The Greenwash

We are currently victims of a greenwash. What is a greenwash? It's when we are constantly bombarded by products and brands that claim to be "green" and "eco-friendly." I'm not about to say that companies trying to be more sustainable is a bad thing, it's not. What I will say is that we don't know what "green" and "eco-friendly" actually mean. There's no standard, there's no real definition. Is a company allowed to brand themselves as "green" because they recycle all their used paper? Can a bottled water company be called green because they use 30% less plastic in their bottles, despite the other 70%?

The problem is there's no way to set a standard anymore. We could have at the beginning, but now "green" is almost a brand unto itself. It's too large, too amorphous, for any single entity to get a grasp of and bring under control. As consumers, the responsibility falls on us to be skeptical of companies throwing around those terms with wreckless abandon. We have to remember that, in the end, a company actively branding itself as "green" is doing so to get a leg up on the competition because it's what consumers want to hear right now. We need to look into the practices of those companies before we decide they can ethically label themselves as "eco-friendly."

Maybe it's also important to remember that no kind of consumption and purchasing is eco-friendly. It can only be less harmful.

So what does this mean for your company? Well, if you want to have a green policy make sure it's one that actually helps. Something that goes above and beyond recycling your office paper. Encourage (even require?) your employees to take public transportation. Use only enough electricity to power what you need, leave lights off and use natural lighting. Make sure your products don't have a lasting impact on the environment (stainless-steel is a good example of this. It lasts forever in the home, but bio-degrades in a reasonable amount of time in nature). Three times a year, have your office go plant trees to make up for the ones that were cut down for your paper. Three times a year, clean up the trash from your company's city.

If you're going to slap the green title onto your brand, make sure you deserve it. Otherwise you're just manipulating people.

History Lesson

What's in a name? 3DVE used to be called 3D Conferencing. The history behind this is fascinating...at least the way I embellish it is. The original company was started by two gentlemen whose first names both started with the letter "D". But, calling your company 2D in this century means you are either really out of touch or you have a serious Southpark addiction. By the way, here's an artist's rendering of me done by the artist James Whalen of Hawaii which in no way indicates that some of us really are addicted to Southpark.



Further introspective thought by the founding fathers to establish their goals for the new company gave them the concepts of "Defining", "Designing" and "Delivering" virtual conferencing for their customer. DEFINE - Help the customer understand what they are trying to accomplish and offer them options as to how they can painlessly achieve their goals. DESIGN - Customize a Solution. Establish roles and responsibilities. Put into place the technologies and people that can meet and exceed the needs of the customer. DELIVER - a world-class conference, meeting, webinar or virtual event that makes the customer look good. Voila! - 3D Conferencing. The name was all about service and had nothing to do with the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify a shape. Then again, I could tell you about how the founders conceptualized that we are offering multiple dimensions of conferencing and merging different synchronistic technologies into a seamless orchestration of communication medias which are independent of the physical boundaries we exist in. Or, I could tell you that a third guy whose name also began with "D" joined the partnership. The truth is actually, all of the above and it was a delightful serendipitous confirmation that the start-up company was on the right track.

Fast forward to now and our recent name change from 3D Conferencing to 3D Virtual Events (3DVE). It's time for a change. We still do conferencing but our forte has blossomed into the high-touch virtual events that our customers need to make the right impression, at the right time in a professional, worry-free manner. I'll talk more about how we accomplish this in future blogs.

I like the change because our new name says so much by saying so little.