Sustainability
Marketing Guide
How to make your green claims honest, authentic and effective.
What's the damage?
Because of its social and ethical implications, colourwashing of any kind – whitewashing, rainbow-washing, greenwashing, etc. – is more than a problematic commercial tactic.
For one thing, colourwashing creates the illusion that real progress is being made. So, at the very least, it undermines any urgency driving genuine action.
And by claiming allyship with a cause, these businesses lead customers to believe that they’re supporting that movement by extension. Little do they know, the support is purely superficial, meaning the business is reaping far more benefit than the cause. In some cases, it can actually be detrimental to said cause.
[.rich-text-h5]The longer companies devote more of their energy to looking green than acting green, the further we get from real, positive change, and the closer we get to environmental catastrophe.[.rich-text-h5]
Take Volkswagen for example. In the 80s, the company started marketing their cars as low-emissions and eco-friendly – claiming that they had created a clean Diesel vehicle. In reality, they were cheating their emissions tests with a hidden device that could tell when the vehicle was undergoing a test and change its usage accordingly. They were eventually exposed by the EPA who found that their engines were emitting nitrogen oxide pollutants up to 40 times over the allowed limit in the US.
And that’s the real danger with greenwashing. The cost of doing business is, to put it frankly, life on this planet. Research shows that 40% of green claims made online could be misleading. And while they’re not always as brazen as Volkswagen, they feed into a distorted commercial ecosystem – one that makes the environmentally responsible option impossible to find.
[.display-block][.rich-text-h5]Research shows that [.rich-text-h5][.rich-text-h4]40%[.rich-text-h4][.rich-text-h5] of green claims online could be misleading.[.rich-text-h5][.display-block]
Source: A CMA co-ordinated global review
And this is devastating news considering climate impacts are already more severe and widespread than expected. And even limiting global warming to 1.5°C – the global target set out in the Paris Agreement – won’t be enough to avoid some parts of the world becoming unhabitable.