Starting this month, Sustainable Brands will bring you a treasure trove of insight, examples and opinions on communicating sustainability, all to help you persuade, motivate, nudge and inspire people and brands to do things differently. That’s a very important goal; once impetus is established people can achieve great things. As Shakespeare wrote centuries ago, "All things be ready if our minds be so."
But it’s not a straightforward job. The attention we're fighting for is scarcer than ever. More blogs, books, emails, tweets, facebook updates, to-do lists, brand marketers and media outlets are clamoring for our attention than ever before. But the precious few hours in a day remain the same, so we've got to be great at what we do. There's no room for lazy, half-arsed efforts that don’t deliver.
The established heritage isn’t helping either. Sustainability has long been the preserve of the ‘rational' — climate science, tons of carbon and impact metrics. Technical, rational language is crucial for the precise communications an expert community needs. But take this language to the uninitiated and it confuses, turning people off. Ultimately, humans aren't rational beings, we're emotional animals — driven by how we feel, acting through habits and heuristics or mental short cuts, influenced by those around us. This doesn’t mean great communications are completely irrational. They need to be grounded in rational thought and intelligent strategy, but they need a heavy dose of emotion to trigger the right chemical responses in our animal brains. Or to say it more simply, we’ve got to get emotional about sustainability.
In the face of these challenges, we’ve got the best solution going, something that has the potential to connect personally and emotionally to every single person on this planet. Something that makes life better, today and tomorrow. Something that’s full of magical and wondrous stories; turning air into energy, algae into fuel and building more with less. So let’s get our minds ready, and capture the hearts and minds of others.
We're looking forward to seeing what you’ve got.
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Published Apr 3, 2013 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT / 8pm BST / 9pm CEST