Companies have to be honest - or at the very least, sound honest. If they can’t, they should sound humble

THERE ARE three parts to any magic trick: the pledge, the turn and the prestige. This came to mind while sitting in traffic on the M50 reading about the current Government plan to position Ireland as a global leader in green technology. Once I had devoured the findings, it became clear that if the Government is to make this re-branding work, a rudimentary grasp of magic will be essential.

"Ireland can be the engine of this change," runs the introduction to Developing the Green Economy in Irelandfrom the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation (Deti). "We have the natural resources, the talent and the Government commitment necessary to become a hub for green enterprise."

I want to make clear that this is not an attempt to mock the plan. I think it’s a great idea. Ireland has much to gain from a new image and if there are jobs, and economic growth and movement on global warming, who wouldn’t be in favour?

The problem with getting the Green Ireland brand across is that the advertising industry has muddied the waters to such an extent that we don’t trust anyone on this topic. How can we manage this, when TerraChoice, the US environmental marketing agency, is churning out data that undermines virtually every environmental claim made on the part of products sold?

The latest report suggests more than 95 per cent of consumer products claiming to be green commit at least one of its Seven Sins of Greenwashing. At the same time, there was a 73 per cent increase in the number of “green” products on the market last year over the previous year.

The Seven Sins are as follows: the hidden trade-off; no proof; vagueness; worshipping false labels; irrelevance; being the lesser of two evils; and outright fibbing.

I was reminded of a conversation I had recently with Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired, the US magazine that looks at trends in technology. Kelly views the relationship between seller and customer as an evolutionary arms race, with each vying for supremacy.

“It’s like a magic trick,” he said. “When we go into a magic show, we’re playing a game with ourselves – we’re aware that we can be fooled and, at the same time, we enjoy that. We’re aware of the trick and we say, ‘I’m going to try hard to catch you, so go ahead and try’.”

As advertisers have become more sophisticated, so too have our defences, both technological and psychological. Policymakers often make the assumption that the public are duped into buying stuff and, therefore, need to be protected. And while this is true of children, Kelly doubts that the advertisers have the upper hand.

“The systems are working against each other. We have the complexity of persuasion and we have increasingly complex technologies that help us escape,” he says. “People are aware of how ads work on a much more complex and sophisticated level than they used to, and much of it is very transparent to people.”

Set against this backdrop, OgilvyEarth, an offshoot of the global advertising agency, produced a report advising clients about how to go about sending sustainable messages.

The report says we have reached a sort of tipping point: for companies, the fear of being caught cheating is beginning to outweigh the benefits of claiming to be green.

This calls for drastic action, the advertising agency says. Companies have to be honest – or at the very least, sound honest. And if they can’t do that, they should sound humble.

“Taking a lesson from the political world, we know people will accept progress over perfection as long as shortcomings are declared in full. But a cover-up? Now that they won’t forgive,” it says.

It is difficult to be sympathetic to the advertising industry, as it has been more guilty than anyone else of breaching our trust by overselling. And as a result we exist on a loop between claim and counterclaim. When the Government brings forward its own green agenda, we default to cynical mode – a view that can almost always be supported by evidence of some bad practice.

But OgilvyEarth is also correct when it points out that the more cynical watchdogs in the green marketplace attribute all greenwashing to malign corporate motives.

“It seems likely, however that most greenwash is the result of marketers rushing to respond to consumers’ desire for greener goods and services, and in the process falling prey to the overwhelming complexity of achieving corporate sustainability,” it says

This last point is the key one. It is virtually impossible to be completely clean. Even sainted companies are vulnerable to bad practices further down the supply chain. What’s more, holding all companies and governments to standards of perfection could be limiting progress.

So be as good as we can is the message and then learn from the criticism that will inevitably come along. It’s not as sexy as the one the Government wants to send out to the world. But it’s more honest, and it has a chance of being met with a positive response.

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