Green Alert: Rampant Consumer Confusion

There’s been a spate of studies about consumers’ green attitudes lately.  And their conclusions often are in direct contradiction to one another.  Joel Makower has a great run-down in his blog about this.

Perhaps his most noteworthy finding is how completely and totally confused consumers are about everything from the types of green products  worth buying to how serious global warming is  and the companies they can trust:

* For example, according to BBMG, Wal-Mart was simultaneously named by consumers as the most and the least environmentally responsible company:

When asked unaided which companies come to mind as the most socially or environmentally responsible companies, 7 percent of Americans named Wal-Mart, followed by Johnson & Johnson (6%), Procter & Gamble (4%), GE (4%), and Whole Foods (3%). Wal-Mart also topped the list of the least responsible companies (9%), along with Exxon Mobil (9%), GM (3%), Ford (3%), Shell (2%) and McDonald’s (2%).

via Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward.

Aside from anything else, guess this means Wal-Mart still has quite a big marketing problem, despite its recent efforts. Still, a larger proportion of people cited Wal-Mart as being more  socially or envionmentally responsible than Whole Foods? Go figure.