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Pretty green lies /
What are the dangers of greenwashing? Good-Loop convened a panel that included broadcaster and adventurer Ben Fogle to find out.
Greenwashing – using misleading or partial claims to make a brand seem more environmentally friendly – is on the rise.
As more people claim to want to shop sustainably, more brands are using advertising to tout their green credentials – but not all of them are living up to the promise of their promotions.
A poll earlier this year by the Chartered Institute of Marketing showed 45% of respondent marketers felt under pressure to communicate companies’ sustainability credentials, while 49% said they were wary of working on sustainability campaigns because of the fear of being accused of greenwashing.
Good-Loop, a global ad tech for good platform that converts people’s attention into charitable donations and helps brands measure and offset the carbon footprint of their digital advertising, convened a panel at the Contagious villa on 21 June to discuss how brands can ensure that they walk the talk.
Katrina Stirton-Dodd, editor-at-large at Contagious, moderated the panel and began by asking Good-Loop’s founder and CEO, Amy Williams, about the size of the greenwashing problem.
‘Greenwashing is a problem when it’s successful and when it’s unsuccessful,’ said Williams. ‘When it’s successful it creates complacency and can delay progress [...] and when it’s unsuccessful it can confuse consumers [...] and cause people to disengage, which is really dangerous.’
But as much as confusion and complacency can cause people to disengage, so can the opposite. Broadcaster and United Nations wilderness patron Ben Fogle told the audience that it’s unhelpful to hold people to unrealistic expectations of sustainability.
‘We need to change this narrative from this assumption that if you put up your green flag [...] there's an assumption that you must be 100% perfect. My encouragement to people that I meet, is, “why don't we try to encourage 100% of us to make a 10% change to our lives, rather than this insistence that those that those 10% of us who are eco-warriors make a 100% change to our lives?”’
‘You're not going to get it perfectly right from the start,’ agreed Firdaous El Honsali, the global vice president for Dove at Unilever, ‘but you need to aim at getting it right at some point.’
El Honsali’s advice for brands to avoid greenwashing was to be transparent with consumers, think about actions first, and then to ensure that those actions make the largest possible impact.
It was this approach, said El Honsali, that led Dove in 2018 to make all of its product bottles in Europe and North America out of 100% recycled plastic, rather than take part in one-time stunts or limited-edition promotions.
On the question of how consumers respond to sustainable marketing, fashion researcher and psychologist Shakaila Forbes-Bell, warned against treating them as a ‘monolith’ and said brands must instead think about ‘the different motivations that people have to be sustainable.’
‘Psychological research has split this out,’ explained Forbes-Bell. ‘There's people with intrinsic motivation [...] who generally just feel good about being sustainable [...] But there's people who have extrinsic motivations: they're being sustainable because it makes them feel popular, makes them feel that they belong. There's also introjected motivation – people who engage in sustainability in order to avoid feelings of guilt [and] boost their self esteem.
‘So there needs to be an awareness of how communication can reach all of these consumers with these different motivations, so that it can really cut through.’
Forbes-Bell also advised brands to speak to individuals, because ‘a lot of the time people are generally thinking about themselves.’
But as much as brands have to learn about sustainability, there is much they must unlearn, too, according to Williams.
‘Marketers are inherently taught to focus on benefits. We big-up the positives and we play down the negatives,’ she said. ‘We professionally roll turds in glitter – and glitter is famously bad for the planet. So we need to be a little bit less focused on creating narrative and a little bit more focused on communicating honest progress.
‘The other thing our industry does a lot is focus on differentiation – how are you going to win against your competitors? – and this is a space where nobody can win. There is no owning sustainability, there is no carving out a brand niche. It's not a branding exercise. It's a survival exercise.’
Asked what one thing people could do right away to tackle greenwashing, Fogle concluded: ‘Become aware of cause and effect. I first had that when I lived on an island for a year, I saw firsthand the impact we were having on our immediate environment. So the advice to you, if you work in the fashion industry, go to a land refill site, see where those clothes are being dumped. If you work in the food industry, go and have a look at the food waste and where that is going.
‘Go with your eyes wide open, and try to learn and experience firsthand.’
To find out more about Good-Loop’s green media technology, which helps advertisers track and offset the carbon emissions generated by their digital marketing, click here.
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