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General Electric's "Ecomagination" Campaign – A Case Study

General Electric (GE) is a corporation that researches, develops and manufactures a variety of
technologies for use in a wide-range of industries. These include the health care, transportation,
city infrastructure, home construction, finance, entertainment, and power generation industries.
The global corporation has over 300,000 employees and 3,000 facilities. Since 2005, GE has been
implementing the "Ecomagination" campaign to increase public awareness of the commitment
GE has made to develop clean technology and sustainable infrastructure to solve environmental
challenges while increasing financial gains. The campaign takes the form of a companywide
strategic business initiative to promote GE's environmentally friendly practices and products
(Creamer, 2005). It is targeted at a vast audience including investors, consumers, corporate
customers, lawmakers, and employees.

The campaign kicked off with eight-page inserts in four major newspapers, advertisements in
magazines, TV commercials being aired during prime time and large amounts of news
coverage. The company also conducted an internal communications effort featuring a children's
magazine that explained "Ecomagination" to employees and their children. At the beginning of
the campaign, GE estimated that it would double its revenue from environmentally friendly
products to $20 billion in five years.

Over the past seven years, GE has utilized various communications tactics as part of their
"Ecomagination" campaign. These tactics include television commercials, a high-tech website,
social media, news coverage, internal communication initiatives, and a print advertisement
campaign. In 2006 alone, GE spent $150 million on advertising for the campaign.
Advertisements range on topic but always showcase the innovative technologies GE has created
to help solve environmental problems. One example of an advertisement is of a young boy
catching the wind. This ad aired during the 2009 Super Bowl. The boy catches the wind in a jar
and runs home to use the wind to blow out the candles of his grandfather's birthday cake. The
voice over explains, "Capturing the wind and putting it to good use—Wind Energy from GE,
the cleanest renewable energy on earth". This advertisement, promoting GE's wind turbine
technology, gained widespread attention and was nominated for an Emmy.

To further increase consumer engagement, GE also created competitions and consumer

interaction opportunities. The "Ecomagination Challenge" gave businesses, entrepreneurs,
innovators, and students a chance to share their ideas on designing renewable energy
technologies, grid efficiency technologies and environmentally friendly homes and buildings.
GE partnered with four other organizations to award the winning entries with a total of $200
million to help fund their projects. The "Ecomagination Photo Project" encouraged the public to
upload photos representing Light, Wind or Water to Flickr, a photo sharing website. For each
photo that was uploaded, GE donated money to three different charities working in rural Peru.
The final contribution provided 4.8 million gallons of clean water through fresh water wells, 17
million hours of light through solar powered lanterns and 45,000 kilowatt-hours of energy
through wind turbines. One last engagement example is "Tag Your Green." This social media
based campaign let users share ideas and show how they were being environmentally
responsible in their daily lives. Customers could use YouTube, Flickr, Howcast or Foursquare to
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showcase environmental innovations in their area or create their own media advocating for a
more sustainable future..

"Ecomagination" fits into marketplace advocacy not because of the large amount of planning
and money spent on audience engagement, but because of the message and the integration of
the campaign into the core business model. In the "Ecomagination 2010 Annual Report," GE
specifically states that the campaign is a business strategy. The message of the strategy is that
GE does not harm the environment when it brings good things to life (Creamer, 2005). This
message and strategy have since been integrated into every aspect of the corporation. The
integration starts with products. Every product that has qualified to be part of the
"Ecomagination Portfolio" must significantly improve consumers' operating performance and
environmental performance. GE has partnered with an organization called GreenOrder that
ultimately decides if a product meets the necessary criteria.

GE is also incorporating the eco-friendly practices into their own facilities and offices. Each GE
division is encouraged to invent and restructure products to be more environmentally
responsible and a team has been hired to oversee the campaign (Gwynne, 2010). The company
doubled its investment in clean technology research and development, reduced its green house
gas emissions and improved water reuse (GE, 2010). Employees are also responsible for holding
to the set environmental standards. GE links its external communication efforts with its internal
efforts to better penetrate the campaign goals. All efforts are supported and encouraged by Jeff
Immelt, GE's CEO, who also participates in political efforts to take a stand for environmentally
responsible efforts.

With its global reach and integrated components, "Ecomagination" fully meets the criteria to be
considered marketplace advocacy. A careful look at the advertisements and communication
efforts reveal that GE is not attempting to sell a specific product, but instead is promoting a
general idea. The idea is centered on environmental responsibility and the opportunity for
growth in the clean technology sector. GE has the ability to rise greatly in this arena and earn
higher revenue if clients decide to invest in environmentally responsible products. By forming
this positive image of both the corporation and innovative technologies, GE is impacting the
public's opinion and altering the politics around clean energy. GE's lobbyists have already
discussed with Congress about reviving the wind industry's tax incentives, standardizing rules
for connecting solar panels to energy distribution systems and multiple other clean energy
related policies (Fairley, 2004).

Another environmental issue that was brought up by critics and the press soon after the
announcement of the "Ecomagination" campaign was that of GE's pollution catastrophe in the
1970s. One of GE's facilities located on New York's Hudson River had been discharging toxic
polychlorinated biphenyls into the Hudson River for over a decade. Throughout the 1980s and
1990s, GE battled with regulators and advocacy groups over whose responsibility it was to
clean up the river. It was not until 2001 that the new CEO of GE agreed with the United Sates
Environmental Protection Agency to develop a cleanup plan. Marketplace advocacy campaigns
can work to overshadow issues like these and show the public all of the good the corporation is
doing to avoid possible environmental devastations in the future.
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"Ecomagination" as a whole has made great strides toward innovative technologies that help
increase environmental responsibility. The corporation has seen much success surrounding the
campaign. According to the "Ecomagination: 2010 Annual Report," GE generated more than $85
billion in revenue from "Ecomagination" services since the launch of the campaign. In 2010,
there were 22 new products introduced that met the necessary criteria to be considered an
"Ecomagination product." These products provide value to investors because of their increased
value proposition and environmental performance. The report states that GE has exceeded
every "Ecomagination" goal originally set including $5 billion dedicated to clean-tech research
and development, a 22% reduction in facilities' greenhouse gas emissions, a 30 percent
reduction in facilities' water use, and $130 million in energy efficiency savings.

GE itself does not claim any heritage to environmental responsibility. The campaign instead
talks to the future opportunities of clean technologies. It highlights the positives of the
technologies, but does not make false claims about the corporation's sales or investments
(Garfield, 2005). Nevertheless, "Ecomagination" serves its marketplace advocacy purpose of
showcasing the opportunities GE has to offer to this innovative field while impacting the
public's opinions and the political environment surrounding GE's industry developments and
financial goal

Source:
Jacobsen K.L. (2012). Corporate use of environmental marketplace advocacy: A case study
of GE's 'ecomagination' campaign. Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in
Communication. Vol. 3, NO. 2 . 2-3

Additional Reference go to the GE Website at:

https://www.ge.com/globalimpact2012/ecomagination.html#!report=top