Less Green. More Go

Alex Myers
Slant
Published in
7 min readJan 16, 2024

As long as marketers talk about ‘sustainability’ and ‘Green” practices, we’ll continue to tread water rather than gain ground on the climate crisis

Is the language we use to inspire sustainable practices missing the point?

When Manifest was approached by a group of creatives keen to drive up youth voter numbers in the UK a few years ago, I told the organisers that our job wasn’t to convince people of their obligation to vote – it was to understand the tacit significance of not voting.

Rather than preach about responsibility, we needed to understand the inherent rebellion involved by not showing up to the polling station. These young people weren’t choosing not to vote, they were refusing to vote. There’s a difference.

This insight led to “They don’t want you to vote” becoming the rallying cry for RizeUp, a voter registration campaign unmatched in its success in recent times that inspired hundreds of thousands of young people to register to vote – many for the first time – and changed the face of the May/Corbyn election in the process.

RizeUp led didn’t preach to people to use their vote, it weaponised it

“I thought this article would be about sustainability?” You may rightly ask. Well, the challenge may be different, but our problem is the same: we need to move away from the language of responsibility, and toward the language of opportunity if we are to make a difference to mainstream behaviour. In truth, both subjects share the same foundational challenge: because the climate crisis is so sprawling, it is the culturally-prevalent language of politics that has been adopted by the private sector. If this were more about a category or competitive challenge than an existential shared goal, we’d perhaps have been better at coining our own terminology already.

If we have learned anything from Elon Musk (and we learn increasingly little), it’s that we can’t cast improved systems, processes or products as ‘alternatives to the status quo’: we have to present them as the inevitable replacement. We can’t cast behaviour change we wish to instigate in the context of responsibility and conscience alone either, we must represent an enhanced experience on an individual level to incite collective action. That means not just talking about improvement in environmental terms, but being better in more general, audience-centric terms.

It is not enough to simply do things better. We must build better things.

Tesla hasn’t succeeded by delivering an electric alternative to the petrol car, it has delivered an electric vehicle to succeed the petrol car. It’s faster, cooler, more fun and more reliable. After all of that, it just so happens it’s an opportunity to undo a lot of the damage petrol vehicles make to our planet. Improved environmental impact is an outcome of the behaviour shift, it is not the inspiration. In the inimitable language of ‘desire’ that has long defined the car industry – Tesla wins. The language of the environment and environmentalism takes a proverbial backseat*.

From the language of effort to that of effect

Tesla doesn’t speak about the ‘transition’ to electric vehicles, but represents the ‘transformation’ brought about by that change. Which makes terminology like ‘energy transition’ all the more baffling. If ever we want someone to do something for us, would we define the request by the effort required, or the advantage gained? Transition sounds like hard work (spoiler: because it is), but even a simple shift to the word ‘transformation’ at least casts the discussion in the context of opportunity over graft.

The same could be said of ‘net zero’. A valid and vital goal for the world. But for my house? My kitchen? My family? Net zero feels like a lot of effort for, quite literally, a zero at the end of it. This is the kind of language we see from a spectrum of brands looking to inspire behavioural change – from energy companies to supermarkets – but in truth if we were laser focused on achieving it, we’d probably realise that using it is at best ineffective and at worst, counter-intuitive. Let’s talk about reduction in emissions, waste, energy – whatever the environmental focus – instead in terms of the gain achieved for customers. Struggling to find one? Try harder… because that’s what marketing is, not just sticking an offset-powered ‘net zero’ sticker on something and telling your customer ‘job done’.

‘Sustainability’ is another word held back by its own milieu of the mediocre. Fans of Peep Show could well imagine Mark declaring, ‘I don’t want the world, Jeremy. Clean socks, a cup of tea and some sustainability. Is that too much to ask?’. No, I don’t know where that weak British comedy analogy came from either, but as a rallying cry to define a movement, ‘sustainability’ is a conscience-focused PC to a people-focused Mac. Teams to Slack. Nissan to Tesla. Frankie Boyle to Bill Hicks. Politely, it’s impotent. Frankly, it’s just a bit shit.

But that’s not even its major drawback for brands. It’s also without an agreed definition, highly scrutinised and increasingly devoid of emotional connection. As well as lacking hugely in an instinctive, emotional sense, it doesn’t even make up for it in an intelligent, practical one.

And finally, let’s talk about ‘Green’. Never since the Wizard of Oz has the colour green been such a cover-up. Marketers have for decades told us ‘green’ is a useless relic of a past. Yet those same marketers quietly use it on everything where they struggle to define the positive impact a brand, product or service is making. Or worse still, they’re terrified of saying something more specific that might turn out to be untrue. It’s like there was a board-meeting of all the brand-owners in the world where they agreed, “If in doubt, let’s jut call what we’re doing ‘green’”.

If one good thing comes from this article (outside of that Wizard of Oz line, I’ll be using that again), it’s that those who read it might think again before saying something is green, greener or greenest.

So what’s the alternative?

The change to make, I believe, is to focus on the change being made, rather than the means of making it or the modes of measuring it. We need to be obsessed with the latter in our operations, just not in our customer communications. In reality, I’m saying this isn’t any different to any area of marketing behaviour change. From smoking cessation to the obesity crisis, switch-campaigns to loyalty schemes, real behaviour change has never come from preaching to audiences, it’s always come from empowering them.

Long story short, as positive impact marketers, we need to get over ourselves. It is absolutely fine to talk about less altruistic benefits that may result from more sustainable practices, if those benefits are more likely to inspire change. Similarly sing about the efficiency gains or operational improvements those changes make without feeling guilty about it, or worse still gilt-edging it as some sort of ‘sacrifice for the good of man’.

Let’s talk less to customers about emissions, and talk instead about how much faster/cooler/smoother/tastier/exciting your brand is and how your environmental commitments augment, rather than dilute that.

Talk about the experience for your audience, over the conscience of your organisation and we’ll start to see real progress. The majority of us may say we are interested in a brand’s impact on the planet – but the way we behave has always been and always will be influenced far more by its impact on our lives.

Whatever we do as brand owners, we won’t change the world – our customers will. And they won’t do it because they want to (even if they really do). They’ll actually do it because they want to change their experience. Their day, their routine or their relationship. Changing the world begins and ends with changing the lives of the individual customer.

Clarity and specificity is needed

The added benefit of adopting a people-centric approach to language in marketing, rather than just a planet-centric one, is that we more easily avoid erroneous or unsubstantiated claims. We side-step wishy-washy terminology entirely and reopen the opportunity to differentiate and be distinctive as a brand. It is my opinion that the second biggest issue in positive-impact marketing is greenwashing, and the singe biggest is greenhushing. If we aren’t so obsessed with leading with environmental claims, we won’t need to over-polish them, but by leading with real experience claims we will also be willing to shout from the rooftops.

As well as clarity, customer-centric discourse allows brands access to one central ingredient for change: specificity. Coming from an earned media background has helped me understand that the potency of a story is in its specificity – you always need a human story to illustrate the cultural one. Even if it’s not ‘Someone like me’, I’m able to connect an individual’s experience to my own on both a philosophical and a practical level. We’ve all experienced that with the Post Office scandal exposed by ITV’s recent drama this past month. It’s the human stories that have helped us both understand and care about a complicated and sprawling issue.

If we truly wish to inspire choices, practices or behaviours that will improve everyone’s future, focus not on the responsibility of your audiences, empower them. Don’t talk about collective action, but rather the individual experiences that forge it. Individual experiences may just be a drop in the ocean in climate crisis terms – but what is an ocean if not billions of drops?

So instead of trying to turn the tide like King Cnut, a change in language can help every one of our customers to feel like they’re making waves. It’s time to throw away the well-worn sustainability playbook a refocus our attention on real change.

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

Published in Slant

Brands need to stand on the right side of history, but don’t mistake that for sitting on the fence. Slant shares views, opinions and trends from the creative industries. A Manifest publication.

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?