Toyota is “helping save the planet. Faster.” Chrysler is "doing our part to clean up the planet,” and "continually looking for ways to protect the planet.” Ford says that it "seems our most original ideas are recycled.” GM tells us that "people and nature can live in harmony.” Cadillac is "looking for ways to help protect the environment.” Within ten or twenty years, these ads imply, cars will cease to be an ecological burden and will take their place alongside streams, trees, and forests as benign factors in the ecosystem, whose "only emission is water. That's right - pure water."
Green Advertising
These quotes from car advertisements are examples of green advertising, a form of marketing that focuses on the alleviation of environmental ills. According to Subhabrata Banerjee, advertising that appeals to a consumer's sense of responsibility and desire for ecological sustainability can be called “deep green,” while advertising that merely uses nature as an insubstantial backdrop, or celebrates its domination with “tough trucks,” can be termed “shallow green.”
Rather than questioning the existence of cars, however, deep green advertisements portray the redemptive qualities of human ingenuity, presenting the ability of the next technology to rescue us from the negative effects of the last one. The visual and textual quality of these ads is relentlessly upbeat; as in the shallow green, dominance ads, vehicles are portrayed as pristine, uncrowded by any other vehicles, and in harmony with the non-human environment.
Focusing almost entirely on emission controls, this relatively new type of advertising promotes the benefits of gasoline/electric hybrid cars, hydrogen fuel cells, and various corporate measures ostensibly designed to alleviate the effects of car use.
Visually, deep green ads could be seen as “domination lite.” The cars tend to be smaller and less intimidating than those in the domination ads, but the owners and drivers are presented as equally in control. In the clean, sleek lines of the cars and the ads, as well as in the text, consumers are guaranteed that their pursuit of more ecological transportation will not result in any personal sacrifice or discomfort.
Ecological Marketing by Toyota
In a typical deep green Toyota ad, a two page spread portrays a vehicle cruising smoothly across a high-tech bridge, its radiating steel girders reminiscent of a Futurist painting. Viewers are presented with the taut, efficient, and trouble free future that awaits them (as long as they buy the advertised product). As usual, there are no other cars in sight, and the driver is invisible.
A light blue sky with a smattering of clouds accents the rarefied atmosphere through which the hydrogen powered Toyota is traveling, its experimental status accented by the large writing on its hood and sides. The stripped-down, technically advanced imagery of the ad is in visual contrast to desert-themed, neo-primitivist “tough truck” dominance ads, but the two are in ideological agreement regarding the role of the vehicle as a solver, not a maker, of problems.
In another Toyota ad, a Prius, which is powered by a combination of gasoline and electricity, is racing away from the camera down a country road, surrounded by green pastures and blue skies. It has left a pair of bright green skid marks in the foreground, symbolizing the mindset of alleviation advertising: “While the countryside around you, and by extension the world, is pristine, quiet, and undisturbed, you will still be able to drive fast enough to burn rubber, with no other cars on the road to impede you.”
In both shallow green and deep green advertising, the car exists not only in unity with the natural world, but untouched by the rest of humanity. Whether dominating the desert or whizzing across a futuristic bridge, cars in advertising are almost never seen in the presence of other cars. Traffic jams are reserved for reality. It is not coincidental that an excess of cars is one of the most tenacious problems facing humans in the real world. The fact that "corporations will tend to advertise the very qualities they do not have in order to allay a negative public perception" [Mander 1996] extends to the effects of their products as well.
While smaller cars are less environmentally damaging than trucks or SUVs, there is ultimately little difference in the psychology of 'dominance' ads and 'alleviation' ads; the purpose of both is to sell cars, not to save the planet.
Read more of Alan Foljambe's articles on automotive advertising:
- The Displacement of Nature
- Short Term Thinking and Nature as Optional
- Cars, Ads, and Individualism
- A Narrowing of Options
- Dominating Nature
- Cheerleader for Modernity
Sources
- Banerjee, Subhabrata, Charles S. Gulas, and Easwar Iyer. “Shades of Green: A Multidimensional Analysis of Environmental Advertising,” Journal of Advertising Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 1995), p. 21-32.
- Mander, Jerry. “The Rules of Corporate Behavior,” The Case Against the Global Economy. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996, p. 317.
- Meister, Mark, and Phyllis M. Japp, Eds. Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
