The “Greenwashing” Effect
Sharon New September 25th, 2009
Somebody sent me a blog on how the term “local” is really being redefined by big industry – both agri-business and the corporate world. Here are some examples:
HSBC, a sprawling, British-based financial conglomerate, has thousands of branch banks in localities across the globe (from Boston to Brazil), so it has labeled itself, “the world’s local bank.”
- Barnes & Noble, the biggest bookseller in the world, is trying to scale its image down to mom-and-pop level by proclaiming that “all book-selling is local.”
Hellmann’s, a division of the Dutch-owned Unilever conglomerate, is claiming that its mayonnaise is a local product because most of its ingredients come from somewhere in North America – a 9.5 million square mile stretch of “local.”
Starbucks, the ubiquitous 16,000-store caffeine purveyor, has been losing market share to cool, local shops that are the opposite of cookie-cutter chain stores, so the giant is opening a series of pretend-funky shops designed by corporate headquarters to present a “local vibe” – a consumer hoax that includes no display at all of the Starbucks name and logo.
I recently had the pleasure of hearing Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance speak at the first ever one-day conference of the Annapolis Sustainable Business Allinance . She said in this blog, that “the corporate pretenders are often boosted by economic development officials.” She also went on to say that during a “buy local” campaign in Fresno, Calif., county officials sold out the true locals by proclaiming, “Just so you know, buying local means any store in your community: mom-and-pop stores, national chains, big-box stores – you name it.” You can go here to listen to Stacey’s presentation at the ASBA’s conference this past March.
Here’s another quote from an executive of the Hartman Group: “There is a belief that you can only be local if you are a small and authentic brand. This isn’t necessarily true; big brands can use the notion of local to their advantage as well…. It’s a different way of thinking about local that is not quite as literal.”
Wow. Like the blogger wrote, I guess that makes “Made in China” local!
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That means the term ‘local’ has enough people paying attention that the larger entities see a need to respond to it.
You never know about corporate involvement helping or hurting your cause. Starbucks, love them or hate them, greatly enlarged the market for high-end coffee:
“In 1989, the SCAA estimated that there were just 585 coffee retailers in the United States. By 2006 that number had risen to nearly 24,000. Sixty percent of these shops are independently owned or part of micro-chains of less than ten units. …All of these numbers come prior to Starbucks’s [recent] store closings.”
http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2008/12/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-caffeine-empire/
There may be a similar trajectory from the “Whole Foods” experience to smaller, more independent food distributors. It is interesting to watch…
Words words words. IT seems big business is always trying to redefine the meaning of words. Someday we know we are in trouble when all our meaningful words get abused and redefined. Then what will we call what we are doing? We will have to use peoples senses to show them what to do instead of tell them because words won’t mean anything like they used to.