Purchases of carbon offsets* by individuals are at an all time high – despite the grim economic news, reports the Washington Post. And this tells us that there is money to be made by businesses who invite consumers to participate in solving environmental problems.
A lesson from the Church
The Catholic Church has known this from its inception – and used to sell indulgences (the promise of eternal salvation, for a small fee) to fund its activities. The need they responded to then continues to exist in the human heart, even in our more secular society. Today ABC agnostics buy eternal salvation in the form of offsets – the promise that some good is being done somewhere that cancels out the feeling of guilt from personal actions today. And they feel even better than the Catholics of yore because they are not only buying personal salvation, but the salvation of the planet.
But this means that people are investing more than their money – they are investing their faith in the solution – and if they discover that their faith was misplaced, they’ll hold onto a sense of betrayal for years – and perhaps for ever.
An anecdotal illustration. I was at a dinner a few days ago, at which people were discussing the environment and climate change and the general difficulty of dealing with this at the personal level. The conversation turned, as it usually does, to recycling. “A total waste of time”, declared one participant, “after you do all the separation, they lump everything back together and put it in the trash. I don’t see the point of participating any more.”
She was Swedish, and referring to a scandal in Sweden more than five years ago. We were having the discussion in Switzerland, with a known and effective system. But the memory and resultant behaviour are proving irreversible.
So, if you are going to provide the means for consumers to participate in improving the environment, ensure you have NGO support, external advisors, and a solid programme. The closer you come to pure PR, the harder the fall for you and your (ex) consumers when they learn the truth.
After all, it takes 20 years to build trust, just 20 seconds to destroy it.
contact ren-new if you want to capture consumer’s faith for your business.
* Carbon offsets are the credits provided by, for example, a switch to green energy, sold on to third parties to “neutralise” their impacts. The thinking is that this creates an incentive to keep organisations investing in clean technologies. In fact, regulation and standards are inconsistent and poorly policed, and the programmes are sufficiently dubious that the US government has come out with a report questioning their validity. (Last week the Wall Street Journal writes, the General Accounting Office released a report criticizing “the limited assurance of credibility” in the voluntary market for offsets.)
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