Marketing Profs

Note: This is part 3 in a three-part series on green marketing.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel likened historical and political cycles to a pendulum in his famous Hegelian Dialectic. It states (in its quickest form) that things go from one extreme (thesis) to another (antithesis) and settle in the middle (synthesis). Always.

Housing booms, dot-coms, high-tech, bio-med, religious fervor, Republican or Democrat regimes, peace-war—all of it... all the best (and worst) bubbles have, or will, pop on their way back to the center. Perhaps Hegel was thinking more of a guillotine.

In terms of the "Greening of America," it feels like we are currently on the thesis end of the pendulum, with a fair amount more left to go to reach the apex. And then the backward slope begins. The bubble pops at the top.

The Green Bubble will pop too

But there are two popping scenarios:

1. Green will index within the mainstream and become ubiquitous.
2. It's a fad and will vanish back to the margins of our society.

Let's look at the landscape:

• Climate Crisis news is above the fold.
• Trade media and beat journalists find new angles every day to connect their scope into the green wave.
• Wal-Mart is changing packaging standards for suppliers, showing end-of-isle favor for greener products.
• Product manufacturers are changing company brand based on "the greening."
• Oil companies are marketing their oil with cartoon people filling cartoon cars with cartoon flowers. (Backed by a Flaming Lips-esque cartoon soundtrack.)
• Coke buys Odwalla, so PepsiCo buys Naked Juice.