Dragon's Den: The Importance of Being Earnest

Blog #2 in a series for CBC's Dragon's Den:


When selling anything, it’s important that consumers trust your product. Witness the recent Toyota mishap for a lesson in what happens when consumer confidence in a product, or in this instance an entire brand, goes south.

In a confusing market crowded with competing claims of “green-ness”, it’s doubly important that your customers believe your claim of “green” to be accurate. If this isn’t the case, at best your product won’t derive any measurable benefit from the “green” claim, at worst consumers will hold your perceived lack of transparency against you. Big time.

Take the example of Sigg bottles as a case in point.

For much of the last three years, the hormone-disrupting toxic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) has been in the news. My organization, Environmental Defence, has made it a signature campaign. Linked to breast and prostate cancer and a host of other human diseases, mounting scientific evidence convinced Canada in 2008 to become the first jurisdiction in the world to ban the chemical from baby bottles.

Since then, a variety of other jurisdictions have also moved. Some of these bans include restrictions on the chemical’s use in food can linings (likely the most significant source of exposure for people). As concerns about BPA gathered momentum starting in about 2006, Sigg, the Swiss-based maker of funky aluminum bottles, positioned their product as a “green” alternative to then-common, BPA-containing, plastic sports bottles. The company enjoyed substantial increases in sales in the process. At the time, Sigg categorically stated that their products were BPA-free. But then, lo and behold, late last year the company had to issue an embarrassing public apology admitting that right up until August 2008 their bottle linings did indeed contain the chemical.

To say the least, this really caused the BPA to hit the fan. If you plug “sigg” and “bpa” into Google, you get over 85,000 hits.

After the company admitted misleading its consumers the Web lit up like a Christmas tree with angry people denouncing their former-favourite metal bottle. In summing up the Sigg episode, Advertising Age wrote that the company had moved from a ”badge of consumer eco-consciousness and all-around cool” to being “in danger of becoming a poster child for brand deception and corporate dishonesty.”

The lesson of Sigg is that, first and foremost, claims that a product is “green” have to be sincere. Before making such claims a company better be darn sure that they are true. In this age of email, Twitter and by-the-minute Facebook updates, the moment a customer sniffs out a corporate untruth it will be broadcast far and wide before the hour is out. Sincerity isn’t the only important consideration in evaluating the relative “green-ness” of a product, but more about that next week.