Corporate greenwashing is not dead or dying
As we return from the festive season, our inboxes and social media feeds are filled with predictions for the year ahead. Earlier this week, B Labs – the organisation behind the B Corp movement – shared a post on LinkedIn predicting that ‘corporate greenwashing’ will be out in 2025. Not one for appearing negative but… I think this is overly optimistic. And wrong.
Here’s why.
Economic woes
UK economic growth is sluggish right now. Last month, the Bank of England warned that “UK growth is on the brink of stagnation amid the fallout from Rachel Reeves’s budget.” (The Telegraph). In that Budget the Chancellor outlined her growth forecast for the economy over the next five years. This certainly provided some optimism. After all, growth is what we all need and want. But this was short lived.
Within days, the impact that the newly announced increase in employer National Insurance contributions will have on businesses quickly became apparent. To remind you, from April, employers will have to pay an additional £800-£1,000 per person per year. This has caused chaos.
Indeed, a S&P Global UK Services PMI report published this week (CityAM) reveals that a quarter of all service sector employers have already reduced their workforces since October. This is in anticipation of the changes that come into effect in the Spring.
It is important to mention this because it provides the backdrop to how businesses and brands reshape their thinking. Especially when it comes to marketing and PR – as I’ll explain now.
Contextual marketing and PR
At times of economic stagnation, businesses and brands take stock of buyer behaviours and shift their marketing and PR focus accordingly to ensure that their messaging (advertising, press releases) appeals to the customers they need to attract. That’s perfectly logical.
There is no better example of this than the pandemic. Those brands and businesses who contextualised their messaging according to the circumstances retained customer loyalty and even attracted new ones.
A great example of this is that of a recruitment client of ours.
Employing more the 250 people globally, the client recognised that few (if any) of their customers would be hiring during the lockdown period. So, they focused on creating content and news stories that offered ideas, help, and advice for hiring managers and job seekers looking to make sense of what was happening at that time.
This enamoured them to their audience. It won them the respect, trust, loyalty and business (when restrictions eased) of those people. Many businesses and brands took this approach, it was the right thing to do.
What happened next, however, sparked the beginning of the problem we’re discussing today: greenwashing.
Creative ‘honesty’
By the end of the summer in 2020, another notable change was starting to take place. It was one that would prove to be more than the zeitgeist to become a movement that continues to gain momentum today: attitudes and buyer motivations changed.
Services: ESG Communications
Consumers began to gravitate towards organisations who stood for something, believed in a cause, and operated with purpose. This was previously a minority market that soon found itself in the mainstream and the money was flowing.
Pre-2020, few businesses and brands gave a crap about mental health, sustainability, and social impact. But that soon changed when they could see where the money was now being spent.
Businesses and brands wanted their slice of this new-wave pie. Suddenly this was all they cared about (apparently). Their marketing and PR strategy now became focused on positioning the organisation as being ‘purpose led.’
For some, this was a genuine and authentic shift towards becoming a more responsible business. For many others, however, it was nothing more than a blatant attempt to falsely seduce their customers into engaging and doing business with them. Cue: the rise of greenwashing.
Rinse and spin
On the face of it, the number businesses and brands exposed for exaggerating their environmental and social credentials appears to have fallen in the last 12 months. This explains why the likes of B Labs and others are predicting that corporate greenwashing is on its way out.
Indeed, Clearly PR has tracked the number of times ‘greenwashing’ is mentioned in the UK on media websites, in articles, on social media, in blogs, and on podcasts media each month. In the first half of 2024, the number of mentions barely changed, ranging from 10,358 in January to 10,089 in June. During the latter six months of the year, there was a notable decline in mentions – averaging 5,800-6,500 per month.
Read: ESG PR: Overcoming media skepticism to boost media coverage
However, the figures above do not provide the full story. There are other factors that could – probably do – account for the dip which to me suggests we need to consider the reality that instances of greenwashing are not dropping as much as we think. We’re just not hearing about them.
Shifting priorities
Cast your mind back to that time. At the end of May, Rishi Sunak called a General Election, which took place on 4th July. That same month, Donald Trump was formally confirmed as the Republican Party’s official nominee for the US Presidency.
In August, Labour’s proposed tax plans were announced which caused a media frenzy. The following month, there was the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and news on the Princess of Wales’s recovery from illness. October saw the Autumn Budget and the fall out from that has dominated the news agenda ever since.
Each of these events simply overshadowed stories about ESG (environmental, social and governance). So, whilst it is encouraging to see a fall in the number of mentions of greenwashing, it is my view a false economy because other stories are now dominating the news agenda.
If you are a business or brand looking to communicate your great ESG-related stories, speak to us. We’ll get you seen, read, and heard by the right people in the right way! Contact Paul MacKenzie-Cummins directly on paul@clearlypr.co.uk.
