Keywords

1.1 Sins and Virtues

Vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture than any other kinds of affection; and it is almost impossible to have the latter without some degree of the former. (David Hume, Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature)

In current discussions on corporate green promises, “greenwashing” has become a paradigm. This concept is infamously ambiguous and difficult to pin down.Footnote 1 Regardless, the fact that phenomena are constantly being identified as greenwashing and made the object of critical attention suggests that a lot of greenwashing is being done. We frequently see corporations and organizations chastised, even publicly shamed—called out as greenwashers. Greenwashing is seen as a vice. Indeed, it is considered a sin, as illustrated by the fact that “the sins of greenwashing” (TerraChoice 2009) has become a standard analytic. While acknowledging the legitimacy of much of the traditional criticism, in this book, we aim for nuance. We want to put less emphasis on the admittedly manipulative character and probable negative effects of widespread greenwashing, in order to explore the positive potential of green marketing, understood as rhetoric aimed at managing profitable customer relationships. Our aim is to provide new perspectives that enable a more constructive approach and seizes the momentum already there within the corporate practices of market economy.

The study follows several different paths. We consider theory from sociology and economics, modern rhetorical theory, marketing theory, and legal doctrine. All of this is read against a historical backdrop of classical rhetorical and philosophical teachings to identify both contrasts and intellectual overlaps, in an attempt at developing a theoretical framework for the discussion and evaluation of green promises, which can account for not only their problematic aspects, but also their possibilities. One of our more tangible contributions is extricating the virtues implied by the different greenwashing sins. The basic idea is simple: if “lying” is a sin, then “truth-telling” must be virtuous. Adjusted to our subject, if “fibbing” about the environmental footprint of a product is deemed unethical, then truthful accounts thereof must be virtuous. The sins imply values (e.g. the value of truthfulness), and moral spectra, with sinful actions (e.g. lying) on the one end, and virtuous actions (telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) on the other. We illustrate these spectra, and, pursuant to our constructive approach, suggest a change of focus: from sins to virtues and from policing the former to promoting the latter.

The main reason for such a spectral shift would be pragmatic. Commercial actors generally have an interest in being perceived as virtuous; it can further their sales or purchases, facilitate recruitment of qualified personnel, and generally ease their dealings with other actors, private or public. Hence, while a focus on the sins of greenwashing may provide tools for policing discourse, and thus contribute to repressing bad behavior, a focus on virtues is better suited for mobilizing the constructive and transformative potential of the ongoing boom of green marketing. Instead of viewing green promises as an inherently problematic phenomenon, or just another form of corporate bullshit, we argue that scholars could contribute to climate transition by imagining the architecture of a more sustainable commercial system—a system where green promises constitute an integrated part of a consumer market within our planetary boundaries.

The overarching aim of this book is thus to contribute to a transition toward a more sustainable society by introducing an interpretive framework for understanding and critically assessing green promises, a term here defined as simply “[s]tatements intended to influence the addressees by purporting the environmental benefits of something”. We believe that such statements can have a constructive role in the transition toward sustainability, perhaps most clearly within the realm of consumer marketing, by empowering consumers to take an active part in the transition. However, the full potential of green promises can only be realized once we get a firmer grip on their various designs, functions, and effects. We need to understand their role as an integral part of a larger system. This requires work, and not only empirical work—we need rhetorical theory fit for the task.

1.2 Positioning and Some Key Concepts

What you hold in your hands is a book proposing a constructive take on corporate rhetoric, or more specifically, on corporate discourse addressing topics connected to environmental consciousness. In this section, we will briefly mention a few key concepts, and as a matter of academic positioning place the work in its context.

In an era of growing environmental and especially climate consciousness, “green” rhetoric is so widespread that it is hard to avoid, and yet, it seems to be ever growing. It takes different forms. Sustainability reports have become standard operation procedure (Makower et al. 2020; cf. Dyck and Manchanda 2021). Corporate storytelling regularly espouses how companies care, are close to nature, or promise (to try) to do better (e.g. Chap. 9, Sect. 9.3). Perhaps most prevalent of all, and the main object of this book, is how companies regularly resort to green marketing.

Like many concepts with a widespread use, “green marketing” can be hard to pin down. The same is true of its variant terms, such as “environmental marketing”, “sustainable marketing”, and “eco-marketing”, which are often used more or less interchangeably. The concepts are hard to pin down in part due to their uses in different contexts. Especially “green marketing” seems to have been used for different reasons and to denote different phenomena.Footnote 2 The term has often functioned as an underdeveloped catch-all concept, especially in non-academic discussions, but there are also more precise uses as a technical term in different academic fields, including of course marketing, law, and rhetoric, but also communication studies, sociology, and management, to name just a few. While we need to designate our research object, we wish to avoid falling prey to the impulse of trying to formulate universally applicable definitions of the strict analytical kind. Instead, we opt for a functional description of the phenomenon in question. A traditional understanding might be that green marketing refers solely to promotion or advertising of products by reference to their environmental characteristics (using terms like “environmentally friendly”, “recycled”, etc.). Such cases are indeed textbook examples of green marketing. However, in our view, green marketing can incorporate a broad range of activities, including not only promotional practices but also production process, product modification, and packaging changes, to name just a few central examples (e.g. Koenig-Lewis et al. 2014; Boncinelli et al. 2023). In this sense, green marketing is, as the term signifies, a subset of marketing in the wider sense of marketing studies (e.g. Polonsky 1994; Dangelico and Vocalelli 2017, discussing the evolution of green marketing definitions). However, our perspective is not equivalent to that of Marketing scholars, typically domestic to the field of Business and Management studies. We, the authors, are scholars of rhetoric and law, and what we are interested in, and what our disciplinary tools can further, is the study of marketing as communication in a broad sense, marketing as performance, as persuasion, and as the object of normative structures. We are interested in the rhetorical characteristics and functions of the particular type of communicative act that we call green marketing.Footnote 3

In some senses, green marketing is like an elephant: You don’t need a definition as you will know it when you see it. Indeed, such recognition is almost a criterion for it to work as marketing, as it needs to effectively communicate that whatever is being promoted is in fact green, in order to persuade. Normally, the telos of green marketing as persuasion will be to facilitate that the audience enters into some form of transaction with an actor directly or indirectly constructed as green—the paradigmatic case being marketing intended to further sales of a promoted product. This is also the paradigm of the legal framework regarding marketing (see Chap. 7). However, to focus solely on such paradigmatic cases would entail a reductive analysis. It would exclude much of what is most interesting about green marketing, including most aspects related to the construction of a green ethos, which is an apparently efficient and indeed common green marketing strategy (see Chap. 3).Footnote 4 Thus, for the purposes of this book, green marketing can be functionally defined as strategic communication about qualities and performance in relation to environmental sustainability. As corporate rhetoric regards, the object of environmental performance will normally be either a brand/company, or products, and these are our main examples. Note that this definition of green marketing is provisional, in the sense that the discussions in the book will provide more flesh to the rather boney structure of the definition, but we need to start somewhere, and the provided definition will suffice as a starting point.

This book is a result of an ongoing interdisciplinary endeavor, at the intersection of law, rhetoric, and sustainability. The work is cross-disciplinary, in the sense that we are less bothered by the traditional field demarcations of different academic disciplines, and more about our object of research. In this volume, we contribute to the field of rhetoric, and especially climate transition rhetoric, and to a better understanding of the realities to be subject to legal analysis. We do so by articulating a theoretical framework for the discussion of green marketing issues, including the analysis, criticism, typologization, and evaluation of green promises.

We use the concept of green promises to capture instances of green marketing that can be considered as promissory utterances (possibly subject to concrete legal effects, e.g. as contractually binding, cf. Mossberg 2023). Possible clear examples are commitments made by a company or organization to take (or to have taken) specific actions or to implement certain practices in order to minimize their environmental impact and promote sustainability (e.g. by reducing emissions, conserving natural resources, using renewable energy sources, or promoting sustainable practices throughout the supply chain). Rhetorically, a green promise is a means of demonstrating commitment to protecting the environment and appealing to those concerned about sustainability. Legally and ethically, the implications of green promises are seldom very clear. Partly, this is because the analytical frameworks can be further developed, but more often, it is a result of the intentional vagueness and ambiguity of the promises—fully in line with the prevalent greenwashing criticism.

The concept of greenwashing is indeed related to green marketing practice. The term is a play on the words “white washing”, metaphorically used for attempts to look better than one is, and perhaps also brainwashing, referring to the manipulation of beliefs (e.g. Dangelico and Vocalelli 2017; de Freitas Netto et al. 2020). Greenwashing occurs when poor environmental performance meets the desire to communicate positive environmental performance (Delmas and Burbano 2011), and it has often been used about operations providing environmental advertising without environmental substance, in essence about making false or misleading claims about green issues. We will return to the concept of greenwashing (inter alia in Chap. 2).Footnote 5

There are more concepts which could be considered key concepts of this book, including corporate rhetoric (which we conceive widely, as any form of signifying behavior hailing from companies, businesses, or other actors, especially in the economic sphere), and environmental communication (“the dissemination of information and the implementation of communication practices that are related to the environment”, “a broad field that includes research and practices regarding how different actors (e.g. organizations, states, people) interact with regard to topics related to the environment and how cultural products influence society toward environmental issues”, Antonopoulos and Karyotakis 2020; cf. e.g. Pezzullo and Cox 2022). We also refer to climate transition rhetoric, a new subfield of rhetoric, that moves away from a traditional focus on revealing manipulative language and ideological presuppositions, toward exploring the constructive potential of rhetoric to facilitate sustainable development with a particular focus on climate-related issues (cf. e.g. Wolrath Söderberg 2020; Eise et al. 2020). Indeed, we might even define more basic terms, like climateFootnote 6 or even the environment. However, we wish to avoid merely being caught up in a nervously defensive practice of postulating definitions and abstract analysis. While words and terminology are any author’s primary tool, and avoidance of definitionary fullness leaves openings for criticisms from more analytically inclined scholars, at this point it seems more prudent to just get on with things.

1.3 Overview of This Book

In ten chapters, this book introduces and explores a new framework for the analysis and discussion of green marketing. Directly following this brief introduction, Chap. 2 presents our main idea about the potentially transformative power inherent in green promises. Chapter 3 then engages with selected research on organizational theory. Within this broad field, the question has been raised about the possible constructive effects of green promises. Researchers have also conceptualized the promises’ functions, in terms of organizational ethos and legitimation processes. We engage with selected contributions in this discussion, to provide a rudimentary understanding of the concept of legitimation, and to acknowledge green legitimation as a specific form of legitimation practice that has gained momentum as climate change is being increasingly sedimented as an institution. In our view, these modern contributions to the analysis of societal phenomena have clear links to key concepts in classical rhetorical theory, especially that of ethos.

In Chap. 4, we search for the building blocks for a new scheme of ethos analysis, by taking stock of modern rhetorical research. We scrutinize the merits and demerits of earlier attempts to merge the legitimation perspective of institutional theory with rhetorical theory. In doing so, we strive to be particularly mindful of the often problematic ontological implications of earlier attempts to analyze corporate green rhetoric by combining rhetorical theory on ethos with organizational theory. Hence, while Chap. 3 provides a presentation of institutional theory that functions as an important frame of reference, Chap. 4 provides a critical discussion of earlier research. We note that the Aristotelian paradigm seems to be positively dominant, and while there is good reason for its popularity, as it provides useful analytical tools, it has problems and drawbacks. We illustrate this by examining some of the limitations for corporate image analysis that arise from a strict adherence to an Aristotelian paradigm.

Following the problematization, Chap. 5 launches the search for an alternative framework by mapping how the relation between rhetoric and virtue has been conceptualized within the rhetorical tradition, beyond Aristotle. By returning to the classical rhetorical tradition, we can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the social dynamics of rhetorical practice, one that is more consistent with a dynamic understanding of institutional theory, and most importantly, works better as a framework for a constructive turn in the scholarly discussion of green marketing. We draw from historical sources, primarily Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian, but the discussions do not merely serve as a historical backdrop. Instead, the lessons drawn shape our development of a theoretical framework of green marketing virtues.

An analytical framework is then presented in Chap. 6 in the form of a typology, categorizing the sins, their corresponding virtues, and the different types of problems that they concern. This chapter thus contains the perhaps most tangible of our contributions, regarding theoretical building blocks and analytical tools for future discussions about green marketing. We believe that these tools may well prove useful in different fields. Thus, in the following Chap. 7, we discuss some of the possible legal implications of our proposed shift of focus, from censuring or chastising sins, toward cultivating virtuous action.

In Chap. 8, we focus on mapping the premises for a qualitative analysis utilizing the virtue framework and present five analytical principles to guide the scholarly work. Chapter 9 then uses the framework to examine the role of environmental labels in green marketing. We also explore various forms of corporate green promises within consumer-oriented marketing from two branches of industry, namely the clothing industry and the energy sector.

While at times we do discuss possible legal implications of the framework, the primary potential of the perspective here proposed exists on a socio-discursive level, rather than on the level of hard law. We do not deny that legal rules can be a powerful influence guiding human behavior. However, as reality should be primary to the rules purporting to regulate said reality, a robust analysis of the real problems of green marketing practice should precede regulatory development, to secure the efficaciousness of regulatory responses. Ultimately, it seems that if marketing agencies, environmental organizations, and consumers change their way of talking about and conceptualizing green marketing, this could have significant, and positive, consequences for climate transition, and it could thus contribute to a more sustainable society. We end this book, in Chap. 10, with a concluding discussion on green marketing as the performance of ethical judgment and on future interdisciplinary avenues of research.

Finally, we present a few reading recommendations. As our scholarly endeavor is interdisciplinary, and the topic treated might attract readers with varying interests and backgrounds, a few suggestions and possible shortcuts might be helpful. First of all, readers interested in getting the gist of our argument and results with as little leg work as possible could consider focusing on Chaps. 2, 6, 8, and 10 where some of the merits of a constructive turn and the basic structure of the framework are introduced. Readers well read in institutional theory might consider skimming Chap. 3, since that chapter is primarily introductory, and aimed at readers without previous knowledge in this research tradition. For readers with a scholarly background in rhetoric, Chaps. 1, 2, 3,4, 5, and 6 might be the most interesting. Chapters 3 and 4 co-read institutional theory and research on corporate rhetoric, while Chap. 5 revisits the rhetorical tradition, bringing out its relevance for contemporary issues, and Chap. 6 provides an analytical framework. Readers interested in the legal potential of the framework can direct particular attention to Chap. 7, albeit being wary that the discussion there presupposes the discussions of the previous chapters. As Chap. 9 provides concrete examples of how the perspective can be used, it merits attention by those interested in applying the perspective introduced in their own work as analysts of green marketing, producers of it—or as policy makers. Of course, the discussion might be of particular interest to those interested in sustainable clothing or the energy sector.