Last night, the Columbia Business School Alumni Association hosted a packed event called SPREADING THE WORD OF GREEN MARKETING through HSBC’s Groundbreaking “There’s No Small Change” campaign. Attendees were expecting to learn how corporate green initiatives can deliver new customers and enhance brands. This event promised to be interesting. HSBC’s green checking campaign is often cited as an example of how green marketing can seem superficial.
In recent years, banks have rushed to show their green side. Perhaps none have been as bold as HSBC, which now offers the “Green” checking account, meaning a bank card with a leaf on it and gift bag full of CFL bulbs and recycled paper. Through prominent display ads at retail banks, the ad campaign associates HSBC with sustainability by sharing green lifestyle tips with its customers. Nicole Rousseau, VP Retail Marketing at HSBC added, “We offered customers ways to reduce their carbon footprint.”
In a sense, due to the gift bag giveaway, this was the “classic retail toaster effort” said Linda Lewi, a panelist and Chief Integration Officer at JWT. The green element, however, Ms. Lewi said, forced the bank to “change the way you think about marketing.” There was evidence that customers cared about whether their banks were green. The question was whether HSBC could communicate what the bank was doing at the corporate level (buying carbon offsets, implementing energy efficiencies and investing in companies that met their ethical standards) to lure and covert potential customers to their retail branches.
So has the campaign worked? Ms. Rousseau cited data that more people are choosing paperless checking (a success point for being green) although this may be correlated with increased usage of the Internet. Perhaps more impressive was the data that showed higher income customers were converting to HSBC at 300% over previous efforts.
The Q and A session, however, summed up why this particular green marketing campaign may not be sustainable. Audience participants shared how they switched to HSBC after researching their sustainability initiatives but were later discouraged when the green efforts were inconsistently coordinated throughout the company. For example, one audience member recalled how a green credit card offer they received in the mail still included tons of junk paper. Others complained that no one had a clue about green when they called customer service.
It seems that HSBC has made honest efforts to become more sustainable so a greenwashing backlash is unlikely. But by focusing its ad campaign on “personal empowerment” for its customers and not thinking and communicating holistically about what sustainability should mean for the bank, the program will likely be seen for what it is: a bank card with a leaf on it. As anyone in green marketing should know, that’s about as credible as proclaiming “carbon neutrality” in 2008.
By Stefan Deeran at The Element Agency in New York
