Have marketers deprioritised climate?
It's all about 'culture'. Are the forces acting from above - inflation, Chinese competition, culture wars - taking climate issues out of the discourse?
We’ve written before about the climate paralysis afflicting brands, where too much responsibility weighs on marketing and communications teams terrified of courting greenwashing accusations. But good marketers are nothing if not tuned to culture. What if the silence on climate over the past year is actually marketers reading the room? What if our attention is elsewhere? This month we look at the forces bearing on the culture - cost of living, political tensions around imported green technologies and climate in the culture wars - to try and read where we’re headed.
We also share an article we published in WARC last month. It confronts the risk of taking recent numbers, which paint a lacklustre picture of Gen Z’s sustainable behaviours at the checkout, at face value. We argue culture shows up with a lag in the stats and there’s no use reading it once it’s already happened on an issue of this magnitude. You need a well-trained qualitative eye on mercurial culture, if you’re not going to be left behind. Because, as The Guardian’s brutal reporting last week reminds us, while marketers may be looking elsewhere, the climate crisis is not going away.
Climate: not ‘so hot right now’
We know that people living payday to payday in a cost of living crisis deprioritise ethical consumer preferences. Unquestionably, everyone is still suffering. This month, IKEA rolled out its third round of price cuts in recognition of the increasingly budget-conscious shopping happening among its core young, middle-income customers. As an independent, they can do cuts when others are raising prices to take share from competitors. (IKEA presents this as part of an ongoing drive to lower prices forever - nothing to do with the cyclical nature of the economy. But will furniture prices really continue to drop in a future determined by climate transition?? Incidentally, the picture above was found on TikTok - it is an AI generated image of an IKEA store in post-apocalyptic times!)
So, we’re hard up and that’s one obvious pressure being exerted on climate culture. But there are others at play.
It’s become very clear Europe and the US are freaked out by Chinese advances in the manufacturing economy of the green transition - the huge surge of Solar, EVs and battery technology headed for Western shores - accelerating (and subsidising) the transition but putting existential pressure on darlings like the German automotive industry.
Should it be any surprise, then, that we hear EV sales are now stalling and the big car manufacturers are redeploying efforts into promoting hybrid vehicles, previously thought to be a stop-gap on the way to full EV? Yes, they’re struggling to reach customers beyond the tech early-adopters but there is clearly a shift in tone on EV in the media.
This all washes up in the cultural mood.
Last month, Chris Stark stepped down from his role as CEO of the Climate Change Committee and gave a number of interviews in which he expressed some disappointment that enthusiasm had waned for climate policy in the UK and worried that, “today it’s much more of a culture war, and net zero is presented—including by the prime minister—as a cost more than an opportunity.”
Again, the cultural mood music.
Stark points out that Rishi Sunak’s move to push back the UK’s EV deadline had a decisive impact in the UK.
“…[W]hat did the country hear? They heard, “Don’t worry, now’s not the time to switch to electric vehicles.” It’s hard to tie anything back to a single speech, but if you look at the share of electric vehicles being sold in the UK, it has flatlined since September. I’m sure there are other factors here, but there will be people who thought, ‘Oh well, maybe I don’t need to get that electric car right now.’”
Speaking to The Independent, Stark was keen to stress the need to reframe the transition as an opportunity and not a cost - both for government and industry and the man in the street. “I don’t think your day-to-day life will be that different in 2050 when we hit net zero. You will still be driving your car, you’ll still be warming your house… you can still fly off on holiday each year, and you can have a steak if you want to.”
To do climate, you simply can’t talk about climate.
This is the Biden administration approach in which a big climate fiscal package (once known as the ‘Green New Deal’) gets rebranded as ‘The Inflation Reduction Act’, even when its more likely a contributor to inflation than it is a solution.
Again, the cultural norm is to downplay climate for fear people only hear the disagreeable stuff (especially when the growth and opportunity argument is so much more complex than a simple tale of industries closed and jobs lost).
So, as communicators do we pretend this isn’t happening. Metaphorically, throw in our budgets to promote the hybrid option rather than full electric?
Well, there are short-to-mid objectives and then there are mid-to-long objectives. To see how the latter unfold, watch Tesla closely over the coming months.
Has Elon Musk thrown in the towel on delivering the affordable, mass market EV financial analysts were so hungry for? Is he furiously refocussing strategy on robotaxi to defend Tesla’s valuation as an AI company instead? Is he limiting reach to the premium automobile market for his consumer car business as he sets his sights on a mass transport infrastructure AI play?
Only time will tell. But if so, he’s acknowledging the war on Chinese mass market pricing is already lost. And can he win a race to introduce AI-powered public transport in America? A place where the image of the individual, behind the wheel of their car is inscribed in the national psyche. Perhaps more so, can we get over the idea of robotaxi fatalities which - as Adam Tooze points out in a podcast linked below - while inevitably dramatically fewer than those caused by drunk, reckless or plain unlucky humans in charge of vehicles are flat out culturally unacceptable to us at this moment in time?
Again, culture is the key.
33_Zero is predicated on the cultural dynamic of the transition - whether our clients are running ahead of it to make culture or pivoting to acknowledge cultural shifts as they happen. What’s certain is that whether or not we pretend this isn’t happening, the cultural forces of climate change can’t be contained.
The Uncomfortable Truth About the UK’s Climate Policies, Wired
Net zero does not mean ‘huge shift’ in everyday lives, top climate adviser says, Independent
US set to impose 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports, FT
For an unusually illuminating deep dive on Tesla’s current pivot, listen to this podcast from Adam Tooze
The Guardian: the ultimate doom scroll
And, while we pretend, the world’s leading climate experts, together with the UK’s Guardian newspaper, are taking another shot at waking us from our slumbers. The Guardian has surveyed the experts and report that:
“77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a devastating degree of heating; almost half – 42% – think it will be more than 3C; only 6% think the 1.5C limit will be achieved.”
Their contributors say things like, “I’m relieved that I do not have children, knowing what the future holds” and “I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south.”
The paper’s Editorial attempts to strike a more positive tone offering: “The Guardian view on the climate emergency: we cannot afford to despair.” It fails, with little to offer beyond encouraging us to maintain individual acts of behaviour change. These can, it says: “build collective awareness, a sense that change is possible and momentum for wider systemic progress.”
We prefer Chris Stark’s conclusion after his tenure at the Climate Change Committee, that the challenge has to be reframed as a net positive, an opportunity for business (just as is already proving true for Chinese manufacturing) and subtle shift for consumers with outsized benefits for their quality of life.
Stark says, “I don’t think we need to dial up the risk now. I think people see it. Climate change is definitely with us and people are worried about it—in a sense, the climate is doing that job for us. The despair comes in when you are worried about climate change, you’re seeing it playing out, and you’re not seeing a response from industry. My worry is that’s where we’ll end up.”
Let’s try and avoid that, please.
The Guardian view on the climate emergency: we cannot afford to despair, The Guardian
‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair, The Guardian
Keep watching culture to get ahead of the data
Part of the CFO’s job is to read the numbers and adjust the finely tuned features of a businesses’ finances accordingly. Is demand shifting to a different territory or consumer group? Should investments be moved from one part of the business to another? The challenge is, by the time the numbers demonstrate a quantitative shift in direction, the business is often behind the curve on investment and paddling furiously just to keep up. The competitor that correctly predicts the shift before it shows up in the numbers gets the jump. To do that, they have to read in front of the numbers.
(You’ll hear Central Banks always remind us they are ‘data-driven’, which is why they have a history of throwing economies into recession when lifting rates to tame inflation - by the time the numbers show inflation coming down, it’s already too late to save the economy).
This is the perspective, we argue, which has to be applied to a changing culture under pressure from climate deadlines. We can’t see the shift in shopping habits showing up with Gen Z clearly yet in the numbers - there are lot’s of reasons for this - but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Unlike CFOs and Central Banks, however, we have qualitative tools to help us read culture and predict where it is going. If you want to get the jump on competitors, we suggest that’s exactly what you do.
The article in full on the link below.
The net zero culture shift won’t announce itself - brands must read the signs, WARC
About 33_Zero
33_Zero offers low commitment strategic workshops designed to help contextualise your brand against the backdrop of ‘net zero culture’. Uncover the opportunities that will emerge in your category as these forces shape new ideas about value, change shopping behaviours and as whole new sub-categories emerge in the growing sustainable economy. We work with both the new brands redefining categories - like cultivated meat startup Ivy Farm - and established brands like Nike, who are raising awareness of their initiatives in this space.
Workshops are led by our Strategy Partner, James Poletti, who has years of experience steering brand strategy projects in technology, finance, fashion, automotive and other categories for clients like Hyundai, Samsung and Adobe.
Email jamesp@33seconds.co to find out more.