Green Marketing: Is it Time to Start Your Campaign?

For years, green marketing has been met with a healthy mix of skepticism, scandals, and successes. The concept first rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s as the movement for environmental protections gained traction. Once businesses realized that there may be room for profits in showing their corporate responsibility or in providing profits that let activists feel good about themselves, they started to get on the “green” train. However, when companies first jumped on board with the trend they didn’t have a strong point of reference to see if these tactics would be profitable or not. Since then there has been a range of different approaches trying to tap into the green marketplace from a wide range of companies including those whose leadership takes their commitment to the planet seriously to those who just slap green labeling on old products and call it environmentally friendly. 

What really separates the success stories from the scandals is the amount of investment that a company has in going green, and that doesn’t just mean an investment of funds. The new mentality has to be rooted through your organization and not just be a way to offset having extremely unsustainable everyday practices. With green marketing comes the ever feared “Green Washing”: giving your consumers the impression that you are an environmentally conscientious company when you really have no business calling yourself such. Consumers are more careful than ever when researching the ethics behind the marketing, and if you’re found out, you’re more likely to experience a drop off in sales than sudden profits. So what does this mean for you, a business executive, in a world where consumers are calling for corporate social responsibility? That all depends on you and your company’s values and how much you are willing to invest in change. 

1. Rothy’s: A company that produces women’s footwear that was produced using recycled plastic water bottles
2. Lush: A company that creates bath and body products using recycled, recyclable, or non-existent packaging and avoids material components in their products known to cause negative environmental impacts
3. REI: A wilderness experience supplies retailer that makes a pointed effort to have their employees volunteer often to reduce their impact on the planet

Each of these companies has implemented different, yet effective approaches to improving their impact on the planet from having their entire product suite be beneficial, to their packaging, to their staff. The presence of these companies and their continued success make a case for there being a market for green marketing. In addition to this, they also provide good examples of the different tiers of approaches you could take when implementing a green marketing campaign in your company.

When the concept of Green Marketing first launched, there wasn’t any research that showed if it produced a good return on investment or not. Since then, many reports have been produced that give more tangible descriptions of the effectiveness of launching one of these campaigns. One such journal article published in 2012 saw researchers developing a questionnaire to investigate how integrating “green” products, practices, and marketing campaigns impacted business outcomes. The survey questioned marketing contacts within corporations as to what green strategies had been implemented, their current financial and market status, what the risk aversion within the company looked like, and if there was any current funding surplus. Based on their findings the authors concluded that all green strategies appeared to increase a company’s ROA, however different strategies had different effects and not all green tactics produced uniform results. Some of the significant findings also showed that money freed up by government incentives was able to create good opportunities for investing in efforts that proved to be successful. Having these slack resources are a good way to jumpstart a move into green marketing 

campaigns that can either help you develop new product lines or to change your operations providers to ones that are more sustainably. Any of these changes have the potential to grow your revenue or to reduce your overall expenses, so even if you aren’t making a green product to sell ad advertise, it can still be profitable to switch to greener practices.

If you are starting to weigh the benefits and detriments of moving into greener practices, you are bound to come across the topic of Greenwashing rather quickly. Since the inception of green marketing, greenwashing has been an omnipresent counterpart to the benefits of the practice. Large corporations have been coming under one after the other for years for making a variety of misleading claims about the environmental benefits of their products to consumers. In 2013 the Danish consumer ombudsman came after Coca Cola for the heavy green imagery used on their PlantBottle packaging insisting that there were not nearly as many benefits that came from using them as were implied. Another company known amongst environmental supporters as a giant responsible for immense amounts of deforestation and aquifer draining, Nestle, continues to advertise is products as being good for the environment, fair trade, and very conscientiously sustainable. These sorts of actions and campaigns have done nothing but bring bad press to their brands, and drag their reputation in the eyes of the consumers. However, while these companies have massive teams of staff to review and judge these claims, smaller companies don’t have access to such resources, and they are the ones who make infractions more regularly according to green marketing and eco-innovation consultant Jacquelyn Ottman. In an article published in the International Business Times, a reporter was given the opportunity to chat with Ottman following the publication of her coauthored report from AdvertisingAge “How to Make Credible Green Marketing Claims,” that works to make the new FTC guidelines easier to understand for marketing teams without a legal background. The Federal Trade Commission guidelines which were updated in 2012, have been known for being difficult to understand and adhere to when a company doesn’t have sufficient resources to interpret the rules in their context. To really avoid making misleading claims, it’s advised to really drill down and analyze what terminology your company is blasting out. What are the actual benefits of your product for the environment? What tangible actions are your employees taking to support the planet? Are you trying to cover up negative actions you may have taken in the past? What have you done to acknowledge these actions? All of this and the additional content found in Ottman’s report can help to keep your company from making misleading or unsubstantiated claims in your marketing efforts.