Keywords

In a nutshell, what we have tried to advance in this book is the merits of imagining discursive conditions in which green marketing can contribute to combating climate change. The idea at the heart of the book is that green marketing can influence opinion and guide praxis in ways contributing to climate transition. Instead of merely chastising transgressions, we should attempt to harness the potential of the massively influential tool marketing has proven to be. To do this, we do need to discourage certain marketing practices. Given existing discursive conditions, however, it seems at least as important to encourage the kind of constructive behavior we want more of. We should point to positive exemplars, articulate the reasons for their positive evaluation, and perhaps even work to maintain a rhetorical copia of virtuous green marketing, for different areas and marketing channels. Hopefully, such efforts can shift the focus, from merely discouraging the current race to the bottom of innovative greenwashing practices, to also encouraging the opposite tendencies. There are good examples out there, and encouraging them could, potentially, provide the necessary fuel for a race to the top, in an envisioned spiral of virtue.

In presenting that vision, we map out an area of research that is by constitution interdisciplinary, drawing not only from rhetoric and law, but also from communication studies, sociology, economics, and of course business-oriented marketing studies. Still—and this is a key point—this perspective cannot only be viewed as a reasonable addition to be implemented within existing paradigms of the social sciences, such as in management, organization theory, and business studies. Our book is also a call for humanistic scholarship, as it evokes fundamental questions that require qualitative analysis of symbol use, combined with philosophical reflection. Consequently, we must, on the one hand, admit the parallels between the perspectives put forward here and views found in other academic fields studying marketing. On the other hand, we should also note the scarcity of previous attempts to combine a humanistic Rhetoric & Law-approach with a constructive take on green corporate rhetoric. We aim to open up the area of constructive green marketing to scholars of rhetoric, and to contribute to the development of a research field of sustainability rhetoric that takes corporate rhetoric seriously. At the same time, we want to introduce a more theoretical rhetorical perspective to scholarship that has traditionally treated corporate rhetoric from a more pragmatic, hands-on, sometimes shallow, perspective. The pragmatic nature of such traditional perspectives (touched on in Chap. 4) is logical, considering they have regularly been adopted in higher education milieus servicing the business sector’s personnel needs. However, that traditional perspective can be enriched by interdisciplinary dialogue.

One way to provide a more in-depth understanding of rhetoric is to explore the concept of rhetorical ontology: how rhetoric shapes our understanding of the world, and ourselves as part of it. In this volume, we engage with fundamental aspects of rhetoric through our treatments of the historically anchored paradigms of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates. In comparing their very different approaches to rhetoric, we exemplify what the humanistic perspective—in our view—can offer. Their paradigms provide alternate routes, and reflecting on alternatives add value to discussions of very contemporary societal challenges, as choices between different routes have consequences. Considering the classical tradition provides a means of taking a step back, to question our own perspectives, methods, and assumptions. In doing so, we find that the tradition of Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian, and their notion of the virtuous orator striving for the common good, can aid us in raising fundamental questions about our society. They can help us envision a future where corporate rhetoric can fill a constructive function in the transition toward a sustainable market system.

If we work at the intersections of the disciplines that investigate the phenomena of green marketing, and draw upon developments in disciplines with related interests, we can develop an eclectic approach, utilizing the concepts and results best suited to guide our work (Kuypers 2016). One area of research that has a lot to offer is environmental communication—a field that, at the same time, could benefit from future interdisciplinary research endeavors, considering the limited attention given to commercial rhetoric within that field today (cf. Hansen and Cox 2015; Pezzullo and Cox 2022; Takahashi et al. 2022). Indeed, looking at handbooks in Environmental Communication, we can see that commercial rhetoric is rarely thematized at all. Instead, the tendency is to focus on media framing, public policy, popular culture, environmental movements, and research communication. When corporate rhetoric is treated, it is commonly presented as a bad Other, for instance, in discussing the rhetoric of Big Oil and the “merchants of doubt” (Miller and Dinan 2015), or insofar as it is a target of social movement campaigns. An interesting concept in the latter area is market advocacy, a strategic way for activism to utilize market logics, including the use of boycotts and divestment campaigns, as well as “buycots” (the affirmative opposite of boycotts) and investment campaigns promoting desired practices (Pezzullo and Cox 2022). These discussions are all interesting, with the latter in particular contributing an important perspective on how the transition to virtuous green marketing practices can be facilitated. All in all, however, the current discussions within environmental communication offer something very different from what we propose here.

A field with which we more clearly overlap, though we have thus far only touched upon it tangentially, is marketing ethics. To anyone in marketing ethics, there will be obvious links between that field and what we propose here. While current approaches to marketing ethics do not supply any self-sustained solutions to the problems we engage with, studies in that field can no doubt contribute with enriching perspectives. For example, Thompson (2002) has tried to “market virtue”—promoting the relevance of virtue-perspectives in the marketing field. He attempts to sell the idea of replacing marketing practices based on consumerism, and artificial stimulation of consumer needs, with more ethical marketing practices, performed by marketers as moral agents. Thompson takes as his starting point a conventional story about the roots of modern marketing, and how it originated as a tool for the common good. Specifically, it was a tool for informing agricultural consumers about farm-gate prices, to counteract “suspected manipulation of prices by middlemen to the detriment of producers and consumers alike”. Following this origin story, Thompson argues for the adoption of a deontological framework for marketers. In his view, they should be bound by a number of duties to foster marketing practices that can service common needs and contribute to the good of society.Footnote 1

Another example is provided by Dyck and Manchanda (2021) who, like Thompson, give some overview of the field of marketing ethics. Their main contribution is however an argument for radically rethinking the “4 Ps of marketing” (product, price, place, and promotion). By taking account of Aristotelian virtue ethics, and actively contrasting it to the purportedly dominant consequentialism of mainstream utilitarianism, they argue against a “more is better” ideology. They argue that it is a driver of cynical marketing strategies, artificially stimulating consumer needs to enhance organizations’ financial well-being while disregarding or misvaluing other consequences. Dyck and Manchanda argue for what amounts to a fundamental rethinking of a dominant economistic worldview and for the adoption of a different ideology as guiding light. By proclaiming that “enough is enough”, they seek to offer an alternative for anyone concerned that the current utilitarian approach is having dysfunctional consequences for the world, as well as for those who suspect that, even at their best, current practices are inadequate.

Our perspective is congruent with both of these approaches, as well as with other work in the field of marketing ethics that highlights the problematic logics of consumerism or advocates for ethical considerations. Our approach is, however, to some extent, new—or at least different, and possibly less radical—in that it focuses on rhetorical virtues in light of a rhetorical ontology. Our argument is not primarily moral, in the sense of presenting a moral appeal or imperative, but rather political. We discuss how to order a society, with its practices, norms, and written rules, and how to do that in a way that serves the common good, including the facilitation of climate transition, and the establishment of a market within planetary boundaries.

As already mentioned, there are no quick fixes, or ready-made concrete solutions, but if we continue to work in dialogue, partaking of each other’s contributions, and working at disciplinary intersections, and in dialogue with surrounding society, we ought to be able to make transformative headway. A constructive framing of such an endeavor might be to envision marketing channels as a stage for the public performance of ethical judgment, and for the evaluation of green marketing performances as such, in order to hold them to high ethical standards.

This reconsideration on how to understand marketing should not be limited to a scholarly discourse. On the contrary, we believe that it could and should influence how we—as societies—understand marketing and evaluate the construction of corporate ethos. Our overarching argument in this book has already been made, but in short, it is not about building an ivory tower with certain rules for ethically correct marketing. Instead, we hope to contribute to the shaping of a collaborative movement that can explore how certain dynamics in a market economy could function differently, and work to shine a light on alternative and more sustainable ways of performing marketing.