How To Encourage Consumers to 'Do The Green Thing'
What if we could use world-class creativity to make actions like walking, buying old things and taking holidays in your own city as desirable as rampant consumerism?
Creativity VS Climate Change
My friend Andy Hobsbawn and I co-founded Do The Green Thing as a behaviour change idea. We saw that people were aware of climate change and of the difference that simple actions could make, but were unwilling to take those actions. We wondered, are people being asked in the right way? Governments and NGOs were using gravity and responsibility to tell the public to be sustainable. At the same time, marketers and agencies were using glamour and desirability to tempt the public to be unsustainable. It really didn’t seem like a fair fight. So we wondered if we could use world-class creativity to make environmentally friendly actions as desirable as consumerism.
Meaningful, Global Responses
The objective was - and still is - to inspire as many people as possible in as many countries as possible to ‘do the green thing’. Inspire rather than nag, preach or lecture - not because those things are wrong, but because there are many other initiatives that nag, preach and lecture and we felt the sustainability movement needed another kind of voice. As many people as possible in as many countries as possible - not because we’re megalomaniacs, but because climate change is a global problem and can only be slowed or halted by a meaningful global response.
From Idea to Reality
The year before we launched and the year after we launched were breathless. Defining our brand. Writing our story. Naming our initiative. Creating our logo and identity. Socialising our idea with friends and colleagues over 500 cups of coffee (it was at this point I switched to decaf). Pulling together our environmental advisory panel. Building a dayto-day team. Getting legal counsel on our charity and non-profit status. Trademarking. Raising money from trusts, grants and benefactors. Building our site. Creating our launch pieces of inspiration. Getting press and buzz for the launch. Creating a new campaign every month. All while doing our day jobs. Possibly the most exhausting time of my working life but also the most mind-opening and gratifying.
No Funding, No Agenda
Do The Green Thing runs on very little money and a lot of love. In one way it’s a problem, because regular low-level funding could buy us an editorial team to distribute more inspiration and have more effect. But in another way it’s a tremendous freedom. No funding means that we have no agenda to respond to other than the planet’s and our own. It leaves us free to ask companies, industries and politicians why they’re failing to put the environment first. It leaves us free to create the freest and most powerful creative work, with no supporters’ strings attached. It leaves us free to ask the world’s creatives to donate their time and talent to inspire the world to help the world - and here is perhaps where we are at our most successful. In our first nine years, more than 500 creative people have produced films, tracks, songs, apps, illustrations, images, posters, products, poems and stories for Do The Green Thing; a truly humbling output fuelled by a common platform and a shared belief that great creativity can perform an important service for the world.
Adapting a Core Purpose
Do The Green Thing has been my crash course in how to manage a brand. Before Do The Green Thing, I used to advise clients how to manage their brands and, on reflection, that advice ranged from clueless to irresponsible. I know more now. I know more than I used to about keeping hold of your core purpose but adapting to technological and thematic trends, such as our recent move towards creating long-form journalistic issues. I know more than I used to about defining your aesthetic tightly enough and defining it loosely enough so that contributors can help to define it. I used to ? about publicity ideas and revenue ideas and when they support the core mission, which is seldom. Perhaps most interestingly, I know more than I used to about partnering with other brands in a way that advances a joint cause over either party’s sole ability. For Earth Hour 2014 and 2015, we partnered with WWF UK and added our creativity to WWF’s credibility for two brilliantly strong campaigns that were better than either of us could have done alone.
The Future’s Green
In the short term, I would love to take our current long-form issues and produce them more frequently and spread them more widely. If we could put out long form issues at our current standard, 12 times a year instead of six times a year, I think that Do The Green Thing could enter the cultural bloodstream more compellingly; it could create a regular voice too as a constant counterpoint to the constant draw that is consumption. And in the mid term, we have plans to campaign around a single issue which will do the greatest good we can do and get me kicked out of the advertising industry in the process. I won’t say what it is just now, but if we can pull it off, it will be a genuine public service and my unemployment will be a price well worth paying.
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