McKinsey, one of the biggest consultancy firms, has dedicated a lot of effort in publishing articles related to sustainability. When having a look about companies taking green initiatives, I have realised that McKinsey was posting a lot of articles about how sustainability should be a big issue in today’s business world. I have read some of them and they consists of studies, proposals, critiques, awards and different ways to express the message of:
I strongly think that what McKinsey is doing is key for companies to realise the importance on taking actively action on sustainability. This company is one of the most influential consultancy firms in the business world. That is why McKinsey expressing the importance of sustainability would result in a big change of mind of most businesses around the world.
After realizing how impactful can McKinsey’s messages be, let’s look in detail McKinsey itself as a company. When thinking about McKinsey, green is not an attribute it would come to our minds. This is because they are not positioning themselves as a green company, which may be surprising once we know it is spreading green values through its articles and studies. However, it is important to take into account that its target market (companies) is not choosing McKinsey (or any of its competitors) for being green. Greenness is not “the” attribute when deciding whether to have one consultancy service from one company or other.
Having the Green Marketing Strategy Matrix in mind and knowing that McKinsey’s costumers do not care much about greenness and that McKinsey’s possibility of differentiating due to greenness could be high (given that its competitors have not taken huge steps towards green initiatives), we could thought of McKinsey as a Shaded Green company. This is why McKinsey is not positioning itself as a green company, but does care about this issue, as shown in the numerous articles and studies it has published about sustainability.
The message of this post is basically that even though there are some companies not known for its greenness, such as McKinsey, which is not positioning itself in the green companies zone, they can cause huge impact on society when it comes to sustainability by its actions.
hovictor
February 27, 2016 — 4:10 am
I’m just wondering what McKinsey does within their company that makes them more green. Of course spreading awareness through studies and articles help the issue by promoting green issues, but are they doing anything within their operations (such as actively working to suggest greener solutions to problems) to help the problem themselves?