Painting the Environmental Marketing Picture

Dec 10, 2010 2:15 PM ET
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Painting the Environmental Marketing Picture

A picture is worth a thousand words. There’s a reason this is a cliché - we’ve all heard it before. Why then, do we often overlook this simple truth when it comes to environmental marketing and advertising? Polar bears and virgin forests are the visual equivalents of “green” and “eco-friendly,” yet as marketers we spend the majority of our time crafting accurate and precise written claims only to have them undermined by misleading visual cues.

The Federal Trade Commission is also guilty of this oversight, which is why Cone filed comment today as part of the Commission’s two-year review of the Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims (“Green Guides”). Despite the Commission’s rigorous review of the outdated Guides and over 200 pages of detailed analysis in the full report, it provided little guidance for marketers on how to correctly use imagery to convey credible environmental claims. To continue reading click here...

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