Marketing Sustainability: Are we doing it wrong?

In the mid 1980s and early 1990s, the dairy industry in California struggled to sell milk as the sales kept declining. It was difficult to market milk as the board’s executive director Jeff Manning explained “it was white, came in gallons and people felt they knew everything there was to know about it”. 1993, however, experienced a dramatic change of approach when the Goodby, Silverstein and Partners advertising agency created one of the most ingenious marketing campaigns. The campaign titled ‘Got Milk?’, was unique in two ways; In contrast to previous attempts focussed on getting more people to drink milk, this one focussed on existing users to drink more milk. Second, instead of focussing on the benefits of milk, it chose to capture what the absence of milk meant for people. The ‘Got Milk?’ catchphrase and idea trended, and the milk consumption in California rose. The advertisement campaign showed that there is more to marketing a product, even the most mundane one, than the pragmatic approaches normally thought of.

25 years on, the approach to sell an idea needs to be rethought. This is the idea of sustainability and is the one of the key things that could solve the problem of global warming. Until now, the approaches to market sustainability can be put into two categories; one has been to draw attention to it by the demonstrating the adverse effects of global warming, and compelling people to go sustainable. The second approach has been focussed on how a sustainable lifestyle or the use of renewable resources can save them money. And the effect of these approaches has been an increase in the global consensus on the problem, only for the carbon emissions to increase in 2018. The rather disappointing statistic points to an apparent gap between awareness and action, for which a possible explanation can be found in the way sustainability is marketed today.

Since the topic in contention is marketing, let’s use a marketing campaign manager’s favourite subject: Psychology. The Maslow pyramid, a common element of psychology studies, in figure 1, is used to show the hierarchy of needs of human beings. Priorities in the pyramid shift from bottom to top, as each level in the pyramid is secured.

Figure 1: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Now take the example of the first approach which is related to safety needs on the Maslow pyramid. Try telling your cousin, whose wife just gave birth to a baby girl, that the world is dying and you need to shun meat or to make investments in sustainable energy so that your daughter’s future is secure. His response will range between denying the threat to cross-examining how his daughter will be affected by it. By assessing this response you start to see the problem in this approach. Global warming is a threat so complex, so distant into the future and so widely debated, that it is not perceived as a threat to safety and security. And one cannot threaten someone to buy something unless the threat, however real it may be, is perceived to be real. Without this perception, our approach becomes a poorly constructed argument.

The second approach is by directly targeting an individual’s wallet and is therefore concerned with the physiological needs on the Maslow’s pyramid. On the outside, it makes sense. Sustainable approaches, like using a cloth bag when buying groceries or a steel bottle to avoid packaged drinking water, do save money. However, does the cost of packaged drinking water, plastic bags or even energy, make major hole in your pocket? Before sustainability being a solution to an expensive product, the product has to be expensive enough to be a presure-point. And perhaps, the widespread use and availability makes existing products so inexpensive that our approach does not necessarily solve any pressure-point. Thereby its connection with the physiological need on the Maslow pyramid isn’t one hundred percent fail-proof.

The gap between awareness about global warming and action, can therefore be attributed to this loose connection between the what people consider as priorities in their life, as in the Maslow pyramid, and what aspects of sustainability are marketed to them, as in the approaches. With pragmatic approaches to market sustainability failing to create the scale and gravity of impact needed for the hour, it might not be the worst idea to look to other ways like the one proposed here. We might just be a genius ‘Got Sustainable’ campaign away from transitioning to a sustainable world.

About the author

Anurag Deherkar

Sustainable Energy Technology student

As a strong believer of Individual action, he likes to write about never-thought-before ideas to propagate large scale behavioral change. He often likes to use social psychology and economics as lenses to think of strategies to combat climate change.