SAVE THE HUMANS…The Planet Will Be Fine

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

~Stephen Hawking~

What’s the matter with the climate change debate? Why aren’t more people interested in “Saving the Planet”, or “going green”? Aren’t you aware that there’s no Planet B? I want to let you off the hook today. I want to put the blame squarely at the foot of the Environmentalists, Environmental Scientists and climate change advocates.  I recently discovered that it’s their fault that we don’t care….and here’s why…

It’s a Marketing Issue. 

This occurred to me during a consultancy project I was undertaking for an international NGO. I was advising on corporate strategies that can be adopted by the NGO in order to remain competitive and relevant. The International NGO had to get comfortable with business terms that it had, for a long time, found distasteful. Concepts like Competition, innovation, differentiating your product, value propositions and, inevitably, marketing.

The concept of marketing has been a big No-No in the social sector, but the sector is becoming so competitive that marketing cannot be ignored anymore. And so it is for the climate change debate. The challenge is that a significant portion of the society doesn’t seem to care much about it. A different marketing strategy can help with that.

“Save the planet, you say. It seems fine to me.”

That’s because the planet will be fine. It’s the Humans that need saving.

This should be the message coming from the environmentalists if they want us to pay close attention. The climate change debate has been poorly branded and marketed for the last few decades and that’s why more people aren’t paying enough attention. We need to look at the climate change debate from a different perspective.  With a tinge of corporate strategy included.

Environmental scientists are very good at doing science and other science related stuff. They are very good at communicating their findings to other scientist.  What they aren’t very good at is communicating their findings in a way that’s relevant for billions of people. This is why the predominant message is “Save the Planet”, “Conserve the Environment”, “Save the Polar”. These are all great, and true, messages but they need to be made more palatable to the billions of people who don’t have Master’s degrees and PhDs. But they do own fuel guzzling trucks that pollute.

Even more worrying is that when it does reach them, the message is always far removed for them. It’s always about a polar bear, an ice-berg, and O-zone layers. It’s not talking to them. So they don’t care. However, the latest advert for the newest model of truck is absolutely talking to them. That’s because the truck company has hired a marketing department and probably an Ad agency to tailor make an advertisement that will specifically target the viewer. The advertisement will capture their imagination and move them to action and that’s why it’s effective. It’s not the engineer who built the truck who crafts the advertisement. A totally different skill-set is needed for that.

In today’s world, people are bombarded with copious amounts of information, all competing for our attention. The climate change debate is just one of those bits of information and it needs to be much louder and much more effective.

And that’s where the environmentalists get it wrong. They are passionate about the environment, and they understand the science behind climate change….but they don’t have a marketing team to sell the idea. Their key message is disconnected from the listener. The message tells the listener to save the planet…don’t kill the host planet. In reality, the planet will be fine. It’s been here for Billions of years, albeit in different forms. It’s the Humans who will die off. They’ll be unable to sustain themselves in the Earth they are creating. They will die off, and the earth will continue to spin as if we were never here. Much like the dinosaurs, we’ll be relics. It’ll take a few millennia for the planet’s environment to auto-correct, but what are millennia in the face of Billions of years.

Environmentalists, please hire a marketing department and the odd Ad-agency to help package the message. Let’s change the slogans to “Save the Humans”, “Humanity’s Last Stand”, “The End of Human Civilization as we know it”. Admittedly, some of these are a bit dramatic but a bit of drama doesn’t hurt. Perhaps urgency calls for the dramatic.  In any case, your science driven communications, and peer reviewed journals have not been all that effective. Time for a different approach.

The planet will be fine. It is the Humans who won’t be.