Best Green Companies are a sign of the (Sunday) Times

The Sunday Times has just launched a competition to find the best green companies in the UK. As they say, in a world where there are an increasing number of green certifications competing for attention, being featured in the Sunday Times could really help you stand out. True enough, and it is a positive sign of the times that a national paper like the Sunday Times is running a competition of this kind. It seems that environmental responsibility is genuinely becoming a serious issue for both business and consumers.

At first glance the competition sounds like a great idea. They've even enlisted a professional environmental consultancy to do the judging and have divided companies up into high, medium and low impact industries to make it fair and inclusive.
What's sad though is that when you read in more detail, you find that the entrance fees range from £500 to £1500+VAT and the competition is only open to companies with more than 50 employees, ruling many of the most exciting and innovative green businesses now entering the market. When you consider that the only prize is a logo to put on your marketing materials and your name listed in the paper, it means that basically you are buying a very expensive lottery ticket with the only real prize being to get your name in the Sunday Times. It all seems a bit bizarre when they claim in their publicity that companies can be nominated by anyone from the CEO to the cleaner, or even a customer or outsider who believes that the company deserves an award, but then you have to pay the entrance fee when you nominate, so its unlikely that many cleaners will be signing up for their employers.

Overall, its great that The Sunday Times is taking green business seriously, but its not really the open, independent competition that they would like to make out, and its unclear what it will really achieve other than create yet another green accreditation to confuse consumers. Hopefully though, some really excellent green companies will enter and get some major publicity to reward them for their responsible attitude to business.

This blog is supported by Scamper - The pioneers in Sustainable Brand Strategy

Eco-nique Climate Positive

Here's an interesting example of the green marketing dilemna. Today I stumbled across a company called eco-nique that claim to be a climate positive company, selling climate positive products.

What are these products? Mobile phone and MP3 cases. No, they're not some nice organic cotton or bioplastic sleeves - just your usual PVC, leather and silicon cases, whose environmental impact clearly spreads further than their carbon emissions.

The company themselves don't mention any environmentally positive actions either (e.g. energy efficiency, renewable energy, recycling etc). They're just a normal company selling phone cases on the internet (see their main website www.i-nique.com) who have realised that by buying a few tonnes of carbon offsets from Climate Care, they can create a separate 'eco' brand to appeal to the growing green market.

Very shrewd, but doesn't this highlight the problem with carbon offsetting. People can pretend to be really good for the environment, when in fact they're doing nothing at all. They're just buying the right to pretend to be good.

This is not to say that carbon offsetting isn't a good thing. It does help to reduce global emissions, and through some schemes can increase woodland areas and provide funding for energy efficiency projects in developing countries that benefit the local people. However, it only works if we recognise that it's only an interim measure to help us minimise our damage while we move to more sustainable practices in the long term. If we treat offsetting itself as the solution then we're probably doing more harm than good, which makes the use of the term Climate Positive somewhat dubious.

Selling carbon offsets with little control over the way that they are communicated is also damaging to the offsetting industry too, as its becoming clear that cynicism towards the concept is growing. Promoting the benefits while discouraging the exploitative use of offsetting is going to be an interesting challenge for the industry.

This blog is supported by Scamper - The pioneers in Sustainable Brand Strategy

Green Business Brands Video Presentation

The first in our series of video presentations is now available to view here, giving an overview of the issues to consider when developing brands for green businesses.

This blog is supported by Scamper - The pioneers in Sustainable Brand Strategy

Live the Brand

I saw this today and thought that it really nicely summed up the importance of living up to your brand as explained in my previous post (actions speak louder than words).

I think it speaks for itself.

This blog is supported by Scamper - The pioneers in Sustainable Brand Strategy