Green marketing is aspirational

Green has to do with interrelationship with the environment. In practice, Green is a hard or impossible ethic to deliver on, because companies have to make compromises, and people are imperfect; disengagement is human.

What this means in practical terms is that Green marketing has to be aspirational, or else the reality of the footprint that is actually introduced will undermines the Green claim. Buying a Prius isn't better for the environment than walking, let's not kid ourselves. And, more than this, the authorities are catching on, clamping down on spurious Green marketing claims.

Today, Australian paper The Age reports that "The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will check the authenticity of several green marketing products after receiving a growing number of complaints."

Marketing should relate "moving towards", not "having it together."