Getting your green story straight

by Jaime Pfeffer

February 11th, 2008 in Business, Environment, Marketing

With U.S. companies jumping on the “green bandwagon” in record numbers, consumers are becoming skeptical about which businesses are truly green and which are just “greenwashing,” or pretending to be green. And rightfully so.

What if your company is not a green impostor but one of the good guys? How do you convey this sincerity to consumers? Consider these four tips.

1. Perform an environmental audit. If you are serious about your company’s environmental impact, you need to know what the company is doing right, or green, and how it can improve. And an independent audit is one of the best methods to reveal just that. Campbell-Ewald’s Garden practice can help you with a social-media audit to find out what’s really being said about your company’s environmental practices.

2. Compare yourself. Use existing environmental standards and measure the company’s practices against them. If federal standards are lacking, adopt state standards or develop your own.

3. Be honest. One of the worst ways to promote a business’s green practices is by acting like the company is “all green, all the time.” Instead, be real and transparent by focusing on the environmentally friendly practices the company actually employs, and not hiding the fact that no company, not even yours, is perfect.

4. Promote, promote, promote. Tell others — shareholders, customers, anyone that will listen — about your company’s unique environmental practices or initiatives. By some estimates, it can take up to 450 years for a printer cartridge to decompose in a landfill. But, as a printer cartridge manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard doesn’t tout this fact; rather, it publicizes pro-green initiatives like its Global Citizenship Report, highlighting its major global accomplishments on its website annually.