ebook img

Guilt trip: from fear to guilt on the green bandwagon PDF

278 Pages·2010·1.759 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Guilt trip: from fear to guilt on the green bandwagon

G T G T F r o m F e a r t o G u i l t o n t h e G r e e n B a n d w a g o n A H a n d B N A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication This edition fi rst published 2010 © Alex Hesz and Bambos Neophytou 2010 Registered offi ce John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom For details of our global editorial offi ces, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com. The right of the author to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hesz, Alex. Guilt trip : from fear to guilt on the green bandwagon / Alex Hesz and Bambos Neophytou. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-74622-6 1. Consumer behavior–Psychological aspects. 2. Social responsibility of business. 3. Green marketing. 4. Guilt. I. Neophytou, Bambos. II. Title. HF5415.32.H475 2009 658.4′083–dc22 2009027974 ISBN 978-0-470-74622-6 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 12.5/15.25pt Adobe Garamond by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall, UK C o n t e n t s Introduction – Idiots and Infants vii Chapter 1 An Irrational Animal 1 1.1 The Sneetches and Other Parables 1 1.2 A Rose by Any Other Name 15 1.3 ’Tis the Season for Extraordinary Mass Acquisition 31 Chapter 2 The Necessary Lie 45 2.1 What is Marketing? 45 2.2 A Brief History of Shouting – Part 1 56 2.3 A Brief History of Shouting – Part 2 68 2.4 Omnipotent Slaves 82 Chapter 3 You Can’t Handle the Truth 99 3.1 Keep It Simple, Stupid 99 3.2 An Extraordinary Addiction 111 3.3 The Tuna that won’t Turn Pink in the Can 123 v Chapter 4 Guilt is the New Fear 139 4.1 The Pet Goat, and Other Frightening Stories 139 4.2 Culpability Killed the Cat 151 4.3 The Big Green Button 165 Chapter 5 Shades of Green 177 5.1 A Sweet Truth, or, A-Till-a the Un-healthy 177 5.2 A Token of Appreciation 192 5.3 The Arabian Babbler and Bob Dylan 205 Chapter 6 Reparations 217 6.1 Ask not . . . 217 6.2 It’s OK to be Bad 230 6.3 What Now? 244 Index 259 vi In t r o d u c t i o n – I d i o t s a n d In f a n t s And how we gasped. R emember? We were glued to P anorama or 6 0 Minutes and told something quite utterly remarkable. Soberly, with a sense of sombre occasion, we were told of the existence of a hole the size of Paris in something called the “ Ozone Layer ” . It seemed we had only been introduced to this vital, previously ignored, part of our natural world in order to be told it was catastrophically broken. Oh m erde , we thought, tucking with gusto into our TV dinners. In the background, excitable scientists began to explain the poten- tial ramifi cations of this Parisian “ hole ” with an overenthu- siastic, stumbling glee reserved only for those who very rarely get to speak to anyone at all, let alone a TV crew. Merde indeed. A s far as we were able to understand, this enormous rip in our world was the unfortunate by - product of a perfectly innocuous obsession with air freshener and deodorant and the like, products so benign in their intentions that we vii couldn ’t have imagined them in the least bit damaging. All we had wanted, after all, was for our world to smell nice. And so, how were we to have known? We weren ’ t to have imagined that our touch of living- r oom Alpine would so maul our planet, but we were waking up to a new era. An era of dying pandas and rising sea levels, of melting ice caps and El Ni ño and Tsunamis. An era where Godzilla no longer ravaged New York on the big screen, but instead scientifi cally plausible fl oods and hemispheric snowstorms tore along Fifth Avenue fossilizing Prada handbags and miniature dogs in one. T here was this huge new thing to be scared of and, secretly, we rather loved it. Because we had been getting bored. The fear agenda had been rather static, all things considered. O ur parents had been presented Communists to be afraid of, with all the delightful and colourful parapherna- lia of the bomb, and that had been great while it lasted, exciting and modern and ideological. However, a fear such as that can only exist for so long without being a little undermined by the fact that it was yet to yield any substan- tive disaster. It’ s the reason the younger generation in San Francisco can sleep at night. We had been in the market for something new to be afraid of. Our parents’ generation had been raised on their own fears, weaned on the frighten- ing and precarious balancing act of Mutually Assured Destruction. Much as we admired their fears, and as famil- iar as we were with the lexicon and traditions that accom- panied them, we weren ’t about to pick up their outdated phobias any quicker than we were going to reach for their viii old records or tie- d ie headbands. What we needed was something new to be afraid of. A new fear that was the Barack Obama to their JFK. The iPod to their eight- t rack. We needed something they could just about get to grips with when compelled to do so by sheer weight of exposure, but something they would never entirely understand in the way that we could. We needed something that was ours entirely. T he fear of Global Terrorism had been offered with devastating clarity, and we had responded energetically to it. We gave it a fair hearing in its campaign to be the fear that would defi ne a generation. We were very afraid, make no mistake, but nonetheless we began to see the fear of Terrorism as exactly what it was. No matter how genuinely frightening, here was a reliable old fear (bombs, wars, for- eigners, death by fi re) dressed up in a new frock and set marching under new fl ags. It was a fear that every genera- tion could relate to equally. We needed more. What we craved was a new chapter in the book of human fears. A book which had started with Sabre Tooth Tigers and Woolly Mammoths and had moved on to fi re and Gods (plural) and God (singular) and Science and Protestants and Papists and Fascists and Communists and Nuclear Weapons and Soviets and AIDS. Something different and bigger and more fundamental to keep us looking over our collective shoulder. Something to make the last genera- tion ’s old- w orld fears seem petty when compared to the magnitude of the disasters that had come to haunt our altogether more modern, existential nightmares. And then, as if to answer our prayers, there was a great big bloody hole in the sky leaking out our valuable oxygen ix (that ’ s oxygen , which we all need for life ) and replacing it, basically, with poisonous space gas. Beat that, Comrade. W hile a new swathe of society had been fl icking with interest through the available fears for the particular horror that was to demarcate the cross- g enerational border, our love affair with being scared had not gone unnoticed. For decades and more, on the foundations of what we dared only look at through the cracks between our fi ngers were built great empires. Toothpastes and Tanks, Politicians and Princesses and Primrose Oil, Rock and Roll and Richard Nixon, they looked us and the generations before us right in the eye, caught a glimpse of what made us afraid and said the same thing: “ I will make it OK. ” W ell before and long after we found a hole in the ozone layer, or cried watching the images of Ethiopia at Live Aid, there was nothing to stop the juggernaut of what could be accomplished by the offi cial recognition of the more per- vasive of our fears. We were presented with shiny new things to be afraid of, and were given exciting new ways to make everything better. Afraid of looking worse than Madonna? Use this face cream. Afraid of being a corporate square? Go fi nd yourself in majestic India. Afraid of reli- gions fanaticism (Islam)? Vote Bush. Afraid of religious fanaticism (Christianity)? Vote Obama. For everything we could be afraid of, there was something or someone there to make us feel better, and all we had to do was buy it, vote for it or believe in it. From marketing to politics to science, those responsible for infl uencing minds en masse had come to realize that explaining an upside was nowhere near as powerful as x promising the removal of a potential downside. There was a new and pervasive culture in communications and a new king on the rhetorical block: fear. B y the early years of the twenty- fi rst century the capi- talization upon our infatuation with what made us afraid was alive and in all its pomp. 9/11 guaranteed its place at the centre of politics for a generation further. Bird fl u, foot -a nd- m outh, bluetongue disease, Asiatic avian fl u, Mexican swine fl u and Jamie Oliver’ s tirade against Turkey Twizzlers had us scuttling with glee to the organic aisle in Tesco and there was, quite astonishingly, a run on Boots for anti - ageing cr è me when a credible article appeared sug- gesting it might actually work. People were, in that delight- ful instance, scared to miss out on the product that answered their fears of looking like their mothers. S tepping back, though, there was the embryonic whiff of something new. This most recent of our fears, that we were living on a planetary time- b omb comprised of increas- ingly toxic air, diminishing rainforests, rising seas waiting to engulf us and arid land upon which we would surely starve, was arousing something slightly alien in us. This new fear seemed to elicit a subtly different reaction from us than its predecessors and contemporaries. Where once we had looked at the shrinking seas of Central Asia and tumbling Arctic ice - shelves and foreseen our doom, pre- dictably shrieking “ Oh God, what are we going to do?” and scattering the tiny boxes at B & Q in search of the energy- effi cient light bulbs that were to be our salvation, more and more we were beginning to react in a different way. We were starting to ask a different question. “ My God, what have we done?” xi

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.