Is Green A Fad?

Green Marketing guru (and PSFK Conference Panelist) John Grant looks at whether Green could be a passing fad.

Green is very ‘in’. You can hardly pick up a fashion magazine, visit a supermarket, watch a car or travel programme, open the business pages without finding it in there. Many corporations are described as ‘jumping on the bandwagon’; GE, HSBC, M&S, Toyota, AOL, NewsCorp. And smaller greener businesses such as Howies, Able & Cole, People Tree, Treehugger and Yeo Valley are booming. People are talking about a tipping point in public awareness. Yet there is also a darker side to this new found fashionability; what if it is just a fad? What if green is ‘in’ this year and out the next? It happened before in the early 1990s. Can such hype be sustained?

Of course nobody knows. But we need to recognize that it’s not just a media obsession. Nor limited to the middle classes. Landor recently found “universal support for green thinking” in a large-scale survey of US and UK general public; and compared with an identical survey the year before which found green thinking to be marginal, they discovered one of the most “complete and speedy revolutions in consumer attitudes ever seen”…The point I want to make is the fact that it is fashionable at the moment gives us no indication as to its prospects, either way.

…Yes the last green bandwagon of 1989 did crash. But in 1989 this was a political cause, filling the vacuum of the peace movements after the cold war, driven by (very real) concerns about social justice, toxic waste, labour rights, deforestation, the effects of globalisation and so on. In human terms, the last green bandwagon was a mid life crisis – a soul searching over whether we had the right sort of society and economy. Whereas this green bandwagon is more like a medical diagnosis of a potentially fatal illness. Of course many given such a diagnosis go into denial. There is still no certainty that sustainability will prove sustainable. But it is different.

My guess is that the current situation is that some people have ‘got’ the emergency we face and what needs to change (everything, beyond recognition, very fast). And that many are still at the early stages of getting caught up in a movement but not a profound realization.

Very good stuff. Read the whole analysis piece here: greenormal