Last month, the Federal Trade Commission released its long-pending revisions to its green marketing guidelines. Commonly known as the Green Guides, these guidelines regulate how marketers may promote the environmental benefits of their products and services.
The revised Green Guides offer new guidance on several topics, including renewable energy, renewable materials and carbon credits. However, the most game-changing aspect of the revised Green Guides is that they now expressly prohibit marketers from making “general environmental benefit claims.” These include statements such as “green,” “eco-friendly” and “environmentally sound,” which all imply that a product or service is good for the environment without making clear exactly why or how.
Based on research indicating that consumers are easily misled by such language, the FTC states that unqualified general green claims are no longer acceptable, whether marketing to consumers or B2B.
Furthermore, a statement doesn’t have to be clearly articulated to count as a general green claim. The guidelines apply to “all…forms of marketing in any medium, whether asserted directly or by implication, through words, symbols, logos, depictions, product brand names, or any other means.”
This is huge.
Why? Because so many of us have incorporated environmental benefit claims into our branding.
Just think about some of the major companies who have done so. Clorox, with their “Green Works” line of cleaning products. Kimberly-Clark's Scott Naturals. Seventh Generation.
These companies, and countless others both large and small, have built environmental messaging right into their identities, or into the identities of certain of their products.
What will happen to brands like these under the new FTC guidelines? What are they supposed to do? Is it safer to stop talking about green benefits altogether? Is this the end of green marketing?
Next page: The Green Guides as customer feedback
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May be important to not
May be important to not 'mislead' readers about what FTC Green Guides are — and are not. They do not 'regulate', and they can't 'prohibit'. They are merely guidelines as their name suggests.
Am glad to see that FTC Green Guides do come down stronger on general environmental claims, as I discuss in my Oct 11 post,
http://www.greenmarketing.com/blog/comments/upshot-of-ftc-revised-green-...
Yes and no. The Guides
Yes and no. The Guides themselves are not laws. However they expand upon and clarify Section 5 of the FTC Act, which is. When the FTC takes action against a company for misleading environmental claims, they are actually doing so under Section 5, but use the Green Guides as guidance in doing so.
In addition, several states have used the Green Guides as a template for anti-greenwashing legislation. I explain this in detail here: http://www.thegreeninkwell.com/2012/10/ftc-green-guides-not-just-guideli...
FTC "green" claim ban is not
FTC "green" claim ban is not new. The original guides published by FTC in 1992 prohibited the use of impossible to substantiate general claims of "green" and "environmentally safe." Nothing new now except possibly better PR and maybe some more enforcement after all these years of letting claims get way out of hand.
It's true that the FTC has
It's true that the FTC has always discouraged unqualified general environmental claims. However the revised Green Guides are far more explicit about it and have strengthened the guideline in several significant ways.
1) In reiterating the General Principle of Overstatement of Environmental Benefits ("Marketers should not imply that any specific benefit is significant if it is, in fact, negligible") specifically as it applies to general green claims, the agency has underscored the seriousness of the ban and removed any trace of vagueness about the issue.
2) Marketers are now required to analyze environmental benefit trade-offs. This is a hugely important addition, because with enough rationalization you can substantiate green benefits for nearly anything. (Case in point: nuclear power plants.)Under the old Guides it was technically ok to do so; now any marketer making a general environmental claim will need to not only qualify it with specific, substantiated benefits, but also be able to prove that the product as a whole is a superior overall environmental choice. This means taking into account the entire environmental impact of the product, including manufacture, distribution and ultimate disposal.
3) The new guidelines specifically address advertisement context in regards to general environmental benefit claims (in addition to specifying the scope of the Guides elsewhere in the document.) That is, even if all statements are properly qualified (or even if there are no explicit environmental statements at all), anything about the context of an ad that could lead a reasonable consumer to believe that a product is more eco-friendly than it actually is, puts one in violation of the Guides. This includes such things as imagery, sounds (such as birdsong)or implied messages.
In short, the new guidelines have pretty effectively eliminated vagueness from the "green" claim ban, making it substantially stronger - enough so that I would expect marketers to take it far more seriously than the older version.
FTC is clearer this time
FTC is clearer this time around. As I've commented to FTC and guided my clients over the years, it boils down to two principles:
1. Be technically accurate
2. Do not be misleading
It's the second one that is subjective and a moving target. To make it work we need to understand what customers think and FTC needs to continue issuing guidance and do enforcement when necessary.
Georjean Adams, EHS Strategies, Inc.