I idly searched Twitter for the #fortheloveof hashtag, just to see if The Climate Coalition had achieved anything in its campaign to urge or support action by the UK Government on adopting the Fourth Carbon Budget as set out by the Climate Change Committee.
What I found were pictures of babies, puppies, flowers and hearts. Nice fonts. Good colour Android phone-like backgrounds. Like so much other twenty tens advertising design. What, I thought, would make this style of communication stand out from all the other schmazzy blah our collective visual cortex is assaulted with from dawn to zombie hour ?
What distinguishes this campaign from, say, Lloyds Bank – “Because your family matters” with a photo of toddler, “Because a place to call home matters”, with a picture of a puppy”, “Because your time matters” with a scenic shot of sea kayaking ?
And take the name of the campaign. If you were to say “For the love of…” to many British people, a little voice inside their heads would complete the phrase with “Christ” or “God”, as it is a traditional outburst phrase used when people are annoyed or agitated. It’s almost always said in a loud voice, and conveys anger. It’s almost like this campaign is ambushing itself.
Apart from stylistic considerations, my main concerns are functional – how on Earth can this campaign reach beyond the core group of people concerned about the environment ? Yes, experts have done the audience segmentisation and motivation, and they know that the British public respond more to positive messaging than negative campaigning.
But most people concerned about the environment already are middle class, and this campaign is a middle class, affluent campaign. The people who are taking part in the messaging are the “haves” – they still have puppies, babies, dry homes, vegetable gardens, incomes and food. They’re mostly urban. They’re not like people living in rural areas who have lost their homes to successive flooding and coastal erosion are who are environmentally displaced within their own country, suffering great stress and loss of ease.
How could anybody respond to this appeal if they’re in low-lying low-income Oxford, the West Country, farming communities or just about any riverine or seashore community and they’ve suffered the devastating impacts of increasingly extreme rainfall, storms, temperatures and drought ?
The British people who are already suffering from climate change responded quickly and easily to newspaper stridency on flood defences, coastal protection and river management – remember Dredgegate – the call to restart dredging the Somerset Levels ?
The people who are still living in trailers after losing their village homes to floods in the last five years can be reached – but it’s not with a fluffy, hippy call to participate. They face the same kind of problems as the economically dispossessed, and like anybody forced to try to live ordinary life with restrictions and privations, they are going to be desperate to get their voices respected and responded to.
Who cares about sunflowery graphics when there are people with no home to go home to any longer ? Whose lives are so stressed by the national climate disaster already unfolding in their town, that they cannot work or sleep well, and who may end up losing jobs and careers as well as their bricks and mortar ? What kind of poverty of imagination amongst creative agencies is still settling for puppies and lovehearts when the truly gripping and engaging, gritty tale is with what is being lost rather than wheedling about what can be protected ?
What I’ve learned from this campaign is : it’s fine to be a ditsy, kitten-adoring, primary-colour-loving, tender-hearted, mildly-concerned OK-ite; but the voices of those already being affected by climate change in our own country are still not being heard. The people of this country are not being given adequate tools with which to address climate change. I would suspect that more of them would react to a rant in the Daily Mail than they would to The Climate Coalition’s doves-and-postcards, pretty-in-pink messaging.
It’s time for the NGOs to man up and admit that they’re not engaging the vast majority of the British public to participate in a democratic movement to politically and practically address climate change. They are merely window dressing.