According to John Marshall, a Madison Avenue veteran and now climate campaigner, many climate and sustainability people — himself included — are card-carrying members of “Overthinkers Anonymous.” 

Sound familiar? 

As a professor of advertising at Dartmouth College, Marshall knows a thing or two about effective messaging. He now dedicates his work to addressing the climate crisis through the lens of communications and communication strategy. Marshall is the Chairman and CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition — a nonprofit marketing firm that describes Earth as its only client. Potential Energy uses the power of storytelling, as well as advanced marketing and analytics tools, to develop and test messaging that genuinely drives change.

In my role as Director of Communications Strategy at thinkPARALLAX, I frequently turn to the insights and resources Marshall and his team have created, as they provide a powerful way to check our assumptions, test our hypotheses, and develop sustainability-focused corporate messaging and strategies that reach beyond an audience’s preconceived notions or biases. 

‍Learn more: Why honest sustainability communications matter‍

‍The anatomy of a winning climate message

During a plenary session at the 2024 Aspen Ideas Conference, Marshall and his team expanded on their theory, explaining how their purpose gets translated into practice. Using the same techniques perfected by the advertising industry, the firm creates compelling, audience-specific, and research-informed communications designed to move the needle on climate.

But that’s just the start of it. Once they’ve developed messaging, they continue to refine and test that messaging and then share their learnings in reports, white papers, and resources that everyone who is working on climate and sustainability can use. 

When the team developed an ad called “One Emergency” that provocatively connected the dots between extreme weather events and climate, they reported that it did “okay.” Among the audiences they sampled, Potential Energy’s team measured an increase in support for climate action of about 3.4%. What did better, however, was a natural, casual conversation between two moms. One of those moms was a climate scientist, and the other one was a fellow American with questions. In fact, among the audience members participating, “Dr. Burt’s Extreme Weather Explainers” increased strong support for action by an impressive 12.4%. 

The lesson? Humanizing the topic is critical to breaking through preconceived notions and can work far more effectively than fear-based messaging alone.

Similarly, “A Letter to My Kids” is an ad featuring Dr. Joellen Russell, a climate scientist. In it, Dr. Russell explains that her children’s future is one of the single most important motivators for why she works so hard on this issue. When tested, the Potential Energy team found that it increased support for government action on climate across all political affiliations, with Democrats and Independents showing around a 10% increase in support, and Republicans not far behind at around 7%. 

The learning here, according to Marshall and his team, is that while “identity politics” often gets a bad rap these days, they’ve found that leading with a shared identity trait with your desired audience — a person’s role as a parent, for example — can actually increase engagement and break through partisan divides.

‍Is climate partisanship overblown?

Speaking of partisanship, it turns out that the perception of climate as a “left-leaning” issue may be significantly overblown. In a recent survey of 58,000 people around the world, Potential Energy found a strong base of support for climate action across a wide range of the political spectrum.

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To summarize, Potential Energy has found that with their nonprofit and activist partners, messages that win on climate are those that: 

• Humanize the problem: They use accessible, easy-to-understand language that resonates with the target audience.
  
  
• Personalize the problem: They use arguments, examples, and stories directly relevant to the people they seek to reach.
  
  
• Ground messaging in love: While it might sound cheesy, the messages that win out are those that are centered on shared human values like care, respect, fairness, and yes — above all — love. 

These insights are evident across the Potential Energy Coalition’s ads. From the humorous, localized messaging of the “Save Florida Man campaign,” to their partnership with the American Conservative Coalition, the result is a diverse range of communications specifically tailored to key target audiences. Perhaps none are more effective than the heart-wrenching reflections of a climate scientist and mother in “Later Is Too Late”: 

 

But the work of Potential Energy goes deeper than outlining big-picture messaging and themes. They also test the nitty-gritty of how a message or an ad is performing, uncovering insights like:

• The power of human stories: Centering a story on a human protagonist, rather than a conceptual idea, consistently increases engagement. As does using close-ups of human faces in your imagery.
  
  
• Alarm is polarizing, concern is universal: Messages perceived as alarmist — using the threat of wildfires and extreme weather for example — tend to turn off the skeptics. And yet focusing on pollution, smog, and the importance of paying for what you pollute was actually far more broadly shared.
  
  
• Women are more likely to listen: Men and women have a significant gender gap in how they respond to climate messaging. And while Potential Energy has found stories that resonate with men — focusing on finances, for example — they suggest advocacy campaigns can gain more by focusing on reaching women. 

What about for-profit climate messaging?

I recently presented on this topic at a meeting in Dallas. While the reception was generally positive, one audience member rightly pointed out that much of Potential Energy’s work is focused on the non-profit sector. Yet the space in which for-profit companies communicate — and the goals of those communications — are somewhat different. I wholeheartedly agreed. We should be careful about extrapolating too broadly.

Potential Energy has also researched the impact of corporate climate communication. And what they’ve found is that some areas of commonality do exist. For nonprofits or for-profit businesses alike, engaging, human, and relevant, audience-specific messages continue to win out. 

However, corporations run a greater risk of turning off detractors or skeptics when they focus on morality- or values-focused messaging. The public, it turns out, doesn’t much like the sense that they are being told what to think or feel by a company, especially if they perceive that messaging as being counter to their political or ideological affiliations. 

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Yet, most businesses have a vested interest in not upsetting their customers. So how should corporations and private companies approach climate- or sustainability-focused messaging?

As part of their report, Potential Energy Coalition tested two separate messages for the same fictitious company. One focused on “doing the right thing” (morality), and the other centered on climate action as a sound and relevant business strategy (materiality). The results provided an interesting comparison: 

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Both morality-focused and materiality-focused messaging received similar scores in terms of favorability, suggesting that those predisposed to support climate action were likely to respond to either approach in fairly similar numbers. Yet there was a stark difference in unfavorability, with the materiality-focused approach being far less likely to turn off audience members or elicit a negative or oppositional reaction. In other words, rather than shaping the messaging around values and morality, what Potential Energy’s testing has shown is that for for-profit messengers, and those seeking the widest possible receptivity to their messaging, it may be better to focus on materiality instead. 

A few questions that may help guide this approach: 

• Why are you investing in clean energy, biodiversity, or efficiency? 
• What benefit does it bring to your business? 
• What benefit does it deliver to your customers? 

Read more: Sustainability has evolved. And so have we.
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Business strategy over corporate soapbox‍

So what does this look like in practice? While Burt’s Bees has a robust sustainability program that incorporates everything from water conservation through package recycling to greenhouse gas reductions, much of their sustainability storytelling leans into pollinator health, the benefits of natural ingredients, and building responsible and socially beneficial supply chains — sometimes all at the same time! This makes sense in terms of the company’s focus and provides audiences with a natural pathway to learn more about the brand’s origin story and how they differentiate their products.

Similarly, when Allbirds talks about the aggressive climate action driving their Allbirds Flight Plan, the focus is primarily on how rethinking the fashion supply chain is an integral part of their business strategy, and central to their brand promise that they “make better things in a better way.” Whether sourcing materials grown using regenerative agriculture, or shipping products with cleaner and lower carbon fuels, the result is profoundly positive for society. Yet the framing around that positivity is grounded in Allbirds’ vision for their company and sense of responsibility, not an attempt to preach to its customers. Perhaps most memorably, this effort manifested itself in a rather tongue-in-cheek advertisement called “Allbirds Owes You Nothing”:

‍The insights from the Potential Energy Coalition are not surprising to the team at tPX. But they are validating. From internal sales training on sustainability to employee activations to customer- and consumer-focused communications, our goal always is to not simply communicate the importance of a topic, action area, or initiative. Rather, it’s to also establish the credibility of our clients to be speaking out on that topic, and then to frame their work in a way that is directly relevant to the interests and needs of the audiences they seek to reach. 

In many ways, this is exactly why we are set up as a full-service agency that connects the dots between strategy, reporting, and communications. It’s only in drawing a throughline between these activities that we truly pinpoint the areas of substantive materiality that provide the opportunity to actually move the needle. 

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