Sinners will pose as saints.

While there will be a few spectacular successes (such as Burt's Bees selling itself for $915 million), the average company will receive only the smallest "halo effect" from sincere efforts to become more environmentally sensitive. Why? Because sincere companies will be surrounded by charlatans falsely proclaiming their own virtue.

If this sounds cynical, ask yourself this: Which food company deserves a halo for combating the obesity issue? After all, many companies offered "healthy" alternatives by substituting well-known nutritionally suspect ingredients and recipes with less well-known, but equally suspect, ingredients and/or recipes. (One such example: Nutri-Grain Pancakes, which brags that they are made with whole wheat and whole grain but contain mostly white flour and high fructose corn syrup, according to consumer watchdog Nutrition Action.) I cannot tell which companies truly deserve to be commended for making changes and which ones have simply played a nutritional shell game. Can you?

The same pretense has already begun in the environmental arena. Car companies are extolling green SUVs (an idea that surely misses the larger point). Exxon (XOM), which has been among the staunchest opponents of scientific findings on global warming, now runs ads boasting of its (relatively minor) efforts to ameliorate the problem. Research by an environmental marketing firm claims that of the 1,018 "green" advertised products it studied, all but one fudged the definition of green in some way.

The media will not always be green's friend.

True, to date the media has been quite supportive of efforts to alleviate global warming. However, high-profile media coverage of the issue has dropped off substantially since form Vice-President Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize award in 2007. Perhaps this is because of the recession or the excitement of the Presidential election, or the importance of Britney Spears' latest travails. In any case, CEOs must accept that the media will inevitably move on to the next subject—just ask those still involved in cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina or those trying to capture indicted Serbian General Ratko Mladic.

CEOs must be prepared for the media backlash against green. The initial coverage of a subject always creates an expectation of huge breakthroughs in an unrealistic time frame. This is always followed by a period of silence, which is then always succeeded by stories of disappointments. CEOs must expect stories about how the "sacrifices" of consumers in support of green are being thwarted by business interests.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16