The world over, advertisers are concerned about appearing environment-friendly, and regulators are clamping down hard on advertising that is seen as false propaganda.
March 13 2008: Business Line
We seem to be suddenly waking up to the reality of global warming. By “we” I mean the advertising industry. In January the India Chapter of the International Advertising Association (IAA) had a distinguished speaker addressing its members . For once it was not a creative guru or a multinational agency head or a top media planner. This time the speaker was Dr R. K. Pachauri who received the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore for the sterling work the organisation they represent had done in the field of global warming.
Dr Pachauri had a grim message for the advertising pundits seated in the exclusive confines of a five star hotel. Global warming is a very real threat and the sooner we wake up to this terrible reality and do something, the better for all of us. The good news, of course, was that it wasn’t too late for the world to take action.
All over the world, the colour green, which till a few years ago was associated with envy or emeralds, is now clearly associated with sustainable activity. So you have green cars and green hotels and green office buildings and green tourism and so on. There seems to be a push, if not a rush, to try and get sustainable activity going in every field of life. After all this is one problem that really concerns us all. Massive downpours of the kind Mumbai faced a couple of years ago, the possibility of the oceans rising and reclaiming coastal areas, climate change and polluted water and air are all beginning to claim increasing mindshare and gaining momentum as days go by. Green campaigns are not just the passion of some vocal minority any more. Nor are the issues confined to the realms of fad.
A few days ago, Porsche, the company that just opened a showroom in Mumbai and is hoping to grab some of the action generated by the great ‘India story’, was in the eye of a storm in London. The Mayor of London who has evidently been a pioneer in the area of strategies to curb traffic congestion announced a plan to triple the daily entry fee into the city of London for cars that generate the most pollution. An indignant Porsche responded that if the Mayor did not reconsider his plans, they would seek judicial review of his proposal. A newspaper article commented that Porsche’s stand was making it look like the stand the tobacco lobby took many years ago. The point is that public sympathies, at least in the developed economies, are clearly with the pro-green lobby and manufacturers would have to realise that they have to stay on the side of customers at all times. The tobacco lobby in the US first disputed the fact that tobacco was responsible for cancer-related deaths. They spent years fighting cases in courts and then coughed up billions when all the court cases went against them. Yet, all the while they earned billions as well and also ensured they catered to the addiction of younger generations as well.
In fact, advertisers in these countries have realised the importance of being perceived as “green” in the minds of their customers. So much so that regulators are now having to come down hard on advertising that they feel is wrongly exploiting the “green’ feeling.
In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority held a series of television advertisements released by the Malaysian Palm Oil Council as “misleading”. Evidently, the voice-over in the commercial claims “Malaysian palm oil. Its trees give life and help our planet breathe”. The real issue was that these oil-palm plantations have often been planted in illegally cleared natural rain forests. Apparently, in Indonesia, Malaysian palm-oil companies own large swathes of land where the operations are destroying the natural habitat of species like the Sumatran elephant. Throughout the Western world watchdog groups are now keeping an eagle eye out for what they call a practice of ‘greenwashing’. This is a new word coined to describe bogus environmental marketing. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which oversees advertising claims is now conducting hearings to determine the kind of claims that can genuinely qualify as green marketing. In Norway, governmental regulators banned all car advertising from claiming their vehicles are “green”, “clean” or “environmentally friendly”. This was because they felt that all car production leads to more, not fewer carbon emissions.
Yet, the fact remains that marketers are making a special effort to reach out to the ever-growing market for greener consumers. In fact, there are steps being taken to map and measure the universe of Ecologically Conscious Consumer Behaviour (ECCB). Consumers seem to believe that they, as individuals, can help solve environmental problems and this belief appears to be the best predictor of ECCB.
In India, the launch of the Nano stirred up a storm when some people debated its possible effect on the environment. Yet, one does not see too much awareness and activism in this area yet. It was left to the judiciary to clean up Delhi’s air by mandating that buses and auto rickshaws must use CNG as fuel. Legislators and administrators seem to see environment as something that is certainly not on top of their agenda.
One noticed a television commercial of Honda for its cars where the central theme was the environment and how friendly Honda had been in the last ten years. The indifferent execution left the message more in the grey rather than the green area. Yet even such advertisements are few and far between. With competition increasing rapidly and differentiators harder to find, a green label, if acquired and emphatically touted early on in the game, could turn out to be a great advantage at a stage that is not too far away. Yet, that position demands a commitment from the manufacturer first, the marketer after that and the advertising consultant finally. There seems to be little knowledge or even awareness amongst advertising agencies about these important issues. I wonder what agencies would reply if they were asked whether they were carbon-neutral. For that matter, there is a debate whether advertising space in newspapers is carbon-neutral or not.
One would imagine it is fairly clear that as awareness about global warming and its effects on the world grows, consumers would definitely demand products and services that are green. There are a couple of Ecotels in the country and one reads about some “green” building being currently built, but that seems to be the exception rather that the rule. Obviously, marketers have not really joined the green bandwagon seriously. They are probably unsure whether the green consumer in India is a golden goose or a wild goose chase. One hopes they do not miss the green bus.
(Ramesh Narayan is a communication consultant.)
