I'm uncertain how I feel about this.

On one hand, creating a file format is an intriguing way to shape behavior and potentially help save the environment.

If you received a WWF attachment, would you think it was smart or smug?

But to look at it another way, I wonder if this isn't a heavy-handed approach. WWF's are essentially copy-protected files (printing being one kind of copying)-- something I'm not happy with in any form. Moreover, you can already do this with PDF's, so it's a bit redundant --not to mention a little ostentatious-- to invent a strongly-branded "green" format just for this purpose.

I wonder about the ethics of crippling a file intended for someone else. Shouldn't people be allowed to make choices about what to do with their information? Taking away the option seems to be making a big assumption about personal responsibility, even if it is for the greater good.

Hat tip to Core77 for the story.

The Guardian recently cited an interesting study, published by researchers at the University of Minnesota, which examines the reasons why consumers make environmental product choices. The study says that it’s not financial, ethical, or environmental reasons that drive “green” purchases; rather, consumers make sustainable choices in an attempt to elevate social status.

Furthermore, consumers were interested in green choices only when their purchases were conspicuous – if others could see that they made a green choice or the green products were high-end and could signal wealth. It’s sort of like the whole thing where people wash their hands more when being watched. Yuck.

The Guardian points out that this study helps to explain why greenwashing is so effective:

Confronted with a problem like climate change, our consumption-based economy responds in the only way it knows how – by selling sustainability like it sells soap. But while a desire to be "seen to be green" clearly leaves us vulnerable to the dubious motives of commercial marketing campaigns (not to mention some ribbing down the pub), harnessing the primal urge for social status is critical for promoting pro-environmental behaviours that are more substance than spin. We may currently compete through demonstrations of conspicuous material consumption, but material goods are simply a marker for social status. It's the social status that's important – and the markers we use to signify it can easily change.

The Guardian seems to be ending on a positive note, suggesting that if everyday conspicuous consumption becomes conspicuously green, it shouldn't matter what the motivations for that consumption are. True, perhaps. But it matters even more, then, that promises are kept: the claims made about green products must reflect actual environmental benefits.

Corby Kummer has related a rather confusing realization to us this month in the Atlantic Magazine. Namely, that retail supergiant Walmart may be playing an important part in sustaining small organic farms.

Detail from Kang Can, Fast Food III (2007) [via]

If Walmart's move into organics strikes you as cynical — "a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business," you're not alone. But, Kummer suggests, it's not entirely clear that the right reaction is disapprobation. For example, he notes that:

[L]ast year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive.

Kummer, suspicious of greenwashing, called Charles Fishman, the author of The Wal-Mart Effect. Fishman was quick to note that, in Kummer's paraphrase, "whatever Walmart decides to do has large repercussions."

A virtually unknown Walmart program is responsible for their responsible buying — one that Kummer claims "could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture." At the time of their interview, not even Fishman had heard of it. "They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about," he said.

Kummer's conclusion? If it's not decidedly the case that "the world’s largest retailer is set on rebuilding local economies it had a hand in destroying," at least that "if it wants to, a ruthlessly well-run mechanism can bring fruits and vegetables back to land where they once flourished, and deliver them to the people who need them most."

Decide for yourself here.

Cliff Kuang recently wrote a piece at GOOD Magazine that takes after my own heart.

He tells a nice story about his recent experience at a "green" themed consumer electronics show in New York. At the show, he was offered an application for a green credit card. The card awarded one ton of carbon offsets for every $1000 spent by the card holder. One ton of carbon offsets is worth $8-12 dollars.

Most credit card holders will recognize that a $10 return (on average) per thousand spent is a very cheap reward relative to most other (airline mileage or cash-based) credit card reward programs. (For those who don't: most programs return $25-50 of value per thousand spent.) The response of the booth's attendant, when questioned: "...it doesn't really matter what it costs, for people that care about green."

This kind of emotional blackmail is just what I hate about the green design movement: It uses an important value (ecology) as a way to take advantage of unthinking consumers. It's bad enough that the value itself is cheapened in the process, but it's truly awful to consider that the consumer actually ends up paying to cheapen it.

The reason that the green credit card provides such a potent example of this phenomenon is because it's not just more bullsh*t -- it's actually internally contradictory. It incentivizes people to increase their consumption level, a behavior which in all likelihood negatively overcompensates for the relatively negligible good of the reward.

In other words, it rewards you (and relatively poorly, remember, you're subsidizing this reward) to engage in ecologically destructive behavior with less potent ecologically beneficial dividends.

Kuang's lesson here is an important one: "being 'green' is chiefly about your behavior and daily habits." Rest assured that no credit card is sufficiently motivated to help you with those.

So I spent a fair part of my weekend trolling the internet for information about the BP rebrand. But there was something that's been really bothering me: why does BP's clearly hypocritical branding strategy seem to be working (and indeed even on me)?

This was really sticking in my craw, not because I think the world of corporate branding is morally comprehensible, but because I honestly believed that brand hypocrisy didn't work. So BP's rebrand was chewing at me. Did I just miss the boat here?

The answer hit me in an unlikely place: the in the comments of an article about BP's recent technical woes at America's largest oil field. Let's read the comment that was my lightning rod.

The focus of the article was the numerous challenges faced by the oil industry in general. They even specifically mentioned that in an overview of the story. Guess it's easy and popular to take shots at BP.

Hold on. Why is it easy and popular?

I've got an idea.

Read More...

Back in July of 2000, British Petroleum, the world's third largest global energy company, launched a massive $200 million public relations and advertising campaign, unveiling their current "green" brand image, in an attempt to win over environmentally aware consumers. The campaign was created by the British advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, who later the PRWeek 2001 "Campaign of the Year" award in the 'product brand development'. All told, BP spent around $200m on the rebrand.

The big ideal? What's that again?

The heart of the rebrand involved changing the company's name to BP (back from BP-Amoco, the result of a recent mega-merger), creating a wordmark in which small letters were used ("bp" was thought to have fewer imperialist associations than the erstwhile "BP"), and finally implementing a new corporate tagline, "beyond petroleum."

BP's then CEO John Browne said: "It's all about increasing sales, increasing margins and reducing costs at the retail sites." And it apparently did: During more than a decade with Browne as chief executive (ending last year), BP's market value rose fivefold and its share price rose 250 percent.

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