When tackling the burning issue of global warming, marketers sometimes resort to politically incorrect methods to face the challenge of encouraging energy efficient solutions to a divided audience.
Enigin are an energy efficiency service provider and, as such, are subject to being impacted on by the outcomes of advertising campaigns encouraging consumers to do their bit for the environment and use energy saving products.
But marketers, who share Enigin PLC’s point of view concerning the importance of reacting to climate change, know that there are two types of audiences their ads must reach, along with reaching the people who are already acting responsibly for the environment.
On the one hand are the skeptics who think climate change is just an opportunity for governments to instill paranoia among the population, to manipulate consumer behaviorism for the benefit of large multimillion international businesses. Along with the skeptics are the people who simply don’t feel concerned by environmental issues, judging them too vague or too distant in the future to feel threatened about.
On the other hand, are the fervent believers and ecological activists, who want to become energy efficient, but who are so overly flooded with dramatic scenario descriptions and worrying environmental statistics, that they feel helpless in the face of the colossal problem the world is confronted to. This feeling morphs into motivational paralysis, leading to their resignation to respond to any new messages on the subject.
So how can governments get through to such audiences about promoting energy efficient products, such as the ones offered by Enigin?
The answer resides in the mainstream media! Advertising strategies that governments worldwide have been employing recently are attempting to reach audiences about energy efficiency and climate change with ads that some might classify as politically incorrect, and others would label as being plain shocking.
U.S. environmental groups have focused on the bright side, playing up the collateral benefits of saving energy and using energy efficient solutions, by saying that the oil industry wants Americans to depend on it, but that Americans have access to cleaner and cheaper energy that will infringe oil price rises and preserve the planet.
But in other countries, some activist groups and governments have used much darker messages to urge people to save energy.
For example, the British ministry for climate change has produced an advert that shows a father reading his young daughter a bedtime story dealing with climate change and energy consumption. The ad shows a bunny rabbit crying, a carbon dioxide monster in the sky and a puppy drowning. It was subject to a lot of complaints and seen as ‘too scary’ for children, although it does educate them about the importance of saving energy.
Another controversial example is EU’s Nicolas Hulot Foundation portraying the World Trade Center Twin Towers as two burning tree trunks, reproducing the 9/11 scene and carrying the message: “For nature, every day is 9/11″.
In South Africa, Greenpeace has issued an ad showing a snow globe filled with water, with empty top hats and scarfs on the bottom, having seemingly belonged once to snow-men, and saying: “Winter. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.”
Perhaps the most shocking of these ads is the Portuguese environmental group Quercus’ ad, showing animals living in hellish landscapes, with deforestation, drought and shrinking ice caps, who decide to commit suicide! A monkey slips a rope around his neck, a polar bear takes a plunge from a cliff and a kangaroo jumps in front of a speeding train… A gruesome, depressing scenario with a message: “If you give up, they give up.”
Energy efficiency, conservation and preventing global warming require urgent attention and active contribution from everyone, and especially from businesses, that produce enormous amounts of carbon emissions. Enigin PLC’s energy efficient solutions are beneficial to business owners as they save them a lot of money by cutting down energy
consumption and hence costs.
However, do we need shocking advertising to choose to save money while saving energy and the planet? Because, at the end of the day, most businesses consider this to be the most logical thing to do anyway, and seem to think that implementing energy efficient products, such as Enigin PLC’s, is definitely the way forward.
