Definition

Marketing yourself as environmentally friendly while your actual practices range from negligible to actively harmful, sustainability theater at its finest. It's slapping a leaf logo on your product while dumping toxic waste out back.

Example Usage

Their 'eco-friendly' campaign was pure greenwashing—they added recycled content to 2% of their packaging and called themselves sustainable.

Source: Environmental marketing and corporate communications

Related Terms

Intermediate

heatmap

Visual representation of user behavior showing where people click, scroll, and hover, typically revealing that nobody reads your carefully crafted copy. The marketing equivalent of finding out which parts of your outfit actually get noticed.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
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sales qualified lead

A prospect who's been vetted by marketing, kicked over to sales, and deemed worthy of actual human attention rather than automated email sequences. Abbreviated as SQL, which confusingly has nothing to do with databases.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
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Value Proposition

A fancy way of explaining why someone should give you money instead of your competitor. It's the corporate pickup line -- it sounds rehearsed, slightly desperate, and works about 10 percent of the time.

💼 Corporate / Business📣 Marketing / Advertising
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target

In business and marketing, the specific audience segment you're trying to reach, sell to, or manipulate into thinking they need your product. It's the demographic, psychographic, or behavioral group that your entire campaign is aimed at—ideally based on data, but often based on whoever the VP thinks buys stuff. Missing your target means wasted ad spend; hitting it means annoying the right people with your ads.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

takeover

A high-impact ad buy where a brand dominates all advertising placements on a website, app, or platform for a set period. The digital equivalent of a hostile acquisition, but temporary.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Intermediate

sentiment analysis

Using natural language processing to determine whether customer feedback, social mentions, or reviews express positive, negative, or neutral opinions about your brand. It's teaching computers to detect sarcasm, which goes about as well as you'd expect.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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See “greenwashing” in Corporate Speak, Gen-Z Slang, Pirate Speak, and more.

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