In between the stuffings this Thanksgiving holiday, I spied a number of green marketing initiatives. Here’s a quick taste of the good, the questionable and the simply foolish.
The Good
Ford has made a number of small but significant moves in the last few months to prepare for a greener future. One of the more interesting ones was their acquisition of a company that can help turn paint fumes into energy. Talk about making lemonade out of lemons, this is indeed a tasty technology if it works as promised. Here’s what they said about in on Environmental Leader:
Ford Motor Co. is purchasing a fuel cell from FuelCell Energy
for its Oakville, Ontario, facility
to reduce paint solvent from automotive painting operations by
turning its fumes into 300 kilowatts of electricity. The Direct
FuelCell unit turns Volatile Organic Compounds that emanate from
enamel base paints and clear coat finishes used in manufacturing
into fuel.
The Questionable
Aveda announced recently that like other Estee Lauder-owned brands, it would focus on green messaging in 2008. Frankly, I’m just not sure what Aveda is doing to be green other than talking about it. Feels like a basic case of greenwashing with a touch of bandwagon jumping. I look forward to being proved wrong about this. The Adweek article noted:
Suzanne Dawson, vp of global marketing at Aveda, cited research
showing eight of 10 Americans now believe that it is important to
buy products from green companies. “We’ve always talked about our
environmental work to the trade, but now it’s time to start shouting
it to a larger audience,” she said. The new campaign, themed “Beauty
is as beauty does,” will switch focus to a new green issue every six
to eight weeks in both print advertising and in-store displays
across the company’s 8,000 salons.
The Simply Foolish
If you thought you were doing good by dropping off your tired electronics gear off at at recycling center, think again. CNN reports that much of this gear ends up in third world backyards. Clearly electronics manufacturers need to step up their efforts to recycle their products properly before they are legislated to do just that. I wrote about Sony’s recycling initiative a few months ago. Here’s a bit from the CNN article:
activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000
tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year
ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and
Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to
extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and
the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.
The bottom line is that you can’t simply talk about being green. You actually have to do something. Something meaningful and preferably across all aspects of your business. The risk of being exposed as a greenwasher is significant. Toyota is under fire right now for touting its greenness in advertising while lobbying Congress for less restrictive mileage (CAFE) targets. A recent Financial Times article noted that Business Schools around the world were waking up to green as a means of gaining competitive advantage and saving the planet.
Javier Carrillo, director of the school’s Centre for EcoIntelligent
Management, argues that…”Companies have tended to see spending on
sustainability as a burden. However, this reactionary view is slowly
disappearing and is being replaced by the idea that improved
competitiveness and sustainability can go hand in hand,” he says.
“Service companies – and this includes business schools – tend to be
those of least environmental impact,” he says. “But that’s not to
say that they couldn’t raise their game.”
Hopefully this message will permeate the business infrastructure as these freshly minted and green MBA’s hit the real world. Perhaps MBA will soon stand for More Business Acumen instead of Mediocre but Arrogant.
Feel free to add your own acronym.