Guilt trip: from fear to guilt on the green bandwagon

278 Pages·2010·1.759 MB·English

by  Hesz, Alex, Neophytou, Bambos

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
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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