This handy chart from Futerra, a nifty communications shop in England. It identifies how to spot, prevent and avoid greenwash for consumers, companies and agencies. Futerra’s new Greenwash Guide analyses the current state of greenwash and what’s being done about it. You can also find guidelines for companies and agencies on how to prevent greenwash, and a ‘spotters guide’ for consumers to help avoid it.

So the question we ask ourselves is how much of what we are seeing out there is bad marketing, how much is lazy marketing, and how much is deceptive marketing? Most likely, there is a fair share of marketers who have jumped on the green bandwagon and who are spinning green pitches unduly and even unjustifiably, but what about those who have something to say and rely on an agency that just doesn’t get it? They rely on the hackneyed images, colors, and ideas that are the low hanging fruit of green communications strategies and executions. For example, I recall a Toyota ad where they used #3 here with the daisy flourishing from the tailpipe for Prius. And yet, Prius has a great story to tell–technologically speaking with direct benefits to the consumer. Sometimes, it isn’t even laziness, but simply a lack of understanding of the challenges in how to reach the consumer regarding these issues. I recall seeing GE’s first Ecomagination print ads that used Audubon prints in a very clever way, but in the end, the execution served the agency’s portfolio better than it did the initiative, and so they changed to a smarter, more informationally driven look and feel that explained the environmentally friendly technologies GE has been working on.

The challenge facing communications professionals will be to tell the stories that carry information and help educate the consumer on what makes something green and why it matters to them. But it most likely will not be colored green. And it will not involve a tree.

The quintessential, perfectly shaped, ribbed leaf. Almost any tree. Polar bears, glaciers, treefrogs, and bamboo. Illustrations of leafy vines, branches, stalks and roots. The classic dandelion image with seedlings a-blowin’. Of course, the omnipresent windmill as icon, regardless of the fact that the sponsoring brand has nothing to do with wind. And we cannot leave out the classic that started the category and continues to live strong to this day: a pair of tender hands cupping a baby earth globe.

And these days, globes of all shapes and sizes are selling like hotcakes at Getty Images and other stock photo sites. When I got my Green Festival brochure in the mail recently, I wondered what the meaning might be behind the woman on the cover who is playfully batting the globe around as if it were a volleyball—perhaps that the powerful human race is not taking this stuff seriously enough, and that our future might be in the balance? Hmmm. But then why is she smiling?

These are the images of green. We have all seen them now, and they are multiplying like the green tendrils of the invasive English ivy that have taken over my backyard. The big question for those of us in the business of communications around brands that are talking about sustainbility, is what works and what doesn’t? And what is best for the cause? It’s big business obviously, or Getty wouldn’t be selling their secret sauce for 400 quid.

Of course, for colors, just about every shade of Pantone green has been used to sell green. When egg started in 2003, we even created a Conscious Consumer swatchbook with seven shades of green—from darkest Off The Power Grid Green, to lightest Red State Green—to playfully denote the various segments of the green consumer landscape based on a US Green Consumer survey that we conducted. Somehow, at the time, it seemed warranted in this manner and for our specific purpose.

Obviously, the more we see the same images and colors used over and over again to communicate issues around sustainability, the less meaning and differentiation there is across the board. And who really wants a brand that looks like all the others? Within the Green Festival program itself, there are fewer than 5% of all ads that chose NOT to use the color green in their layout. Good for them. Bad for the movement, and bad for the communicators out there. We can do better than this.

As the green “movement” moves ahead, for it to become a success, we need to move away from these clichéd communications solutions. Such expected images and colors have become suspect in the selling of green. Consumers are having a hard enough time on their own without us marketing types muddying the waters. While they are desiring green solutions, they have a hard time understanding it, finding it, and embracing it. Because of the rampant nature of this cavalier and listless approach used to communicate green, consumers have come to question all things green, and we are now in the cynical, distrustful phase of the game. Greenwashing has become the standard.

But people are actually smarter than we think. They want to know what this all means and they are willing to listen, so long as we try a little harder. And brands that understand this stand to gain green ground.

The story of green is so much richer, and more colorful than “green”. Green is about innovation, technology, intelligence, and exciting solutions which conjure up all kinds of great images. As has always been the case in our business, the unexpected is far more interesting than the expected. And as John Grant thankfully proclaims in his good new book, the Green Marketing Manifesto, “Green marketing is about making breakthrough green stuff seem normal—and not making normal stuff seem green.”

We can do better. We need to do better.

Cultural trends tend to follow a certain pattern. A meme or a look or a movement will percolate through the culture, at first gradually, then infectiously fast, and then it will saturate the public consciousness so thoroughly that it will no longer satisfy those on the bleeding edge, who will initiate a radical shift and begin the cycle anew. And the interesting thing about trends, as opposed to fads, is that they reflect larger underlying cultural forces and tend to affect multiple domains. Thus, we witness transition times like the 1980s, when the US began to emerge from recession, and earth tones, bellbottoms, and back-to-the-landers gave way to neon, massive shoulderpads, McMansions, and big hair.

Right now, we’re going through another cultural shift, heralded in by the faltering climate, the faltering economy, and the profound reassessment of values that began in 2001 after the towers fell and the dotcom bubble burst. And as 2001-2007 saw the revival of green, from a fringe concern to a mainstream trend, 2008 appears to be witnessing the beginnings of an interesting shift around the color wheel — to blue. Which makes all of us at egg very happy, because ‘green’ was never a broad enough term to describe what we’re about, but we found ourselves using it anyhow, often when talking to people who have no idea what sustainability means (which is most people).

Whence blue? Two words: climate change. If green was about hugging trees and not paving paradise, blue is about the fact that the entire planetary balance is shifting, fast. When climate change finally begins to scare mainstream people in a Y2K problem or duck and cover kind of way, we can expect to see a lot more blue everywhere we look. We’re only witnessing the first glimmerings of the blue shift right now, but I predict that it will eventually come to subsume green in describing the cultural shift that’s been happening since the early naughties. Green was a step in the right direction, but it always had too much baggage. Blue is neutral, it’s soothing, it’s the color of clean water and air (ever-scarcer resources), and it also happens to be the color that people worldwide choose most frequently when asked to name a color. I think it’s got good staying power, as far as these things go. And don’t worry — the sensibilities underlying green won’t go away. They’ll just expand

Ready to jump on the blue bandwagon? Pantone has beaten you to it — they’ve declared Blue Iris the color of 2008, because it “satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.” A complex world indeed. A google search reveals 9680 hits for “blue is the new green,” and I expect that this number will be growing exponentially. Gradually but gradually, all the common leitmotifs of “green” ads — leaves, seedlings, and of course, the ubiquitous color itself, will give way to a newer bluer look. And this blue period isn’t just about imagery; we’re already seeing it percolate into names and concepts: Mercedes has dubbed its newest eco-technology Bluetec, France has been using the Pavillon Blue as an eco-label to indicate eco-towns and ports, our client Gerdling/Edlen has named their latest eco-building Cyan, there’s a UK sustainability consulting firm named Level Blue, and the list goes on and on. Yeah, blue may have corporate associations, but a fresh new shade, especially complemented by some vibrant gold or orange hues, will be in no danger of looking workaday.

The thing that makes me happiest about this shift is that I won’t have to keep reading articles about what green is not. It seems that every article I read nowadays assures me that green is not about Birkenstocks or granola or Ralph Nader or frumpy hemp clothing or tree-huggers or patchouli or dubious hygeine practices. In short, people are still terrified of hippies and hardcore environmentalists, especially those people who are still stuck in the 80s conspicuous-consumption mentality. And yeah, the back-to-the-land movement is on its way back, and the hardcore hippie look will eventually undergo a full-on revival, as the current porn-plastic-botox-airbrushed-metrosexual aesthetic reaches a zenith and the utterly natural begins to look dramatically different and fresh. But at this moment, green still has plenty of limitations. And I welcome the influx of blue. It won’t happen overnight (hell, there are still plenty of people who covet McMansions), but it’ll happen.

As for me, I’ve already moved on.

For this January 1st post, I’ll skip the conventional list of 2008 predictions and resolutions, except to say that I resolve to work less, eat better still, consume less, and exchange as much screen time for face time as possible. Oh, and be outdoors even more.

And my one big, hairy prediction for green and how it will be successfully marketed in the coming year is in the use of “citizen marketers”. Citizen marketers are customer evangelists—regular people–who extol the virtues of brands, products, services, and companies to their friends and peers online and offline. This form of peer-to-peer marketing is the perfect vehicle for green brands for a few reasons.

Citizen marketers are recruited and incentivized by companies to sell their products, and while one of the shortcomings for companies looking for citizen marketers of non-green products is that it is somewhat hard and costly to find reliable citizens to become shills, the green arena will prove to provide legions. One study in green-forward England showed that because of green peer pressure, people tell “little green lies” to overcome guilt and inaction. Green brands will find a surfeit of willing green evangelists to pitch their wares and in so doing pitch their own individual holier-than-thou brands in a show of conspicuous conservation.

Conversely, the recipient of the assurances given by the citizen marketer in pitching their favorite green brand, unlike the possibility of a skeptical or turned off friend for a non-green brand, is similarly positively inclined and more likely to listen and buy in. Green begets green as a powerful marketing tool.

Green brands benefit most from lack of spin (read: advertising as usual) and communicating an authentic and truthful message, and what better way to do that than through the bottom-up mechanism of word of mouth promotion? The new greenwear company Nau knew this coming out of the gate when it launched its company this year on the backs of its non-profit partners’ constituents and their green posses.

The highest level of code cracking by today’s marketing mavens involves some important themes, not the least of which is getting consumers involved with your brand, and even letting them shape it. In the realm of green branding, by using the green brandgelist, companies avoid accusations of greenwashing by effectively skipping any green claims that they would otherwise make in advertising and allowing their green brandgelists to do the heavy lifting.

Unilever’s ahead of the curve on this. Its “Go Green and Small With All,” uses in-classroom magazine and Web ads to recruit participants, targeting elementary school kids via a contest that looked for the greenest grade school in the country. Its ambassadors were encouraged to get their families to make small, green changes at home (like using concentrated All detergent) and to spread branded, eco-friendly messages. The ambassadors and their parents submitted report cards on their progress, and the school with the highest percentage of report cards (not yet announced) will receive a $50,000 grant for eco-friendly school improvements, a solar-powered iPod Shuffle MP3 player for every student, a one-year supply of All and an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in January. More than 3,000 elementary schools entered.

Using young students as ambassadors “reaches our target audience of mothers of school-age children,” says Helayna Minsk, marketing director for All. Incorporating it into a contest “encourages … word of mouth and got kids involved collectively,” she adds.

All of this doesn’t mean that there will necessarily be much of a reduction in the attempts to hit the green message home in traditional advertising. In fact, we’ll see a lot more of this. But traditional advertising will only be marginally effective in connecting with consumers, mainly because few agencies know how to create advertising for green or socially responsible brands that actually works. Case in point this year is the Chevy campaign “Gas Friendly to Gas Free” that began to position Chevy and GM as a green car maker. Desperate times require desperate measures, and Chevy is in line for one of the more grandiose greenwashing awards of 2007 with the public’s reaction of utter confusion over ads for cars not for sale, giant hybrids and vegetarian cars. To think that all of those years of building a brand around patriotism and durability could somehow be sidestepped to capture the new green consumer is an embarrassment to the advertising industry. (Maybe the next TV spot in line should show nature imagery in the vein of Infinity’s seminal ad campaign from 1989 of “rocks and trees” to redefine the tagline, Like a Rock. And instead of Bob Seger, they use Bob Dylan.)

The fun will come in effectively integrating the messages and the vehicles across media, which increasingly means letting go and allowing the consumer to influence the brand.

The famous car-truck that provokes such deep anger in the eyes of good carbon-fearing, clean air-loving citizens is struggling amidst a sea of societal change. As both oil prices and awareness of the increasing problems associated with global warming rise, General Motors has gone to its genius branding mavens to spin the brand back into consideration. Good luck.

Going from a less than serious 2002 positioning in the days of oil and roses geared toward macho hipster cred (reflected in such gratuitous tunes as Happy Jack by The Who), Hummer has finally whiffed the burnt edge of a wanton carbon brand personality and thrown down with a sudden humanistic face. Here we can see the new “green branding” happening before our very eyes in all its gorgeous ability to maneuver public sentiment and orient toward market success.

Titled ‘HUMMER HEROES‘, the campaign will show how rescue workers, among others, rely on the vehicle to help them help those in need. Because the brand has come to, in the words of Hummer Marketing Director Megan Stooke, “represent an icon for all things evil”, it’s high time we change it into a force for good.

Wow, evil to good in a fall campaign through gross ratings points.

The ad agency Modernista aims to position the vehicle as a force for good by portraying how rescue workers and owners rely on Hummers to help others. In a few weeks, the GM brand will launch a microsite, Hummer Helps, that will encourage owners to send in stories and photos that illustrate how they assisted the needy with their SUVs.

Says Martin Walsh, the brand’s general manager,”The unparalleled capabilities of a Hummer make them the ideal disaster-response vehicle.” Indeed, a more palatable frame than the unparalleled disaster creating capabilities of the Hummer.

This new campaign could be effective for the skeptics who either discount any man-made effects of global warming, refuse to care, or simply refuse to deny their ego the luxury of a 6000 lb, 8.6 miles per gallon steel truck to get them to the gym. What could be more convenient, or necessary in this case, than wrapping the brand in a gauzy, feel-good aura of social responsibility amidst national and global crises happening around us regarding such things as consumption, energy security, population growth, demand for natural resources, pollution, and terrorism.

Sometimes the best way to deal with the thought of such overbearing consequences is sheer denial. Bummer. No, Hummer.

Well, at least in The British Isles it appears to. And if past trend patterns are any indication, it will probably prove itself over here as well within a year or two. They are definitely ahead of us on the green issues across the pond, so we should predict the fallout of the green advertising and marketing push of late stateside–indicating the success in opinion polls of brands like Chevy, Dow, BP, GE, Wal-Mart–to show up in polls here soon enough indicating people’s perception that the greenest brands are those that advertise it the most. (Was that really a surprise to anyone?)

The sad truth is that lowest common denominators factor in when taking the broad pulse of the green movement and that in the end, whoever shouts the loudest, gets the prize. In spite of the fact that none of these companies above are doing as much as it seems like they are from their ad campaigns, the public will end up with a positive opinion of them. If I recall correctly, BP and Wal-Mart both have looked pretty good in recent surveys. And only if you make egregious mistakes will you come out harmed from this practice.

It all begs the question a bit of what exactly is greenwashing, and how does one identify it? But then, does it even really matter? We talk a lot about the need for transparency because we believe that the consumer now has a wealth of information at their fingertips to unravel the true corporate stories through the web, but is the diligence really there? One recent report indicates that companies just need to have a few things in place for consumers to give them the social or environmental thumbs up. (Anyone for a quick carbon offset bump?)

Let the green guns blaze, and caveat emptor.

Ronald McDonald continues to inch ever so slightly towards a more socially responsible brand.

Starting in 1990 and working with Environmental Defense, McDonald’s eliminated 150,000 tons of packaging, replaced foam-plastic sandwich containers with paper wraps and recycled boxes, and made other packaging improvements in its restaurants and throughout its supply chain.

Next, taking cues from the first litigation attacks against “Big Food” in 2002, when McDonald’s was alleged to have caused the obesity and related health problems of two young customers in Perlman v. McDonald’s Corp., they started to promote salads and apples a little more vigorously alongside the Big Mac and double cheeseburgers.

In 2003, they implemented a global policy to reduce antibiotic use in chickens, cattle, and pigs — although such measures could be considered a drop in the bucket when it comes to the issues revolving around standardized food. Many argue that large-scale food production inherently compromises agricultural and biological diversity.

Numerous other milestones for the company along the way culminated this year in an Energy Star honor for smart energy management practices and investments throughout its operations that have resulted in significant energy and financial savings.

And today, we read that McDonald’s in Europe has successfully redesigned both its retail spaces to be more European friendly, and its menu, to accommodate local and regional tastes. Paying attention to local tastes has also helped McDonald’s overcome some of the cultural hurdles it faced in Europe as a large American fast-food chain. “The problem in Europe,” said David Kolpak, an investment manager at Victory Capital Management in Cleveland, Ohio, who owns McDonald’s shares in his portfolio “was the perception that any large U.S. brand has, which is bringing the American way of eating and marketing and invading the local culture.”

McDonald’s faces inherent environmental and social concerns with a business model that relies so implicitly on mega-economies of scale. So while the aspect of healthier local food economies may be an uphill battle for advocates of decentralized food production when it comes to McDonalds, we should still look for the chain to incorporate more local suppliers and local foods into their offerings, and healthier recipes with healthier ingredients. And it goes without saying that the chain needs to continue to address its global energy footprint.

As what we might call a brand with a “little bit of CSR”, it is the challenge of the corporate brand alchemists to present these sustainable aspects of the brand in an honest and genuine way, while still balancing the brand’s consumer facing dimensions of value and taste.

Today’s egglog post presents readers with a rare case of blatant self-promotion acting under the guise of worthy “news”. The news is concurrent interviews from two dichotomized but harmonious publications with egg’s founder and creative director Marty McDonald. The reason we decided to throw caution to the wind and bury our modesty this one time is the serendipity of the situation: two publications, representing the present and the future of our industry, give cause to observe “green” and the trend towards recognition of issues surrounding sustainability in marketing and advertising.

one. a magazine is the periodical of the One Show, the annual award show for creativity that creative professionals in the industry pay homage to as the gold standard for elevated conceptual thinking amidst the sea of communications mediocrity.

The magazine is “…the professional home for advertising’s creative community. Each issue features interviews with the industry’s creative leaders and thinkers, unearthing the latest trends in advertising culture. With its behind-the-scenes coverage of the making of ads - including graphic and web design, directing, special-effects, and editing - the magazine is an index of industry standards for advertising professionals worldwide.”

Then, Sixty, is the student created publication of the Virginia Commonwealth University’s AdCenter, which, in this writer’s opinion, is the preeminent professional advertising program in the country. Sixty is an engrossing rag in its raw creativity and one that any imaginatively minded person can disappear into for a good while, and come out refreshed and inspired by the talent coming out of VCU. It’s energizing to see how such talent will infiltrate the legions of future ad professionals and keep them from becoming too comfortable.

Marty was interviewed by the veteran Warren Burger of one. a magazine, and the talented recent VCU graduate Brian Feeney of Sixty, in regards to what egg is doing on the green front in brand development and advertising. Dichotomy-wise, it is quite reassuring to see that the industry as a whole is paying closer attention to sustainability and actively taking a role in some cases to support these issues, both from the top down and the bottom up. It is exciting to see that large agencies are now developing green strategy departments and green consumer experts, and that the ad schools are also paying close attention to developments on the sustainability front. We know too that Seattle’s Cornish College for the Arts and School of Visual Concepts are both very engaged with issues surrounding sustainability

Recognizing the self-destructive path we were forging for ourselves, the vision for egg was to use the astonishing systematic power and force of marketing to, in effect, heal thyself. But as a smaller player, we can only do so much good. The future of our industry, as well as that of our economy, environment and overall society, will have to rely on the concept of sustainable and integrity-based business models, supported by ethical marketers.