Selling Global Warming
Seth Godin has posted about why the ‘marketing’ of the global warming problem has failed. He’s got some good points about the problems:
1) that the words in the name - global and warming - both inspire good, warm feelings - we think that ‘global’ is good, and warm is, of course, good. BUT GLOBAL WARMING IS BAD, DUMMIES! (The same problem arises with ‘climate change’. We’re told all of our lives that change is good’ and we know all about climates. Mmmmm. The thought of a warm climate makes me green with envy at the moment, but that’s just the northern Canadian in me.)
Seth proposes the name ‘atmosphere cancer’.
Alternately, what about ‘death by choking’ or ‘poisonous air’ or even “air flu” (given the ’success’ of ‘bird flu’ in raising global fear) - making the problem personal to each of us so that we can’t think, “atmosphere cancer? Poor guy. But cancer will never happen to me. I don’t smoke. It doesn’t run in my family.”
But ‘death by choking’ is personal. I can envision that. It’s terrifying.
2) that global warming is happening too slowly and with not enough visual impact to make good tv. How true! Yet how pathetic we as a people are! It’s all about fast moving images and bright lights.
Seth Godin is so right. This is a huge marketing challenge. It would be awesome if the best minds in the advertising business would get behind this and try to change our thinking about this issue. What about turning global warming into a reality tv show? I hear they are all the rage.
2. March 2006 at 14:11
I think the problem is more fundamental than that: we, as humans, aren’t really evolutionarily designed to deal with problems that take place over such long time spans and with such disparate and multifaceted causes, even if we created them. Evidence indicates that we’ve been awfully good at causing population- and technology-driven environmental catastrophes on many different scales (from Easter Island to Rwanda) — and, on occasion, also at creating relatively long-term sustainable systems as well.
It’s a huge marketing problem, because it requires getting people’s thinking brains to override our innate predelictions for thinking in spans of a few years, instead of a few decades, in terms of our immediate interests instead of the more general commons.
I’m not sure if “atmosphere cancer” would help that.
2. March 2006 at 14:36
Hi Derek: Yes, I totally agree. Your point was Seth’s second point. It’s the frog in a pot of boiling water theory (which turned out not to be valid but anyway….) that we can’t imagine, or CARE about what happens decades from now because damnit, I wanna drive my SUV NOW!!
But I also believe that the language doesn’t even alert us that the problem is freaking serious and we ought to pay strict attention - and fast.