Green Marketing is Dead. Long Live Strategy and Marketing
Noted green business journalist Joel Makower caused quite a stir when he published this article in May: “Green Marketing Is Over. Let’s Move On.” What Makower fails to do, as comments pointed out, is define what he means by “green marketing.” This makes the article somewhat confusing because many of the things he points to as working are also marketing issues. Turns out that he’s describing green marketing communications, not the full marketing discipline. With this clarification, this article provides substance to the position we’ve taken on green marketing for several years.
I welcome the demise of obsession with green marketing communications.  No one is ever going to scale sustainability by trying to get people to buy green for green’s sake. As I’ve discussed in previous articles, the people who will buy green for green’s sake are the innovator’s and early adopters of the industry. Everyone else buys for other reasons, primarily the utility of the product or service.
It’s my hope that as people recognize the limitations of so-called “green marketing,” they will rediscover the other 3-4 “P”s of marketing (depending on how you count them), will discover the value of strategy as a place to embed sustainability values into the core business rather than bolting them on through features-benefits descriptions. According to Makower’s article, this *is* what’s working. Let’s get to it!
Tags: Green Marketing, marketing, Strategy, Sustainability, Trust, values
