Climate Messages That Connect With John Marshall
This episode features a conversation with John Marshall, CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition. It was recorded in March 2024.
John’s three decades of experience in advising the leaders of Fortune 500 companies spans branding, marketing, innovation, and digital transformation. As well as his work leading Potential Energy Coalition, John is a Professor at Dartmouth College, a senior client advisor at the marketing consulting firm, Lippincott, and he’s even delivered a Ted Talk on climate change too.
John’s been a partner at consulting firms big and small, and a frequent industry commentator, speaker, and marketing writer whose words have graced the likes of the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The New York Times, Wired, and Fast Company.
Amongst other things, John and I discussed radical audience centricity, the down sides of using crisis messaging, and how we can more successfully sell the troubled “brand” that is climate change.
Additional links:
Sign up to the “That’s Interesting!” newsletter on Potential Energy Coalition’s website
The Talk Like a Human guide
The Later is Too Late report and interactive tool
John’s TED Talk on effectively talking about climate change
Dickon: Hi and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practises and the worst offences always looking for ways to help you and me improve our abilities to engage, empower and ultimately activate audiences on climate related issues. This episode features a conversation with John Marshall, CEO of Potential Energy Coalition. It was recorded in March 2024.
John’s three decades of experience in advising the leaders of Fortune 500 companies spans branding, marketing, innovation, and digital transformation. As well as his work leading Potential Energy Coalition, John is a professor at Dartmouth College, a senior client advisor at the marketing consulting firm Lippincott, and he's even delivered a Ted Talk on climate change, too.
John's been a partner at consulting firms big and small and a frequent industry commentator, speaker and marketing writer whose words have graced the likes of Harvard Business Review, Forbes, the New York Times, Wired and Fast Company.
Amongst other things, John and I discussed, radical audience centricity, the downsides of using crisis messaging, and how we can more successfully sell the troubled brand that is climate change. So let's get on with it. This is Communicating Climate Change with John Marshall.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
John: Yeah, that's a good question. I was a career marketer before I started working on climate change. I started to do this just that was the skill I had and I didn't know how valuable it was until I started doing the work.
We realised that there’s a pretty large swath of the 8 billion of us who are sleepwalking on this issue and we just find that when you educate people in a way that is relevant to their lives, you significantly increase their pension to take action. That's what great marketing is. It's, you know, meeting people where they are and giving them information that's valuable for them to accomplish their goals. And when you embark on an education mission, you really move people significantly. And it really drives their interest in taking action. It's a hard product to sell climate change in a way.
But when you communicate and connect with people in a way that matters to them, you really move them a fair amount. And so my theory of change on on how how we solve climate change change, maybe not surprisingly, goes through communications. We're not going to get there if we don't have a massive amount of public will, and we're not going to get a massive amount of public will, if we don't educate people on how this impacts the things that matter to them. So that's the short answer. It's a nice validation of a career spent selling soap and shampoo that you know, maybe marketing can matter to climate change as well.
Dickon: For those who aren't aware of Potential Energy Coalition, could you give some introduction to its goals and its methods?
John: Potential Energy is a relatively new firm. We're about to have our 5th birthday and it was born out of a moment that happened in my living room when my 17 year old son came home one day. He was taking a course about climate change and he basically said, “dad, you're not doing beep about this particular problem and you're selling credit cards and soap and shampoo. I I want you to do something,” he said, “Well, what if I lock you in the house for a couple of days and you called all your all your marketing friends? And so if you know the people who I worked with, which is in the commercial marketing sphere, you know, working with big brands like Bank of America and Walmart. And so forth. Can you get the marketing firm to rally to the cause and could we, you know, could we run campaigns that actually got people much more interested in the issue?”
So that was the start of the effort and you know, 4 1/2 years later, we've built a firm that is a nonpartisan nonprofit whose sole mission is to market the solutions to the climate crisis. That's our goal and we sort of think of ourselves as a little bit of Earth's marketing firm. We don't necessarily have clients like I did when I was in my agency, in my consulting world. We think of the planet and future generations as our client. And we have all the skills that professional marketing firm would have now applied to this massive environmental problem.
Dickon: In the past, in other places where I've heard you talk and also in some of Potential Energy's reports and documentation, you've described climate change as having a marketing problem. I guess that connects to some of the things you were just talking about. But could you maybe elaborate on that and perhaps explain the parallels that you see between climate change and say, a brand.
John: Yeah. I mean, I think it has a marketing problem for a fairly basic reason, which is no one knows what the hell we're talking about. As I often say, no one wakes up in the morning and says “it's a great day for some decarbonization.”
And there has been this bubble, I would say, climate elites and scientists and policymakers. Brilliant people. Who have created a means of communicating that is not necessarily relevant to someone who's going about their day. And so what is marketing? The essence of marketing is having empathy and understanding of the person you're trying to communicate with, understanding how they see the world. And connecting with them. And so the marketing problem is the stuff we're saying is not connecting and you know it's not connecting when you do a pull like we did recently.
We asked about 60,000 people in 23 countries. What is the UN's target for an acceptable temperature change? And the average answer was 4°. Kudos to the Germans, who actually were more accurate than any other country. But we're running around in a bubble. I sort of think of it as like overthinkers anonymous, like a bunch of people are really thinking very deeply about complicated things and not necessarily connecting. How do we make climate change relevant to your average person and such that they want to take action and be and be a part of the solution.
So that's the marketing problem. I mean the first tenant of good marketing is simplicity. I have a phrase that I always use with my team, which is when you're explaining you're losing and so much of the climate content comes with a footnote. So, my my goal is to communicate on climate in a way that it's an instant get and it's relevant and people want to actually join that whatever we call it, the climate movement or supporters of climate action and and do something about it.
Dickon: Much like practitioners within marketing and advertising, Potential Energy take audience centricity very seriously. Can you explain more about that philosophy and where your methodologies intersect with those from say, the creative industry?
John: It really is a lesson from our backgrounds, right? So I had 30 years in consulting and marketing where really the only way you create value and succeed with a new product is to really understand who is a customer? What's their identity? What do they care about? What job are they trying to perform in their life? What do they value? What benefits are they looking to achieve? And so really good marketing is radically audience centric. I would say that's not necessarily the same. As really good advocacy, really good advocacy is often issue centric and the attempted innovation of Potential Energy is bringing all the tools of really good marketing into the advocacy space.
So, we should have arrived at this without bringing our own values to the table, but only bringing the values of the core audience. That’s pretty different if you're in the advocacy space you live and breathe your values, but oftentimes the people who care a lot about the issue, their values may not match the values of the audience that they're trying to talk to.
So we're just radically audience centric to try and figure out how to connect with people. So what does that mean? It means I think we're probably approaching a couple of 100 focus groups that we've done. We have these online panels where you've got 100 people on a panel and you're wondering about something and you ask them. So we try and not make the decisions on our own. We try and let the market make the decisions and meet them where they are, which is kind of how business works. And you know most companies that have created a massive amount of value have started by understanding how do I actually fill a need.
Now there are a series of needs out there, but a carbon tax is not a need. A carbon tax is a policy. We might have a need to make it more difficult to pollute in order to stop the planet from overheating. That does meet a need. But a carbon tax is not a need, nor a whole series of those types of solutions. So, in the advocacy space, we often pick a policy and then and we hope that we can sell that. I have a tagline that we often use at Potential Energy, here's my second one, which is “Nice policy… Can you sell it?”
We have a really good supply of policy right now. The question is, “What can we get people to actually engage in and how do we frame a policy in a way that somebody says I want that I want that in my life?”
When I do a focus group, I do not reveal that I care about climate change, maybe until the last 10 minutes of the focus group. OK, when the typical climate organisation does a focus group, they might say, “talk to me about how you feel about climate change.” And so when I first started, this is like about four or five years ago, we thought we're going to work in Florida. This is an obvious place to work because it's a very important state. And it’s sinking. And so let's go down to Florida and let's go talk to people about flooding.
Now, one approach would be, “Climate change is flooding your homes. How do you feel about it?” The approach we took would be to go down to the communities that are going to be underwater and say, “Tell me about your life. What do you care about now? What matters to you?” And so you get in these focus groups and you're hearing about healthcare and the prices are too high and the city's overcrowded and the traffic and you're, you know, this is Ground Zero for climate change. And these are the homes who are going to lose value. And these are the people who are truly threatened about it. And you're 45 minutes into the focus group and you haven't heard climate change happen yet, but eventually you get to flooding. That's annoying, isn't that? And then you can talk about flooding. You can learn about it and so forth. But the radical audience centricity is the issue comes last and the needs come first. So we're looking to figure out what is it about people's lives that makes them concerned. And that they want to protect and they want to preserve. Let's fit climate into that.
So that's kind of the contrast between a where I say, a marketing mindset and an advocacy mindset. Both are incredibly valuable. But we're really trying to be in the listening mode in a way that we can figure out how do we grow the market? How do we get more people on the bus?
Dickon: Potential Energy outlines eight principles for good climate communication, and the first is, “Talk Like a Human”. I wonder if you could give some examples of words or phrases that you found people struggle to understand or connect with, and what might we be better off using instead?
John: Yeah, great. Well, all of them. I mean, many of them: decarbonization, net zero, anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon footprint, 1.5°. So, there's a lot of things that that aren't necessarily intuitive and face value. And my favourite recent one is it's time to start trying to tackle the problem of scope 3 emissions. You know it's a complicated issue and we've made it more complicated with our vernacular.
There was an article in the New York Times this morning about scientists voting on whether or not we have truly entered the anthropogenic era. I don't know that how many clicks that particular article is going to get and who really thinks about the Anthropocene too much. So, I guess the rules aren't terribly complicated. It's pretty clear cut, but the way you can sell things is by connecting into frames that people are already understand, that people already use, that people already think about.
And so we talk about pollution and overheating, we don't even talk so much about climate change. We talk a fair amount about extreme weather. We don't set 100 year flood or 100 year storm, but we might say the hottest year on record. And so heat and overheating and pollution and you know regular concepts really do work with people and there isn't necessarily a reason to use decarbonization instead of carbon pollution. We've done a tremendous amount of testing. I just think it's common sense in terms of how to talk regular speak.
Climate's actually not an adjective, right? It's noun, “the climate”. And so somehow we've turned it into an adjective where we've got climate jobs and climate action and climate this and climate that. It's a little bit of a code for a certain group that talks about climate or not, right, like “talk climate to me”. And it's not necessarily how regular people talk when they're sitting around the kitchen table.
So I firmly believe that if you make this a pollution problem and talk about the fact that small number of polluters are creating a blanket of pollution that's overheating the earth, causing a whole bunch of problems, that that's actually a way easier way in. We gotta simplify it and I think the elites who are accountable to the broader population, they have a long way to go, I think.
Dickon: When we make use of crisis and emergency messaging, what do we gain and what do we lose?
John: Yeah, this is a really good question and it's very nuanced. You know, when I first started working on this, the phrase climate crisis was coming in to vogue. And I think there were a lot of communications professionals saying “call it what it is, call it a crisis,” which is absolutely true. And and I think the first real communications is to tell the truth. It's a fairly simple guide.
We have found that there's a fine line between worry and alarm, so in much of the content that we've created, that is a little more extreme. There's a cataclysmic event that is coming. We do get backlash by backlash. I mean, when you test an ad, you get more opponents than supporters, we do get backlash from certain segments because people don't necessarily believe it, which is tricky because it is a crisis. So there is an emergency. It just happens to be slow. When we use emergency frames that have immediacy next to the crisis. It doesn't necessarily feel that way.
I mean, the wildfires are massive crisis, but not that many people fear that their home is going to go up in flames. So, the relevance of crisis, we found it works for some segments, in particular works for the left, but it has not worked for us for conservative audiences. We've learned to focus mostly on relevance and truly creating worry. It's something we should be worried about and so we have no qualms about creating worry in our marketing. We think it's appropriate, responsible, and I think it's honestly the moral thing to do to great worry because there's not enough worry out there right now. I just find that when you yell climate crisis pretty loudly, you can lose a lot of people.
We had an ad that we created that everybody loved was called One Emergency and it's a good ad and it had it had scenes from, you know, wildfires and floods and storms, and it was basically a summer of emergency. So it was two summers ago. And we had, you know, news clips. A news clip on a storm, news clip this, news clip that, and all the news clips used the word state of emergency. Florida declares the state of emergency. North Carolina declares a state of emergency. And then at the very end, the final line, “it's all one emergency.” Which is actually I think a pretty effective idea.
But we've got a lot of backlash. We shrunk support among conservative audiences because they didn't necessarily see it in the same way. And so that was a challenge to us to try and get better and understanding how do you meet people where they are?
We created another campaign after that which worked really well which was called “In Memoriam”, where we showed pictures of things that people really valued in their lives, like a park that they used to go to or Lake Mead or something like that. And we showed before and after. And that worked way better than the, “holy smokes, there's a whole bunch of state of emergency happening.” It it actually had a much higher impact on all audiences because it was just that much more relevant people could relate to. “Oh, that's a place I might go on vacation.” “That's a glacier that's melting that I would love to see or where I've been” or “that's a ski slope” and so forth. And so I think, the relevant side of that has been really important in terms of learning.
Dickon: Yeah, I mean that taps into one of the other findings is that loss aversion frames are much more powerful than gain frames.
John: Yeah, it's come through. We've done maybe as many as 500 ad tests now and we have consistently seen that when you talk about something that's relevant to someone or that something that particular cherished or loved and you show that that's threatened you get more climate supporters than talking about, you know, this is what you're going to get out of it.
Now, that's not necessarily in vogue among climate communications. There's a lots of people who say we've too much pessimism and not enough optimism. I don't disagree that we need to end with an answer, but I'm telling you statistically and analytically that talking about the things that people cherish and that they are at risk is the most effective messaging that we've seen today.
Dickon: You've served billions of ads in message testing campaigns across the globe. Could you give some examples of messages that were not successful? With which audiences? And which alternatives connected with those respective groups instead?
John: Well, my very first ideas were really wrong. You know, when you start a company, you write your little manifesto. What do we believe in? And what are we going to achieve? And all those things. And so I was looking back on that and it was called “stop at nothing.” And I thought stop at nothing was a great tagline. I though it was so clever because we were going to net zero, we were going to work really hard to get to “nothing”.
And so it turns out that was a terrible idea because no one wants to go to nothing, right? And this is my always been my issue with net zero is, it was always very confusing, but it's also not that exciting a place to go to. Let's go to zero. So “stop at nothing” was the original mistake I made. We didn't go very far with it because luckily we put testing protocol in place to see what would work, but that taught us a lot about the fact that we were living in our little bubble, like we thought it was great to get to a place called zero.
You know, abundance frames do better than zero frames. We see this in a lot of different places, like anytime you have the ban, a mandate or limitation. You’re going to lose 10 to 20 points. So, the only thing we ever want to ban or limit is pollution. As opposed to household products. So, that's an example to your question of something that didn't work very well.
I think the things that have consistently worked, and consistently worked across segments, are foundational and educational. And some of them aren't necessarily thrilling. Some of them are interesting and relatable. We have this brand called Science Moms, which we partner with a bunch of prominent climate scientists, and they’re moms, and they’re climate scientists, so they they have a kind of an interesting. position in life, like they're looking into the future while taking care of their families today.
We found that when we engage them in simple conversations with other moms, you know, just record a conversation that describes what's happening and what do we do about it. It's really good stuff like, it gets double digit lifts. On average, when we test a message, we'll get four or five percent increase. So, I expose a group to a message and I have a test group. I'll get 4 or 5% on average, but we're getting 10, 12, 13, 14 points lift for simple educational stuff.
We've struggled mightily to try and figure out how do you find the language to be non-polarizing. And we're a nonpartisan group. We're all going up or down together, right? No one's asking what our values are when the heat wave comes, or when the floods come. We have found that simply inserting the two words non partisan into any message gives it a significant lift. In a way, it's not that complicated because a lot of people with conservative values, they can interpret a climate message as a political message. And so you just say, “this is a non partisan thing” and then you say the message you'll get significantly higher performance than not saying it. So, we stick nonpartisan in front of everything. It's a very interesting way to have people connect and not feel like there's some sort of agenda there.
Dickon: So often, advocacy and social campaigns exist within a bubble. They start, they end, and maybe next time it's actually an entirely different organisation who takes the lead on the same issue with no access necessarily to the insight from the previous organisation’s campaign. How does Potential Energy apply learnings from all of its research and its campaigning into subsequent iterations of that work?
John: Yeah, that's a great question. And a pretty big part of our mission is to be a learning organisation that can make us smarter, but also can make everybody else smarter. And I often say to our team, "We we may not have enough money to save the world, but we might have enough money to figure out how.” And so I think an important part of what we do is we invest a lot in research and in measurement and to share openly with anyone who wants to hear, and our donors want that too. They really want to invest in a way that the work that we do can be an accelerant for others. So, you know, we have a knowledge team that is trying to tackle the hard topics do really deep both research, but also actual measurement and then apply that to our campaigns, but also publish with our newsletter and with reports and those kinds of things to get it out to others. And you know we have a goal of trying to get several hundreds of thousands of senior climate communicators on the framings we think work the best. So, the knowledge part of the business is half of the impact.
We're eager for people to subscribe to our newsletter. It's called “That's Interesting”, and you can find it at potentialenergycoalition.org. And the more people we can spread the word to, the better off we are.
And I'm trying to be radically data-driven. Sometimes the advice is different than what people are using, but it's coming from a place, hopefully some humility in the face of data. And we're also trying to tackle the harder issues, right? At times it's a distant policy in a state capital. But climate is starting to come into your kitchens and your driveways and your boiler rooms and your farms, like you know the solutions are getting much closer to home and so we're trying to understand how do you communicate effectively to get people interested in EVs? How do you make them not feel like an elite product but a product for everybody? How do you communicate effectively on building decarbonization, which is a complicated topic which also can be frightening, can make it people feel like, well, the way that I cook or the way that I heat's got to change, how do you communicate about wind farms? And so forth, so our knowledge teams try to tackle all these things to try and learn what we can find. The words that work the best, spread it around as much as possible and hope we can be of assistance to all the other great organisations in the community.
Dickon: So I want to dig into your “later is too late” frame and how it builds on some of the other climate communications principles that you're championing. For instance, in the “Talk Like a Human” document. What can you tell us about its power, later is too late, and its ability to help us as communicators focus on producing output that works?
John: Our enthusiasm over this “later is too late” frame came from a large global research study that we did over the summer. And you know, we've done a tremendous amount of work in America, but this was the first time we've done big scale body of analytic work in 23 countries actually. So, the G20 and then three other countries, we did randomised control trial message testing. So, that's basically, you know, exposing some people to messages, leaving some people in a control sale, seeing what the outcome differential is between the two groups.
And we wrote one message that we called “later is too late” that had two components to it. We call it the generational urgency message. But there are two components. One is there is a risk to future generations. And then secondly, that there is an irreversible dimension to climate change that makes acting now important. And I think the combination of those two things is important because on one side you've got to drive the relevance, people and things that you love. Largely, for most people it’s the fate of younger folks, but there are other things that people love, places and species and so forth, and so anything that falls in the category of loss aversion. And so that's the thing that tended to drive relevance more than the other messages.
But the urgency part was also important because most environmental phenomena that we've encountered in the past do have a reversibility to them, right? After a stream is dirty, you can clean up the stream. Litter is both a thing that you can stop and pick up. And so the concept of irreversibility, we found, is pretty motivating to turn people in to strong climate supporters.
It's not that different, our marketing friends and particularly are the marketing folks on our board, really like the tagline because any really good tagline has a buy now aspect to it. Climate has a salience problem, right? It's easy to say, “oh, yeah, that's great. Maybe someone will solve that. And I got to focus on my daily issues.” I think it's a good line in that it pushes people to think that they've got to get engaged in. It is a direct assault on delay. It has to be done in the right way. When we've used it, when it's too alarmist, we found we've created backlash. But when you have a story behind it, you know, “protect the next generation, later is too late.” Just economically we found it's one of the most effective ways to turn people into climate supporters.
I'm not here to say someone's got a bad message. They're just some messages that are better. “Make polluters pay" is a very effective message, even with "solutions are here and coming and the world's going to be better.” It's still an effective message. It's just half as effective as a generational urgency message.
We only have so many pennies to spend on climate comms. We don't have the budgets of the big brands. And so I think I'm interested in getting the messages that are five times more effective out into the world and you know, trying to get as many of us as possible to use phrases like “later is too late”.
Dickon: What's the single most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our communication endeavours?
John: I have one and then I just thought of another one that vies for the lead but the one I wrote down when you said that first was relevance. That's a good communication is, it's finding something your audience cares about and being relevant. Challenging yourself, are you truly relevant to them and their lives? And do you understand them well enough?
But there is another one which is just plain old frequency. Like, I can tell you, we've done so much marketing and we measure the effect of multiple exposures and decay effects and all that sort of stuff. And it's just valuable to have frequency and to continue to remind people this exists so relevance and frequency, those matter a lot, and we got to talk about it more. But we got to talk about it in a way that doesn't make people change channel on you.
Dickon: Conversely, what's the biggest mistake that you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues?
John: I do think that if you're a communicator, your biggest mistake is caring more about your POV than your audience’s POV, and that's really hard to do because the people who are drawn to this are deeply passionate about creating change in the world. And to be that way, but to also be ridiculously empathetic for someone who doesn't quite see it the same way you do, is really hard to do.
But I think that's the thing. Talking and not listening. If you're asking questions, you're gaining share most of the time. If you're talking, you're gaining share half of the time. And so I think we've got to figure out how to connect with people. We don't have a lot of time, but listening will save us time in the long run.
Dickon: I had such a fantastic time talking to John for this episode, but what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and alley to your work?
For me. I mean, where to start? There was a lot on offer. First it was yet another mental note to add to the toolkit. “If you're explaining you're losing”, that's a gem. And for any of us working in climate communications, it really needs to be up on the wall.
Next is relevance. This is something we've covered a fair amount in the past, but it bears repeating. Does what you're saying really matter to your audience? Have you taken the time to try and understand what might matter to them? Sometimes we might need to do some listening before we start telling people what we think they ought to find important.
Finally. Straight out of the marketing playbook, repetition. What's the old saying that people need to see your brand seven times before they commit to a purchase? Well, we need people to commit to taking action on climate related issues.
With relevance as our guide, we can make our messages connect. Then we just need to do it again, and again and again. So that's what I'll be taking with me. But how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to John Marshall for sharing his time and expertise with the show, it was great. You can find links to some relevant resources in the show notes. Thanks also to you for listening to Communicating Climate Change. If you enjoyed this episode, why not leave it a rating or a review? You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts or by subscribing so you never miss out. You can find communicating climate change on LinkedIn too, and if you think the series would be of interest to friends or colleagues, why not point them in the right direction. Remember each and every episode attempts to add to our toolkits to help us develop the skills and gather the insights that we'll need for this exciting task. So be sure to stay tuned for more. For anything else, just head over to communicatingclimatechange.com until next time. Take care.
