Green Leaf Report

I read an article this morning about how green CEOs are bad for business.  Steve, these billion dollar companies have made so many good moves and bad moves over the years; you can’t possibly blame their failures on any single marketing strategy.  I’m sure $100M sounds like a lot of money to a journalist, but it’s a small part of the yearly marketing budget for a company of BP’s size and profitability.  BP’s operational budgets dwarf their marketing budgets; the oversight of the leaks and corroded pipes in Alaska didn’t happen because a marketing team wrote green commercials.  It happened because of an operational breakdown and a series of failures in communication and responsibilities among many field and corporate managers, engineers and technicians.  Do you really believe that the field engineers, technicians and managers were pulled from their jobs by the CEO to write green commercials? 

And Ford was right; SUVs are bad for the environment, they’re wasteful of a non-sustainable resource, and any tightening of that resource damages the SUV market demand and thus Ford’s revenues.  They should have moved faster from SUVs, and Ford’s error doesn’t appear to be in being green, but in not driving his company faster to a more stable segment of the market.  Strategy is difficult but execution is even more difficult. 

The success of the company does not falter when a CEO wants his company to be more green; you’re drawing causal relationships out of the air.  Neglecting any part of business execution will cause problems, whether green statements were made or not.  

tags: green+business, junk+science, BP, Ford, green+campaigns, green+advertising, green+pr