The Virtues of Green Marketing

Front matter

= The Virtues of

Green Marketing

A Constructive Take on f Corporate Rhetoric

Prologue

Some time ago, a man was walking down the street. A nice, normal man. Let’s call him John—that’s a nice, normal name. John was on his way home from work. As he walked down the busy city streets, he could not help but notice the billboards, signs, and posters advertising “green” products and services. It seemed “green” marketing was everywhere. It had started to invade his email, his phone, really all of his different apps. Indeed, he felt it was starting to pervade his reality. He could not escape it. He would get advertisements for electric cars, solar panels, eco-friendly cleaning products. When he would look at clothes, the fabrics would be “eco-friendly”, made “with care”, from “sustainable cotton”, or just adorned with a label signifying how both the products and the company “cared” for “our mutual environment”. Lately, everything seemed to be “for a sustainable future”; even the electricity in his sockets was from renewable sources. Or at least his provider claimed it was. (How would he know?)!

1 One could of course argue that the authors’ blatant use of normative stereotypes here is problematic. It steers the storyline in certain directions, appeals to culturally valorized narrative scripts, and reproduces a number of hierarchical normative structures (gender, anglocentrism, Global Northism, and other subjects of norm criticism). And one would be right. However, most normative frameworks for evaluating communication work with stereotypes. In law, as well as in marketing, this is often explicitly so: To ensure the “objectivity” of evaluation, the contents of a message will tend to be understood from the perspective of a constructed addressee, often in the form of a stereotyped character (an average consumer in a particular sector, a bonus pater familias, a reasonable person, etc.) more or less situationally placed in the position of a possible actual addressee. The stereotype here is meant to be obvious—parodical even—and as will become clear throughout the book, the need for better ways of constructing the recipients of communication is a major theme of this book.

y vi PROLOGUE

Now, John was a reasonably socially aware person, as interested in protecting the environment and battling climate change as any of us. Of course, he thought it was a good idea to do what you can, to contribute to the common good. He knew we needed to protect the environment, and he had a feeling that public concern about climate change was rapidly growing. He therefore felt responsible to do his part. As long as it was not too much of an inconvenience, or cost too much extra.

Until recently, however, John had never really thought about how intensely businesses were trying to market themselves as environmentally friendly, as green. As he continued on his walk, he noticed more and more green marketing everywhere he looked. John couldn’t help but wonder what it all meant. Were businesses just jumping on a trend to make money? To John, this seemed likely. Or were these companies genuinely committed to protecting the environment? Less likely, probably. Their green promises were rarely very transparent. As a nice, normal man, John had a hard time judging what the green claims actually meant. What does it even mean that something is made “with care”? Or that electricity has a certain “origin”—can you even prove that? And how does this or that percentage of renewable or recycled materials in a product compare to other products in the same category? This is what John thought about during his walk. He made a mental note to do some research when he got home.

And so, he did. As a nice, normal man, John started his research by using the Delphian Oracles of our time (i.e. Google and Wikipedia) and what he thus found was ... disturbing. In no way was he the first to react to the veritable onslaught of green marketing. There were loads of information, discussions, opinion pieces, criticisms, of both a scientific and a more popular variety, with statistics, storytelling, experiments, and evidence both empirical and anecdotal. He was a bit overwhelmed. Apparently, there were even awards. Both genuine ones for successful green marketing efforts and ironic ones, for seemingly cynical tactics of rhetorical manipulation, called “greenwashing awards”.

Now, “greenwashing” was a concept he found to be particularly interesting as it confirmed his suspicions about some of the green marketing he himself had noticed. Apparently, “greenwashing” was a term of abuse, but greenwashing practices were very prominent. Even though their environmental performance was dreadful, companies had incentives to give a green sheen—to convey the impression that their environmental work was very serious and successful. He found this disturbing. He kept on reading. For days. Weeks even. Spiraling down, down the rabbit hole, he went from

PROLOGUE vii

Wiki-pieces, to news articles, to critical NGO-reports. Indeed, he spiraled even deeper, and started to bore right down into the scientific discourse, on climate change, environmental communication, and environmental psychology, and found it immense and overwhelming, troublesome and disheartening, often gloomy, and at times just plain boring. He went on, via Marketing, Business, and Sociology pieces, to books literally titled “Bullshit” and works discussing “the post-truth conditions of our time”. Soon, he started to find it all downright depressing.

Now, John was as much of a liberal capitalist as the next one. He had never really thought about it, but, had anyone asked, he would probably have had good things to say about ideas like economic growth and market freedom, not to mention freedom of speech which now seemed to grant businesses a wide berth in saying whatever they wanted about their products and themselves. Regardless, he found some of the marketing practices he read about troublesome and often quite cynical.

As John grew more aware of the various sins of greenwashing, he felt his critical faculties heighten and grew better at seeing through the hokum. Soon, he grew so good at it that he was reflexively suspicious of green marketing. Indeed, he was suspicious of anything claiming to be green. John had reached a state of what some scholars had apparently called green skepticism, instantly mistrusting green signals. By then, he had started to be turned off by the whole concept of sustainability and to develop a rather dystopian world view, where he felt that nothing could be trusted and that nothing much mattered anyway as we were all racing toward our own annihilation. It seemed that—even though most anyone knew that something needed to be done, and many claimed to know exactly what needed to be done—nothing was happening. Despite widespread environmental concerns and mountains of green promises, inertia remained, as we kept consuming more than our planet can sustain. And so, John grew cynical.

One morning, after having his breakfast serving of despairingly bleak reports on the state of the art, John went out to walk to work. He was distracted, and as he was crossing the street a laundry truck (“Save water— let us do your laundry!”) smashed into him. It hit hard. The impact sent him flying through the air, until he landed headfirst on the pavement. As you can understand, John was hurt severely. He fell into a coma.

In his comatose state, and possibly aided by the cocktail of medicines his doctors prescribed, his mind seemed to race, as if it was still processing his days of late. In a dream most vivid, John experienced a world as he vill PROLOGUE desired, but had not himself been able to imagine while awake. He dreamt of a world where there was less cynicism, where greenwashing had subdued, and actors took responsibility, acted prudently, and were open, honest, and transparent about their environmental impact. A world where regulatory and market practices had developed to support the muchneeded climate action, where green marketing had the virtue of supporting better choices, and where green promises actually meant something. In short, John dreamed of a utopia and a modern society that had started to use all tools available to seriously tackle climate change.

In fact, John’s comatose state persists to this day. The brain waves of his EEG suggest he is still dreaming. Personally, we like to think he is in a better place. Considering our own situation, however, it seems prospects are darker. Judging from most contemporary accounts, John’s utopia is the stuff of dreams rather than something we can bank on for our own future. Nevertheless, this book is a rough sketch, of a small aspect of something that could contribute to changing the state of the art, to work toward realizing something like John’s dream. Missing our imagined friend, we write in the hopes that he will not only wake up, but that he will be able to awaken to a brighter future.

Preface

This book— The Virtues of Green Marketing—is intellectually and textually an entirely co-authored project. The ideas presented have been shaped in an ongoing dialogue between us and put into words in a shared process of text production. We have shaped each chapter and every passage together. In fact, cloud technology has enabled us to write simultaneously in a shared document. Hence, we bear equal responsibility for the research presented, just as we share the joy in noting that extraordinary people— like you—take an interest in what we have to say.

At its best, scholarly work is teamwork. We want to thank the Department of Law, the Department of Literature, and the Centre for Integrated Research on Culture and Society (CIRCUS) at Uppsala University, as well as the Section of Rhetoric, at Södertörn University, for their institutional and intellectual support, as well as encouragement. We also thank our funder, the Swedish Energy Agency and their research program Human, Energy Systems and Society (MESAM) for enabling us to pursue this line of research.

Our work on corporate rhetoric has benefited greatly from various seminars and collegial discussions. In particular, we thank Cecilia Gullberg and the participants of the Higher Seminar in Business Studies at Södertörn University; Linus Jacobsson, Marios Iacovides, and the participants of the Research Seminar in Law and Business at the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University, and the attendants at the 8th Nordic Conference on Research in Rhetoric, NKRF8 in Örebro, 2022. We are also grateful to Elizabeth Stuart Perry, Noah Roderick, Kendall Leigh, ix

X PREFACE

Johanna Chamberlain, Love Ronnelid, Olof Wadell, Collin Bjork, Maria Wolrath Söderberg, and Anna Krook-Reikkola, as well as our two anonymous reviewers, who have provided insights, encouragement, and feedback that have contributed substantially to this book and the experience of writing it.

Finally, we would like to thank the series editors at Palgrave Macmillan’s Rhetoric, Politics, and Society series Alan Finlayson, James Martin, and Kendall Phillips for putting together this wonderful book series, and for welcoming us into the gang.

Uppsala, Sweden Erik Bengtson Uppsala, Sweden Oskar Mossberg,

FUNDING

This work was supported by the research program: Human, Energy Systems and Society (MESAM) at the Swedish Energy Agency

Contents

Introduction: A New Framework for Green Marketing 1.1 Sins and Virtues

1.2 Positioning and Some Key Concepts

1.3 Overview of This Book

Chapter 1

Abstract This chapter introduces the idea, at the heart of the book, that we need a constructive turn in the rhetorical study of green marketing, as the negative focus on greenwashing can only ever be part of the solution. We elaborate on some key concepts, discuss the disciplinary position of the work, and provide an overview of the book.

Keywords Greenwashing ° Key concepts ° From vices to virtues ¢ Field positioning

1.1 SINS AND VIRTUES

Vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture than any other kinds of affection; and it is almost impossible to have the latter without some degree of the former. (David Hume, Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature)

In current discussions on corporate green promises, “greenwashing” has become a paradigm. This concept is infamously ambiguous and difficult to in down.' Regardless, the fact that phenomena are constantly bein P 8 > P y 8

1 We will comment on some key terms, including greenwashing, in Sect. 1.2.

© The Author(s) 2023 1 E. Bengtson, O. Mossberg, The Virtues of Green Marketing, identified as greenwashing and made the object of critical attention suggests that a lot of greenwashing is being done. We frequently see corporations and organizations chastised, even publicly shamed—called out as greenwashers. Greenwashing is seen as a vice. Indeed, it is considered a sin, as illustrated by the fact that “the sins of greenwashing” (TerraChoice 2009) has become a standard analytic. While acknowledging the legitimacy of much of the traditional criticism, in this book, we aim for nuance. We want to put less emphasis on the admittedly manipulative character and probable negative effects of widespread greenwashing, in order to explore the positive potential of green marketing, understood as rhetoric aimed at managing profitable customer relationships. Our aim is to provide new perspectives that enable a more constructive approach and seizes the momentum already there within the corporate practices of market economy.

The study follows several different paths. We consider theory from sociology and economics, modern rhetorical theory, marketing theory, and legal doctrine. All of this is read against a historical backdrop of classical rhetorical and philosophical teachings to identify both contrasts and intellectual overlaps, in an attempt at developing a theoretical framework for the discussion and evaluation of green promises, which can account for not only their problematic aspects, but also their possibilities. One of our more tangible contributions is extricating the virtues implied by the different greenwashing sins. The basic idea is simple: if “lying” is a sin, then “truth-telling” must be virtuous. Adjusted to our subject, if “fibbing” about the environmental footprint of a product is deemed unethical, then truthful accounts thereof must be virtuous. The sins imply values (e.g. the value of truthfulness), and moral spectra, with sinful actions (e.g. lying) on the one end, and virtuous actions (telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) on the other. We illustrate these spectra, and, pursuant to our constructive approach, suggest a change of focus: from sins to virtues and from policing the former to promoting the latter.

The main reason for such a spectral shift would be pragmatic. Commercial actors generally have an interest in being perceived as virtuous; it can further their sales or purchases, facilitate recruitment of qualified personnel, and generally ease their dealings with other actors, private or public. Hence, while a focus on the sins of greenwashing may provide tools for policing discourse, and thus contribute to repressing bad behavior, a focus on virtues is better suited for mobilizing the constructive and transformative potential of the ongoing boom of green marketing. Instead of viewing green promises as an inherently problematic phenomenon, or just another form of corporate bullshit, we argue that scholars could contribute to climate transition by imagining the architecture of a more sustainable commercial system—a system where green promises constitute an integrated part of a consumer market within our planetary boundaries.

The overarching aim of this book is thus to contribute to a transition toward a more sustainable society by introducing an interpretive framework for understanding and critically assessing green promises, a term here defined as simply “[s]tatements intended to influence the addressees by purporting the environmental benefits of something”. We believe that such statements can have a constructive role in the transition toward sustainability, perhaps most clearly within the realm of consumer marketing, by empowering consumers to take an active part in the transition. However, the full potential of green promises can only be realized once we get a firmer grip on their various designs, functions, and effects. We need to understand their role as an integral part of a larger system. This requires work, and not only empirical work—we need rhetorical theory fit for the task.

1.2. POSITIONING AND SOME Key CONCEPTS

What you hold in your hands is a book proposing a constructive take on corporate rhetoric, or more specifically, on corporate discourse addressing topics connected to environmental consciousness. In this section, we will briefly mention a few key concepts, and as a matter of academic positioning place the work in its context.

In an era of growing environmental and especially climate consciousness, “green” rhetoric is so widespread that it is hard to avoid, and yet, it seems to be ever growing. It takes different forms. Sustainability reports have become standard operation procedure (Makower et al. 2020; cf. Dyck and Manchanda 2021). Corporate storytelling regularly espouses how companies care, are close to nature, or promise (to try) to do better (e.g. Chap. 9, Sect. 9.3). Perhaps most prevalent of all, and the main object of this book, is how companies regularly resort to green marketing.

Like many concepts with a widespread use, “green marketing” can be hard to pin down. The same is true of its variant terms, such as “environmental marketing”, “sustainable marketing”, and “eco-marketing”, which are often used more or less interchangeably. The concepts are hard to pin down in part due to their uses in different contexts. Especially “green marketing” seems to have been used for different reasons and to denote different phenomena.’ The term has often functioned as an underdeveloped catch-all concept, especially in non-academic discussions, but there are also more precise uses as a technical term in different academic fields, including of course marketing, law, and rhetoric, but also communication studies, sociology, and management, to name just a few. While we need to designate our research object, we wish to avoid falling prey to the impulse of trying to formulate universally applicable definitions of the strict analytical kind. Instead, we opt for a functional description of the phenomenon in question. A traditional understanding might be that green marketing refers solely to promotion or advertising of products by reference to their environmental characteristics (using terms like “environmentally friendly”, “recycled”, etc.). Such cases are indeed textbook examples of green marketing. However, in our view, green marketing can incorporate a broad range of activities, including not only promotional practices but also production process, product modification, and packaging changes, to name just a few central examples (e.g. Koenig-Lewis et al. 2014;

? Part of the reason for the ambiguity is found in the first part of the word: “Green”, which in itself merits comment. As symbols, most colors have a multitude of connotational references, the result of many different uses in different contexts over time. This is not least true of green. It has been associated with jealousy, envy, and even greed. Being the color of US-dollar bills, it is regularly invoked as the color of money—a reference reinforced by the dominance of the American pop-cultural scene. Fully in line with capitalist values, green has often been associated with success, and is often viewed as the color of balance. Decorators will note that the fact that the color is the result of mixing blue and yellow gives green traits of both, being both relaxing (like an ocean) and energizing (like the sun). The references of green will vary with the context. In our present context, the central aspect of green is of course the way it has become associated with the environment. It represents the hopes for a better future and has been associated with nature, health, growth (even economic growth), indeed with life itself, and it has become a symbol both for environmental movements and for corporations mimicking their symbolism. Green is regularly juxtaposed with black—the color of death, smog, or fossil fuels—and brown, representing dirtier, less sustainable practices (in extreme cases, there can even be implications of guilt by association, as brown is the color of fascism).

Boncinelli et al. 2023). In this sense, green marketing is, as the term signifies, a subset of marketing in the wider sense of marketing studies (e.g. Polonsky 1994; Dangelico and Vocalelli 2017, discussing the evolution of green marketing definitions). However, our perspective is not equivalent to that of Marketing scholars, typically domestic to the field of Business and Management studies. We, the authors, are scholars of rhetoric and law, and what we are interested in, and what our disciplinary tools can further, is the study of marketing as communication in a broad sense, marketing as performance, as persuasion, and as the object of normative structures. We are interested in the rhetorical characteristics and functions of the particular type of communicative act that we call green marketing.* In some senses, green marketing is like an elephant: You don’t need a definition as you will know it when you see it. Indeed, such recognition is almost a criterion for it to work as marketing, as it needs to effectively communicate that whatever is being promoted is in fact green, in order to persuade. Normally, the te/os of green marketing as persuasion will be to facilitate that the audience enters into some form of transaction with an actor directly or indirectly constructed as green—the paradigmatic case being marketing intended to further sales of a promoted product. This is also the paradigm of the legal framework regarding marketing (see Chap. 7). However, to focus solely on such paradigmatic cases would entail a reductive analysis. It would exclude much of what is most interesting about green marketing, including most aspects related to the construction of a green ethos, which is an apparently efficient and indeed common green marketing strategy (see Chap. 3).* Thus, for the purposes of this book, green marketing can be functionally defined as strategic communication about qualities and performance in relation to environmental sustainability. As corporate rhetoric regards, the object of environmental performance will normally be either a brand/company, or products, and these are our main examples. Note that this definition of green marketing is provisional, in the sense that the discussions in the book will provide

3In terms of the 4 Ps of Marketing studies, our focus is primarily on the promotional aspect, although not exclusively. This is because promotion and especially the evaluation of its ethical implications are closely related to the other aspects of the 4 Ps of marketing: promotion, product(ion), place, and price.

4 And yes, focusing on ethos, rather than on product, can be a functional way of circumventing important parts of the regulatory framework, as will be briefly developed in Chap. 7.

more flesh to the rather boney structure of the definition, but we need to start somewhere, and the provided definition will suffice as a starting point.

This book is a result of an ongoing interdisciplinary endeavor, at the intersection of law, rhetoric, and sustainability. The work is cross-disciplinary, in the sense that we are less bothered by the traditional field demarcations of different academic disciplines, and more about our object of research. In this volume, we contribute to the field of rhetoric, and especially climate transition rhetoric, and to a better understanding of the realities to be subject to legal analysis. We do so by articulating a theoretical framework for the discussion of green marketing issues, including the analysis, criticism, typologization, and evaluation of green promises.

We use the concept of green promises to capture instances of green marketing that can be considered as promissory utterances (possibly subject to concrete legal effects, e.g. as contractually binding, cf. Mossberg 2023). Possible clear examples are commitments made by a company or organization to take (or to have taken) specific actions or to implement certain practices in order to minimize their environmental impact and promote sustainability (e.g. by reducing emissions, conserving natural resources, using renewable energy sources, or promoting sustainable practices throughout the supply chain). Rhetorically, a green promise is a means of demonstrating commitment to protecting the environment and appealing to those concerned about sustainability. Legally and ethically, the implications of green promises are seldom very clear. Partly, this is because the analytical frameworks can be further developed, but more often, it is a result of the intentional vagueness and ambiguity of the promises—fully in line with the prevalent greenwashing criticism.

The concept of greenwashing is indeed related to green marketing practice. The term is a play on the words “white washing”, metaphorically used for attempts to look better than one is, and perhaps also brainwashing, referring to the manipulation of beliefs (e.g. Dangelico and Vocalelli 2017; de Freitas Netto et al. 2020). Greenwashing occurs when poor environmental performance meets the desire to communicate positive environmental performance (Delmas and Burbano 2011), and it has often been used about operations providing environmental advertising without environmental substance, in essence about making false or misleading claims about green issues. We will return to the concept of greenwashing (inter alia in Chap. 2).°

5 See also note 8.

There are more concepts which could be considered key concepts of this book, including corporate rhetoric (which we conceive widely, as any form of signifying behavior hailing from companies, businesses, or other actors, especially in the economic sphere), and environmental communication (“the dissemination of information and the implementation of communication practices that are related to the environment”, “a broad field that includes research and practices regarding how different actors (e.g. organizations, states, people) interact with regard to topics related to the environment and how cultural products influence society toward environmental issues”, Antonopoulos and Karyotakis 2020; cf. e.g. Pezzullo and Cox 2022). We also refer to climate transition rhetoric, a new subfield of rhetoric, that moves away from a traditional focus on revealing manipulative language and ideological presuppositions, toward exploring the constructive potential of rhetoric to facilitate sustainable development with a particular focus on climate-related issues (cf. e.g. Wolrath Söderberg 2020; Eise et al. 2020). Indeed, we might even define more basic terms, like climate? or even the environment. However, we wish to avoid merely being caught up in a nervously defensive practice of postulating definitions and abstract analysis. While words and terminology are any author’s primary tool, and avoidance of definitionary fullness leaves openings for criticisms from more analytically inclined scholars, at this point it seems more prudent to just get on with things.

1.3 OVERVIEW OF THIS BOOK

In ten chapters, this book introduces and explores a new framework for the analysis and discussion of green marketing. Directly following this brief introduction, Chap. 2 presents our main idea about the potentially transformative power inherent in green promises. Chapter 3 then engages

6 And indeed, given the currently extremely prolific use of the term climate, it is an interesting concept. It seems inherently vague. In the context of climate change, it will often refer to more than just long-term meteorological patterns within a specific area, or the average physical conditions of the atmosphere. The surface temperature is rising, but usually “climate” will refer to something more, and possibly more elusive, for abstract conceptualization. “Climate” refers to something like the state of the climate system—that is, conditions in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere—at any given moment, and over time, and thus it refers to how the air, water, ice, land, and life are, develop, and interact with each other.

with selected research on organizational theory. Within this broad field, the question has been raised about the possible constructive effects of green promises. Researchers have also conceptualized the promises’ functions, in terms of organizational ethos and legitimation processes. We engage with selected contributions in this discussion, to provide a rudimentary understanding of the concept of legitimation, and to acknowledge green legitimation as a specific form of legitimation practice that has gained momentum as climate change is being increasingly sedimented as an institution. In our view, these modern contributions to the analysis of societal phenomena have clear links to key concepts in classical rhetorical theory, especially that of ethos.

In Chap. 4, we search for the building blocks for a new scheme of ethos analysis, by taking stock of modern rhetorical research. We scrutinize the merits and demerits of earlier attempts to merge the legitimation perspective of institutional theory with rhetorical theory. In doing so, we strive to be particularly mindful of the often problematic ontological implications of earlier attempts to analyze corporate green rhetoric by combining rhetorical theory on ethos with organizational theory. Hence, while Chap. 3 provides a presentation of institutional theory that functions as an important frame of reference, Chap. 4 provides a critical discussion of earlier research. We note that the Aristotelian paradigm seems to be positively dominant, and while there is good reason for its popularity, as it provides useful analytical tools, it has problems and drawbacks. We illustrate this by examining some of the limitations for corporate image analysis that arise from a strict adherence to an Aristotelian paradigm.

Following the problematization, Chap. 5 launches the search for an alternative framework by mapping how the relation between rhetoric and virtue has been conceptualized within the rhetorical tradition, beyond Aristotle. By returning to the classical rhetorical tradition, we can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the social dynamics of rhetorical practice, one that is more consistent with a dynamic understanding of institutional theory, and most importantly, works better as a framework for a constructive turn in the scholarly discussion of green marketing. We draw from historical sources, primarily Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian, but the discussions do not merely serve as a historical backdrop. Instead, the lessons drawn shape our development of a theoretical framework of green marketing virtues.

An analytical framework is then presented in Chap. 6 in the form of a typology, categorizing the sins, their corresponding virtues, and the different types of problems that they concern. This chapter thus contains the perhaps most tangible of our contributions, regarding theoretical building blocks and analytical tools for future discussions about green marketing. We believe that these tools may well prove useful in different fields. Thus, in the following Chap. 7, we discuss some of the possible legal implications of our proposed shift of focus, from censuring or chastising sins, toward cultivating virtuous action.