Nonetheless, it does make one wonder, despite the funky ecomagination website and massive marketing campaign, whether or not the average consumer will see the staid GE brand any differently following the initiative.

In fact, says GE's O'Toole, ecomagination is not meant to revamp the brand at all; it's about good business sense. It's "not an advertising ploy or marketing gimmick," he says. "GE wants to do this because it is right, but also we plan to make money while we do so." Ecomagination is "never going to be a lecture by GE about ‘what's right.' It had to be a viable business prospect."

When asked what GE hopes to achieve through ecomagination, O'Toole answers simply, "Strong growth." He adds that, "in what Jeff (Immelt) calls a ‘carbon constrained world'—where it is also more of a challenge to find the kind of growth GE demands, companies need to strive for developing technologies and business prospects where perhaps they haven't in the past."

The efforts of a huge diversified company to go green have been echoed in the past by other large energy companies. One such project was the sustainable development project initiated by Shell in 1996 and launched at the Earth Summit in 2002. Shell is a massive, worldwide energy brand that has not traditionally been associated with a green focus. In fact, Shell's reputation at the beginning of its sustainable development project was in tatters. The Anglo-Dutch brand began to think seriously about building green into its image shortly after the 1995 Brent Spar disaster in the North Sea. During that situation, Greenpeace activists grabbed world headlines by occupying a derelict oil platform owned by Shell and refusing to let it be tipped into the ocean as a means of disposal.

At the end of that same year, Shell's brand suffered another blow when environmental activist and Nobel Prize nominee Ken Saro Wiwa and eight of his fellow Ogoni environmentalists were executed by the Nigerian government for obstructing Shell's pollution of their tribal lands. Critics charged the brutal move was backed by Shell, who did nothing to intercede during their show trial. "After these two debacles," Claudia Mpeta, Shell's communication manager for External Affairs at Shell's Cape Town offices reports, "over a hundred Shell service stations across Europe were vandalized in some way, and employees were scared to come to work. Our brand value was below zero."

At the start of 1996, Mpeta says, the company went into a "massive introspect" when Shell began a systematic review of its entire operations. The result was a sustainable development program meant to "restore Shell's integrity" to the world. Heads of departments of various countries were asked to sign a "letter of assurance" that their operations were doing the right thing from an "economic, social and environmental" standpoint. Now Shell launches yearly independent audits to make sure that its officers are toeing the line in all three areas.

According to Mpeta the rebuilding of Shell's brand required a long-term, three-phase process. The first phase lasted from 1996 to 1997, when the company went through an introspective period and planned what it would do to re-establish the brand worldwide. The second phase, Mpeta says, saw the creation of the Statement of General Business Principles and the yearly publication of the Shell Report, which is a detailed appraisal of the company's yearly effort to abide by its sustainable development goals. The Shell Reports are slick catalogues that break down the company's activities into highlights and lowlights. The third phase began in 2001 and continues today; the project launched at the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in what Mpeta describes as a "coming out party."

Shell divides the way it manages the brand into two sectors. Traditional brand managers cover products and lubricants. They work in tandem with colleagues involved with corporate identity. Shell's External Affairs department is involved in all corporate decisions and uses what the company calls an "issues management system" which "ensures we do not repeat the same mistakes." To do this they use a global brand tracker and a methodical "reputation tracker" as measurements of the efficacy of the system.

American writer Ron Irwin lectures on Brand Management at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He researched this article with the help of the University of Cape Town Business in Context postgraduate student research team comprising Zarif Kahn, Melody Johnson, Nikki Emerton and Shelley Levin, to whom he is gratefully indebted.