Who are the merchants of doubt and how can their narrative be countered? How much money does it cost to get someone to take action on climate change?
This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington is joined by John Marshall, the founder of the Potential Energy Coalition, a marketing firm that uses data-driven marketing techniques to accelerate the energy transition and climate action. They discuss:
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Bryony Worthington
Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is John Marshall, founder and CEO of the non-partisan, not-for-profit marketing agency, Potential Energy Coalition. John was enjoying a very successful career marketing some of the most famous global brands when a conversation with his teenage son persuaded him to put his superpowers to work on the challenge of climate change. In addition to running Potential Energy, John is a professor at Dartmouth College, lecturing on marketing, and a scientist at heart, having earned a chemistry degree from Princeton. In my first cleaning up episode with Professor Naomi Oreskes, we explored the negative impact marketing professionals have had on climate attitudes over the decades. Oreskes famously dubbed them the merchants of doubt. John is actively seeking to counter this drag on progress, and has found a formula that he knows works, so I was eager to get him on the show. Please join me in welcoming John Marshall to Cleaning Up.
ML
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BW
John, thank you so much for joining me on Cleaning Up. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I'm going to start by asking you to introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
JM
That's great. Nice to be with you Bryony. I'm John Marshall. I founded and lead a new organisation called the Potential Energy Coalition. We are a marketing firm that is basically trying to sell climate change in order to accelerate the energy transition. We are a group of professional marketers who spent our careers working with big brands and big companies who have now come over into the climate movement to help inject that talent to accelerate our ability to use marketing. So that's what we do.
BW
Thank you. And you're over on the east coast. Is that right?
JM
I live in a little town, Jamestown, Rhode Island, but the company isn't. The company is based out of New York, because that's where the advertising people are. And we have some folks internationally, and folks on the west coast, but largely on the east coast of the US.
BW
Brilliant and so let's go back a step. What actually led to you leaving Madison Avenue and starting to focus on climate change, what brought about that transition?
JM
Well, my kids made me do it. Just like many people in the climate movement. My son was taking a course from a guy named Dan Schrag, who we both know, who's an environmental academic, and came home one day from school on a Friday and said, 'Dad, do you know what's happening? What's happening is that you're wasting your time selling soap and shampoo when there's only one issue that really matters.' And so he shamed me into doing this. He actually locked me in the house for the weekend and said, 'I want you to call all your advertising friends and see if you can make something happen, and get some high powered Super Bowl making advertising talent to work on climate and try and make a difference.' So that perpetuated a set of events where we incubated Potential Energy in my branding firm, which is a little firm called Lippincott, and started to do a bunch of research to try and understand consumers, like any good marketer would do. And after a year or so realised we could turn this into an actual firm and an actual nonprofit. So we went out and raised money from philanthropists and created a company.
BW
And it's a not for profit company, right? It's basically doing what you would do for a commercial client, but doing it for the issue of climate change. Is that right?
JM
Exactly right. A not for profit company. 90% of us come from the commercial sector, so 90% of us worked with the American Expresses and the Walmarts and the Bank of Americas and the 3Ms. And so that's the toolkit that we use: the customer segmentation, testing, insights, focus groups, the media buying, all that stuff that we would do for big brands, typically spending a bunch more money for big brands, and trying to use it for the climate world.
BW
And so when you were in your original career as a marketer, did you ever have any... How did you choose your clients? What is the criteria that people apply when you're on the commercial side? I suppose what I'm getting at here is, did you ever have to represent anybody who was actually working against climate action in your past?
JM
Yeah, I knew this question was coming. Look, systems work in the way that they're designed, right? So if you're in the for-profit sector, you're accountable to your shareholders under governance, so your goal is to make money. And so I think when you're in the for-profit sector, you try and take the best clients you have, because one aspect of making money is having a purpose-driven organisation, where you can attract great talent and do great work. So we would never work, for example, for cigarette companies. And there are limitations you can put on your client choice. Largely, you're trying to help companies succeed. I think the question is, where do you draw the line between someone who's pro climate and someone who's anti-climate? Because there's a whole bunch of grey areas in between. I think that line is moving, thankfully. But did we work for oil and gas companies and energy companies? Absolutely. Do we work for big banks who are financing coal extraction? Absolutely. Did we work for consumer packaged goods companies who had a lot of plastic going through the supply chain? Absolutely. Did we work for companies that had scope three emissions that they couldn't trace in China? We all did. So the question is, where do you draw the line? How do you think about it? I think the consciousness of what's a sustainable company has risen over the course of the last decade, but we still don't necessarily even know. Even most companies that are choosing clients don't necessarily even know where companies stand on that. So the answer is, you choose your clients to meet the objectives of your organisation. And the objectives of most for-profit organisations are one thing: they're to make money. And so that's why it's profitable to be a merchant of doubt, I believe, because there are tools that are effective at creating profit.
BW
So that phrase, 'merchants of doubt,' is something that I explored with Professor Naomi Oreskes in my first episode of Cleaning Up. Obviously, her book of that title and the film really unpacked how we perhaps have all been slightly manipulated into believing that either climate change isn't real or that it's not human caused, and it's a bit unclear about what the causes are. When actually, the science has been pretty settled since the 70s, and probably well before that. Do you see yourself now as kind of trying to make a difference by using these tools not to cast doubt, but to try and create the certainty we need to act?
JM
Yeah. I guess I would say, to comment on the idea of merchants of doubt. Is it effective? Absolutely. Is it nefarious? I think those of us who are working with different carbon intensive industries as clients don't necessarily know whether or not it's nefarious, because you don't think about it that way. But is it effective? Yes, because marketing is a science, right? And so just like any technology and any science, you can use it for lots of different outcomes. One thing I'll say is that we know it works. And so if we want to win the climate fight, we've got to win the narrative fight. And we know it works. We can prove that scientifically, because we can do what a scientist does, we can do a test and control experiment, and we can expose some people to a message and see how they feel about the issue. And we can not expose others to a message and see what the difference is. And we've amassed a really big database of both our messages and opposition messages, and we know that it works, and we know how it works. We've now tested... we've served and measured almost 3 billion ads now actually. And in a lab environment, we've tested about 700 different ads, and this is also highly statistically significant work. And so we can prove to anybody that really persuasive marketing works, with scientific proof. And we can also tell you what works and what doesn't work. And my organisation is in the... we don't have any point of view on this stuff. You'll probably have a number of friends, a number of fellow journey people in the climate movement, who've got an attitude of, 'well, this kind of messaging, we can't have this, we can't have that.' I don't have any point of view. I don't bring any values to this. All I bring is data. And so I can run exactly the same ad and put a smokestack in it and run the same ad and put a wildfire in it. And I can tell you what works better, and then we can try and figure out why that happens. And that's what the forefront of marketing is doing right now. It's really using data and data science to figure out what's the most effective thing. So is that nefarious? I don't know. It's probably no less nefarious than splitting an atom. And you can use it for good, or you can use it for evil, I think. But it is effective. And so I think our belief in starting the company was 'we need to use these tools.' I will say an interesting thing that we've learned is the truth typically does better than the lie. And because I can put a scientifically validated climate change education ad in front of somebody, and I can put a disinformation manipulation ad in front of someone, and typically, it'll do better by about a factor of two to one than the disinformation ad. So our big issue is that we're not in the game on the narrative side, like we spend a fraction of what the opposition spends and what many companies spend to try and get the message out. And so that's been my goal with Potential Energy, to try and raise enough capital to get in the game, because we know we can beat them. And in fact, if we put a fossil fuel ad next to a climate ad, the climate ad is even more effective than it was without being next to the fossil fuel ad. And so this is a narrative war, and we've got a good message, but we just haven't necessarily told it enough and told it well enough.
BW
Well, I've been in the not for profit sector and in the government sector and civil service for a number of decades now. And I can count on one hand the number of above the line advertising campaigns that have been run with a pro-climate message. There was a campaign in the UK around the mid 2000s which was a government-funded public information campaign that ran ads. But since then, I don't know of any interest groups or civil society groups that have had the budgets or maybe even the awareness to use this tool. But as you say, on the other side, it's been a key component of what's kept these brands successful and what's kept the politics as well under control. Because we need to win the narrative war, but it's expensive. So tell me a little bit about how you turn a narrative play into something more permanent. How do you affect change using advertising?
JM
Well I'll start by disagreeing with the word expensive. Because I like to think about a return on investment, and so it's a higher investment, but it's a disproportionately higher return. And so I think it requires more capital, but it's also a tool that's much more effective and much faster than trying to find yourself a million people by knocking door to door and asking them to do a certain thing on their busy days. I'm not saying that's not valuable. It's immensely valuable. It's the backbone of how social change happens. But I think one of the things that's happened as time has gone by is the emissions reduction required to get to net zero is a very steep ski hill right now. And so as time keeps going by, I think we need high impact, high investment, high speed tools, and that's what marketing does. So if you want to get a message out to the world, you can propagate it through social channels at a certain speed. But at some point in time, we've got to use media channels in order to do it. And so we're finding that we can generate a climate supporter for $6.80. Is that expensive? Well, I don't know. Is it valuable? Absolutely, because you can create a tremendous amount of support for action at that particular cost. But you can also do it quickly. You can do it in the course of a month. Now, you have to sustain your investment over time. But companies are used to launching products, they're used to having something new to say and doing that at scale and tapping channels, whether it's traditional media, TV and so forth. Or digital media or influencers or outdoor channels, companies are used to doing that with speed and scale. And that's what the climate needs. It needs speed and scale. So I I would rather portray it as a necessary investment, as opposed to an expensive luxury, because I think that we've certainly proven with our data that the ROI is pretty high on this. Now, does the climate philanthropic sector have enough to run campaigns the size of the campaigns I'm used to running. They probably have it. Are they deploying it? Perhaps not. But can you surgically target advertisements to very important segments at exactly the right moment in time to significantly change the narrative? You absolutely can do that. And that's not that dissimilar from what the fossil fuel industry does anyway. They're not necessarily marketing to 8 billion people, they're trying to pick audiences that matter that are influential in the political discourse.
BW
So finding essentially moments that matter, and then leaning into those. Let's talk a little bit about some of the work you've actually done in the US where, as I understand it, there'll be a debate that's happening about a topic. And by leaning in with some communications, you can help create the political space for that debate to resolve itself correctly, or to resolve itself in favor of climate action.
JM
We help create the political space. We're a 501(c)(3), so we don't explicitly do lobbying in order to lobby for particular bills or vote for particular candidates, that's not part of our charter. But we do find that we can completely shape the narrative with key constituents at moments in time that matter. And so we've worked in the state of California at a time when a tremendous amount of climate climate action has been taken over the last couple of years. Now we work in the state of Michigan, over the course of the last year, when Michigan decided to move its clean energy legislation into a real leadership position among other states. And so just like in regular marketing, Amex created a thing called Small Business Saturdays because if you can make small business about one Saturday a year, you can make a lot of progress. If we concentrate the narrative shaping at moments in time when the conversation is happening, you are essentially serving the role of framing. And there are some frames that are really hard to beat, and I think that the climate movement hasn't necessarily had the deep science of picking the frames that are really hard to beat, but in any social movement, if you catch the right frame, you can do it in a way where it's very hard to be against. And if you frame climate properly, it's very, very hard to be against progress on climate. Oftentimes we pick frames that work for 30% of the population or 20% of the population. I'm looking for the big mega-narrative that actually really moves people pretty significantly.
BW
One thing that struck me in the episode with Naomi Oreskes, was that what was so clever about the anti-climate propaganda was they focused on this concept of freedom. And it was like it would be almost anti-American, anti-freedom, to be concerning yourselves with these questions of environmental degradation. And they pitted this sense of individual freedom, that was the kind of emotional hook that they took. So have you found a meta-narrative that can stand up to that? Perhaps this is uniquely, very much an issue in America, but I think it's somewhat prevalent around the world, this idea that a big government is going to come and step into your life and tell you what to do, and what you can eat, and what you can drive and how you can heat your homes. That anti-freedom feeling, that feeling that someone's going to interfere, it can be preyed on. So what do we have that could stand up to that?
JM
There's no question that the freedom versus limitation argument is always the big one. Now you can choose it both ways, right? Pick another issue like smoking. You can say people should have the freedom to smoke, but you could also say that children should have the freedom to breathe clean air. And both are freedom arguments. Freedom can cut both ways; the freedom to marry was a very successful campaign. There's nothing that people don't want more in America than something that's free. So a couple of things that come out of that: We're very much opposed to any limitation framework. Limitation frameworks have been the hallmark of environmental organisations for a long period of time. We have been the don't people, we have been the limit people, we have been the ban people or the mandate people. And that doesn't work, because that argument will always lose if I do a head to head competition. But it doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Some folks have portrayed electric vehicles as a limitation on your gas car, but there's a whole other way to do it, which is, 'well, we should have the choice to charge, everyone should have the ability to have a cheap, clean car.' And so you could position it both ways. Limitation arguments... like take the word 'ban, limit, mandate' out of any communication. And so if you want to have a limitation from a car point of view, then have a mandate on pollution, the one thing you can limit is pollution. But all that being said, we have been on the search for the mega-narrative that might beat the opposition. And it's a funny thing, because everyone has a point of view on this, right? And so if you go to a climate change conference, you will hear people chastising other people, 'You can't do this. You can't do that. You're creating fear. You're in doomerism.' I think I have either the curse or the benefit of saying I don't care about anyone's opinion, all I care is what the data says. And so, well, that's what we've done, we've tried all these different things. I had a number of theories when I started, and many of those theories turned out not to be true. The simplest framing that people like to argue about is the hope versus fear framing. And there's now an emerging school saying, you know, this fear mongering is creating a sense of helplessness and doomerism. The data doesn't happen to support that. 8% of people in the US fall into a category of feeling somewhat helpless, and half the people in the US have no idea what the hell is going on, okay. The conventional wisdom... I would just advise all of our listeners here that if somebody says to you 'don't use X message, use Y message,' I would advise you that marketing is a science, and ask them for data. Okay, now I'm going to tell you what the data says. The data says, after almost 700 tests, that it's okay to make people worry. In fact, it's really good to make people worry, and we have a lot to worry about, and most people don't know what the heck is going on, because no one wakes up in the morning and says, 'it's a great day for decarbonization,' and no one knows what net-zero is. And the average citizen on the planet thinks that the UN's target for temperature is 3°C, and less than half the people have heard of the Paris Agreement, and they're all lying. And one in five people think clean energy has gotten cheaper, while solar panels have gone down 90% in cost. So people don't know what we're talking about. So the issue isn't people in a small bubble feeling super worried. I'm sorry that our compatriots and our climate buddies are worried about this - tap that worry and keep on working - but the 8 billion people on the planet, they need to be worried. They're not worried enough. And so we have a problem where we have a deficit of worry, not a surplus of worry. So it's a fad to say that it's time to stop being negative, it's time to start being positive. Some aspects of that are very valuable, but the question is, what does the data actually say? And after all the tests we've run, we just did a major study across 23 different countries to try and understand what messages resonate the most — from South Africa to Japan to Indonesia to India to the United States to Germany — what messages actually resonate the most. We did this using the scientific method of randomised control trials where we actually really look at the statistical lift. So we tested a big optimism message. We tested a ‘make the polluters pay’ message. And then we tested a message about, 'it's urgent that we protect the planet for the next generation.' In every country, in every segment, in rural, urban, rich, poor, men, women, north, south, east, west, the message of generational action always won. And that message created a significant amount of worry because there's a lot to worry about. And so when we let people know that something they love is being threatened, it motivates them significantly. And so what we've concluded, after all this testing, is that the territory isn't fear versus optimism versus guilt versus hope, it's actually love. And if you have a message that something that you love is being threatened, let's act together to protect it. It's really motivating. Is that a worry message, yes. Is it a fear message, yes. Is it a hope message? It is a bit because we hope our kids have a better life. It may not be that much of a breakthrough finding, but academics have known for a long time that loss-aversion frames are usually superior to gain frames. And we see the same thing in climate. If we activate something in somebody's mind that they fear they may lose, it tends to motivate them much more quickly than painting a picture of something that they might or might not believe that they'll gain.
BW
So protect what you love. And there's two dimensions to that loss-aversion, aren't there? There's, there's the all-encompassing nature of the impacts - it could cause loss of quite a lot of things, not just your child's future, but there's also the places you love and nature. It seems to be a key theme. But is there also something particular about climate? Because obviously it's time sensitive, there's a point at which this just could all get terribly out of control. And is that a difference around climate, you can play into that kind of feeling that time really matters? You can run out of time?
JM
Yes, it's nuanced, I think. Well, first thing I'll say is when you communicate irreversibility, it's very valuable, because in most environmental problems there isn't the same irreversibility as climate. And people don't know what climate is. They don't know it's carbon pollution that's overheating the earth. They think it's a massive set of environmental sins, including not recycling enough that's somehow causing a loss of species. That's typically the mental model that people have, they don't have a simple mental model. When you communicate that carbon pollution irreversibly stays in the atmosphere to increasingly overheat the earth it's very animating when you put that mental model into people's heads. And so they can impute what the time balance is. But you've got to create the mental model so that people do that. If you say the world's coming to an end in 10 years, it doesn't work because they'll say, 'Well, you said that 10 years ago. You said that 20 years ago.' But if you allow them to arrive at the conclusion that every year that goes by, we put an irreversible pollutant into the atmosphere that's causing massive overheating, they'll get to a place of saying, 'That pollution blanket sure is getting too thick for it to be a livable planet.' So there is a really important educational role that we have to play in communications. We have to seed some of these really important things that get people a little bit surprised and that they're also willing to accept. But you can't necessarily go all the way to the end and say disaster is here. You actually have to put a model in place. And honestly, we've found that air pollution is a really important way to do that, and the notion that this is fundamentally a problem. Because climate change is a crappy brand, who called it climate change. I wish it had been called pollution. It doesn't really make sense to people. What is climate change? Global warming is great, ‘global’ is really good, and ‘warming’ is nice. And so I talk about pollution overheating or over-baking or scorching the planet as a much better way to describe it than the concept of global warming.
BW
Yeah. That blanket phrase... I referenced an advertising campaign in the UK that ran in the mid 2000s that I was involved in. And we had a reasonable budget, and we took some stock footage, and we coloured in the gases so you could see a luminescent colour that we added to all the exhaust of the cars and the chimneys, and it all built up in the atmosphere. And the tagline was, 'if you could see the blanket of gases, you'd do something about it.' But that was 20 years ago? Yeah, I'll have to show you that.
JM
Well, how effective was it?
BW
I think it was, it was effective. But we didn't know... we weren't scientific people. These were civil servants commissioning this. I was involved in the commissioning of it, I didn't know you should do all the testing. We were working on hunches. But it didn't run long enough because that's the thing with politics, there was a change of leadership or whatever, and we didn't meet that test that I think you have, which is you just have to keep saying the same things over and over again, and assume that you've got to get bored of hearing it because you can't assume people are going to get it on one sighting or one hearing of an advert.
JM
Yeah. These days it's all a measurable thing. It wasn't that way, I think, 20 years ago. But nowadays, we've got the ability to know what content people are consuming. We do it in an anonymized way, in our business we follow all the privacy rules, and so we know you're cookie number 10573, but we don't necessarily know you're Bryony Worthington. But we have the ability to know where your media environment is and then we have the ability to measure how that changes. That's the case for all the messages we all get. So listeners, don't be shocked this is happening to you as we speak. We might as well use that to be more effective, right? And so what are we trying to do? We're trying to effectively educate citizens on the truth, but we're trying to do it with the right investment levels. That means that if you expose somebody to two messages a month that might be completely worthless. If you expose them to 200 messages a month, you might have wasted a ton of money. But there's a sweet spot in the middle, which is probably somewhere between 30 and 40, where you're really effective. And then if you do it over a couple of years, it starts getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so the same science that's required to create affinity for a Coca Cola brand can be used to create affinity for an educational topic where it's really valuable to have citizen power. And I guess I wouldn't say it's manipulation. I would say it's something that's been done since the dawn of time, just we just happen to be applying the latest technology and tools to that. All humans have always been in the persuasion business. If we want to persuade for good, we've got to throw a lot more sophistication at it, because the persuasion from the other side has got more money, because we've set up an economic system where the protection of profits from a fossil economy is pretty important. And so, yeah, I think the good news is that the truth does better than the lie. So now it's time to start telling it, and do it in a way that people are ready to accept and is relevant to their lives. They don't wake up in the morning thinking about complex global economic trade concepts, and they don't even wake up in the morning thinking about green jobs, because they don't think they're going to get a new job, they don't want a new job. They might wake up in the morning thinking about some household products, but they're not really thinking about heat pumps. And so how do you talk about things people care about? Turns out, climate, when you do it well, is something people care about. They actually do care about the world for their kids.
BW
And is there a sense... this is a phrase that's trotted out, I'd love to hear what you think about it, but the climate is writing its own headlines. There is a way in which we consume media now which is kind of attracted to catastrophe. Images from around the world can be beamed into your feed very quickly, and we are seeing more climate impacts. You know, last year looks like the first year where we've had really high temperatures over a sustained period, and people are feeling the effect of that, right? So how do we lean into that reality that we're in now?
JM
Yeah, Mother Nature has been the most effective media that we've got. My theory is that if we create the associations between the extreme weather and the cause of the extreme weather, we'll make a lot faster progress on the solutions. And not that many people are making those associations. About half of people in the US are associating extreme weather with fossil fuel pollution. Now, if you can get that up to 70%, every year that goes by where the temperature is more scorching or the hurricanes are hitting new places and so forth, those associations will accelerate the demand for climate action. We get a pretty big return when we educate people on the linkage, and then when Mother Nature comes along, Mother Nature's doing the work. But the education part is still missing. It's there for heat much more than it is for storms. So heat waves have been the big driver of increased climate concern. The connection that people make to flooding and storms is a little more cognitive, a little less easy for people to get, so that's, I think, a really important thing to do. The number of super expensive storms has gone up 20 fold in the last — I'm winging it here on the data, so this is approximately spiritually, artistically — it's gone up about three fold the last 20 years. When you compare that message to people in advertising it's tremendous how much impact it gets because people don't know it. And so I think our role is to point out what's not natural. We call it unnatural disasters. What's unnatural about what's happening. Then when you point it out to people, you make a huge amount of progress.
BW
I've been in this game for too long, arguably, but even for me, the clarity that we can live without fossil fuels has only really come into sharp focus, I'd say, in the last five or 10 years, maybe even more recently than that. Because I think for a long time, the way that the fossil fuel industry was playing this was, 'well, we have cleaner versions of ourselves, we can we can sell your natural gas, we can use carbon capture and storage and remove the pollution we now, we've now got hydrogen as our saviour.' There was always an effort to ensure that you couldn't imagine a world without fossil fuels, because it was just a question of cleaning the fossil fuels up, and then we'd be fine. And that's been true even with the current administration in the US, there's still a kind of all of the above, we can do this with fossil fuels. And it feels to me like that's got to shift. We've got to imagine that it is possible to live without fossil fuels, and that is going to be the more efficient and cleaner and safer way. But there's a lot of money being spent on positioning fossil fuels as part of the answer.
JM
Yeah, there is a lot of money spent on it. And the latest campaigns of 'and not or' are effective. The all-of-the-above strategy is an effective messaging strategy. They also have the benefit of being true in the immediate term. We can't shut it off right away. I do think, gradually, people are starting to understand that, and there's a very high preference for clean energy over fossil fuels that probably didn't exist. And so it's turned into a category. And you have to actually give the fossil fuel industry some accidental credit, because they've got a lot more windmills and a lot of green stuff. And it is patterning in people's minds the fact that there is something new coming, and that something new is better. And I think, I actually think the fossil fuel industry needs to point that out in order to sustain their social licence. So people are starting to understand that. I would say, if you asked 100 people, where does the electricity come from, 99% of people would have no idea. So people don't think about energy that much. They do like cool products. So I think the interesting things that are gonna flip the switch aren't necessarily being against fossil fuels, per se, but I think they are going to be for pro quiet cars and clean cars and electric cars. And there's been a lot of pushback on that, but the marketer in me says, 'Yeah, but the mass market hasn't gotten their product yet.' And yes, there's push back because you can pretty easily de-position a product that no one's interested in buying. But when you get the $30,000 car, the $25,000 car, and it is faster and it is quieter and it is more convenient, that's going to really shift how perceptions happen. So I see the next couple of years as being kind of awesome in getting people excited about electricity and clean electricity, because they're actually going to see it much more in their lives. I'm not a huge believer that you can get people stoked about the heat pump. I think people act in social ways. They want to badge themselves. They want a cool car, maybe solar panels, because it might look good in the neighbourhood. And so I think things that are visible and things that are considered the next thing, will really accelerate up the demand curve, and that'll be super helpful. And that'll be the way people think differently about fossil fuels. They won't think about the company, the drilling. They'll think about the tailpipe noise. So I see that happening. I think people are making a mistake on the car thing, I know it's slowed down a little bit, there's a fear. But the cheap stuff is coming, like you go to China, the good cheap cars are coming, and that's going to impact culture in a pretty big way.
BW
Yeah, and that has been an area where we've seen quite a lot of efforts to not allow this idea that EVs are better to take root. I see in the political realm all manner of new problems suddenly emerging out into the public discourse. Or maybe not the public discourse actually, it's the elite discourse. There seems to be an audience there for very sophisticated memes arriving around cars being unsafe, being too heavy, being a source of pollution. The cynic in me thinks this doesn't feel like an accident, this feels like a merchant of doubt play where we all know EVs are going to be better and cheaper, and you have so many benefits, but you’ve just got to slow it down. The merchants of doubt know how to do that, so they bring in all these other considerations, which we didn't seem to have when we were all riding around in normal cars. Who cared about the supply chain of cars until EVs came on the horizon? So it's easy to get conspiracy theorists about it, but I do think there's a merchant of doubt element to this anti-EV narrative that we're seeing. Certainly in elite circles.
JM
There's no question that there's a bunch of money that is trying to protect itself, running the transportation system off fossil fuels. And there's no question that in the last couple years, a bunch of really effective messages, like 'EVs are bad for the environment,' or 'EVs don't address climate change because they're working off dirty energy.' Or 'EVs are only good for China'. Those three big mega-narratives did not come out of nowhere. But I get back to my science point here, because we did a big test on this. Those are really effective disinformation arguments and they'll move people by double digits. But if we pick our best argument, we'll move people by more. We don't pick our best argument. We need to pick our best argument that's scientifically grounded. And so the preferred argument on EVs in the US, in the political sphere, is good old-American union jobs, which is a valuable argument, and it's valuable in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania. But for millions of people who go to buy a car, that's not the argument that's relevant to them. So clean cars for all is a really good message, like everyone should have the right to buy themselves a clean, quiet car/ It outperforms the political messages significantly. My big point at Potential Energy, we've got to start choosing the things that work, rather than choosing the things that make us feel good or make us look good among our nonprofit NGO peers. If this is a narrative war, let's put our best foot forward, and let's go with the EV arguments that get people excited. We need messages that work at the kitchen table. Dirty energy is expensive, clean cars are good for our kids' health. Those arguments work at the kitchen table. We get stuck in the cerebral so much of the time, as opposed to the simple and the emotional.
BW
What I've noticed now is that on the rare occasions I go to the cinema, I'll see car ads that are by electric car manufacturers. Or it's an OEM, a car manufacturer, selling their EV to me. I mean, in a sense, have we done ourselves out of a job in that the private sector now is incentivized to sell us EVs, or do they also need to work out the right ways to sell them?
JM
Well the private sector is good at making money. I think we're still in this subscale phase of the EV revolution, where the OEMs aren't making a lot of money on every incremental car that they make. And so we're in that catch 22. We need more demand in order to have more profit, but it will change. They all know that EVs are the product of the future, and so it will become a democratised product. And you see this with the products that are coming out of China right now at really low cost. And so I think when we talk about EVs, we're diluting ourselves because we're in the early phase one of the elite bubble, and we're about to become the mass market. And that's when they will take hold. Now, we in the nonprofit sector are important for this, because we need to push for charging infrastructure and sustain government subsidies and make sure that the other products aren't over subsidised. And so policies which are reasonably popular, those policies need to be marketed in order that the OEMs can actually market the product. Because the two big reasons why people are not buying EVs today, that just crush any other reason are cost and the ability to charge. Pro EV policies in the US are kind of in a 50-50, balance. And so we need to push that over the line in order to let the market take off. And I think that's the role of what we do. We try to push for people to see it in a certain way, so the market can then do the hard work. The OEMs are going to have $10 billion of advertising to spend, which does not compare with our little nonprofit efforts, yeah.
BW
But in a way, though, it's this marketing to the elites that can actually have an outsized effect that then leads to the mass market. I was just reading about a new tax that's been introduced in Brazil, which is actually taxing EVs, and it's called a sin tax, and the rationale is that these are somehow not good for the environment. But you know that that's been a combination of the guys who were selling the biodiesel and the plant-based oils in Brazil and probably the oil industry. It's been an elite conversation around here's a policy that's going to slow down what would otherwise be a very fast transition, I think. The Brazil numbers around the uptake of EVs are quite startling. They've started at a low base, but they're picking up fast. So somewhere, a very clever marketing strategy was enacted that made that elite audience feel like it was appropriate to bring in an anti-EV policy. But had we had a big popular support for the demand, a freedom to buy an EV campaign, maybe that wouldn't have happened, or we could even reverse it?
JM
I certainly think that's right. I certainly think we need more framing that comes out of the nonprofit sector that makes fighting climate change relevant and valuable in their personal lives. And we need to lead the creation of these markets. And we're not doing it nearly enough. The size of the climate change communications market is pretty friggin small. And so the good news is that we have analytics that say that it actually works, and you can move people and we can prove that there's a set of winning narratives on our side. We tested 19 policy territories in our global work, and these are things like pro-EV, anti-EV, building decarbonization, eliminating subsidies. And we tested them in a way where you had the pro argument and you had the con argument, and they fight. Because we have to realise everything sits in a competitive context and they're all winners. Some are winners by two to one, some are winners by 1.1 to 0.9. They're all winners. The issue is that the ones that are close, like supply side fossil fuel limitations, the other side realises that if they put some capital on it, then they can stop the policies from passing. And so they're putting real money behind blocking the policies. And if we don't put some framing effort into supporting the policies, people will say, 'yeah, that is going to cost me jobs,' Like phasing out fossil fuels... 'We don't really need to do it, because that's going to make our products more expensive and it might cost you.' That's a pretty understandable argument, and that actually can beat the other. So it's a fight, we need to put more resources in. When I say marketing, what I really mean is telling the truth. So what is marketing? Great marketing is the truth well told. So all of these policy areas are winners, if you frame them in a way that's relevant to people. They all win.
BW
I'm interested in your comment earlier, though, about heat pumps being a problem. And I can see how even the word heat pump is just such a terrible technical thing. But for me, I imagine that what people want is comfortable homes. They want homes that are neither too hot in the summer or too cold the winter. And harnessing the gradient that's around us in the environment, whether it's in the air or in the ground, harnessing that with a little bit of electricity to make your life more comfortable, there must be a way of selling that. I'd love to get your brains on this, because it is going to be one of the ones where a certain amount of acceptance of something being a little bit different in your home is going to have to happen. There are community scale heat pumps you can have fitted that would be very similar to having a gas network in your street — a heat pump that's working at community scale. That's probably the least worrying of all the interventions, but we still need to win the policy, accept that we're going to move beyond gas. And yet we seem to be in very early stages on that whole transition.
JM
Yeah, it's all necessary and it all needs to be sold. And heat pumps can be sold better, and they probably need to be designed like Apple designs its computers, and branded in a simple way. And I think people are working on that. The challenge is the purchase occasion is really long, right? So you think about once every seven years, and that's part of a major expenditure. The reason I mentioned heat pumps was in the context of other things that are more regular, visible signs of progress, which are really important. Like, if you think about progress on smoking, just to take an analogous marketing area, eliminating smoking from planes and bars was a huge part of creating the social understanding that this is a product that maybe shouldn't have a place in our lives, because it was regular and it was visible. It was an incredibly important beachhead, getting smoking out of New York bars was a nick that really was more of a wound for the tobacco industry. So if we want to get more consumers on board, we need to do things that are highly visible and highly regular, and a little cooler, as it were, just so that it becomes a bit more part of culture and a little more visible. I think Hollywood has an important role to play there to showcase that. Diet's actually moving in a way, and that's becoming... People are generally social creatures and so the reason I think heat pumps are not the first wave or the second wave from a consumer supporting climate action is they're private and they're boring. So what consumers like is something that they could talk about, which is why the car, maybe the solar panel, and the diet and so forth, are probably a little bit easier to sell. I like school buses.
BW
Oh, school buses is a good one? Is it because it's so visible?
JM
Yeah and if we can play it for your listeners, there's a very, very good school bus ad that is very effective that we've made, making it relevant, making electric school buses relevant. What is that? Your kids are inhaling benzene. So that's an interesting piece of creative that would be interesting to show.
BW
Yeah. We'll try to do that. And John, I really think you've been so generous with your time, but I just wanted to quickly take a little step out to think globally. Because, as you were talking there about, where do we start? How do we make sure this transition happens at the speed and scale that's necessary? I'm always really concerned that I have a very western perspective. I do think actually the US, and before you leave me, I want to just touch on the US politics a little - but the US is certainly one of the biggest consumer markets in the world, and one that needs to be cracked. So I'm glad you're spending a lot of your time focused on the US. But what about globally? We know you did that study. Is there a way in which this toolkit can be deployed more effectively at a global scale to unite a lot of disparate voices? How are you thinking in terms of outside the US?
JM
Yeah, I have a perspective that the US is kind of like training for a marathon in Colorado. I don't know if this applies to your listeners, but if you get really fit in Colorado then you're going to run really fast when you're down at sea level. And so the degree of difficulty is actually much higher here. It's much more polarised. We actually have the lowest support for climate policy among the G20, we have the least educated populace, and we have really expensive media markets. So we've been able to operate economically very effectively in the US, and if you go to another country like Brazil, you can accomplish the same thing for 10 cents on the dollar. Your media is a lot cheaper, the issue has much higher trust because it's not necessarily been polarised, and education and awareness goes a long way. So I do think we're under-communicating climate as a social issue in other countries, and so one of our goals is to get into other countries and make a difference there. I will say that the US is a good exporter of culture, and to the extent that we can advance culturally norming responses for climate, then that gets into Hollywood, that gets in the media, that's valuable in other places. But the battle lines have been much more calcified here, and economically we're just so much more effective with our marketing. Places like India, conservatives actually care more about climate than progressives, as it turns out. We have a 47 point gap between conservatives and progressives in terms of climate support. On average, it's 12% throughout the rest of the world. So this is our high altitude training ground for Potential Energy to be able to talk to other markets. Now, in our world, it's the same toolkit. We're used to creating the 'I'm loving it' brand for McDonalds in 80 countries, and this is the same toolkit. That toolkit is pretty simple. It's the same toolkit as a good activist. Go into communities and listen and figure out relevance, and then structure messages in a way that moves people.
BW
So I had a practical experience of how your lessons have spread. I was in Indonesia for a series of meetings, and spoke to a marketer there and she had taken your toolkit and had worked out that if you want Indonesians to care about rainforests, you have to play into their competitiveness with Malaysia. So she was basically running ads that said, 'if we cut down more of our rainforests, we'll lose our title of being the second biggest rainforest nation to our neighbours, and we can't let that happen.' There was an activation around pride.
JM
We've seen national pride and state-based pride everywhere we've gone as a leading message. It’s ‘don't let the other guys beat us.’ So we're working on some ideas in Brazil right now, and there's a lot of yellow and green soccer jerseys or football jerseys in the content. And it works locally as well. That was our success in Michigan. 'Powered by Michigan' was the tagline, because it was like, 'Michigan's actually looking out for Michigan.' So the more local you make it, the easier it is to do.
BW
And do you think it's possible then to have... So recap on what we've discussed. Like there is this motivating factor around love and specifically around future generations and this feeling of time being critical. If there's a global brand that's uniting that seems to hold up, right? But then the application and the implementation has to be super local, or at least you've got to listen to your audience and be super relevant in each country in order to ladder up to this more unified picture, is that the way?
JM
There's a human truth that we all care about things, and we all care about people. Like people like us do things like this, and we care about protecting people that we can identify with. That's true in every single nook and cranny. But then on execution, it really matters a lot. So this is also true in the corporate brands that we used to build, you know, we were helping Samsung in 40 countries. The execution is very different country by country. So we did some very, very tear jerking stuff in the US that makes you cry about your babies, and we've had to do cheeky jokes in the UK to make progress. So the American sentiment doesn't necessarily play in all different places. But the good news for us is that we have people in all these different countries who are experienced in being relevant in advertising. It's the same way you do it if you're running a global campaign for a big brand. You look for a through line, an idea, and then you really give it to local teams to figure out how to make it relevant. We were taking great pains not to be the ugly Americans who show up and do our thing. We have the benefit of working with partners who have dozens and dozens of offices in different cities.
BW
Right. I would like to end though, just on a quick political question. Another theme of our podcast series, certainly for this series, has been that this is the year of elections. We've just seen the European elections, we've seen the UK elections, Mexico... there's been a ton. But there's one yet to go, which is probably the most significant. And I would love to get your thoughts on how climate is featuring in the US elections, if at all? And any insights you're able to share with us on that?
JM
Yeah, well, you ended with a tough question. I think it remains to be seen. I think one of the things is that election season is also extreme weather season. People are noticing that things are different. We're a nonprofit that is that is not associated with any any political party but I will say that when you communicate to citizens that the US has actually made a fair amount of progress on climate, it actually is A) surprising and B) very motivating. And so it is not necessarily that as low on the list of issues that your average person thinks that it might be. But I'm not in the business after these last crazy few weeks of understanding anything that's gonna happen in the next few months. But I think it's getting more important, and it will get more important when people are starting to make the connection, and it's gonna be harder not to have a climate policy. Maybe not now, but it's coming. Or I think it's coming.
BW
Yeah, that's good. Because, at the same time that progress is being made, and I'm sure we've had episodes where we've looked into the Inflation Reduction Act, and there's now this kind of 'build things in the US,' and 'build back into manufacturing,' which is, I guess, welcome. But at the same time, the US is now the biggest exporter of fossil fuels, I think, bar none. So it's such an important country in terms of determining what happens to the planet. But I guess also, as you're saying, it's a continental weather pattern where some of the most extreme weather events are going to happen in North America, and that is ultimately going to change the politics, I imagine, over time.
JM
Yeah, I mean this Hurricane Beryl in the Caribbean is unprecedented... a June hurricane to go through Grenada, and that's just happening more and more and more and more. So we're growing the climate segment, Mother Nature is helping us. Efforts like what we're doing are hopefully making a difference. It's not happening fast enough, but it's happening. So we have to keep at it, keep playing our part, keep our fingers crossed.
BW
Well, John, I have in a previous episode, perhaps unbeknownst to you, dubbed you the 'merchants of love,' because I feel like this insight that we have to use these tools... and as you said, the tools are getting ever more sophisticated, we're able to do marketing and advertising persuasion in ever more targeted ways, cost effective ways. And we need to, as you say, lean into the truth, and help create this sense of inevitable momentum on this positive side. And so as the merchant of love, the initial merchant of love, I'm really hoping that many more people will join that gang and we'll see some progress.
JM
That's terrific. Well, thanks for the moniker. I think it's something we've always known in our hearts, and it just so happens that the data proved it out. So I'm glad for that. It's great to be with you.
BW
Thanks so much, John, and yeah, catch up soon.
JM
Okay, let's do it again. Thanks, Bryony, goodbye.
BW
So that was John Marshall from Potential Energy Coalition. Viewers of the podcast on YouTube will be able to see some of their creative content, but for those listening, we'll add some links to the show notes. Marketing clearly works and is big business, and until now, it's largely been seen as the preserve of the for-profit sector. But John's work is enabling these tools to be used by those focused on social good, and especially those preserving a habitable planet. This feels significant for anyone interested in making sure that we have the political will to make this clean energy transition happen quickly. And his insight that the powerful emotion of love can help unite humanity in this cause gives me hope. My thanks to Oscar, our producer, and to Jamie, our editor. And as always, my thanks to you, the listeners.
ML
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