Greenwash
When something is popular, a company can capitalize on it. The cheapest way to do so is to change the way the product is marketed so that it appeals to current trends.
If this involves changing nothing about the product, or the process used to create the product, it’s just a fairy-tale.
Now, the marketing might be true. If it’s popular to be environmental, and someone is selling a bicycle, then promoting the environmental aspects of bicycling instead of driving a car makes sense. It’s smart, responsible marketing.
When things get less smart and less responsible is when marketers get tricky.
For example, the manufacturer may take steps to reduce costs in making a product. They could then make a marketing claim that the product is now greener. However, if they have only done so to save money, but have actually created a poorer quality product, one that would then be disposed of even sooner, then clearly the net effect on the environment is worse, not better.
Being green usually evokes a set of values in the minds and hearts of people. An idea of doing less harm, or no harm to the environment.
Greenwashing is when a marketing company uses that idea to play on our heartstrings and tries to “incentivize” us to buy that product, when in fact there is no drive within a company to work towards any of those ideals.
Let this be made very clear, the essence of greenwashing is
to use your environmental guilt to steal your money.
What can I do?
The most important thing is decide what’s important to you, learn everything you can about it, and make your purchasing decisions based on that research. Find out what other people are saying about the environmental effects of a company or product. We can’t all be experts manufacturing and the environment, but we can get informed and involved as
much as possible.
Greenwash Logo?
There’s another tool we can use: Marketing & Branding!
Greenwashing needs a logo, so people can make their own culture jamming ads, to reveal the worst greenwashing offenders.
It’s hard to educate people, but marketing learning a long time ago that people respond to pictures and symbols.
The greenwashing logo on this page can be used to stick onto ads or anywhere to let people know the real-deal.
It’s a combination of the Recycling logo and an Army logo for neurotoxins. The idea is to show that greenwashing is like a form of brainwashing. It’s toxic to your thoughts about shopping and the environment.
So go ahead, print a bunch out, make them into stickers, and put them on ads for offensively deceptive environmental marketing.
Or “photoshop” them into spoof ads and upload them to the internet. In fact, send some here, and it’ll be posted on The Flytrap Gear Wiki.
Why not use the tools of marketing against greenwashing? If these tools didn’t work, big marketing companies wouldn’t use logos and brands, and big businesses wouldn’t hire them!
Plus, logos are fun :)
