Green Business Still Needs To Be About Business

Via Kelly Spors, I read this essay at GreenBiz.com by Joel Makower, author of one seminal book for the current "green" movement, The Green Consumer. His argument, as I understand it, is that the "going green" business practice needs to be more than just putting out environmentally-friendly products and making those products in green-conscious ways. It also needs to take on the problem of what Makower sees as excessive consumption: people buying too many things.

Encouraging your customers to buy less stuff? Seems paradoxical, but Makower gives an example of something Patagonia did recently: it cut down on 30 percent of its clothing line, deciding that, in the words of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, "two styles of ski pants are all that anyone needs."

For me, this is where the whole "going green" mantra goes off-course. It's one thing for businesses to offer products that cater to consumers' desire to be kinder to the environment.  That is simply what good entrepreneurs do: they see something that people want, and they provide it for a price. And running your business in an energy-efficient way is, again, just a smart business practice.

But it's quite another thing for businesses to take it upon themselves to diminish the "problem" of a materialist society.

First, this has problems as a business practice. This is pretty much the exact opposite of "the customer is always right." The customer wants ten different styles ski pants? Sorry, buddy--Yvon Chouinard knows exactly how many you need. But, of course, there's nothing stopping the customer from going to the next guy who will indulge the desire for excessive ski pants.

Now there's certainly a case to be made that doing what Patagonia did, for example, could be good for the company in the long run. It could build their brand and make them be a more credible, trustworthy company to the consumer. That's very possible. But it also seems clear that consumers are always going to want tons of choices. That's how we got so much stuff out there in the first place: people were willing to pay for it. If one company starts paring back the choices it offers, that might work for that company, but there's going to be many more businesses out there willing to offer as many kinds of ski pants as our hearts desire.

So I don't deny that a "buy less" message could work as a marketing strategy--I just doubt it will work for most companies most of the time. And that brings me to my second point--even if it makes a little sense as a business practice, it really does not make sense as an environmental practice.

Is materialism yielding too much pollution? Maybe so, but that's a question for policymakers, not businesspeople. It's not realistic to expect a substantial number of businesspeople to voluntarily sell less stuff to their customers. People have many different motivations for going into business, but making money will always be the most important. That's nothing to criticize--the profit incentive has produced a lot of great things. But when that profit incentive creates problems, turn to the law to deal with those problems, and let businesses be businesses.