Can Marketing Save the Planet?

January 29, 2024
Marketing consultants Carvill and Butler follow up 2021’s Sustainable Marketing with a confused manual on how businesses can adopt greener business practices and encourage sustainable consumer behavior through advertising. Drawing guidance from the practices of eco-friendly businesses, the authors emphasize the importance of telling a “compelling story” and credit Patagonia with successfully entreating customers to take advantage of their repair service by encouraging them to feel “a sense of achievement” about selecting the sustainable option. Unfortunately, much of the advice is vague, as when the authors warn against using “sustainability stock” phrases but fail to mention any examples. There’s also a fundamental tension between the need for sustainable practices and corporations’ profit imperative that’s never quite resolved. As Carvill and Butler note, the narrative pushed by traditional marketing that “we need to own stuff to be happy” generates waste and pollution, but their call for ads to instead “motivative everyone they reach to want to do something that benefits people and the planet” fails to grapple with the reality that most marketing departments are evaluated on their ability to boost profit. Despite a smattering of surprising trivia (“one Google search equates to half the carbon impact created as boiling a kettle”), this doesn’t come together.