Today in class we discussed issues surrounding Greenwashing and Green marketing. Before this class I didn't know a lot about this topic and the discussions/ 4 articles assigned opened my eyes to the vast amount of Greenwashing that I am exposed to on a daily basis. It also has made me more aware and critical of these advertisements and marketing strategies.
In the "Let It Green: The Ecoization of the Lexicon" I liked it how it outlined the green movement's beginnings, it is interesting to find out where something that we are so used to seeing on a daily basis , all started from, and also realizing that it was quite some time ago that this trend started, and also realize how much it has been exaggerated with new media, and all the new available technological platforms from food labels to television commercials to social media advertisements. It is also interesting to see how the insertion of green into language transformed from being rooted in environmental battles to being branched out into a form of marketing.
The other part of this article that i found very interesting, was the way in which it discussed the word "eco" as being exploited. Benz states that:
"...eco- no longer refers to concern for the environment primarily because savvy marketers have exploited eco's original green connotations and have affixed eco- to the front of their products in an effort to sell more units, to increase consumption of their products- anit-eco actions to say the least."
In class we looked at a lot of hummer ad's, and a lot of the discussion surrounded these different ads. As we were going through these ad's and as I was listening to these comments I thought to myself, that just as the word "eco" is exploited in rhetoric, eco-like images, like green landscapes, beautiful natural scenery, and other green images are exploited visually in television, magazine and internet advertisements through the images we are presented with alongside the products.
An example of an advertising campaign for the cleaning product "green works" was shown. The discussion surrounding this video everyone's really connected to the "Greening of Products" article. This article presented a study that used Information Manipulation Theory as a framework to understand participants (and people's, more generally) evaluation and perceptions of green advertisements. This article points out that many consumers are skeptical towards green glaims which hinders the products effectiveness. Within this study one of the main findings was that Quality ( expectations about the truth of the information) was hugely associated with honesty and positive attitudes towards advertisements. When discussing the video shown for "Green Works" most of the responses from students were regarding the fact that they couldn't even tell it was an advertisement until they saw the product placed throughout the video a few times, and at the end the product name came up and it became obvious it was an advertisement. This response was often followed by how effective they found the advertisement to be. I found it really interesting how much a real life situated paralleled the research presented in this article.
Below is a link to the Green Works video shown in class:
A third article assigned for this week, "Communication Business Greening and Greenwashing in Global Media" explored the ways in which knowledge about greenwashing is communicated in the specialized discourse of a CNN's Greenwashing video, to show the ways that processes of knowledge selection are employed for shaping public awareness and understanding of environmental issues. This article is useful because it illustrates the communicative tactics and downfalls displayed by different organizations. It argues the ways in which the environmental organizations activities and the consumers attitudes are legitimated and evaluated in order to provide a legitimate base for the specific product and advertisement. However the article takes issue with the fact that the greenwashing companies are not given a voice or legitimizing any of their claims, which leads to a imbalanced and unreliable discourse. This article is important, in a class which is focusing on the communication of environmental issues, because it highlights, relating to the last article, why people may be skeptical about all of these green advertisements that they are being so constantly bombarded with. Since they are not confronted with any kind of verbal legitimations, they are given nothing to counterbalance the delegitimizing opinions of criticism and environmental experts.
For my artifact this week i found a number of sites concerned with greenwashing. These sites all have a common goal, to raise awareness and create critical awareness around greenwashing throughout the media. They all give different examples of greenwashing as well as provide information surrounding environmental causes, the harmful effects of techniques like greenwashing, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment