Most English-speaking people have heard the term whitewashing: Literally, it means to paint a surface with a diluted white paint to lighten the surface and conceal blemishes. Figuratively, it means to downplay the negative aspects by emphasizing the positive ones of a person, event, or situation.
Greenwashing is a term related to environmental issues: It is the deliberate dissemination of a false or misleading impression of environmentally friendly practices used to conceal or obscure damaging practices.
Blackwashing is the use of public campaigns and advertising funded by the coal industry to draw attention away from environmentally unsustainable practices or to justify exclusion from carbon taxes.
Bluewashing is to tout a business or organization’s commitment to social responsibility while using this perception for public relations and economic gain; to present a humanitarian front while obscuring actual practices.
Redwashing is the practice of a state, organization, political party, politician or company presenting itself as progressive and concerned about social equality and justice, in order to use this perception for public relations or economic gain.
There are other colours of X-washing, but they all stem from greed: In marketing, these tactics are a way to charge customers more, because the higher price leads people to think, in connection with the misleading information or imagery, that the extra money spent is going to a good cause, e.g. schools for the workers’ children or working children, when in fact it’s likely going toward a CEO’s yacht.
On holiday recently, we’d forgotten to bring towels from home into the motorhome, so we went into a houseware store; I thought the towels would be a bit more expensive than another store I usually buy our towels from, but it was a whopping 50.- per towel more! On each towel was a tag; here’s the translation (the company name withheld):
“Cotton (name)® Made in green, inspiring confidence. Tested for polluting ingredients and sustainably produced according to (name)® guidelines. The label “made in green” gives you the assurance that this textile product has been made by pollutant-free materials in environmentally friendly factories in protected and socially acceptable work environments.”
Nowhere is it mentioned where this product was made; their testing agency, for accountability, is them. Inspires confidence? On what grounds? Price? Notice that they don’t claim to have passed those tests or what they were testing exactly, nor do they state what their guidelines were supposed to be.
These schemes prey on first-world people’s sense of guilt, or of wanting to pay a bit extra to help those less privileged. Yet their concept of “environmentally friendly factories in protected and socially acceptable work environments” might have nothing to do with your or my concepts – would the company’s execs be willing to work in those factories? I doubt it. This is also an example of bluewashing.
An E-Talk was given to show the marketing tactics in connection with the foods we eat. The disclosures made in the short talk are enough to leave the audience in stunned silence. I challenge you to watch the video (less than 7 minutes long) here. Marketing’s most effective, secret weapon is you. They bank on willful ignorance (the avoidance of making undesirable decisions or taking actions that accurate information might prompt).
All of these wash-tactics boil down to hogwash. So the next time you find yourself looking at the claims of a label, or seeing the sunny kitchen in a perfect home with perfect families on a commercial, take a moment to challenge what you’re reading or seeing, and use your purchasing power wisely. Research; see if the company is on any blacklist by organisations that actually care (WEF, Greenpeace, or any from a long list of NGOs). Search the topic online – there are a lot of informative articles out there with practical tips for making informed decisions. Here’s a website for checking a brand’s ratings: https://directory.goodonyou.eco/. If you find that a company is making bogus claims, stop buying their products; make the effort to blow the whistle on them – social media can be a positive tool in that aspect.
This brings us back to that secret weapon of marketers, our willful ignorance: The tragic factor in all of these tactics is that, like water, humans usually choose the path of least resistance… least effort… least active involvement, least time required; and so willful ignorance prevails. However, since we’re making an average of 35,000 decisions a day anyway, (automatic, habitual, emotional, stress-related, worry-related, or environment-related) let’s neutralise that ignorance one wise, informed choice at a time.
Stephanie Huesler 