The BP blowout was the swan song of an old style of green marketing, one in which companies could make green claims and hope that no one would look over their shoulders. In the last five years, a new type of green marketing has taken hold, and it has high standards.
It's no longer enough to say you're green in your advertising. It's not even enough to have one or two flagship green products in your line or to screw in a few compact fluorescents and send out a press release. In a time when consumers and watchdogs measure the environmental impact of raw materials and industrial processes, packaging and transportation, a company marketing itself as green needs to have sustainability built into its DNA, or at least painstakingly retrofitted into its culture. But even more important, green products have to be good products.
