"Marketing climate change" - interview with Terry O Riley

By: Dan Mossip-Balkwill

Dan: Let’s start with emotions vs facts.  Why are emotions more powerful than facts in terms of motivation.  

Terry: I don’t think facts are a good way to motivate people.  I think facts are seductive to the person with the facts.  A fact seems powerful on its own, it has a revelation or epiphany attached to it, the problem with facts is that they are not emotionally rooted.  In order to move people at all, you need to connect with them emotionally, and most facts don’t do that.  A fact sits there coldly on a piece of paper, and has no emotion attached.

One example we’re always told is to chance our batteries in our fire detectors when the clock changes (daylight savings time).  It’s a wonderful fact, but nobody does it. 

Getting people to change their behaviour is the toughest thing you can do.  It’s one thing to create desire for a product, but a totally different thing to change an ingrained behaviour.  Another example that highlights emotion is important is around losing weight.   If someone says to me “I want to lose 10 lbs this summer” I think to myself immediately ‘good luck with that’.  But if someone says “I want to lose 10lbs because I want to look good in my daughter’s wedding photos”.   I think that will happen because there’s an emotional reason, as opposed to this concept of weight loss for the sake of losing weight.   

Dan: Why is changing behaviour the hardest thing to do?

Terry: Because creating a desire for something is much smaller than changing behaviour.  To change behaviour you have to change peoples beliefs systems.  People hold onto beliefs like possessions, they are absolutely hesitant to give them up.  You have to get people thinking about something in a new way.  Then that belief starts to loosen, and because it’s a process you keep communicating to them in surprising ways, and that belief shakes free and you have a chance to influence it.

Dan:  Why do emotions grab onto us more than facts?

Terry:  Facts are an intellectual exercise.  Where the heart goes, the mind will follow.  Where the mind goes, the heart may not come along, that’s the difference, that’s the huge distinguishing feature.  So if you’re heart is recruited in a decision, I think the weight of that starts to change your behaviour, the chances of it go way up if you’re emotions and heart, feelings are involved, then if it’s purely intellectual. 

Dan:  So emotions and feelings are necessary, but are some emotions not useful, such as fear?  

Terry: If you look at the history of marketing, the most successful campaigns have a positive emotion at the end of the day, it’s not a negative one like fear.  (talks about joy)  If you begin to use fear people will start to repel and deny the negativity.  

Dan: When you think about climate change, is there a positive emotional call environmental groups can make?

Terry: This is a very difficult topic.  When I was working with David Suzuki he said “the environmental issue is a slow motion catastrophe”.  It moves so slowly that you don’t feel it in some ways.  I’m looking out the window right now, and it’s a beautiful day, the birds are singing, and I think everything is fine. 

The other problem I see with the environmental movement is that there are too many issues.  They are all valid, but there are too many of them. For example, when we wanted people to buckle up in their car, it was a specific behaviour change that we needed.  It was very well defined, same with not smoking, drinking and driving, those were big societal issues that took time to change behaviour on.

Environmental issue is very diffused.  You need to make an emotional positive journey for somebody on this issue.  I think the root is our children.  I think we need to start to frame this issue as “what kind of world do we want to leave for our children”?  When I think of my own life I can’t think of anything more emotionally motivating than my children.  If you frame it to me in that way I get really interested.  I get afraid, that we’re not going to leave something behind.  The through line for that story is the most compelling thing I can think of.  It’s the biggest tug we have in life.  And the key is it’s a positive thing, what we can do to leave a positive world for our kids.  Rather than you’re leaving a horrible world for your children.  

Dan: That resonates with a talk I heard Malcolm Gladwell give where he explains the success behind the seatbelt campaign.  He states that compliance rates were initially 15% partly because people resist being told what to do.  Instead the seatbelt campaigns pushed for laws requiring children to wear seatbelts.  Suddenly there was a constant seatbelt advocate in the back telling their parents to put on their seatbelt, and within three years compliance rates were up to 75%.  

Terry:  The other factor that helped with seatbelts, as well as smoking and drinking and driving were laws to enforce the behaviour change.   

Dan: So if an environmental group came to you with a campaign asking you about what kind of world you would want to leave for your children, how would you respond to that?

Terry:  This is such a big issue.  It’s probably the issue of our generation.  I think the way to get people to sit up and notice you is you have to be surprising.  Not just fact based, not just emotional, but surprisingly so.  Frame an issue so that I look at it in a whole new way.  I think “wow I have never ever thought about that issue in that way before.  Now you’ve got my attention.  Now you’ve got me thinking, now I’m ripe for the next step.  Every great marketing campaign, is a book, and a book has chapters.  A smart strategy has got many steps, not just one step.  Get me sitting up and aware of you, surprise me by making me look at issue in new way.  Next step is now I’m open to hearing what my contribution can be. 

Short-term marketers have a one step marketing plan.  Smart marketers know this is a process.  You stage every process to get people to think one way, to open them up to the next step in the process. 

Dan: The science is overwhelmingly in favour of climate change.  Based on polls it sounds like people are ready for the next step.    But people aren’t sure what to do.   

Terry: The science is pretty overwhelming.  The majority of people understand that it’s taking place.  If I look at my life, my house is heated and cooled with ground source heating, we drive a hybrid, we green box and blue box, etc.  But I don’t know if I’m doing enough.   I have no scale to know if even what I’m doing is even worth it.  As well because of how the issue is framed a lot of the things you can do to make a difference on this issue involve purchasing differently, and are usually expensive.  

Dan: It appears ENGO’s are afraid to ask people to do too much or anything that will affect quality of life.

Terry: There’s a great line – “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work.” 

You need a grand audacious plan for people to become part of it.  When you give them small incremental moves, while they are achievable they are not motivating.  You don’t see a huge battle plan that makes you think “that’s so outrageous, but I want to be a part of this cause if it does turn out it’s going be incredible!”   You need a big, bold plan. 

Dan: I read something on a website called “Hollaback” that tries to address street harassment.  The writers, Samuel Carter and Emily May share lessons around their campaign to end street harassment.  They make a great point around the importance of a vision when they write “Martin Luther King said ‘I have a dream’ he did not say I have a list of compelling facts and figure.”  Which if we look at it has many of the components you’re talking about, it is big and bold, it involves children, its a positive vision for the future, and it’s emotional.  

Terry: That’s such a great example.  If you look at the video, he starts off with a fact based speech, then ad libs the I have a dream speech.  You need a leader, you need big leadership, and we do not have that right now.  

Dan:  One of the leaders we have right now, or at least someone who is getting a lot of attention is Al Gore, and I heard a great critique about Al Gore from Malcolm Gladwell during a Big Ideas talk on TVO.   Gladwell said “...for eight years this man is the second most powerful man in the world, situated like no other human on this planet to devise an agenda to combat climate change.  And what does he do?  Almost nothing.  Until, he leaves office, and no longer has any authority or power.  And then he makes a movie?  We give him an Oscar, and make him a hero.  He avoids the hard path of trying to figure out what to do about this problem, and takes the easy path of building awareness, and we raise him up on the pedestal.”

Terry:  I think that’s valid.  I think we’re missing that next step.  Getting traction is always the key moment.  You can frame the issue, frame the emotion, get people all primed, but the next beat is everything.  How do you get real traction on it?  That’s where most marketing campaigns fail.  

Dan:  Can you think of campaigns you’ve seen that have done a good job getting traction?

Terry: Apple.  I think jobs in his prime was the greatest marketer in our generation.  He used emotion well.  His message was we’re going to put power into the hands of ordinary people, the kind of power that only big corporation have had up until this moment in time.  It was a rebellious, creative thing.  If you look at 1984 commercial he created an Us vs IBM image.  That fight against corporate oppression, that people just responded to it.  They said “ya that’s me, i wanna have that creativity and power, and not rely on a corporation for it”  It wasn’t the product as much as the emotional call, but then the product was amazing too.  

Dan:  Is there a role for shame to play in dealing with climate change?  For example, in one of your podcasts you discuss the advent of mouthwash and how the desire for it was created out of a shame around bad breath.  Is there an effective way we can shame politicians and CEO’s?  What made me think of this was an example of an activist group Otpor taking on Milosevic and how they used shame.  “They took photos of their wounded. They enlarged the photos, put them on signs, and carried the signs in front of the houses of the police who hurt them. They talked to the cop’s neighbors about it, took the signs to the schools of the police officers’ children and talked with the children about it. After a year of this, police were plainly reluctant to beat Otpor activists even when ordered to do so, because they didn’t want the negative reactions of their family, friends, and neighbors.”  (http://organizingforpower.org/people-power-2/) 

Terry:  Yes, I think so.  It has been employed in the past with major companies when a light was shone on their behaviour.  I would consider using shame against corporations, but i wouldn’t use it against people.  You still want a positive campaign to get people to buy into it.  The big difference between the two is that bad breath is a very singular issue, where as climate change is a very broad,  it isn’t easily defined, or an enemy you can point at, it’s an army of problems. 

Dan: So if you were going to give marketing advice to ENGO’s what would you say?  

Terry: At least bring it down to a couple of issues, rather than of dozens of issues.  The whole focus has to be absolutely narrowed.  Try getting consensus on that, it’s a tough.  There’s no central body, it’s not a company with a centralized marketing department.  

Dan: There seems to be a notion that giving people a lot of options, and ways they can make a difference is a good thing.  What do you make of that? 

Terry: That’s a problem, it’s ’ paralysis by analysis.  Any marketer will tell you when you walk into a  boardroom with ideas for a campaign, you don’t go in with a dozen, you go in with three.  You’re really trying to manage the process there. 

There’s no easy answer to climate change in terms of messaging.  People are still struggling with how to frame the issue, and it’s so difficult.  It’s not like selling a car or a computer.  It’s so wide ranging and unyielding.  It’s a slow motion catastrophe, if every tree in our lawn was dead it would be different issue, but it is not. 

One thing I’d say is you can be too good, your message can be so heartbreaking that you repel people.  For example, you see a starving child on an infomercial and the picture is so heartbreaking that the next time you see that advertisement you’re going to change the channel, you’re going to want to push it away.  I think that’s the danger of painting a dower picture, you need more than one exposure to a message to get people to act, but if the image is too heartbreaking they won’t accept it a second time.  They will run away cause it’s too hard.  

Dan: So people have an emotional limit?

Terry: Without question, especially to real heartbreaking things.  There’s a place for people to see the reality, but it can’t be the only push.  

Dan:  From the outside it looks like a lot of campaigns have three basic actions, which are to sign up for a newsletter, write a politician, or donate money to the campaign.  Do you have a sense of why this is?  

Terry: I don’t want to criticize because I’m not elbow deep in marketing this issue.  From a distance that is an age old way to try and get support on an issue like this, it’s been around since the 50’s.  It makes sense you want to government to see how many people feel this way, so you want people to write MP.  The environmental movement wants to show it’s force, and campaigns need money to continue  I get the logic of it, I really do.   I think there’s a place for it, but groups need to think bigger, and be more emotional, really find a wonderful leverage point to use on two or three major issues so we can move this issue along, instead of being stalled at a hundred issues.