If you are a large corporation, or even a medium-sized one, and you are in an industry which exploits natural resources, you probably find it very inconvenient that most of the American public says they care about the environment and that they want the government to protect it. This can really interfere with the way you do business: you may have to pay more to transport the resources you have extracted; there might be limits placed on how much you can extract in the first place; there could even be fines you are forced to pay for the by-product of your manufacturing activity. What a pain in the posterior. You didn’t go into business to placate a needy planet. Let the planet eat cake!
Granted, you do have the option of relocating to another country where democracy is still struggling, especially where democracy of local people resisting multi-national corporations like your own is still struggling. However, you are likely very accustomed to the various perks of your CEO life in the U.S., so the most cost-effective solution is if you can get round the American body politic and then never have to leave home at all!
Listen up for just a few minutes – have your secretary tell whoever it is you’ll call them back -- and soon I can teach you how to be a whiz at Greenwashing too.
There are two major goals you will want to meet and address. Fortunately, there are clear steps to accomplish both.
Goal #1) Greenwashing your company
In order to satisfy the public’s deep suspicion that companies do not care about the environment but merely value profits, you will need to do a lot of work to change your image and brand yourself as a conscientious, responsible, communitarian company that voluntarily curbs its own greed and cleans up its act. You want the public to feel that you are on the same side as them. There are two options that will help you make this shift.
Option A) Hire an expensive public relations firm.
The highest-end public relations firms have a great deal of experience in manipulating public opinion to conform with the wishes of corporate clients. Hire one of these, and be willing to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. They will then handle everything for you. Before you know it, the public will be willing to vote against their own interests and for yours instead.
Try to find a PR firm which worked for the tobacco industry for a long time -- they will have had a great deal of important and instructive experience in the paradigm that so many other industries have successfully followed ever since. Those firms deserve awards for how many decades they managed to paint the tobacco industry as genuinely interested in finding out the truth about nicotine and addiction. This is the kind of magic trick you want someone to do for you too!
Or
Option B) Use your own internal public relations people, but train them well to follow these three steps:
1) Partner with a prominent environmental organization:
a) Look for a well-known, established environmental organization so that you can benefit from the name recognition of an alliance with them. Find a big enough, top-down, hierarchically-structured group so that they have assets they want to protect and a docile membership – look for organizations with fancy offices, national membership bases, sleek newsletters, and extensive fundraising operations. This will make them much more likely to be willing to work with you than organizations which are more action-oriented. Since the more sedentary organizations do not have much opportunity to actually boast of specific actions and accomplishments, if they can boast to their membership that they have pressured you or transformed you, it will look like a big achievement for them. This is of course a win-win situation for you both. You do realize, I hope, that no actual transformation need happen.
b) Be willing to make some superficial concession if they require it. If your company has been responsible for a massive oil spill, for instance, you will want to show that you are willing to consider some sort of plan that will improve the environmental health of the devastated area. Do not, of course, just blindly concede to their requests. You are not allying with this organization in order to reform your own company, but to use the credibility of the organization to mend your own credibility. It is about image.
c) Donate money to the organization or to a specific environmental project that your company and they develop together. Sponsor an event which seeks to make everybody feel good about helping the environment but that does not bring up controversial issues or raise too much awareness: cleaning up litter, for instance, or gathering items for recycling. Go for the kind of events that are good harmless fun for the whole family. (Planting trees makes you sound like hippies, though -- and besides, do you want the fake-tree manufacturers to get annoyed?) Make sure to tell stockholders, customers, and the public at large about your generosity and take lots of photos.
d) Treat the partnership as a long-term collaboration. Serve on their board of directors of the environmental organization; it is an inexpensive way to spy on them and shape their attitudes at the same time. Find joint ongoing projects that you can contribute to and thus give you something to boast about yearly. This will give you long-term credibility and be insurance for any further trouble you may get into in the future if your chemicals turn out to be toxic, your products turn out to come from old-growth forests, you realize you’ve killed off an entire species of fish, or some other potential problem.
2) Pay for slick ads which portray your company as environmentalist:
Ads do not have to bear any relation to actual facts, so you can just throw up images of trees, grass, water, children playing, butterflies, dandelion seeds blowing in the breeze, and so forth. Use terms like “clean,” “safe,” “healthy,” “Earth,” and “future,” all of which have positive connotations and can be applied to virtually anything. Make sure you stress your “commitment” to the environment. It is okay, you won’t have to get specific.
3) Counterbalance your perceived negatives:
If you are in a relatively new industry which the public tends to think is artificial and dangerous, like genetic engineering or the manufacturing of synthetic chemicals, make sure you play off the idea that you are making big and heartfelt investments in technology and innovation, and that you really have respect for the wonders of science. Be on the side of progress. Imply that the other side is superstitious and uninformed.
If your business needs to exploit natural resources that have been around for centuries – but which your company is fast using up – make sure you emphasize how much you value traditional things like family, our natural heritage, and common sense.
Goal #2) Pursuing your own agenda
It would not be much of a benefit for your company if collaborating with a green organization prevented you from continuing to pillage or pollute, so of course you also need the PR firm or your own PR professionals to guide you in a plan to prevent regulations from limiting your profit margin. These are easy principles to execute:
1) Delay, delay, delay
You may not be able to hold off regulations forever, but you can hold them off long enough to continue to grab what you can get in the meantime. You just need to keep telling the public that more information is needed before the health and safety of your product or activity can be determined. Scientific studies can take years to finally finish, but in the meantime, Wall Street stock trading takes place daily. Profits accrue!
2) Pretend that you care about the democratic exchange of ideas
Pass your company off as a proud part of that whole American democratic tradition thingy. Emphasize words in your public pronouncements like “dialogue,” “debate,” “openness,” and the weighing of all the information. (If you add the word “robust” to those nouns, that’s always helpful.) Promise to take action as soon as all the facts have been tabulated, just do not give a firm deadline by which anyone can expect said facts to arrive or to actually be conclusive. Take a calm and dispassionate tone!!!!!!
3) Engage in name-calling
Though you might think it would back-fire, somehow it never does. Make sure that you target your critics as “alarmist,” “nay-sayers,” “doom and gloom,” “anti-capitalists,” “kooks,” “emotional,” etc. Dismiss the science that criticizes your company as “junk science” and elevate science which redeems you as “sound science” -- no media outlet will ever mention which studies are funded by you, so this is a safe strategy.
4) Paint your side as the compromise position
Part of your name-calling approach should be to portray your opponents as extremists who have unrealistic demands and little interest in practical solutions. Contrast this with how you and your industry just want to pursue “wise use:” techniques and methods which still allow humans to make use of the environment, within reason. Do not allow the environmentalists’ arguments for “sustainability” to sound like the same position you are taking. Do not, of course, sign up for any true limits on exploitation or pollution of natural resources.
You’re all set, as will be the future of the planet! If you follow these recommendations, you will be able to meet both the important aim of greenwashing your company so you can benefit from the public trust, and the pivotal goal of pursuing your own corporate agenda so you can keep doing whatever you were doing that the public objected to in the first place.
In other words, you will be able to go on making use of the Earth’s bounty forever, or for as long as that bounty lasts. Even if that may not be for very long.
