On the Frontlines: Greenwashing and Closing the Authenticity Gap

Some 20 years ago, I worked as a public relations consultant with an ad agency that specialized in sustainability communication, working largely with clients in the energy sector.

While originally coined in the 1980s, the term “greenwashing” gained more public traction in the early 2000s as a code word for inauthentic, ethically compromised messaging, often engaged in by many otherwise top-shelf, credible brands.

All too often, corporate marketers were promoting their companies as bastions of all-things-green, when, in fact, company methods, policies, and operations told a very different story. Public relations crises would erupt when brands would be called out — often by well-organized activists — on their false and misleading messages.

The ad agency team I was working with sought to help clients close any existing or potential authenticity gaps by aligning messages with verifiable compliance and measurable achievement across the full gamut of their sustainability scorecards. The goal: Craft meaningful and truthful sustainability messages that could withstand scrutiny and earn respect from stakeholders, thereby supporting business and competitive objectives.

Our collective work with clients over several years to overcome or proactively avoid the greenwashing trap proved to be an insightful exercise for me as a public relations strategist who values communication ethics.

It illuminated for me just how mired in aspiration, so many companies were — and today, often still are — with their hopes and dreams of sustainability performance in laudable service to a cleaner world. The headiness of it all often clouded people’s judgment when it came to accurate messaging about the “realness” of green claims.

For some companies, this “say-do” disconnect on sustainability registers so egregiously that performance violations have triggered legal action. Search online for “worst cases of greenwashing” and you’ll find a veritable encyclopedia of legally actionable violations occurring over recent decades, some involving the world’s largest and most well-resourced brands.

Twenty years later, the global corporate world — particularly major players with massive budgets — has made strides to avoid the greenwashing label. However, massive challenges remain.

For example, government regulations worldwide remain fast evolving, with some standards and goals set by politicians leaving industry leaders scratching their heads, wondering which rabbit they must pull out of a hat next and with technology that may not even exist.

Demonstrating an “over and above” level of effort and impact has become an essential strategy, not only in proving compliance with existing standards and statutes but also in proactively staving off costly new regulations that may or may not pose realistic value to a cleaner environment.

As someone who believes in the importance of helping everyone to the finish line in this challenging era, I sponsored the Business Integrity Library a few years ago, assembled by the not-for-profit Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI), based in Vienna, Virginia.

The library includes robust ESG reports from some of the world’s largest companies. By cataloging them via searchable keywords and making them available for review, ECI shows the corporate world at its best via the practices, ideas, and innovations detailed in the reports, as well as with the communication and presentation of data. Both elements are important.

Having reviewed many reports in ECI’s Business Integrity Library, I’ve been struck with just how far companies have evolved in the past 20 years when I first began consulting in this space. The degree of ESG sophistication documented in their reports help make the case that many companies truly comprehend the importance of aligning messages with performance. It’s good for corporate ethics and stakeholders.