As mentioned in my last blog, I’ve been attempting to launch a career for myself since graduating with a degree in Marketing Food and Drink from the University of Brighton earlier this year and have tried to faciliate that by enrolling on an internship programme (which I finished last week).
Part of me had naively expected I would land a job devising creative and cunningly clever campaigns for one of my favourite foody brands fresh out of Uni (favourite foody brands being Guinness and Marmite, if you’re interested…). But the other, more realistic part of me started wondering, what if jobs were so thin on the ground when I graduated, I would end up peddling a product or company I not only disliked (brands I wouldn’t purchase myself), but fundamentally disagreed with (patently unethical brands and products)?
I found I was cultivating an ethical conundrum over my choice of marketing as a career path as my academic experience progressed. I loved studying. I was good at it and I had a passion for my subject, but I was frequently challenged by friends quoting Bill Hicks marketing and advertising rant at me. Once I even had the pleasure of a friends rather inebriated parent intensely demanding I justify the soulless, manipulative nature of marketing to them on what would otherwise have been a very pleasant and civilised social occasion.
I’m certainly not the first, nor will I be the last to ponder the ethics of marketing and whole libraries could be filled with more eloquent musings on the topic than mine, but this was (and still is, to an extent) a cause of conflict for me, one I explored quite frequently in essays and assignments when given the chance.
I signed up to study an ‘Ethics in Marketing’ module in my last year of uni hoping that might help me fend off criticisms and soothe my conflicted soul(!), but only two people applied and the module didn’t run. This was depressing. Did no one else (except one solitary student) care about ethics?
At about this time, my dad said, “You don’t strike me as the marketing type”. At first, I admit this comment stung. I’d spent three years studying marketing, what was I meant to do if not follow that up with a career? But the more I thought about it, the less it bothered me… He was right, more or less. I’m not the marketing type.
That is to say, I’m not the “soulless, manipulative” marketing type my friends drunken parents are so quick to attack and actually, I’m fine with that… I like Bill Hicks.
The two jobs I’ve landed post uni have coincidentally concerned energy conservation and green technology, both of which have introduced me to the world of ‘green marketing’. This hadn’t been a conscious decision, rather I’d jumped at the chance to gain as much experience as possible and it just so happened that both of these opportunities were concerned with green technology, but the wider topics of sustainabilty, social responsibility and green marketing have gripped me. My conflicted feelings about a soulless, manipulative career in marketing have (more or less) abated.
That said, I’ve been pondering what it really means to be ‘green’. Is it purely environmental? Does it encompass ethics too? Some might argue that there is a fundamental difference between ‘green’ and ‘ethical’ but the crux of both for me is being aware of the impact of your actions and decisions in a wider context. I went to an interesting seminar titled ‘Green Marketing: Saint or Sinner?‘ in London a couple of weeks back that covered a lot of these topics. ‘Greenwashing’ came up quite frequently, that is; claiming or alluding to have green or ethical credentials that are unsubstantiated and often false, which got me thinking…
The company I did my internship with (and now work for) sells a green product, by which I mean it saves energy, reduces carbon and is recyclable, but can we claim to be a green company? Businesses can utilise a host of green activities throughout their operations such as installing solar panels, driving hybrid and electric vehicles, monitoring their supply chain and using only sustainable office equipment, carbon offsetting servers for their websites, building roof gardens, using fuel cells, installing a comprehensive recycling system and more. In light of this, it seems fraudulent to call your business green just because you use energy-saving lightbulbs and recycle your waste paper in the office. Many consumers do these things in their own homes and would certainly not consider themselves to be “green”.
To what extent can we tout the green credentials of our product when, as a company, we’re not doing everything we can to be green (yet)? As Kermit sang, it’s not that easy being green… Surely we need to put more work in to ensure our credentials are credible before we shout about them?
Hitting the nail on the head, Dave ‘Carbon Coach’ Hampton tweeted today, “What if the reason so few people are stressing the importance of leading from the front with a low-carbon footprint is that they aren’t – yet”.
For more on this topic, see this recent article from Advertising Age. Is Green Marketing in a “trough of disillusionment”?
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