Silly Gorilla Ruins Marketing

We have a new column called Silly Gorilla Ruins Marketing. Today we'll talk about green products. If you have no idea what is a green product spoiler alter -- marketing people don't either 🙃

So here's what I found. One of the most recent articles researching the green product definition found that there is no universal and clearly defined green product definition. Even though the term "green" dates back to the emergence of green marketing in the late 1980s the green product definition is still inconsistent throughout academic literature and across industries.

For example, one of the more popular articles within the green marketing field has defined green products as “products that consumers perceive to be environmentally friendly”. Yep, without any regard as to how the products should be evaluated as green or whether the perceptions of consumers must match objective facts of sustainability. It was found that in most academic literature terms such as “ecological product”, “eco-friendly product”, “eco-product”, “environmentally-friendly product”, “environmental product”, “green product”, “sustainable product”, “pro-environmental” have all been used interchangeably (full article).

Green vs. Sustainable

One important misconception is that what is "green" is sustainable. A way to remember that it is not is to think that sustainable is what Greta Thunberg would want you to aim for and green is what most marketing is aiming for.

Due to the lack of agreement as to what constitutes a green product, the terms "green" and "sustainable" have been mistakenly used as synonyms. These misconceptions in literature also added to the fifty shades of green we now choose from when shopping.

Sustainability (my favorite) is referencing to the Triple Bottom Line coined by John Elkington in 1998. Elkington explains environmental sustainability as one of the three pillars of the Triple bottom line and considers the whole product life-cycle impact on the environment.

And that's the thing about "green". It allows for small incremental changes at any point in the product life-cycle “while leaving the larger systems within which these products are embedded” relatively intact (full article). The green products we see in the market today, focus mostly on individual environmentally friendly product attributes. This does not make green products truly sustainable, only less harmful to the environment. So if the processes of a value chain don't address the impact on the environment that recycled polyester jacket ain't shit, dear H&M. It's not enough 😉

The newest consumer trends report by the Euromonitor reports that “conscious consumerism” and “plastic-free” are two of the most important trends for nowadays shopping cultures. Now more than ever, marketers will try to capitalize on consumer trends by making minuscular changes to their products. Usually, these changes don't address the real problems, such as the need to innovate and invest in smarter production and sourcing practices.

Green products are used as a low-hanging fruit which reconciles the need for at least some environmentally-friendly action without actually solving any problems. Greenwashing can create uncertainty about the necessity of environmentally friendly actions but we can reduce, reuse recycle, and make sure we demand businesses for some real change.