The release of Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan, which my agency helped to name and structure, has generated plenty of buzz in the relentless CSR circuit. A lot of that buzz has focused on trying to communicate the scale and potential impact of the company's commitments and those of industry peer P&G. Here's two examples, both from the same article:
"P&G calculates that if it could convince everyone in the US to wash in cold water it would reduce domestic energy consumption by 3% and allow the country to meet 6% of its Kyoto commitment."
This works. We get a logical percentage and a contextual understanding of how the commitment fits within larger political targets.
Then we get an example that doesn't work:
"Unilever says that if all its laundry users across the world switched to concentrated detergents, it would save four million tonnes of CO2 a year, equivalent to taking one million cars off the road."
How much is four million tonnes? It sounds like a lot, but in the context of a company with 1,600 products and a global supply chain I can't be sure. Then there's the ol' equivalency metric--wowing us with a hypothetical scenario which actually never happened. It's not exactly greenwash, but it's not good communications by any means. Equivalency metrics are exactly the kind of corporate tendency in the CSR vortex which confuse people about what is actually being achieved.
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