A Green Image Better Than the Reality is NOT Good Public Relations

Newsweek's Weston Kosova examines "greenwashing" in an article about the gap between how companies scored on its new Green Rankings list--which factors in environmental impact, policies and performance--and how they scored when it comes to green reputation, based on a survey of CEOs, CSR professionals, academics and environmental experts.

"Sometimes a good ad campaign does a better job of enhancing a company's green reputation than going through the expense and hassle of adopting actual environmentally sound practices," says Kosova, citing a Chevron ad campaign. "You might think that if Chevron was really worried about problems like global warming, they would spend some of those PR dollars lobbying Congress to adopt stricter gas mileage requirements for automobiles. They do not do this. Instead, I'm apparently supposed to praise them as environmental heroes because they tell me to unplug my toaster and think about getting a Prius.

"Yet ad campaigns like these work. Chevron lands at No. 371 out of 500 companies on Newsweek's green rankings. But it claims the No. 62 spot when it comes to green reputation thanks in part to those pretty, polished ads."

I'm not sure the ad campaign is "working." If a company's green reputation is significantly better than its green performance, I wouldn't call that a public relations success; I'd call it a public relations problem.

Particularly in the social media age, any gap between a company's advertising and marketing activity and its actual performance will almost certainly be exposed--probably sooner rather than later. And when it is, if people believe they have been misled, the damage to the company reputation, its credibility and its stakeholder relationships will be severe.

Companies whose reputation is better than the underlying reality would do well to rein in their communications.