Green Marketing Strategies
The recent debacle in the Gulf of Mexico has raised serious concerns about the future of green marketing strategies. BP was often cited as a leader in green marketing and as we watch the corporation struggle to recover from the disaster, it is perhaps a good time to reflect on what this means to the practice and philosophy of Green Marketing,. A few months ago there was an interesting article in Entrepreneur Magazine about this issue. The article was titled Green Fallout and the author, Jason Daley, correctly stated that “the era when green marketing meant sunny logos and big environmental claims is over. Just ask BP.” Green Marketing strategies will never be the same
Six years ago I used to teach a case study about how BP attempted to shift their brand from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum. This seemed like an excellent example of green marketing strategies, and I regularly contrasted BP’s green efforts with those of Exxon who have generally represented the bogey man to most environmentalists in Europe. Now the tables have turned, and Greenpeace protestors demonstrated against BP in London not Exxon. As you can see from this headline, Activists have shut down some of their gas stations BP have lost a big PR battle as the faced a highly visible and popular protest against their negligence.
So how did it all go so horribly wrong? Was it simply that BP had the misfortune to be the corporation in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were responsible for this tragedy rather than their competitors? Quite possibly, as all the major Oil corporations are vulnerable – especially those engaged in deep sea production. The loss of life and appalling consequences to the economy and environment of the Gulf communities has dominated the news for the last 3 months, and destroyed BP’s carefully cultivated image in one terrible stroke.
All the beautiful ads and clever green marketing strategies and green branding mean nothing now. As Jason Daley wrote on the Entrepreneur website “when the company’s Deepwater Horizon offshore well began blowing tens of thousands of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico each day, no outlay of advertising dollars could change the cold, hard facts: The company that had cultivated the greenest image in the oil industry still derived more than 99 percent of its revenues from gas and petroleum. For consumers who had been fed the image of the company out tending windmills, the revelation was almost as shocking as the images of oil-soaked pelicans.”
The facts are relevant to all green marketing strategies and green branding campaigns. They are the ultimate criteria by which we must evaluate the substance and impact of green marketing strategies as well as green products. So perhaps now is a good time for green marketing professionals to focus more attention on being authentic and honest, and less time on the “smoke and mirrors” that characterizes so much of their green marketing strategies. We all have to “get real”, to act responsibly and redefine what green marketing is and what it is not. No longer can we maintain the illusion that green marketing is perfectly fine if it’s primary purpose is to sell more products for corporations that are causing enormous damage to the environment in most of their other activities. New Green Marketing Strategies need to take a more systemic approach and take into account the big picture
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