Most companies and businesses are making the move to ‘Green’. Some are born green: Innovative business created to support sustainability e.g.: Innocent Drinks or The Body Shop. Some become green: Offering new products and reviewing the fundamentals of their business e.g.: Toyota. And some have greenness thrust upon them: Responding to market pressure and consumer demand, these companies use CSR and PR to present their green intentions, which often amounts to no more than ‘greenwashing’.
We attended the Green Marketing NPD conference here in London a couple of weeks ago. Many of the companies presenting acknowledged that they had to change at a very fundamental level; reinventing their production lines, looking at their waste, reviewing how their products were packaged and marketed. Reassuringly, in more than one case, the products that were the result of these changes actually cost less to develop, produce and market.
Abbey Bank for example have developed a new green loan, which they are marketing and packaging using only sustainable materials – printing on recycled paper for example. Encouragingly, this initiative is forcing a company-wide review of marketing collateral, across all their products. This change is often a result of good intentions as well as customer pressure. More and more consumers are demanding greener products and information. But what are they doing with it?
Another observation made by many of the companies presenting was the very obvious Intention-Action Gap present in their customer’s behaviour. Most claim that they would like to do something, but this seems dependent on how much they are expected to change their comfortable patterns of behaviour.
So does the responsibility of change lie with the companies? Should they offer green products only? Reinvent their production and review their supply chain and simply stop offering plastic bags at the checkout counter?
If the consumer is not prepared to do it themselves, should they have greenness thrust upon them?
