Greenwashing is a viable marketing plan for businesses

GREENWASHING is a viable marketing plan for businesses who want to persuade the public that their product is environmentally friendly.

As consumers become more alert to the need to preserve the environment, many companies have come up with PR strategies which range from ‘varnishing the truth’ to simple fabrication and this process is known as greenwashing.

In late September 2022, Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) communications agency, Clearly PR polled 1,500 senior UK executives asking whether they understood their sustainability aims and whether they were achieving them.

Astonishingly almost half (44 per cent) of these UK businesses admitted that they are failing to deliver on their sustainable commitments, with nearly one in five (18 per cent) admitting to publicly exaggerating their green credentials.

A further one in four (24 per cent) admit they do not know if their sustainability efforts are making any positive difference at all, and 20 per cent were even unaware as to whether their business had any system in place to measure the effectiveness of their environmental initiatives in the first place.

To put this into perspective, just 19 per cent of respondents believed that their business was making genuine progress on its sustainable initiatives.

The findings of the poll could suggest that the rise in businesses guilty of greenwashing may partly be the result of a lack of understanding among businesses of how to measure the impact of their sustainability initiatives in the first place but equally a good number cynically distort the truth in order to benefit their companies.

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