Marketers need a clear message on the environment

CHRIS POWELL has some advice for clarifying the conflicting messages on climate change

ASURE WAY to get no action is to give masses of contradictory advice. That's what a welter of well-meaning greenish organisations seem to be doing, often with quite substantial budgets to enable them to do it. Climate change communications is a mess of conflicting messages. Are we to stop travelling (except by donkey, horse or foot), to turn off our TVs when we go to bed, hope that science captures carbon before it leaves the power stations, recycle our bottles in Tesco’s car park, eat only organic vegetables, trade carbon with our neighbour, lag the loft, blame George W Bush, doubt the science and not worry, or put a Cameroonian wind turbine on the roof and sell electricity back to the grid? Or all of these?

To make matters worse, some of the advice is amateurish and unintelligible. There was quite a heavyweight campaign late last year around the theme that any six year old could do it, featuring, unsurprisingly, a lot of six year olds who went on to be photographed in Downing Street. The only thing I got out of this was the clear message that I was more stupid than the average six year old and, while that may be true, it was difficult to see how that piece of abuse would advance the cause.

Where do these people get the money from to mount so many campaigns, which come at us from all different directions? Perhaps the government is spraying money around any organisation that sounds as though it will do something about climate change, but the aggregate effect is a cacophony.

One piece of very good news, though, is that the sheer weight of scientific evidence and, gradually, the weight of media opinion has convinced most of us (although not George W Bush), most of the time, that there is a problem. The figures go up and down a bit according to whether there has just been a shock programme on Channel 4 with errant scientists claiming there is nothing to worry about, the melting of the Arctic ice cap is quite normal and anyway nothing to do with us. Or, helpfully to the cause, we have a spot of unseasonal weather and everyone assumes this to be evidence of climate change.

On the whole, however, most people in the UK agree there is a problem and that action is required.

This is a huge advance. The avoidance (or more likely limitation) of global warming depends on action now to prevent catastrophe many years in the future. It is akin to the prevention of an epidemic, a famously difficult communications task. Much money and many years of effort had to go in to convincing us that it was worth having a slightly inhibited sex life to avoid a disease that, at that stage, seemed to be having little impact in our milieu but would if we didn’t take action now. Climate change seems to have got beyond the early problems of AIDS prevention without the need for advertising.

What are we are supposed to do about it?

At the back of our minds is the hope that, like overpopulation or the exhaustion of oil and coal reserves, science will solve the problem and we won’t need to change a thing. Power stations, cars and aeroplanes will be fitted with a device that cleans the emissions, or some vegetation will be found with an enormous capacity to clean the air, or fuels will just become vastly leaner. The desire for an excuse not to act lurks in most of us and any confusion or unreality about what we are to do allows us to take refuge in these hopes.

We all want to be seen to be virtuous but few of us like to suffer in a good cause. We tell market researchers that we don’t mind paying more for green benefits but only a minority of zealots ever really will. A campaign that delivers more widespread green behaviour is going to need to be cleverer that that. MORI asked what action people were taking to improve matters: 60% were doing nothing or didn’t know what they were doing; 23% said they were recycling.

At a minimum there will need to be a single clear, much repeated, message that is credible and is realistically likely to lead to action. It is hard enough to get over one idea, especially if it is unwelcome, so there’s no chance of success with a myriad.

At the root of all this, I suspect, is that no one really knows what one single action we could all take that would at least start the process of reducing our carbon footprint and, it seems, no one person or organisation is in charge. The Carbon Trust, the Energy Saving Trust, the Climate Challenge Fund, various regional Sustainability organisations, Greenpeace, the Department of the Environment, Friends of the Earth, Planet Energy Saving Solutions, each ploughs its own furrow. Little will be achieved until there is a single source of advice.

What could that advice be?

Part of the difficulty is the paralysingly large scale of the problem. Global warming, what can Chris Powell of 42 Acacia Avenue do to prevent that? The tiniest, tiniest drop in the ocean won’t make any discernible difference, so why bother?

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has been dong some work that has pointed to this credibility gap. The world is going to burn, ice caps melt, deserts spread, storms rage, populations starve, so please go out and buy a low-energy light bulb. There is a scale problem here between the vast and the infinitesimal. I feel inadequate to take any action that realistically could do anything to stop disaster, so I will do nothing and hope for the best. Communications will have to show a credible connection between the action suggested and a solution to the global problem.

Too much mustn’t be expected of advertising and promotion. Successful social behaviour change campaigns have balanced legislation and persuasion. Communications comes in first and performs two functions.

First, it persuades many, but usually only a minority, to take the action recommended. At the same time it softens up attitudes and makes it possible to bring in legislative change that might otherwise be unacceptable. The ban on smoking in public places could never have been successfully introduced without the years of campaigning on secondary smoking. Drink/drive works by the combination of advertising reminders of the awful social consequences that can come from drinking and driving and seeing at least one driver pulled over by the police to convince us that there is still a real risk of being caught.

Neither on its own is enough. Recycling seems to be going the same way: we need to do it and, in the end, we will be punished if we don’t. Restriction and legislation need to be matched by measures to make the alternatives easier. We, on the whole, accepted congestion charging in part because we knew there was indeed a problem, but the restriction was matched by the immediate benefit of emptier streets for public transport and more buses, which together made journeys easier.

Another problem facing whoever takes on this task is the escape clause that governments themselves have been using – there’s no point in our country doing anything because your country isn’t. Why should I suffer when the Chinese are building two new coal-fired power stations a week? Not only do we need the international agreements that are still proving so elusive but we also need ‘confidence building’ measures to convince us that this is a concerted global push. In the hyper-inflation period of the early 1970s trade unions were insisting on deals that took into account their expectations of ever faster inflation in prices and the presumption that other unions were succeeding in doing this. It took a year’s campaigning with signed pledges in large-space advertisements by employers and union leaders promising to abide by low inflation targets to dampen the fever down. Something of that nature might be needed here.

So campaigning needs to be realistic in what it asks people to do, and use legislation as part of the mix. People asked to take unwelcome action will always look for an excuse and those excuses need to be blocked off as best as can be done.

But it won’t be enough to tackle this case by case. There will, indeed, need to be campaigns to achieve one behaviour change (like recycling) and then another (maybe low-energy light bulbs, although the government is going to phase out the other sort by 2011 anyway) until aggregate behaviour has lowered emissions.

But there needs to be an underlying attitude change that makes each individual behaviour change make sense – a campaign that explains how these actions succeed in tackling the global problem so that there is a continuing reward and incentive to act.

The scene has been well set. We do think there is a problem that needs action. There isn’t an unfortunate do-gooder image attached to sustainable behaviour to inhibit action (indeed sustainability is seen to be pretty fashionable, probably because so many pop stars bang on about it).

It’s just that no one is telling us what to do about it. Or, rather, loads of different people are telling us all sorts of different and unconvincing things we should be doing about it.

So doing nothing is the safest bet, and that’s exactly what most of us are doing.

[email protected]

We all want to be seen to be virtuous but few of us like to suffer in a good cause. We tell market researchers that we don’t mind paying more for green ,benefits but only a minority of zealots ever really will. A campaign that delivers more widespread green behaviour is going to need to be cleverer than that There needs to be an underlying attitude change that makes each individual behaviour change make sense: a campaign that explains how these actions succeed in tackling the global problem so that there is a continuing reward and incentive to act

Little will be achieved with regard to reducing our carbon footprint until there is a single source of advice.