Greenwashing is A Bad Thing, right?

As we all know, companies that promote products and services by overstating or lying about their green credentials not only insult customers' intelligence, they also stoke cynicism against the entire green business movement.

And yet I'm starting to think that the vociferous criticism that greenwashing increasingly attracts is starting to do more harm than good.

Yesterday, I appeared on a web TV show for small businesses from the IT company Dell and the British Chamber of Commerce to discuss how businesses can still make the case for going green in the current economic climate.

During the broadcast, one audience member emailed in to ask what the point was in undertaking green initiatives when your customers would only end up seeing it as a cynical marketing ploy, an example of "greenwash"?

You have to say it is a valid question.

My colleague at BusinessGreen.com's sister title vnunet.com, Iain Thomson, neatly summed up the attacks those companies that seek to promote their green credentials can in a blog posting from the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

In it he complained that if he had to listen to one more company talk about its environmental commitments he would seriously countenance an assassination attempt on the offending party.

His criticism of the raft of green technology announcements that dominated this year's show centred on the oft-argued point that businesses promoting new recycling services and energy efficient products were only interested in the bottom line and did not really give a stuff about the environment.

"All this supposed 'green' focus is nothing more than an attempt to sell us products," he wrote. "What these companies have recognised is that consumers want to buy green products so that they can feel better about themselves. I'm willing to bet some of these companies would cheerfully club seals or burn rainforest if people liked the idea and it got them more sales."

Thomson is certainly not alone in levelling such criticism at firms' green marketing campaigns, but the question his attack begs is "so what?"

If the end goal is to reduce businesses' impact on the environment, then should we really care whether or not a firm's motivations are in some way ethically "pure"?

Surely all that matters is whether they are seeking to cut their environmental impact or not and whether they are doing so effectively? In fact, I prefer it if their green initiatives are driven by a desire to make profits, as at least that gives them the ultimate incentive to make sure they are successful.

Obviously green marketing that relies on inaccuracies or lies is fair game for criticism and should be eradicated, but if companies start to get attacked for simply promoting their environmental improvements there is a real risk they will ask themselves why they are bothering.

Much of the criticism levelled at green marketing campaigns centres on the fact that green products and initiatives undertaken as part of some huge multinational often look incongruous when set against the firm's wider activities - the BP paradox if you will.

This criticism boils down to whether you think a firm should be allowed to promote green activities when they make up only a small fraction of its overall operations?

Well, I can understand why it grates with some old school environmentalists, but the answer has to be "yes, they should".

Green marketing messages might run ahead of a company's overall ability to deliver green products and services, and will almost certainly run ahead of their ability to decarbonise their operations. But what they demonstrate is the company's awareness that these products and services are desirable and will resonate with customers. They give you a vision of the way the company wants to be seen and sees itself. Advertising is a window into, if not quite a company's soul then certainly its ego.

For example, Samsung, which this week debuted a new range of energy efficient monitors at the CES show, may still make plenty of products that use lots of energy and contain potentially harmful chemicals, but the fact it made such a fanfare about its new green technology suggests it knows demand for these types of products will grow. Regardless of my colleagues protestations, Samsung has every right to communicate that understanding to as wide an audience as possible.

Like the food companies which in the 1950s routinely produced laughably inaccurate adverts trumpeting the health benefits associated with their products, many firms are now guilty of overstating the scale of the environmental benefits they can deliver. But those old school adverts, ridiculous as they may look now, displayed an awareness that healthy food resonated with modern consumers, and in so doing heralded the start of a 60 year long transformation that has seen nutrition become the issue that arguably defines the way the food industry operates. It is entirely conceivable that the raft of new green marketing campaigns that have emerged in recent years mark the beginning of a similar journey.

Moreover, if environmentalists do want to find misleading campaigns to criticise, they would do far better to train their sights on the Daily Mail and its ridiculous and grossly unbalanced criticism of energy efficient light bulbs and the UK recycling industry.

This "brownwash" does far more harm than even the most blatant examples of greenwash, and yet, while those companies attempting to produce genuinely green products get criticised, others are allowed to spread this type of self-serving misinformation almost unchallenged.