Sarah Carter - Negotiated Projects by Sarah Carter

Negotiated project outcomes

brand extension that reinforces and enriches the brand

Creating a brand that challenges corporate environmental claims

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As consumers become more eco-conscious, companies will go to ever greater lengths to present themselves as environmentally friendly. Some make exaggerated or absurd claims, other’s resort to downright lies. This sinister trend has created buzzwords galore but is it possible for a company to be truly ethical? In a world in which all that is alternative is sold as soon as it appears, where any innovation or subversion is immediately adopted by faceless corporations, is it possible for us to be truly apart of what we believe to be good? Or are brands claiming the green culture, changing it and reselling it to us as if it were original?

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As more and more customers demand environmental responsibility from companies, few large corporations with any sort of public profile now dare to enter the marketplace without a blizzard of sustainability audits and low-carbon-emissions targets. But that being so, the risk of being conned by slick corporate "greenwash" has never been greater. This book explores and exposes a worrying abundance of case studies. Even the most innocent of brands fall into the inevitable falsity of greenwash.

Flamingo An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fullam Palace Road. Hammersmith, London W6 8JB Flamingo is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Limited Published by Flamingo 2009 Copywrite ÂŠ Fred Pearec 2009 9 8 7 6 The right of Fred Pearce to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copywrite, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ISBN 0 645 8463 6 Designed by Sarah Carter Set In Helvetica Printed in Great Britian by Scotprint

Fred Pearce has written about business and marketing techniques for seven years as a correspondent and columnist for The Guardian in London. His work has appeared in newspapers worldwide, including The New York Times, The

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wall Street Journal and The Independent. Pearce now specialises in environmental publications and is the author of The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

He holds degrees in business from Cambridge University and in economics and environmentalism from American University in Washington.

FOREWORD

1.The Birth of the Brand The Triumph of Identity Marketing

Though the words are often used interchangeably, branding and advertising are not the same process. Advertising any given product is only one part of brandingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grand plan, as are sponsorship and logo licensing. Think of the brand as the core meaning of the modern corporation, and of the advertisement as one vehicle used to convey that meaning to the world. The first mass-marketing campaigns, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, had more to do with advertising than with branding as we understand it today. Faced with a range of recently invented products - the radio, phonograph, car, light bulb and so on - advertisers had more pressing tasks than creating a brand iden-

I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motorbicylces, chopping down posters at the dark of moon in the name of good citizenship. - David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy and Mather advertising agency, in confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963

tity for any given corporation; first, they had to change the way people lived their lives. Ads had to inform consumers about the existence of some new invention, then convince them that their lives would be better if they used, for example, cars instead of wagons, telephones instead of mail and electric light instead of oil lamps. Many of these new products bore brand names. These products were themselves news; that was almost advertisement enough. The first brand-based products appeared at around the same time as the invention-based ads, largely because of another relatively recent innovation: the factory. When goods began to be produced in factories, not only were entirely new products being introduced but old products - even basic staples - were appearing in strikingly new forms. What made early branding efforts different was that the market was now being flooded with uniform mass-produced products that were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Competitive branding became a necessity of the machine age - within a context of manufactured sameness, image-based difference had to be manufactured along with the product.

The astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multi-national corporations over the last fifteen years can be traced back to a single idea - that successful corporations must produce brands, instead of products. Until that time, although it was understood in the corporate world that bolstering oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brand name was important, the primary concern of every solid manufacturer was the production of goods. This idea was the very gospel of the machine age. An editorial that appeared in Fortune magazine in 1938, for instance, argued that the reason the American economy had yet to recover from the Depression was that America had lost sight of the importance of making things. This is the proposition that the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things; that the more things it makes the bigger will be the income, whether dollar or real; and hence that the key to those lost recuperative powers lies . . . in the factory where the lathes and the drills and the fires and the hammers are. It is in the factory and on the land and under the land that purchasing power originates. And for the longest time, the making of things remained, at least in principle, the heart of all industrialized

Naomi Klein, journalist, columnist and author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and No Logo:Taking Aim at The Brand Bullies.

economies. But by the eighties, pushed along by that decadeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recession, some of the most powerful manufacturers in the world had begun to falter. A consensus emerged that corporations were bloated, oversized; they owned

3. The Green Claim Jumping on the Green Brand Wagon

Back in the days of no-holds-barred advertising by Madison Avenueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finest, anything went. Drinking alcohol made you sexy, smoking cigarettes was good for your lungs and every washing powder contained a magic ingredient that made your whites super-white. And guess what? Those days are back - David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy and Mather advertising agency, in confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963

THE TRUTH BEHIND CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTALISM

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The great green swindle 17/11/08 As consumers become more eco-conscious, companies will go to ever greater lengths to present themselves as environmentally friendly. Some make exaggerated or absurd claims, others resort to downright lies. The green claims coming from corporations can be absurdly general. Nearly everything we buy these days seems to be "sustainably sourced" or "environmentally friendly"... >> .....................................................................

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THE TRUTH BEHIND CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTALISM

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SUBSCRIBE TO HERE ARE INNOCENT REALLY INNOCENT? Innocent teaming up with McDonalds - a conflict of interest?

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Greenwash: Driven mad by toyota’s carbon claims Nov 13 2008: A car that could one day clean the air as it drives it not what it seems. It's a classic case of highly selective statistics >> ..................................................................... The slippery business of palm oil

Top 10 Greenwashers Did shell rank the highest in our top 10 corporate nasties?

Official Merchandise Green branded products - spread the word of Green.

Nov 6 2008: Palm oil is used in a third of all foods. But can it ever be produced without causing environmental devastation as some big companies are promising? >> ..................................................................... Time to bury the clean coal myth Oct 30 2008: How energy companies and governments are trying to rebrand coal as a clean fuel of the future despite the evidence >> ..................................................................... The great green electricity con

Could global warming cause a mini ice-age? This video shows a time lapse of a possible ice-age... In the early 1900s, near the Berezovka river in Ukraine, frozen Woolly Mammoths were found with half chewed food still in their mouths, and more food undigested in their stomachs. Since then, scientists have been debating and speculating about what terrible environmental scenario could have flash frozen Woolly Mammoths so quickly.

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Oct 23 2008: In his first of his weekly Greenwash columns, Fred Pearce finds that "green" electricity tariffs are often far from what they seem >>

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GUILTY?

Profits are still all about fossil fuels

Innocent team up with McDoanlds

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Innocent smoothies have launched a controversial trial in McDonalds outlets in an attempt to reach children where there isn’t much healthy consumer choice. This out of characters move has already tarnished their squeaky clean brand image...

The latest debates from this months top corporate related news. Shell and BP announce more investment in the controversial Canadian tar sands project, Primark are targeted in 3 UK cities by anti-sweatshop protestors and BT talk aload of

THE FUTURE

22 GREENWASH

In today’s world of changing consumerist attitudes, what does the future hold for branding? Branding is infact a necessity, it gives the consumer a choice. However, have the big corporate nasties spoilt consumer trust for the honest brands out there?

A lowdown on the history of Greenwashing. How, when and why did it begin as a brand tool? Who are the companies most guilty of claiming false green credentials? What companies can we really trust? Is it ever possible for a company to be 100% good?

26 GR££N | NOVEMBER 2008 | 03

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