The Guru is Right and Wrong, Part 1: The Green Backlash

I don't often completely disagree with Seth Godin. But, I often find myself only partially agreeing with him.

Here's Part 1 of an example from his recent blog post entitled "The coming backlash over green marketing".

I agree with his main point: Too many brands are rushing to make themselves appear "green" and, in Seth's words "...devolving into short-term, often selfish come-ons. That's not going to last and it's not going to scale."

I disagree with two other points that he makes, though, and will write about them in future posts.

But back to the green stuff.

An interesting thing about the current environmental movement is that its value as a marketing or branding direction will die off long before people stop caring about pollution, climate change, extinction, deforestation, and other related issues.

A good comparison is the concept of "healthy".
Consumers never really stop caring about the healthiness of the products they use. But two things are ever-changing:
1. The degree of caring. Interest and attention in well-being trend up and down all the time. We seem to switch back and forth between "I deserve a treat, never mind the ramifications" and "I need to take care of myself or else" -- most of the time, sitting somewhere in the middle ("Sure this treat is naughty, but it's not the worst thing I could get, and besides, I did something healthy earlier..."). These peaks and valleys occur on both a micro (daily or weekly) and macro (yearly or decadely*) scale.
2. The particular shiny thing. We seem incapable of caring about a big concept. We need a specific cause, product, issue, or concern to capture our attention. For awhile "oat bran" was absolutely necessary in everything we consumed. Recently, the looming danger of lead-laced, Chinese-made products was going to wipe out all life in the galaxy. Other times it was powerline radiation, jogging, sunburns, low carb, high carb, salt in our diets, shark attacks, too much fluoride in our water, not enough fluoride in our water...

I think "consumer environmentalism" is going to follow a similar pattern based on this combination of interest and shiny-thing-du-jour.

It's hardly a new concern, but is currently at an interesting peak: total attention is perhaps at the highest it's ever been, and several shiny things are getting our attention concurrently.

Marketers are taking a very simplistic approach, either:
a.) Making vague "green" statements that aren't any more substantial than claiming to be "healthy". While not untrue, they don't mean much when everybody else is doing it too.
or
b.) Focusing entirely on a handful of specific, short-term, shiny things.

Using the environment as a marketing tool or discussion point isn't going to go away.
But most of it is going to become background noise.

Later, I'll finish babbling about the other two parts of the post: How do you quantify the qualitative (and the subjective)? And what really is the intelligence of consumers?




*Decadely is not a word, but should be.