It Ain't Easy Being Green

Abstract

The “green gap” is traditionally thought of as the gap between how consumers intend to behave regarding green living and how they actually behave. We extend the idea of the green gap by demonstrating a different kind of disconcerting green gap. There are three levels of green advertising—with tensions embedded in their differing agendas. An ethnographic content analysis and phenomenological interviews reveal that there is a macro agenda of saving the planet associated with nonprofit green advertisers. There is a meso agenda associated with for- profit enterprises. These commercial approaches do not appear to be aligned with consumers' micro agendas of saving one's own part of the planet (or at the very least, of not wasting one's part of it, as perpetuated by consumers). We then provide solutions for green advertisers in bridging this unsettling green gap among for-profit advertisers, nonprofit advertisers, and consumers who want to make being green and less wasteful easier in their everyday lives.