Roger Cowe: making sense of sustainable development
August 01, 2002
Sustainable development (SD) is a difficult concept for most people to get their heads round, and that leads some people to conclude that the best way to communicate it is not to mention the term at all. It’s a plausible approach. Communications professionals habitually focus on key messages and attributes which mean most to their audience. Marketers sell margarine by telling consumers how good it tastes, not by explaining the nature of the fat in the tub. Journalists write about profits and share prices, not the capital-asset pricing model (except in the FT). Companies wanting to promote SD messages therefore tend to follow the slogan: “don’t mention the s-word”. Instead they talk about saving energy, avoiding waste and similar notions which appeal to consumers and are easily understandable.
Interestingly, though, a straw poll at a recent debate on this subject returned an overwhelming vote against the “silent strategy”. The debate came after the showing of two short films made by Futerra, an organisation dedicated to communicating SD innovatively. The outcome reflects the fact that the audience consisted largely of converts – people who are already passionate about the subject. Perhaps the result was also strongly influenced by a passionate plea from the veteran environmentalist Jonathon Porritt not to give up on the term. It would be “an evasion of political responsibility”, he argued. (Porritt is chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission – what would that become under the silent strategy?)
He has a strong point arguing that sustainable development is the greatest challenge facing the world over the next couple of decades, so pretending it is something else will not be helpful.
War is not a perfect analogy, but imagine Churchill being advised by the wartime equivalent of Alastair Campbell that the fight against fascism was too difficult for people to grasp, so he should take a softlysoftly approach. What would have become of “blood, sweat and tears”, and would he have told the nation: “We shall have dialogue with them on the beaches, we shall have dialogue with them on the landing grounds” etc.?
But that is the political end of the challenge. It is different from the business challenge of communicating SD in marketing messages. Futerra is right to argue that selling SD, especially to a mass audience, requires intelligent messages which hit home with a power that this complex concept currently lacks. It would be a mistake to imagine, though, that there is some Holy Grail which will suddenly allow the task to be accomplished. Looking for a simple formula will result in fudging of difficult issues and wishing away the complexity and the trade-offs. Simple too easily becomes simplistic.
The answer is to break the message down into manageable components – like energy use, fair trade, poverty, waste – but to acknowledge they are connected. Indeed this is what one of Futerra’s films more or less does, translating SD into fairtrade coffee, avoiding the arms trade and saving energy. But it is not only the message that matters. “Share of voice” (as the marketers describe the power with which their message is promoted) is critical. If the government wants the SD message to get across to the public, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and other senior ministers should be devoting speeches to it frequently. Similarly, if the business world sincerely believes SD is important, Digby Jones and other business leaders should be saying that at virtually every opportunity. And individual companies need to make sure their SD messages are heard. Then journalists, consumers and everybody else might start to take more notice of the big picture as well as specific messages about saving energy or recycling waste, and companies might be able to capitalise on their sustainability activity.
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