Around ten years ago, student reps on the undergraduate programme complained to the programme director when I included slides on greenhouse gas emissions in a Principles of Marketing class in the context of PESTLE analysis, a framework for assessing external factors that influence an organisation. They insisted that climate change was “not marketing”. They did not foresee the transition companies had to make in terms of developing closed-loop supply chains, increasing the recycled content of packaging, and launching novel green products. Life has moved on. King’s Business School now boasts a Centre for Sustainable Business. However, I was again faced with a similar issue when working on climate-related interdisciplinary research grants. The general conception of marketing research was that it was for selling a product and the link between marketing and climate change was not clear to other disciplines.
People often see marketing as a tool for selling. While not technically untrue, selling is only a part of what marketing can do. At its core, marketing is about understanding latent needs of individuals and finding effective ways to motivate behaviours at a large scale.
Think about the use of the cuteness appeal when World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) highlights the “cuddly toy” in their welcome pack for animal adoptions, or the guilt appeal in Greenpeace’s “A Cheesy Love Story" showing how Doritos can bring about deforestation, negatively impacting orangutans’ natural habitats. These are common marketing techniques that are used to promote or dissuade certain behaviours. Other popular marketing strategies include nudging, which consists of providing alternative solutions without specifically telling people what to do, and reverse psychology, which consists of going against expectations. Providing healthier food options alongside unhealthy ones is a form of nudging. Patagonia’s Black Friday New York Times ad in 2011 ‘Don’t Buy this Jacket’ is an example of reverse psychology. Nudging is a way to avoid a backlash from individuals valuing freedom of thought (reactance theory) through incremental changes. However, from a climate adaptation perspective, the time to make incremental changes is probably over. Reverse psychology stops you in your tracks and tends to encourage reflection. This makes it more memorable. Patagonia boosted its green brand image as a sustainability pioneer in the fashion industry thanks to that ad.
Marketing can step up to play a key role in climate change because it can influence individuals to think differently. Extreme weather, such as heatwaves and floods, means that most people no longer feel that climate change is psychologically distant. We are at a stage where more communication is needed to encourage people to consider climate adaptation strategies to make it easier to bounce back from future climate-related events.
An interesting meta-analysis by van Valkengoed and Steg (2019) shows that the key factors motivating climate adaptation behaviour to natural hazards are self-efficacy (self-perception on the ability to adapt to climate change), outcome efficacy (perception on the effectiveness of adaptive actions to minimize the impacts of climate change), and negative affect (an unpleasant state such as feeling too hot). In comparison, experience, knowledge, and trust in the government were less important.
Marketing’s role is to apply these findings to develop effective messages and communication strategies to drive change within the society. This would be done by identifying criteria to segment the market, targeting the most important segments, and defining a clear positioning strategy before launching a campaign. Clarity and getting the message across are the key goals of marketing. Without marketing, many policies may be lost in translation and time wasted while extreme events continue to occur. A good example of this is the push for households to invest in heat pumps. Initial campaigns focused on financial incentives before any public awareness campaign on the different ways to heat a home (Vaillant, 2020). From a marketing perspective, this does not follow the AIDA model – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. Campaigns should have focused first on Awareness, that is, introducing the concept to the public and making sure everyone understands what ‘heat pumps’ can do. Financial incentives should have come only when the public has reached the Desire phase, to spur them onto the Action phase.
Marketing is ultimately about communicating benefits and allowing people to feel satisfied about the decisions that they make, so it has a significant role to play in sustainable transitions.
References:
van Valkengoed, A.M., Steg, L. (2019) Meta-analyses of factors motivating climate change adaptation behaviour. Nature Clim Change 9, 158–163. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0371-y
Vaillant (2020) Written evidence submitted by Vaillant Group UK Ltd (DHH0112) to Parliament, available at https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18541/pdf/