I have recently seen a zillion advertisements about being green. While no doubt some good will come of them...c'mon, if we were to believe everything we've been hearing, the planet would be in tip-top shape by next Tuesday.
You have to admit that our industry has, oh, just a slight propensity to exaggerate. And, to pander. If research identifies a hot button then by golly we'll push that consumer's buttons and expect her to love us. But there's more to persuasion than pushing the right buttons after you've been pushing buttons for the sake of pushing buttons.
Indulge me here a little. When I was a kid, I teased the hell out of my two sisters because, well, I was a little boy and being a little boy, there is, in my DNA, a teasing gene that endows me with the ability to assess a sister and know exactly what buttons to push to get her screaming, "Mommmmmy!" In such little boys there is also a gene that finds it rewarding to hear, "Mommmmmmy!" if only for a millisecond of sniggering––a millisecond being all it takes for the screamed-for Mommy to lunge in from the kitchen, grab you by the hair and ground you for eternity. But I digress.
Point is, my pushing of buttons didn't accomplish much. It certainly didn't communicate to my sisters that I had their best interests at heart. How could it? All it did was incur vile hatred toward me.
Now, what if you've been teasing people for a long time? What if you've been promising them good things only to have them discover that there was––fooled you again!––no good at all in your actions? Given our history, we need to do more than project images of polar bears on melting ice caps. We need some serious evidence to change people's opinion of us.
One time I hanged my sister's Barbie doll from a cellar beam. I hanged it with a rope and then smudged ketchup around Barbie's mouth to look like blood. (This is very sick behavior, I know, even for an eight-year old.) For a brief moment, when my sister seemed to burst with hysterics, I felt badly, so I offered to maker her bed, a chore we had to perform on the weekends. This only exacerbated the problem. Apparently, it takes a lot of good to reverse a sister's hatred after slaughtering her Barbie doll.
After something like that, it takes really, really good deeds to convince people that we have their best interests and the best interests of the planet in mind. A few tweaks to a product or facility, or a slight adjustment to a service, but nothing that could be construed as a systemic change, won't be enough of an RTB. The consumer's hearing has been dulled by years of our greenwashing. Recycling the same old advertising won't impress anyone. It's time to realize that.
