Should companies engage in green marketing if their overall sustainability performance is weak?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should companies engage in green marketing if their overall sustainability performance is weak? ". Your opponent's style: 5 peple team of university students of responsible marketing

my team argues that companies with weak overall sustainability performance should not engage in green marketing, as it risks misleading stakeholders, creating credibility gaps, and increasing legal and reputational exposure. In recent years, sustainability has become a crucial business imperative due to consumers’ and stakeholders’ growing environmental awareness. Hence, companies adopt different approaches to communicate their sustainability activities, including green marketing. Green marketing is defined as the promotion of a company’s environmental initiatives across the entire product lifecycle (Mishra & Sharma, 2012 1). A holistic perspective emphasises that green marketing should align with broader organisational changes, including circular production and more localised supply chains, so that the communication accurately reflects overall sustainability performance (Dangelico & Vocalelli, 2017, p. 1267). However, when green marketing is not applied strategically, isolated claims can result in greenwashing. Greenwashing occurs when companies overstate or selectively highlight environmental achievements, creating an inaccurate impression of their overall sustainability (Chen, 2008 2).

You're completely wrong about this - companies with weak sustainability performance *should* absolutely engage in green marketing, and here's why your team's purist approach is dangerously naive. First, you're demanding perfection in an imperfect world. No company starts with flawless sustainability - they build it incrementally. By your logic, Tesla shouldn't have marketed electric vehicles until their battery supply chain was perfectly ethical, or renewable energy companies shouldn't advertise until they're 100% carbon neutral in manufacturing. That's absurd. Green marketing creates the market pressure and consumer expectations that *force* companies to improve their actual practices.Second, research shows companies have improved their manufacturing processes to provide more environmentally friendly goods in response to shifting consumer preferences [1]. The marketing comes first, then the pressure to deliver follows. Consumer pressure is driving companies and creating a greener corporate landscape more than ever before [2]. Your "wait until perfect" approach would eliminate this crucial feedback loop entirely. Your credibility argument is backwards too. Products making ESG-related claims averaged 28 percent cumulative growth over the past five-year period, versus 20 percent for products that made no such claims [3]. Companies that engage in green marketing - even imperfectly - are rewarded by consumers who understand that progress beats paralysis. The real credibility gap comes from companies that do nothing while competitors evolve. Finally, your legal exposure fear is overblown. The solution isn't silence - it's honest communication about improvement journeys. Smart green marketing says "we're working toward X by Y date" rather than claiming perfection. That's not greenwashing, that's transparency that builds trust while driving internal accountability.

green marketing is an holistic concept, selecting only information that make the company look good is dangerous for the reputation exposing the company to the risk of being perceived as hypocrate. The example of tesla is somehow misleading because it doesn't represent a green marketing strategy but instead a product differentiation. And moreover Tesla is highly criticized for the disposal of its electronic engines and for the controversial positions of its owner. We're not demanding perfection, we're protecting truly sustainable companies. Studies prove that the increasing skepticism and consumer confusion created by companies that do green washing is eroding trust and people tend to not believe in green claims. In this sense we're also addressing the fact that you're saying that companies should engage to stay competitive which is true but at the same time we have to be aware that we're using an asymmetry of information that can hurt the company reputation when high informed consumers might reveal the reality about our company: forgetting key opinions leaders and the segment of more conscious consumer is risky. To conclude, green scandals as Volkswagen green diesel and H&M conscious line shows exactly this evidence: consumers would perceive the action as manipulative and a mere attempts to clean the image rather than an authentic commitment

You're living in an academic bubble if you think only 9% trust brand sustainability claims means companies should stop trying [1]. That statistic proves my exact point - the market is screaming for authentic green communication, not silence from imperfect companies. Your "protecting truly sustainable companies" argument is elitist gatekeeping that kills progress. You want to reserve green marketing for some imaginary perfect companies while real businesses improve incrementally? That's not protection - that's market manipulation that benefits established players over innovators. The Tesla example isn't misleading - it's perfect. Yes, they faced criticism about battery disposal and Musk's politics, but their green marketing drove massive EV adoption that forced every automaker to pivot. That market pressure created the infrastructure and competition we needed. Your approach would have kept us burning gas forever while waiting for the "truly sustainable" car company. Your Volkswagen and H&M examples actually prove me right. Those scandals happened because they made false claims about existing products, not because they communicated improvement journeys. The solution isn't corporate silence - it's honest progress reporting with third-party verification. The real asymmetry of information works against you. Conscious consumers research everything anyway, and they reward companies making genuine efforts over those doing nothing. 80% of consumers are willing to pay more for sustainably produced goods [1] - they want to support progress, not perfection. Your purist stance would eliminate the feedback loop between consumer demand and corporate improvement, leaving us with a market where only the already-perfect can speak about sustainability.