You could not fail to notice all the hype this year – with CNBC and the WSJ running special features on the subject of green business. As far back as April 2007, mainstream business magazine ‘Fortune’ put California Governer Schwarznegger on its front cover with the headline ‘cut the gas or else’ and an internal feature used a whole page to display the words ‘green is good’ (as a pun on the old Gordon Gekko maxim – greed is good). So we know this has been going on a while now but when did the green business hype cycle actually start? Here’s a tip for quickly and crudely establishing a first response to that sort of question when it arises. Head over to Google Trends and enter your term and relevant synonyms to see what you get. Here’s what I obtained recently for the term ‘green business’.
Google Trends Chart for 'Green Business'
It gives you a fairly strong clue about when this round of environmental business excitement was really triggered – not 2007, or even 2006, but 2005. People were searching for information on the subject back then – and enough of them to be tracked by this tool.
However, you should note that Google trends charts are limited and don’t usually follow the hype cycle curve shape. There is rarely a clear trough here becuase you can’t see positive or negative sentiment change in the data.
