Manipulation or evidence?
The study of communication and marketing linked to sustainable development has never been more popular.
Understanding the profile of consumers has become imperative, to carry out campaigns that can give growth impacts, offering less powerful and more correct products for the planet (electric cars, for example) .
In an interview to Harvard, Dr Anthony Leiserowitz explains the statistical data from the ecological vision of Americans in the last decade and the work done to create effective campaigns to convince ecology-sensitive customers and also to make sales with those who don’t care about. Look for:
Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz directs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, studying how Americans respond to the issue of climate change. What do they understand (and misunderstand) about the causes, the consequences, and the solutions? How do they perceive the risks? What kinds of policies do people support or oppose? And what kinds of behaviors (consumer, social, and political) are people engaged in around these issues?
Leiserowitz’s research offers business leaders valuable insight into the attitudes and actions of their customers and employees. Without this knowledge, the company decisions make about advertising campaigns or getting internal buy-in for sustainability projects can backfire. And taking into account the importance of growth and the extraordinary pressure that company bosses go up on, this is non-negotiable.
The research results are interesting.
What do we know about climate change beliefs in the U.S.?
They doing nationally representative surveys of over 1,000 Americans twice a year for more than a decade. They found that the United States is now at an all-time record high in terms of people accepting that climate change is real and that it’s caused by human beings. Worry levels are at an all-time high, and public support for many policies are at or near highs.
The longer-term trajectory is much more interesting. Some points justify this statistics :
The prior high-water mark in public opinion was back in 2008, an upward trend that began in the early 2000s. This included the 2004 release of the global warming disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow" , which was very strong in saying that humans are, indeed, responsible for climate change; An Inconvenient Truth in 2006; Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Prize in 2007; and Arnold Schwarzenegger passing AB 32, California’s global warming law, which has had enormous consequences for California and was a model for much of the rest of the world. And in 2008, the Republican nominee for U.S. president was Senator John McCain, who, for years, had been one of the primary champions of climate action in Congress; in fact, climate action was a core part of his campaign.
Then 2008 happens. Barack Obama wins the election. And we see a dramatic drop in public opinion from 2008, bottoming out in 2010 — basically an 18-month period in which we saw a 14-percentage-point drop in the proportion of Americans who even believed global warming was happening (71% to 57%).
What happened? How do you justify it ?
We did a big analysis to understand why. We found that it wasn’t the economy or media coverage or cold-weather events like “Snowmageddon.” It seems to have been driven by one major factor: In political science terms, it’s what we call “political elite cues,” which is just a fancy way of saying that when leaders lead, followers follow. The key thing that happened in that time period was the rise of the Tea Party and the strong rightward lurch of the Republican Party. As a whole, they basically crawled out on the last twig on the longest branch away from climate science. It became a common Republican talking point that climate change is a hoax.
In the research, they have six target. These six audiences are not based on party, gender, race, or income but, rather, on how people respond to the issue of climate change: how are they thinking about it, how are they feeling about it, and what are they doing about it.
These six groups range in a spectrum. It starts with the “Alarmed” at one end, people who are fully convinced it’s happening, caused by humans, and urgent, and who strongly want action but aren’t yet sure what exactly they can do. “Dismissive,” on the other extreme, includes those who are firmly convinced that climate change isn’t real, and most of them think it’s a hoax. In the middle you have audiences we call “the Concerned,” “the Cautious,” “the Disengaged,” and “the Doubtful.”
There’s a great ad for the Nissan LEAF from a few years ago.
Looking for american publics, Nissan was trying to sell a car that costs more and does less. The america have a car culture so, the original Nissan LEAF only went about 70 miles on a charge, and it cost more than a comparable car. Who the hell is going to buy that? Why are they going to buy it? Who the hell is going to buy that? Why are they going to buy it? Nissan wasn’t going for the mass market; they were trying to get early adopters to buy one of these new innovative cars, because nobody had electric cars back then. Living one’s environmental values is a core part of their identity — they were the ones who were most likely to be early adopters and get the market for electric vehicles started. That was brilliant.
This ad was apparently a success for the brand, and proof of communication and marketing can be a means of raising awareness of climate problems.
Around 10 years ago, communication company’s looking to consumer perceptions of sustainable products and what was keeping people from buying them more often. There were perceptions that they didn’t perform as well as traditional products. And there was a perception that they cost more than regular traditional products. These were some of the barriers that prevented people from purchasing more sustainable goods.
This is in part where Tesla has had an impact in much of the same way that Apple did. Apple totally reinvented the image of what a PC was. It’s not just this ugly metal box and processor that sits on your desk. It’s now a status symbol, an art form of design in and of itself. And that revolutionized computers, because you couldn’t compete anymore with just another, cheaper version of a rectangular box.
In this same way, Tesla has made the category of electric cars and the electrified future beautiful, cool, and higher performance, albeit still at a higher price point. It has become a status symbol in many parts of the country, even though sales are still small relative to all the cars that are sold. But we’re in the middle of an underlying shift in the consumer perception of sustainable products.
Also, consumers want products that empower them. For example, back when Ford was doing some pioneering work in sustainability, they put solar panels on the roof of at least one of their factories in Michigan and were using that to tout their green credentials. Consumers didn’t care much about that — they cared more about having a fuel-efficient car. What consumers want is for companies to empower us to live out our values.
That insight right there, I think, is at the heart of everything that all companies working in the broader sustainability space should be taking heed of and thinking about how to do. How can your products and services empower your customers to live out their environmental and climate values?
For companies that want to implement ecological values by winning customers, understanding how work with their advice in order to reach these customers regardless of whether they adhere to these values or not is essential . The world is evolving. Today it is more easier to find peoples aware of the ecological urgence. But this is not unanimous, and an innovative company cannot take risk of winning only the share of potential customers who are sensitive to these points.
To get employees — and customers, for that matter — on board, you need to be an effective leader. What does this look like to you, be it in government or in a company as a steward and advocate of climate action?
Well, that’s a giant subject. But I’ll say a couple quick things. You’ve got to have a vision, especially if it’s about transformative change. And you also have to have a strategy to actually implement your vision.
This is really important for companies, because, by and large, Americans are pretty skeptical, if not downright distrustful, of the motivations of many companies when it comes to these issues. There is a long, sordid history of greenwashing. So to quote an old friend of mine who is one of the leading communication professionals in Canada, James Hoggan: There are three simple rules. One, do the right thing. Second, be seen doing the right thing. Third, don’t get the order of those two mixed up. In other words, what you actually do is the most important form of communication. You’ve got to get that right before you start crowing to the world about how green and sustainable you are.
This brings me back to my last point that we have seen in our research about consumers. We see a large proportion of Americans as a whole, and especially those within the Alarmed and Concerned categories, who say that they are willing to reward or punish companies for their actions on climate change. In other words, boycotts or buycotts — preferring to buy something from a company that’s seen as doing good. There’s an enormous interest in doing that. We find that roughly half of Americans say that they would be willing to punish a company for its actions.
Now you can say, look, that’s not believable. It’s people sounding off on a survey. Fine, let’s cut it in half, from 50% down to 25%. In fact, let’s be super conservative and cut it in half again. Now we’re down to 12.5%. Let’s just keep being ultra, ultra conservative and cut it again in half to 6% and cut it again in half to 3%. So let’s just say that 3% percent of the country would actually reward or punish a company for their actions.
If 3% of the marketplace was actually punishing or rewarding a company, it would send massive shock waves through any sector. Profit margins are often smaller than this. When I talk to company executives I say, look, I am not in your shoes and I don’t dare for a second claim to understand the decisions that you make. But when we ask people why they don’t reward or punish companies, we ask about a whole bunch of barriers (I don’t have the time, it’s too expensive, I don’t like the products, someone in my house would make fun of me, et cetera), and there’s one reason that people overwhelmingly say is why they don’t do it. One reason by far. Do you want to guess?
Oh my gosh. I have no idea.
The one barrier that’s apparently preventing most people from rewarding or punishing companies by a long shot is simply: I don’t know which companies to reward or punish. That’s it. This isn’t convincing somebody that they need to give up their identity as a Republican to become a Democrat. That’s hard. This isn’t about changing anybody’s values. This isn’t even about persuading anybody. This is just simply about saying, “Hey, we’re a good company over here” or “Hey, that’s a bad company.” That’s it.
If I were in an executive’s shoes, that finding either makes me salivate or makes my knees knock a little. Because depending on where you are in your sector, you’re positioned either to take advantage of that or be punished by it.
As an exec, I would be afraid of two main actors. One is the environmental community, because, when it comes to pointing out bad corporate behavior, I think the environmental community has tremendous credibility with consumers. In other words, the naming, blaming, and shaming of bad corporate actors.
But honestly, the group I would be most afraid of are my competitors, because they have a huge incentive to communicate to the same consumers I’m trying to reach about how their product is better than mine and how mine sucks. And they’ve got the resources to communicate and advertise at scale.
To go back to my friend Jim’s rule: You’ve got to first be doing the right thing. These days in particular, if you’re faking it, you’re going to get called out.THE BIG IDEA
Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz is a faculty member at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and directs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He has been involved in everything from the research discussed in this interview to Climate Connections, a daily national radio program and podcast, featuring more than 1,700 stories of business, government, faith, community, and advocacy leaders and others addressing climate change. He is also a contributor to the recent anthology A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future.
Adaptation of interview from Gretchen Gavett to HBR.
Finally, this practice is "not yet" common in Europe While in the USA it is occurring but it should. Actually, multinational companies adopt American studies + local practices and adapt in a European context.. This is evidently less effective. The ideal is that, immediately integrate a department about DD communication into the marketing. A department with people who study European behaviour and vision ( with particular Country's view and methods of consummation ).
I had a hard time accepting the "communication strategy" as a crucial factor for the subject of climate change. Perhaps, though I am against the capitalist model of continuous growth, I am rational ad understand that we cannot build a new model by merely destroying the actual, but adapting it intelligently and effectively. We are studying, analyzing and adapting new technologies most adequately.
Given a healthy balance of the economy - local and geopolitical, company's need work. We left an era where the subject of Durable Development was entirely ignored by the world company and society also. Today, changing these mechanisms represents a hard challenge. Implementing new strategies, accepting a drop in income is very difficult in a world where the theory of "growth" is a quarterly measured.
For this reason, studies linked to communication strategies with lasting effects are an efficiency solution. This type of studies allows multinationals to implement quickly and effectively involve new strategies. Acting in this way, immediately against ecological damage and still being profitable; what puts fuel in the economic and geopolitical machine. This type of work permit also, to those people who have not yet been sensitized by this subject can (perhaps without realizing it) adopt healthier and more respectful acts by nature.
The world is changing, and we must believe that this change will accelerate positively. Meanwhile, any market strategy that allows us to adopt a new mechanism immediately is welcome!
References :
The troubling evolution of corporate greenwashing Global warming’s six americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis
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