chances of communicating your message. Think about how they process information, what they value, how they speak and read and write. Just think about them and then worry about how to say what you want to say.

Are Cries Over "Eco-Fatigue" a Big Yawn?

Ahem. I just received the following email from the company that inspired my post below:

"We hope you enjoyed the very special trend briefing we sent you yesterday. If you didn't, then please pour yourself a strong cup of coffee and take another close look. It's a SPOOF. Fake. Not to be taken at face value. Even most of the sites we referred to are, well, ours—and entirely fictitious.

We thought it would be fun, just for once, to mock overzealous marketers, crass consumerism and—above all—ourselves. :-) So please don't ditch your pet, stay in ugly hotels, pollute the earth, paint your walls turquoise or start marketing to unborn babies, OK?..."

So, take my criticism of the trendwatching.com report referenced below with a large grain of salt. Dammit.



Sustainable innovation is really rolling now, and the naysayers are already crying foul. A particularly short-sighted trendwatching.com report describes consumers' growing impatience with green marketing as a cry for "authenticity."



Trend watchers, style dictators and pop culture aficionados all insist that sustainability is nothing more than a passing fad, and as such can and should be summarily dismissed. By falling into the sustainability trap, these critics complain, companies "bend over and take the fun out of robust, honest products."

This is where trendwatching.com (and the consumers they supposedly mirror), show a remarkable and unforgivable short-sightedness. Who says that sustainable products can't be "robust" and "honest," and hell, even sexy? Since when did "robust" and "honest" come to mean destructive? When companies charge a lot of money for their "insights" into consumerism, it behooves them to dig a little deeper and ask the less obvious questions.

What the trendwatching.com report fails to really identify is the underlying cause of "eco-fatigue." Consumers aren't sick of having eco-options at all; in fact, every day they're buying more "green" products and asking (no, demanding) more from their vendors. What consumers are fed up with is disingenuous marketing tactics that attempt to paint every new product and service with a greener paintbrush. They're also sick of being treated as though being informed is somehow a bad thing (which is itself a side-effect of the Bush Administration's insistence that we all just sit down and shut up).

One of the most telling lines in the report describes the eco-fatigued as being "treated like unruly infants by Al Gore and his ilk." The irony of such a knee-jerk, inaccurate depiction of this market segment just highlights the laziness of the writers/researchers. Have they really been listening to what Gore and "his ilk" are actually saying? I think, rather, they've been putting their hands over their ears, squinching their eyes real tight, and singing "Mary had a little lamb" so as not to actually have to listen to a viewpoint that might make them really think. People, it's okay to think.

I don't believe there is anything wrong with wanting to buy stuff, or have fun. Sure, there are pious, preaching "greenies" trying to shake their finger at the big, wasting consumerists. But who really gives a shit? The idea is to build consumer interest so that business must take notice. Because business and government (which are pretty much the same thing in this country), will never act in the best interest of the people unless the people demand it.

And so we talk to the people. Gore tries to light a fire, to educate. The beauty of our freedom here is that we're constitutionally granted the right to pursue happiness. But that doesn't mean we're granted the right to ignore the consequences. Because we can play head-in-the-sand all we want, but mother nature's going to catch up with us eventually.

If the eco-fatigued, those in favor of bald-faced consumerism, really want to keep consuming without thought, than more power to them. But those folks better remember that if we want to consume without limits, we all need to find a way to keep us in the stuff. Because stuff will run out, unless we start making sustainable stuff. So shut up already about green products being somehow less fun. 'Cause it ain't gonna be too much fun when your favorite nightclub starts charging $24 for a beer because the brewery is facing a shortage of hops and water.

After all, I want my beer to be cheap and delicious as much as the next girl. And if sustainability is the only way to ensure that it stays that way, quit yer whining and get sustainable. Let's try to have our beer and drink it, too.


Further Reading:
Fads, Frames and the Environment
Businesses Prep for Green Fad to Fade

How PowerPoint Took Down the Columbia Space Shuttle

I don't build PowerPoint presentations as a general rule, but not for the reasons that many of my colleagues avoid same. While many designers absolutely despise PowerPoint for its ungodly design limitations and cheesy effects that are inevitably overused by presenters, I avoid it because I think it's senseless overall.

By senseless, I mean that the information provided within a PowerPoint presentation, as well as the method of presentation itself, is better achieved through other means. That is: not only are the graphic representations allowable via PowerPoint too often ineffective, the delivery method is ineffective, and the very existence of a PowerPoint slide too often renders the human presenter ineffective, too. Therefore, all of the information contained within any given PowerPoint slideshow can and usually should be delivered through more appropriate means. What are those means? Simply, they are:

• The speaker's own words
• Printed handouts for later reference
  

Maybe, you say, if the PowerPoint slides were nicely done, they'd have more of an impact. This is true, to a finite degree. What constitutes "nicely done?" I'd include:

• Relevant content
  
• Quiet graphic elements that don't intrude on this relevant content
• Logical progression

But then you're faced with the problem of what the presenter and the audience each do with the content of each "nicely done" slide. Does the presenter read the slide verbatim? Usually—thereby negating the need for the slide in the first place. Does the audience read the slide while the presenter is talking? Usually—thereby by negating the need for the presenter.

Which leads us to: the use of an abbreviated medium such as a slide to deliver a content-rich message is inevitably damaging to the message itself. PowerPoint typically leads the speaker to reduce his message to a series of bullet points. The speaker's elaboration on each bullet point—if provided at all—is often lost to note takers, slide scanners and the spaced out. In such cases when the PowerPoint presentation is turned into a PDF file and emailed off to the audience after the presentation, all of the speaker's elaborations and nuanced points are gone, forgotten.

Edward Tufte, god of information design, goes a step further than myself:

George Orwell's classic essay 'Politics and the English Language' gets right the interplay between quality of thought and cognitive style of presentation: 'The English language becomes ugly and inaccurate because of our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.' Imagine Orwell writing about PP: 'PowerPoint becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of PowerPoint makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.'" [Ask E.T.]

Which brings me to how PowerPoint took down the Columbia Space Shuttle. Tufte is renowned for his analysis of a particular NASA PowerPoint presentation, in which he argues that the PowerPoint presentations—28 slides in total—used to assess the safety of the Columbia were inherently flawed thanks to the bulleted-list format (PowerPoint's fault) and lousy choice of language and progression (presenter's fault).

The analysis is fascinating and well worth reading in its entirety, as it describes many of the nuanced ways in which PowerPoint quietly destroys the messages it delivers. Why shoot yourself in the foot by using a medium that necessarily simplifies, omits and distorts the very thing you're trying to communicate?

McJob Security: McDonald's Fights to Change the English Language

What started as a humble roadside burger stand now reaches across the globe, an icon of American life for better or worse. And many say "worse." McDonald's has been blamed for America's obesity epidemic, for anti-labor practices and now for trying to redefine what has come to be known as the "McJob."

You know what a McJob is: dead-end, low-paying, unstimulating, unskilled. The word has been in use for nearly 20 years, and in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2001. But according to a recent Times article, Ronald and the rest of the McDonald's crew want the meaning changed to "reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding ... and offers skills that last a lifetime."

That's quite the turnaround, isn't it? And it begs the question: who controls a company's reputation? Clearly, McDonald's has invested millions of marketing dollars into building their brand. They've largely succeeded, too: they've been the top-selling quick serve chain for years and you don't get that way without convincing a few customers to spend their dollars.

But a quick glance at McDonald's marketing campaigns over the decades reveals an interesting trend. Every single marketing "theme" (as listed on the company's website) focuses on the individual customer experience. McDonald's has spent all their marketing karma, it seems, on convincing the consumer that it's all about them. This isn't a bad idea—when you're choosing a fast food restaurant, you're looking for immediate gratification at your own price point. Appealing to this consumer drive makes perfect sense.

But "marketing" doesn't happen in a vaccuum. It's not simply slogans and logos and slick brochures. Marketing has to take into account the company as a whole, and particularly the values and principles behind the product or service. But wait, you might point out, what about all those McDonald's commercials with smiling employees who seem so darn happy to be working for the multi-million dollar chain?

Like I said, marketing isn't just about the consumer-facing collateral (whether print, broadcast, online or whatever). Maybe if McDonald's spent a little more effort actually making employees happy—from the bottom up—they wouldn't have to paint a rosier-than-real picture of what it's like to work there. And then, just maybe, they wouldn't have to fight so hard against the public's entirely organic perception of the dead-end McJob.