The way consumers feel about the ethics and values of a company or product increasingly affects their shopping choices. Consumers are increasingly woke. ‘Woke’ is a slang word that means “being actively attentive to issues of social, environmental and especially racial justice.” Woke consumers might choose not to buy cheap clothes from a company that has a poor record on labour rights in its factories.
Green?
But, is there a chance that companies are exploiting our concern in order to manipulate us into buying their products? What does it mean for a product to be green? Terms like ‘eco-friendly’, ‘natural’, ‘alternative’, ‘renewable’, ‘sustainable’ appear all the time in advertising. They give consumers a positive feeling but avoid making any detailed claims that would have to be supported with evidence.
Marketers know that simply using the colour green in branding and packaging can give consumers a vague sense of something healthy and good and therefore increase sales. In 2009 McDonald’s took the decision to change the background colour of their logo to green in Europe. Green looked somehow healthier, less synthetic, more sustainable and that’s what Europeans customers were starting to demand.
Greenwashing
This practice of making products appear greener than they really are is everywhere and it has a name: ‘greenwashing’. The word combines the concept of “whitewashing” with that of being “green”. Whitewashing originally meant washing or painting a wall to make it white but later developed a metaphorical sense, meaning to cover up defects by a superficial action to make something appear better than it is. Taking this idea a step further, ‘greenwashing’ means taking superficial action to make a product appear green or to hide ways in which it isn’t green.
Shades of greenwashing
There are thousands of examples of greenwashing all around us. Sometimes it just means adding the vague label “natural” to a box of processed food. Occasionally greenwashing involves companies telling a total lie. But most greenwashing lies somewhere in-between. Imagine a multi-billion dollar oil company that genuinely is doing research into clean biofuels but then spends more on advertising the research than on the research itself.
Colourful strategies
Other sorts of ‘washing’ have emerged. Rainbow-washing means trying to appeal to LGBTQ-friendly consumers. The strategy here is sometimes as basic as adding a rainbow to a product’s design or packaging. Every year brands bring out special rainbow edition products to coincide with LGBTQ Pride celebrations.
Recently the term ‘pink-washing’ has gained the new meaning of trying to attract consumers by advertising a company’s solidarity with the campaign against breast cancer. Kentucky Fried Chicken tried a pink-washing “Bucket for the Cure” campaign which went badly wrong when cancer charities pointed out that eating too much KFC-style junk food was a risk factor in developing cancer.
Woke washing
So the marketers are clever at ‘washing’ their products but the woke consumer is getting wiser; if a company makes an ethical claim, as consumers we’re going to demand more than green packaging, pink ribbons and rainbows to convince us.