The Marketer’s Climate Dilemma
Marketers create the storytelling that has driven consumerism and Earth Overshoot. But can the same skills now be used for climate action?
You are walking on the road on a cold day and pass by a coffee shop. The smell of coffee invades your senses, you see people carrying takeaway cups and walking down the road. You feel the urge to buy a cup for yourself, to feel the warmth, to smell the coffee, and to take a sip of one of the most marketed beverages on the planet.
There are countless moments in movies, and pop culture of people drinking coffee, sipping brews in take-away cups, and Instagram pops ads of Gourmet single-origin brewed coffee every day. As a marketer, I understand how all of this works — and how it contributes to climate change.
Fundamentally people do not need a lot, they need the basics, food, clothing shelter, and time with friends and family. But if people followed just the basics, people like me would be out of a job.
One of the first things you learn in Marketing is the difference between a need and a want. Needs are basic, like fresh air in Delhi, accessible housing in Mumbai, and traffic-free life in Bangalore, let the government take care of them.
But wants, that is the stuff of Marketers' dreams, dreams that are brewed by the likes of Don Draper and Peggy Olson. Marketing geniuses, madmen, and women focus on getting people to want more. Coffee at all times of the day, bigger houses, kids, bigger cars, phones, bags, vacations, dining experiences, the list is endless.
But a lot of these wants are irrational.
So how do you get people to be irrational?
At the root of it is the need to be accepted into a group. To fit in you need to look good, smell great, own good clothes, own a house, and have an expensive family vacation — none of these are true, but over the years marketers have convinced the world of these lies.
At the summit of the irrational mountain are luxury handbags. Many women choose to buy luxury bags to fit in, they show them off proudly at parties, airports, and social gatherings. The most expensive and rare ones are made from alligator and crocodile leather. Intelligent marketing covers up the suffering and sells the rareness of the skin. The scales of the crocodile and its porousness are sold as luxury goods (Eg: The Birkin bag by Hermes) and many women buy into this ridiculousness.
This is just one of the many wants that marketers create with intelligent storytelling and tapping of insecurities. All of this could have been fun and games if not for the impact it has on the planet.
With the pace at which we are going, we are consuming resources at a far greater speed than the rate at which the planet can replenish them. Most of the time it is for ridiculous superfluous products and not basic needs.
And all of this is piling up at cataclysmic levels and causing ripples in our daily lives that we are already able to feel.
No amount of green tech and clean energy solutions will solve the climate problem. These solutions address the symptoms and never the root cause. And the problem keeps recurring because the root cause has not been addressed.
In the graph below we can see that we have lost the plot since 1970 onwards. We need more than one earth every year to sustain that year’s activity, which means we are massively borrowing from the future. This is a huge ecological debt that we rarely hear about
At the crux of it, this is a human behavior crisis, the ability to not let go of ways of living that do not benefit the planet nor give the individual incremental social returns.
And it has been fuelled by Marketing and Media. We have sold to the hilt a king/ queen style lifestyle, putting dreams of wealth gain on a pedestal, and trivializing dreams that do not add material wealth as unambitious.
There is no way we can dig ourselves out of this hole without addressing human behavior. And paradoxically it is Marketing that can come to the rescue.
Marketing and Governments can attempt behavioral change on a large scale. And change needs to be driven until we reach the behavioral tipping point. The point at which these behaviors take off without external intervention.
There is an interesting example from the UK. Drunken driving was considered a symbol of masculinity. Through effective marketing, over decades a perception shift was brought about from masculine bravery to masculine insecurity. In the UK this resulted in drunken driving being culturally acceptable (50%) to culturally unacceptable (92%).
Imagine the results if these targeted marketing efforts are applied to areas such as food choices.
Plant-based diets can help curb the environmental impacts of food systems. If everyone goes plant-based the world’s food-related CO2 emissions can drop 68% in 15 years.
But food is a tricky space, it is part of people’s culture and identity. So the space needs to be treated cautiously — instead of focusing excessively on the ethical and environmental impacts that might not work beyond early adopters, the focus has to be on building brands around Plant-based alternatives that connote positivity, taste, and even aspiration.
Take Michelin Star restaurant 11 Madison Park. This already 3-star Michelin restaurant turned vegan overnight. The world waited with bated breath, especially the food critics for the restaurant to lose its status. But surprisingly it did not. The restaurant retained all of its 3 stars even when it went vegan.
The chef Daniel Humm’s brand and the brand of the restaurant carried through. This is an example of how powerful brand narratives can supersede personal biases. In a world where Michelin-star restaurants are associated with the rarest of meat and seafood, it took one guy to show how things can be done differently and have the same amazing experience when it comes to plant-based food. Daniel Humm is being touted as a genius, he truly is, because he took something fundamental and turned it upside down.
This is a fringe case, and also the reason why it is highly celebrated — the question is, can we use Marketing at a larger scale to bring about change for critical issues like Climate change?
Many marketers are in a dilemma because we have been taught that Marketing and Capitalism are close cousins, driving people to want more, beyond their means and the means of the planet. Would it even be possible to market something else?
But it is a complex problem for every marketer to solve to tell the most pressing story of our times and tell it engagingly.
Rays of Hope
Amongst a sea of greedy marketing, some examples give us hope like the ones below
Most of us do not know where our pension money goes, it is such an automated process that we hardly give it any thought. We trust banks to take care of that. Unsurprisingly most banks invest this money in fossil fuels companies. In 2022 alone five of the largest banks in the UK ended up financing $37Bn to fossil fuel companies.
UK-based Make My Money Matter wanted to change that. To do so they relied on narrative and marketing. Most of their storytelling seems to be based on the insight of people being unaware and how banks exploit ignorance.
Then there are gold standards for better marketing like Patagonia. For years now Patagonia seems to be playing to a tune of its own. While the world of fashion has been all about being Out with the old, in with the new Patagonia tried to tell a different story, one of the great outdoors, of being one with nature.
Patagonia’s advertising style follows suit with thought-provoking campaigns such as Buy Less, and Demand More. In doing so Patagonia also wins. The stickiness of such communication is much higher than the sea of similar-looking communication that other apparel brands seem to be doing. It also works for Patagonia’s target audience. People who are environmentally conscious and outdoorsy and want to buy products that do not harm the planet.
While these examples are inspiring, we need more brands and marketers to step up and start telling the Climate story. The same skills that we learn in B-Schools can be put to use for good. It would be challenging as it is not an easy story to tell, you need to engage but not bore people, entertain them, but leave them with a message and you need to do it time and again until we reach a behavioral tipping point, until it becomes ridiculous to ignore this problem, like ignoring smoking in airplanes or ignoring a drunk guy who says he is sober enough to get into a car.
You could either stop the drunk guy or watch him crash and burn — the choice is yours.
