Or so goes the conventional line of thinking.

Consultant Andrew Winston, author of the popular book “Green to Gold,” wants you to believe otherwise. He makes his case in his new book, “Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top.” Winston writes:

This book presents an optimistic view of what green can do for your company in hard times.

Optimistic, yes. And realistic. Winston knows the recession has knocked businesses and their customers back on their heels. There are few companies today with the financial wherewithal or stomach for large-scale sustainability initiatives.

So what’s a company to do? Winston has plenty of suggestions. His small book reads like a how-to guide for businesses, with easy-to-digest lists of pragmatic reasons and low-cost methods for becoming more sustainable.

Focusing scarce resources

He offers four broad recommendations and organizes his book around them:

1. Get lean: You can generate savings fast by reducing energy costs and consumption in your buildings and facilities, data centers, distribution operations, employee travel and by reducing and recycling waste.
2. Get smart: Collect data on your environmental footprint, internally and across your value chain, and make it available to the people who can best use it to create change.
3. Get creative: Creativity is free. And green innovation is what will set you apart as your competitors stand still. Ask “big, heretical questions.”
4. Get (your people) engaged: Winston says, “In these times of low morale, and perhaps because of the stress of harder economic conditions, many people want more meaning at work. A green focus will both engage and inspire your people to keep going through tough times.”

Reducing your environmental footprint now can create advantage over your lesser-prepared competitors. Before long, however, you and your competitors will have no choice. Powerful forces remain at work even as the current economy struggles and squeezes profits. Chief among them are climate change and constraints on natural resources and nonrenewable energy.

In his conclusion, Winston writes:

As hard as it may be to imagine, green pressures will force even larger, more sustained changes in business than current economic pressures. We’re talking about a fundamental shift in how the world works.

Application to smaller businesses

Most of Winston’s examples are from larger companies. I asked Winston in an email whether his recommendations work equally well for smaller businesses.

In short, yes, all of these strategies and tactics apply very well for smaller companies. In fact, smaller enterprises may feel more strain on cash flows and need to get lean even faster. The one caveat is whether any capital is available for investment in environmental improvements.

Winston recommends setting aside a portion of planned capital expenditures for environmental priorities, such as energy reduction. He also says smaller businesses may have the advantage when asking the heretical question. ”Arguably smaller companies will be less tied to the status quo and more able to foment disruptive change,” he told me.

And what about Social Recovery?

I also asked Winston why he only briefly mentions the social dimension of sustainability.

Part of the answer is based in my expertise and focus. Another is that the ideas for getting lean as a way to fund a Green Recovery need to be focused on quick paybacks, and those types of initiatives tend to be more environmental: saving money on facilities, on IT, etc. It’s harder to pursue the social agenda as a cost-saving path…That said, many companies are building strong brands by hitting themes of transparency, responsibility and corporate citizenship.

Winston comes off as a pragmatist with deep concerns about the environment and the readiness of business to deal with what’s ahead. And for good reason. A new study of 1,500 corporate executives finds only 30 percent of companies have developed a clear business case for sustainability. Another recent study of major U.S. businesses concludes:

The current state of corporate environmental policy and management is surprising, perhaps even shocking.

Seizing the opportunity

Looking past the woeful business response to our environmental challenges lies a classic business opportunity. Iconic environmental businessman Paul Hawken, speaking in Portland, Ore. this month, asserted: “There’s no such thing as bad news about the environment, only information.” And in that information lies the makings of commercial success for those paying attention.

Winston sounds a similar theme.

Some companies that had a weak commitment to sustainability may be pulling back now. What a great opportunity to lead.

Enter the nonprofit Northwest Earth Institute, based in Portland, Ore. NWEI has answered the call of businesses and other organizations looking for a way to start — or perhaps kick start — sustainability initiatives. NWEI’s response is a new discussion course designed specifically for the workplace, called “Sustainable Systems at Work.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I am on the NWEI board. As someone who’s participated in previous NWEI discussion courses, I can vouch for the power and inspiration in the model of peer group learning used by NWEI.

Each of NWEI’s courses takes a grass roots approach to sustainability, consistent with the Institute’s mission of “Inspiring people to take responsibility for Earth.” The previous seven courses offered by NWEI are designed to inform and inspire people in support of individual behavior change. The new workplace course is tailored to empower groups of employees at all levels to create or support sustainability projects or programs within their business. This bottoms-up approach creates employee champions for sustainability, as well as employee buy-in for environmental or social initiatives already in place.

Over a course of five sessions (60-90 minutes each, typically one session per week), employee groups will:

• evaluate the current economic model and consider the case for change
• examine the concept of sustainability from an organizational perspective
• evaluate principles and frameworks for guiding a vision
• identify tools and strategies for implementing a framework
• develop an action plan to advance organizational change

The course book, produced in cooperation with The Natural Step Network, contains articles and excerpts from experts and authors on business and workplace sustainability. The readings and companion discussion questions and exercises are designed to move employees quickly from learning and conversation into action. Mike Mercer, executive director of NWEI, says it’s all about engaging employees from the ground up.

Most organizations are launching sustainability initiatives from the top down, which they should. However, for culture and practices to change within an organization, employee commitment is a must. We believe innovation at its best occurs at all levels, and is driven by shifts in thinking. Our programs drive just that.

So if your business or some business you know is looking for a door into sustainability or the key to unlocking employee passion for sustainable change, get in touch with NWEI. They can help.

Daniel Goleman, author of the popular book “Emotional Intelligence,” explains the growing empowerment of eco- or social-minded shoppers in his new book “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Impact of What We Buy Can Change Everything.” Goleman says consumers face an information gap that prevents them from easily knowing and comparing the personal, social and environmental health impacts of individual products they are considering for purchase. That gap, however, is closing, thanks to the emergence of new mobile and point-of-purchase information technology that makes it easier to access the accumulating ecological and social data and ratings of individual products.

The hope and the promise Goleman sees for these new forms of IT is “radical transparency.”

Ecological transparency becomes radical when its analysis encompasses the entire life cycle of a product and the full range of its consequences at every stage, and presents that information to a buyer in ways that demand little effort…Radical transparency means tracking every substantial impact of an item from manufacturing to disposal—not just its carbon footprint and other environmental costs but its biological risks, as well as its consequences for those who labored to make it—and summarizing those impacts for shoppers as they are deciding what to purchase.

Goleman credits the company GoodGuide for its pioneering efforts to equip the shopping public with “comprehensive and rigorous information at the point of purchase.” GoodGuide’s technology platform is still in beta form, but it shows potential for dramatically tilting the information playing field in the direction of the consumer. According to Goleman:

GoodGuide surfaces a product’s backstory. It can calculate the specific environmental impacts during manufacture, transport, use, and disposal. It can perform this calculation down to a single chemical among a batch of ingredients. On a macro level, it can rate how well a given company stacks up against others in its field on environmental, health, or social performance, as well as determine which brand or company has been getting better over time. GoodGuide can evaluate a company’s policies, its disclosure of key information on products, and ultimately a company’s impacts on consumers, workers, communities, and the environment.

And now GoodGuide offers a free iPhone app that provides mobile access to data on more than 70,000 products, according to its website. Goleman says GoodGuide has harnessed decades of industrial ecology research to provide precise metrics of various processes and products. Perhaps most significantly from a marketing standpoint, “GoodGuide cuts through greenwashing to the underlying facts,” Goleman says.

Although GoodGuide is remains at beta stage, Goleman says the tool is nonetheless “a concrete example of how radical transparency might work” in the aisles of shoppers’ favorite stores. It may be a Microsoft or a Google that ultimately provides the transparency system that is most widely accepted. In any case, Goleman sounds confident it won’t be long before consumers have fast, convenient access to information that helps them align their purchases with their values at the place and time they’re ready to buy. I share his confidence.

For marketers, the takeaway is this: Your customers will eventually have all the credible facts they need to decide whether your company or product satisfies their health and sustainability values and how you compare to your competitors. At that point, you’ll have little choice but to ensure the stories you tell about your company and products square with the facts your customers will have at their fingertips. Do you know your products’ “environmental impacts during manufacture, transport, use, and disposal” down to a single chemical used in its ingredients? And how about the labor and trade conditions up and down your supply chain? It’s only a matter of time before not knowing or not caring to know that information will come back to bite the offending company either in lost sales or in damaged image.

The “radical transparency” Goleman describes won’t appear overnight and it may never be fully realized in the market nor embraced by the consumer, but the information trends are clearly working in favor of the customer, whether a business or an individual. One of the trend drivers is demographics. In an interview last month with public television’s Bill Moyers, Goleman said he believes the younger generations have the greatest motivation to preserve the world and their ever-expanding use of social media will accelerate the sharing of consumer knowledge. This, he says, will create a shift “that will make it not only feasible for companies, but actually essential for companies to do the right thing.”

Smart marketers will get ahead of the trend and make radical transparency their competitive advantage.

Update: As I was about to publish this post I came across Joel Makower’s review on June 17 of Goleman’s book. He isn’t nearly as optimistic as Goleman about the transformative potential of radical transparency, for either consumers or producers. “I can’t argue with the premise, but my 20 years of watching the green marketplace leaves me, well, unsold,” Makower writes. Goleman responds to Makower here. He says, “I don’t believe the last 20 years offer apt data points for projecting the next 20. It’s the future I’m talking about, not the past.” I’d suggest you read the book and decide for yourself.

Update: Daniel Goleman references my post in a piece he wrote for Harvard Business here.

Apparently there’s no recession in Martin Lindstrom’s business, Buyology, Inc. His firm takes its name from his book “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.” Consumer products companies are flying him around the world to learn what he knows about what Marketing News calls “the last frontier of marketing research: the consumer’s subconscious mind.”

Lindstrom’s book, published in 2008, sets him up nicely as an expert on neuromarketing, which he says “is to use the latest brain science to understand the consumer’s behavior.” Or as his book title says, “Why We Buy.” (I confess I haven’t read it.)

Nobel Peace Prize winner and neuroscientist Eric Kandel has said the ultimate remaining challenge of the biological sciences is to “understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember.” In the last five years or so, this pursuit has spawned neuromarketing.

Just as marketers teamed with psychologists after World War II to create the field of consumer psychology, the largest brands are now looking to harness the methods and technology of neuroscience to study our brain responses to marketing stimuli. Neuromarketing is just the latest chapter in a long history of marketers learning to produce better and better-targeted marketing messages that will lead us to buy.

What struck me most about Lindstrom’s interview in the latest issue of Marketing News (no article link available yet) is this comment:

“My intention was to write a book so, hopefully, the whole world could engage in a debate and say: ‘Are we going too far? And if we’re going too far, should we have regulations around this?’ Now, here’s the bad news on this one. The ethical debate has not appeared so far.”

Lindstrom is right. There’s been no debate. But he’s not going to be the one to spark it, given he claims to work with 17 of the world’s largest brands, 12 of which are using neuromarketing. His vested interest is in seeing this new field flourish, not in drawing attention to its questionable reason for existence.

I would love to see a thorough debate of neuromarketing. Just as I’d welcome a public debate on the ethics of word of mouth marketing. But my concern is less with neuromarketing itself than with what it says about the marketing industry: Will there ever be an end to the lengths marketers will go to get us to buy? After neuromarketing, what’s next? Cloning loyal consumers of our brand? If you want some answers read journalist Lucas Conley’s superb book, “Obsessive Branding Disorder.” Or if you’re intrigued by neuromarketing, read the blog.

If humans hope to have a sustainable future, they must consume less. A lot less. A recession is one way to put a stop to buying. A better way is for the choice to be voluntary. What the world really needs is to understand how to trigger or train the subconscious mind to reject the marketing stimuli that entice us to buy more crap we don’t need and can’t afford.

Here’s a book waiting to be written: “DoNotBuyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Shouldn’t Buy.” If you write it, I’ll buy it. No MRI required.

“As for OBD in the current economy, I can condense my general observations down to a couple points: consumers are buying less and thinking more. The result of both is that brands are trying harder (either via marketing, discounts, redesigned packaging, etc.) to capture our attention, often driving greater desperation and obsessive branding. Why? When consumers buy less (cutting back on staples and skipping status buys) it means brands have to fight even more for a smaller piece of the pie. When consumers think more (Do I really need this salon shampoo? Isn’t the generic ibuprofen more or less the same as the pricier brand?), they tend to dispel brand myths and discover deals. And any time consumers do more thinking, brands have to fight harder to shortcut their logic with emotional appeals (faster and deeper than logic) or overwhelm them with more marketing, new packaging, etc.”

If Conley proves to be right, and I think he will, the extreme efforts of brands to occupy every nook and cranny of our lives will grow even more frantic and insidious in this rotten economy. And we’re not only talking about consumer products companies. Product and service companies of all stripes are running scared. They could resort to most anything to get customer attention.

Not that any of us would be so guilty, right? Conley says the marketers he interviewed for his book agreed obsessive branding was a widespread problem–it just didn’t apply to them. In other words, they know OBD when they see it; they just don’t see it in themselves.

How about those of us trying to operate our businesses and live our lives more sustainably? Are we better equipped to draw the line when it comes to marketing approaches that offer only the illusion of something innovative, better, unique? Or that deceive customers into believing we offer something they truly need, not just desire?

In this economy, devoted “greenies” in business are not exempt from diminishing prospects. Companies that in good times preach transparency and authenticity in their business practices may be challenged to maintain that commitment as sales rapidly disappear. Numerous incidences of greenwashing in recent years indicate even so-called advocates for sustainability are not above sleight-of-hand branding tactics.

Obsessive branding, Conley argues, distracts companies from what they ought to be doing–innovating. “Real change results from innovation that advances knowledge and improves quality of lives,” he writes. “Branding offers the satisfaction of a sense of change without the hard work.”

There are no shortcuts in the honest pursuit of sustainability. But businesses trying to be more sustainable will also become more innovative. And that will be their ultimate competitive edge.

Want to stand out in this dismal marketplace? Stick to the principles of sustainability. Lead with innovation. And when it comes to your brand, seek the middle ground between neglect and obsession.

P.S. A special note of thanks to McClenahan Bruer Communications, my previous agency, for hosting and introducing me to Lucas Conley last fall.

If you’re looking for wisdom on sustainability, this book may do more to discourage than enlighten. But I believe Walker has given us plenty to ponder when it comes to sustainability, even though it’s not a central topic in his book.

Walker, author of the “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine, attempts to decode what he calls “the secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are.” The publisher accurately describes the book as “Part marketing primer, part work of cultural anthropology.” Walker makes a convincing argument, backed by strong reporting and research, that Americans—far from being immune to marketing, as most of us think of ourselves—are in fact “embracing brands more than ever before.” And marketing, while certainly not alone in explaining our enthrall with brands, is doing more than ever to encourage it. Walker writes:

The modern relationship between consumer and consumed—what I’m calling murketing—is defined not by rejection (of commercial persuasion) at all, but rather by frank complicity.

Walker’s term “murketing” blends murky and marketing to describe the blurring of lines between branding channels and everyday life. Marketers, usually referred to by Walker as “commercial persuaders,” are using increasingly sophisticated and unconventional tactics to brand products and companies. Indeed, there seems to be no limits anymore to where and how we might be delivered a commercial message, as Walker illustrates in his explanation of the word of mouth tactics used by new breed marketing agencies such as BzzAgent.

But Walker doesn’t paint a picture of Americans as innocent victims of shameless commercial persuaders. On the contrary, he uncovers numerous examples to show we are often the ones providing a brand with meaning, sometimes far different from the one intended by its owner. And once we endow a brand with meaning that works for us, we become its biggest champions. Walker’s stories of how a factory worker boot made by Timberland became part of the “global hip-hop uniform” is just one of many great examples.

Today’s youth, the most commercially exposed generation ever, may be more aware than any other group when they’re being pitched. But Walker says they are also “most amenable to using brand to fashion meaning for themselves, to announce who they are and what they stand for.” Brands are just a form of useful raw material for expressing identity and creativity. Perhaps because of the ubiquity and familiarity of our commercial culture, Americans return to it over and over to resolve what Walker calls “the fundamental tension of modern life”—how to reconcile our desire to feel like individuals while also feeling part of something bigger than ourselves.

If youth are indeed “a proxy for the future,” Walker’s findings don’t offer much hope that we’ll see a mass movement toward a less materialistic society anytime soon. He describes a cloudy, cluttered marketplace that “makes it dizzingly difficult to walk your talk” when it comes to simplifying life or buying with environmental and ethical considerations always in mind. And perhaps more significantly, commercial objects are what so many Americans use to project the meaning of our lives, according to Walker. “Meaning and value are things we give to symbols, not things we get from them,” Walker writes.

From a sustainability standpoint, what does it mean that material, branded objects are becoming more, not less, important in the collective lives of Americans? I think it asks for a fundamental change in strategy in how we confront consumerism. Attempts to educate everyone to consume less or differently have had marginal success. And that’s unlikely to change if, as Walker argues, Americans use the commercial marketplace to set ourselves apart from the crowd and to participate in something bigger. We must recognize how difficult it will be in the near-term to supplant this central role of commercial goods in our lives, especially when marketers are hell-bent on keeping consumption our top priority.

So if demand for material goods is unlikely to slacken, maybe we need to make the goods themselves our primary focus. If producers make and sell only sustainable products, customers won’t have to think twice about how a product is made. Sustainability will be embedded. That places the onus on manufacturers and those who market their products to take responsibility for the environmental and social impact of what they sell.

I don’t want to let individuals off the hook for what and how much we consume. But pleas to consume less will keep falling on deaf ears as long as the things we buy are how we tell ourselves we matter. Maybe the key to sustainability is how we confront meaning, not consumption.