Branding the environment

If environmentalists don't change mainstream hearts and minds, they won't make a lick of difference.

by Chris Benjamin

The environmental movement is good at bugging governments until they ban things like uranium mining or cosmetic pesticides. But it has sometimes failed at the more difficult task of bringing mainstream hearts and minds around to its way of thinking. What's the point of laws most people don't yet believe in?

In the fight for those hearts and minds, the eco-freaks are up against capitalism's finest and most financed, the captains of industrial marketing, the manufacturers of cool. Environmentalists have countered with big ideas and righteous souls---and are decidedly uncool.

Some companies even hide any greenness they happen to posses. "Coca-Cola has invested heavily in various recycling programs and recyclable package designs," says Lei Huang. He's a branding expert in Dalhousie's biz school. "The activities are not publicized because there is some fear that it would reduce the product's appeal to some of the company's audience."

This movement needs an extreme image makeover. Marketing gurus tell me that all those depressing facts environmentalists throw into the ether might make us think, but they'll never get us to act. "Ideas like landfill depletion, carbon emissions and the consumerist culture are too psychologically far away," says Huang, "too disconnected from the everyday goings-on of normal people. People can't relate to them in the way they can relate to the benefits they see when they make a change."

He calls these ideas "features," descriptions of a problem. He says environmentalists should shift their focus away from features and onto benefits. People need to know the benefits of anything you want to sell them, including ideas. It's the "what's in it for me?" factor.

"When someone wants to know why we ride our bike around town instead of driving," Huang says, "we retort with, 'Because it emits less carbon dioxide into our suffocating atmosphere.' Technically, it's true, but the problem is that all these other people don't care about features. They care about benefits. So, when your colleague wants to know why you ride a bike instead of take a car to the office, tell her it's fun and the exercise you get saves you money on a gym membership."

Jess Ambramson puts it another way. She's an account exec at theadlibgroup, a full-service marketing agency in Toronto. "You need a feel good story," she says. "People are resistant to change; they want minimal hassle and to maximize the pleasure in life. So the question is how do you make people feel good about change?"

The trick is to replace the doom and gloom of environmentalism with positive, upbeat, motivating messages that request a specific action. "Sometimes giving a million options is not good," Abramson says. "Think of the three things that would make the biggest positive impact." Then tell the story that shows people how good those actions feel.

Abramson, who spent two years of her life developing climate change programs in the non-profit environmental sector, adds that environmentalists---like most professionals---tend to be insular. They talk to their own. She says that new social media present an enormous opportunity to reach beyond the usual suspects in a more interactive format.

She says that PETA is one non-profit that takes advantage of multimedia vehicles. Their McCruelty campaign uses a visually jarring animated website, interactive video games and a comedic viral video starring Martin Short and Andy Dick, playing a burnt-out, sadist Ronald McDonald, to call on viewers to demand more humane slaughter methods for McDonald's chickens. The website links to PETA's blog, Facebook and Twitter pages, and allows users to sign up for the group's listserv.

"It all ties in to the brand's effectiveness," says Abramson. "They're doing a really good job being in all those places, as well as using more traditional media like their magazine and newsletter, and they're making really big changes."

PETA remains controversial, in-your-face, and just plain offensive to some, but it is never ho-hum.

Compare that to Greenpeace's Save the Boreal Forest site, which is cluttered and text heavy. It has videos though, of old white dudes in suits giving Powerpoint presentations. It has a "take action" link, but I had to use text-finder to find it, and it linked to more information and more links.

I'm glad environmentalists are armed with so many facts to confront a complex set of crises. I wish we all were. But the movement needs to learn the secret of great communication: Before you can engage their minds, you gotta touch their hearts.

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Just an addendum: the misconception that environmentalists are radical "tree-hugging hippies who never shave or shower" is entirely the fault of Greenpeace in my opinion. If we got rid of the cancer that is eco-terrorism, that's half the battle of bringing environmentalism to the mainstream.

Posted by Dr. Fever on February 1, 2010 at 2:21 PM | Report this comment

Nayer: I'm not sure if that's a cultural issue (I know that it is in my house, I made a definite effort to be more environmentally friendly) or one that people are making more of an effort because of cost. Perhaps we're both right in that degree.

I just don't understand the issue behind not taking a cue from corporations and marketing environmentalism. It's like the environmentalists have this little community that they're afraid to let anyone else into. If we're going to turn this around (and one could argue that we're too late) we're going to need everyone on board, and taking a cue from the consumption machines that are corporations could actually be a good thing. Think of it: people being environmentally conscious as they are consumptive.

We also need to separate environmentalism from the misconceptions that they're nothing but a bunch of radical "tree-hugging hippies who never shave or shower" (this is a big issue for some), and the only way to do that is to make it as mainstream as possible. To do that, we need to make it as normal as possible. If a company can like Pfizer (don't take this literally, I'm only using it as a clear example) can create a medical condition, then make it seem like we need to fix it now to become normal, and then sell a fix for it, that's a powerful tool. It would change environmentalism as we know it.

We just need the right people behind it so we can avoid further green-washing, which has been a serious issue as of late.

Posted by Dr. Fever on February 1, 2010 at 2:16 PM | Report this comment

http://www.coastforestconservationinitiati…

Posted by Andrew Keith on January 31, 2010 at 11:58 PM | Report this comment

Dr. Fever - you are correct, many people have settled in to the 5 cents per bag. Maybe it should be $1 per bag!! I think at the end of the day you're never going to get everyone on board, but from what I have observed at the supermarket, there are more people using reusable bags than before. I think it is certainly more converts than you would get with a PETA style ad campaign.

Posted by nayer on January 31, 2010 at 9:01 PM | Report this comment

Interesting thoughts. I agree that the environmental movement needs to do a better job of communicating its message, and that there is probably alot we could learn in terms of tactics from the world of marketing/advertising. There is definitely a need to focus more on the positive outcomes of living sustainably (e.g. more wildlife, cleaner air and water, good health, etc.), and not just the doom and gloom type scenarios.

That being said, overconsumption itself is part of the problem, and it is easier to convince people to embrace the status quo and keep on buying more stuff than to convince them to change their ways. At some point we have to be able to get past appealing to people's narrow self-interest, and convince them to make modest sacrifices for the greater good. That's a tough one because that basically comes down to appealing to people's values rather than just their immediate wants and needs, and you have to know what values they have in order to appeal to them. For many people in the environmental movement, it is easy because we see nature as a value in and of itself. For others, we may have to appeal to other values, such as the concern for the welfare of future generations, concern for the future of their children, or even values such as "living within our means". We also need to learn how to build and strengthen environmental values over time. We could probably learn alot here from values-based organizations such as faith-based organizations, humanitarian organizations, political organizations and others.

We can probably also draw inspiration from campaigns such as the anti-smoking campaign, which has basically managed to turn an activity that was once fairly widespread into one which is largely completely socially unacceptable. While it did focus on some of the benefits of not smoking, it did spend alot of time focusing on the "doom and gloom" of what happens to smokers. It was a multi-faceted approach where no one aspect was completely responsible for the success. However, I think one aspect of it that is particularly interesting is it focused not only on the harm that smoking caused to the individual, but also the harm that smoking caused to others, and basically enlisted those "others" in applying pressure on smokers to stop, or at least limit their smoking. If we could do something similar for the environmental movement (i.e. convince a large portion of the public not only to stop smoking, but to pressure others to stop as well), we'd be doing pretty well.

Posted by Derek Simon on January 31, 2010 at 2:01 PM | Report this comment