It’s time to redefine Green Marketing

As we watch BP implode it is the ideal time to reflect on what this means to the practice and methodology of Green Marketing, and there is a good article in this month’s Entrepreneur Magazine about this very question. The article is called Green Fallout and the author, Jason Daley, rightly claims that “the era when green marketing meant sunny logos and big environmental claims is over. Just ask BP.”

I remember when I used to teach a case study about how BP tried to change their brand from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum. This seemed like an excellent green marketing strategy and, as a Brit myself, I was quite proud to contrast BP’s green efforts with those of Exxon who have always been the number one enemy of  environmentalists in Europe. Today, however, Greenpeace are demonstrating against BP in London not Exxon. Activists have shut down some of their gas stations in a highly visible and popular protest against this corporate “villain”‘s negligence.

So how has it all gone so horribly wrong? Is it simply that BP  had the misfortune to be the corporation associated with 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 branding mean nothing now. As Jason Daley writes 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.”

These “cold,hard facts” are relevant to all green marketing and green branding campaigns. They are the ultimate criteria for evaluating the substance and impact of so-called green products. So maybe it is time for green marketing professionals to focus more of their attention on being authentic and honest, and spend less time on the “smoke and mirrors” that characterizes so much of their work. Maybe it is time to get real, to act responsibly and redefine what green marketing is. We cannot continue with the illusion that green marketing is OK if it’s primary purpose is to sell more products for businesses that are doing so much damage to the environment in all their other activities.

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