No One Cares About Your Socially Conscious Advertising

Here's my latest column, which takes on the wave of green advertising we're seeing everywhere these days. Enjoy responsibly.

Have you heard? Corporate responsibility is hot! This season, New York clothier Barneys is wishing its customers a “Green Holiday” and offering scarves handknit from “free-range alpaca yarn.” To tout its green cred, cosmetics retailer Aveda
will run ads with pouty models posed in front of windmills. A current Bank of America TV spot makes the case that banking via a mobile phone can “leave a smaller footprint on the environment.”
At a time when global warming is increasingly referred to in the present tense, one would think that such ads would make it easier for socially aware consumers to make their next purchasing decision. But one would be wrong.
A recent survey by the U.K. based marketing consultancy Evo makes a convincing case that consumers don’t trust such messages. And in many cases, there is ample reason to be skeptical.
First of all, it’s important to place social responsibility on the proper hierarchy of consumer considerations. Only after functional factors like necessity, price, convenience, quality and awareness are met will consumers consider so-called emotional needs like fashion, values, concern and loyalty. And only after that will they start to think about whether a brand is responsible or not, something that takes place on the “self-actualization level.” That’s pretty far down on the list.
“The headline is social responsibility is simply not an issue when it comes to purchase decisions,” said Nicola Lindsey, svp of Evo in New York. “It has to be a case of all things being equal.”
Lindsey added that while consumers tend to feel good when they buy something tagged as socially responsible, the same is not true in the converse: Consumers don’t feel bad if they don’t buy it. Say you’re considering buying an eco-friendly diaper, but conclude it’s way too expensive. While you may fight some guilt, overall you’ll feel that you made a solid, budgetwise decision.
Second, corporations have the same problem that politicians do: Drawing attention to your good deeds only makes those deeds more suspect. “If anything, corporate social responsibility is viewed negatively,” the report notes, like “global monoliths cleaning up their act after wrongdoing.” Lindsey gave as an example BP, which has won plaudits for its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign that shows the company leading the charge to find new, cleaner sources of energy. That green-tinged global ad campaign seems to be smart branding since it addresses the main argument against BP—global warming—in a positive way.
In theory, anyway. Evo found that consumers aren’t dumb: They know BP is still an oil company and “part of an industry where there’s nothing ethical about the industry as a whole,” Lindsey said.
A word of caution is in order. Evo’s report is based on a very small sample—just 70 people in the U.K. But similar studies in Spain and China yielded similar results. Moreover, it’s possible that Americans are more gullable than their European counterparts. After all, genetically modified food is a huge issue over there that’s about as well known here as Cliff Richard. (Evo is planning a similar study in the U.S. next year.)
But there’s another reason why I think Evo’s report is on target: Google. I know when I put any kind of thought into a purchase, I tend to research it online. And do I want to read the good stuff? No. I gravitate to the most critical commentaries I can find. Since a good book can take eight or more hours of my time, for instance, I want to see what the one-star reviewers in Amazon have to say about it.
I don’t think the average consumer will put a lot of effort into researching Barneys green claims; many bloggers are already quite skeptical. And if Barneys, Aveda or Bank of America ever gets caught on the wrong end of some environmental issue, it will probably negate all that advertising.
Brands still have several options. Lindsey suggests basing the social responsibility claims on something real and intrinsic to the name. If BP makes most of its money from oil and spends a trifle on new sources of energy, it’s inviting criticism about being “beyond preposterous.” But what if Gap gave 100% of proceeds from its Product(Red) campaign to Global Fund rather than 50%? Is it possible that such Google-proof altruism would pass Evo’s sniff test? I think an even better way to get the word out about your good deeds is to try to keep it secret, or at least bury that information somewhere deep on your Web page. After all, the best way to spread the word these days is to pretend that you’re trying not to.

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