Surviving Green Cynicism
Part 4 of the series: “How to make People want to pay for Green”
This is a five-part series, you’ll find the link to each individual post at the end of this one.
Say you were a Lewis Hamilton fan and saw him post this on Instagram:
How would you react?
Since you’re reading this post I’m guessing you skew more towards Team 🤔 :
Taking a step back, what these two categories of Lewis Hamilton fans are saying is:
- Team 👏 : Lewis, it’s really great that you’re using your power as a public figure and social media influencer to lead the way on the greening of our consumption and inspiring us all to follow your example.
- Team 🤔 : Lewis, your efforts on your personal carbon footprint and that of your industry are too little, too late. Your post is a disappointing feel-good diversion that benefits your carbon-intensive sponsors.
It is 100% sure that this post will inspire at least some fans of Lewis Hamilton to eat less meat and offset their emissions. It is also 100% sure that the photoshoot was carefully orchestrated by Mercedes with a communications objective in mind and that offsetting one’s emissions does not reduce one’s emissions — not flying and planting trees aren’t interchangeable (even if planting trees helps).
So it’s complicated, really: Formula 1 couldn’t exist without its emissions (despite their ambitions for net zero) and Lewis Hamilton wouldn’t have a platform without F1. F1 fandom is a breeding ground for sports-car and SUV-loving petrol-heads but F1 is also a lab for fuel efficiency and sobriety with massive spillover effects to the auto industry as a whole.
As a result, the positive and the negative collide in the mind of the fan, creating a swirl of confusion and the hard-to-prove but tenacious suspicion that someone, somewhere, is lying and conspiring. And this is just one Instagram post, one instance among many of people and brands promoting their Green efforts and receiving equal praise and incrimination for it.
Ingenuity is a difficult quality of mind to preserve when you suspect you should be suspecting you’re being lied to.
Why the cynicism?
In your Green endeavours, you’ll inevitably bear on your shoulders the baggage of what others have done or failed to do before you. And this is especially true of industries where change is most critically needed.
Example 1:
Example 2:
Powerful eco-lazy companies co-opting Green messaging is known as greenwashing. And whenever cases of conscious corporate greenwashing come to light, they receive massive amounts of media coverage because the layers of high-level deception they involve and the amount of outrage they trigger make for particularly juicy storytelling.
Over time, the public outrage of these stories decants into cynicism. The cynicism is a form of protection against the disappointment of ever rooting again for a good story that turns out to be too good to be true.
The example of Micromobility
The emergence of Micromobility was a new promise of Silicon Valley being a force for good. Its biggest player, bike and e-scooter company Lime, launched with great fanfare, has raised $935M since 2017 and puts intense emphasis on its reliance on responsible energy. Which makes sense given critics of electric mobility (from Tesla down to Lime) put intense focus on the fact that an electric ride is only as green as its power source.
Lime, Bird and many others sold visions of a future where e-scooters and bikes would replace cars in city centres. A critical move against the absurd fact that cars are being used most for urban trips of very short length (in the US, 60% are shorter than 6 miles). Replacing these trips with scooter rides would surely and significantly reduce particle pollution and carbon emissions. It didn’t take long however for the numbers to show that e-scooters mainly replaced cleaner forms of transportation like walking and public transports.
Cynicism: 1
Fulfilment of Promises: 0
Even more recently during Lime’s acquisition of Jump bikes from Uber, stories came out of tens of thousands of bikes being sent to the scrap in an episode reminiscent of the ‘bicycle graveyards’ found in China, courtesy of Ofo, Mobike and others.
While official communications did come out later on, they were upbeat but incredibly non-specific about what had happened to the discarded bikes. If ever it turns out they get dumped Hangzhou-style, Lime’s clean energy stance will legitimately be labelled greenwashing and a distraction from their waste generation. And the wheels of cynicism will keep turning and grinding.
Micromobility like all other industries bows to a simple law:
Any claim of green-ness will receive a mix of hope and suspicion and be given limited margin of error, patience for improvement or space for forgiveness.
It’s even the case for the stories that make us most hopeful.
The inner workings of the hype / cynicism tension
In 2012, 18-yr old Boyan Slat stepped onstage at TEDx Delft to present his idea of what would later be known as the Ocean Cleanup Project. The plan: Design a network of floating nets that will, thanks to their shallow depth, catch the plastic floating on the surface while letting marine wildlife swim under it. In short, a solution for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to clean itself. What’s not to love?
The idea quickly gained traction, became a non-profit in 2013 and was actively prototyping by 2015.
A non-profit to clean the planet, started by a young idealist after an inspiring TEDx Talk, made for absolute media gold:
Of course headlines like “…So Crazy It Just Might Work” are carefully calculated to optimise article click rates. And while clickbait articles generally tone it down once you’ve clicked through and generated ad revenue, clickbait headlines always go all out. For people who mostly see headlines without reading in-depth, the more headlines you saw back then, the stronger the feeling you got that this young man was indeed the messiah (or the devil). And so the hype keeps building up into a towering cliff from which to fall at the slightest sign of reality not agreeing with the hype.
Joe Rogan put it simply in a December 2019 interview with Slat:
A part of writing an article today is writing something that people will get upset about. […] Having controversial opinions, being contrarian, all those things are profitable today, it’s a giant part of why people write articles.
And by picking isolated events of wrongdoing and spinning them into trends, creators of controversy feed the hope-to-cynicism machine. As explained by Tim Urban of Wait But Why:
A scam is like a virus that converts trust into cynicism, but it’s the news, in the name of keeping things entertaining and addictive, that distributes the virus across the whole country.
We can call this phenomenon […] “destructive cherry-picking”. Destructive cherry-picking breeds fear, anger, and cynicism. It’s why we always think crime is getting worse even though it’s almost always getting better.
In the specific case of the Ocean Cleanup, it also probably didn’t help that Boyan Slat was made to do photo ops for a corporate sponsor fairly misaligned with oil and petrochemical sobriety:
Fast forward to September 8th, 2018 when the first full-scale system, the System 001, was launched from San Francisco into the Pacific ocean for a 4-month mission thus described by the Ocean Cleanup website:
During its approximate four months offshore, many aspects of the technology were proven, but it was observed that the system was not effectively retaining plastic. While the team was testing solutions, a fatigue fracture caused an 18-meter section of the system to detach. The crew and the system safely returned to shore on January 17, 2019, thus concluding the first campaign of System 001.
The positive spin on this statement would be: “The first version of the system was thoroughly tested for 4 full months, leading to many learnings and an important weakness was detected which will be a key input for version 2.”
The negative spin would be more like: “Miracle wonderboy’s magic project was fairy dust, go back to living your lives people, nothing left to see.”
Negative-spin cynicism obviously came pretty quickly with content like this:
People had been waiting for nearly 7 years by now, and there was what I’d call inflated expectations debt at work: The more hype your project receives and the longer it takes to launch, the more impatience there is for it to work fast upon release and the more cynicism there will be at the slightest mishap.
The Ocean Cleanup being an engineering project, positive spin around System 001 could only ever be grounded in the technical nuance of reality, seeing slow but real progress. It’s called “System 001” after all… there’s space for a three-digit amount of systems before the mission is accomplished. But patience and nuance are boring and it’s an unfortunate reality that negative spin always gains more traction, acting as a feedback loop reinforcing the audience’s impatience and cynicism.
At this point, you might want to object that Elon Musk and Tesla are a good counter-example in that they were able to ride the hype and never stumble. While Tesla received more than its fair share of cynicism, I’d say a couple things make it different from the Ocean Cleanup Project:
- As a for-profit company vs. a nonprofit, Tesla is much more secretive about its prototyping and tends to only communicate once the production-ready, big-reveal products are in the starting blocks.
- Elon Musk being an experienced, rich and famous entrepreneur, he was able to exert a lot more control over the narrative, thereby compressing the amplitude of hype and cynicism.
- Keep in mind the secret 10 year master plan: Everything was already in there and there was only so much fans and critics could make up.
Isn’t fighting cynics just a waste of time though?
It’s absolutely true that some people will just never be happy. Focus invested in them is focus divested from actually building your product and your company. And if you’re a fan of the Guy Kawasaki school of thought, you’ll have in mind that:
The worst case is to incite no passionate reactions at all, and that happens when companies try to make everyone happy.
It’s something I’ve agreed with for many years and an idea modern communication thrives on. But when it comes to greening up our consumption for the long term, I feel like polarisation is not such a great idea. We can’t just be happy with half the population greening up their act and the other half grumbling away at the Greta Thunbergs of the World, clinging to their carbon-voracious habits even harder. We’d still be collectively headed towards catastrophe, if only a little slower than before.
Take VanMoof’s recent ad campaign that was banned in France for ‘discrediting’ the auto industry by linking it to climate change:
I’m amazed by its creativity. I’m also heavily biased towards VanMoof’s mission so I tell myself “you’re damn right the auto industry is linked to climate change”.
The ad is however quite the antagonisation of people who drive big, fast cars.
A part of me reacts by saying “About bloody time we started antagonising the petrol heads!”. But the more rational part of me tells itself that antagonising current and future owners of big fast cars will only entrench them for even longer in their habits and desires. As my blogging hero Tim Urban brilliantly explains, that’s just how polarised humans work. Even more problematic since big, fast, super comfortable and masculinity-enhancing cars are quite exclusively bought by… the richest among us, responsible for the most CO2 emissions. You may loathe them, but you really don’t want them to dig their heels in the sand.
With that in mind, I view anticipating the cynics as an insurance policy of sorts. Punch them into a corner, deny them any form of moral high-ground and you risk jeopardising the long-term viability of your Mission (and of our planet, no pressure). So what I’m saying here is you need intense AND inclusive communications… capable of setting your core audience on fire while leaving open doors for cynics to eventually pacifically rally your cause.
Sound bloody hard? I’m pretty sure it is. It can’t happen without new generations of amazing communicators AND amazing listeners.
In any case, when launching to claims of green-ness, I really only see one way to go: Be clear about the promise, deliver on that promise, communicate clearly along the way to show progress and control the narrative.
An idea analogous to what I’d written about papernest’s rebranding in 2018: A brand is a promise of the experience a customer can expect with your product or service. If your product is not functionally capable of holding up to the promise you’ve made, expect terrible things to happen to your business.
It’s a delicate equilibrium because you’d then be tempted to minimise the promise you’re making, setting the bar low enough to be sure to exceed it. But low bars have never made for great stories and the attention you’d earn as a result would be just too low to make a difference.
And now… let’s conclude with part 5!
