Futerra are a marketing company that specialise only in green and sustainability issues. They have just produced a new report called ‘branding biodiversity – the new nature message’ to co-incide with 2010 International Year of Biodiversity. I found it very interesting and I think it is well worth sharing.
Their argument goes as follows. Despite the huge efforts and campaigns of many, many individuals and organisations our communications on biodiversity haven’t been very effective – if they had been we wouldn’t be losing as many species as we are. And its all down to psychology!
Psychologists segment us all into two broad groups when it comes to nature: the ‘biocentrics’ who believe nature has value beyond, or equal to, human value; and everybody else. ‘Everybody else’ includes ‘humanists’ who believe nature has value only in relation to people, and ‘egoists’ for whom nature only has value in relation to ‘me’. In reality the ‘biocentrics’ are a small minority (but I bet a lot work for conservation organisations) so for most people wildlife has no intrinsic value. So to get most people to support biodiversity issues we need to engage with them and inspire them opposed to inform them.
Futerra suggest there are four main conservation messages we use: loss, love, need and action.
So in order to make change happen we need to be aware of who we are trying to change. For the public we need to do a lot less ‘loss’ (a current key conservation message) along with a set of clear ‘actions’ that individuals can take.
The problem with ‘loss’ is that it makes people feel powerless and although in the West we have already lost a lot of species and habitats locally loss hasn’t seriously or visibly affected our lives. So instead of ‘loss’ we need to encourage ‘love’.
People do genuinely love special places (look what happened over the recent proposed Forest sales) and some species (e.g. oak trees, otters, orchids etc). Futurra say that as brand values go you can’t get more powerful than wonder, awe and joy.
For politicians and business the ‘need’ case must be made. For example wild bee pollination is estimated to be worth £8B per year.
Dartmoor’s peat stores Devon’s water supply and releases it slowly so we can use it. If the peat disappears then water supplies will cost us all substantially more – that is why South West Water are supporting the Dartmoor Mires Project!
Once the ‘need’ case has been made then ‘action’ is needed. Combine the public messages with the politicians’ messages and change will happen. This strikes me as something really worth thinking about. The National Trust’s Going Local strategy is all about visitor experience by bringing our places to life along with getting outdoors and close to nature so that we can create wonder, awe and joy in our supporters.
Perhaps though we now need to give more thought how we can encourage ‘action’ in our supporters and demonstrate ‘need’ more to our politicians?
A Dartmoor blog 