TO BEAT CLIMATE CHANGE

WE HAVE TO FIX THE STRATEGY

Our last chance to stop runaway climate change is to pass a very aggressive carbon pricing scheme within the next few years. There is no other policy that stands a chance of working. To pass such an ambitious policy requires a massive political movement that demands that Congress pass it. Otherwise Washington won't budge. Why don't we have such a movement today? Not for lack of trying. Many well-funded major environmental organizations, including 350 and Al Gore's NGO, made a valiant effort back in 2007-09. They failed, quite badly.  And so now all of the major environmental groups and their leaders have given up on the one policy we absolutely must pass because, based upon their past failure, they think it's impossible.

They're wrong though. These efforts failed, not because its impossible to rally Americans to demand an effective climate policy, but because the environmental movement relied upon badly flawed strategy. We don't have an effective climate movement today because the major environmental organizations and their leaders simply lack the skills to effectively brand a hot-button political issue. Our Carbon-Right opponents, on the other hand, are extremely sophisticated and aggressive in their sabotage marketing.  So, despite heroic efforts and hundreds of millions spent, the Right-Wing and Carbon Lobby will win every time until we improve our strategy.

My name is Douglas Holt. I'm considered (by some at least!) to be one of the world's leading experts in branding. I have written books that have influenced marketers around the world.  I've developed brand strategies for many of the biggest and most successful brands (Coke, BMW, Converse, Microsoft, Jack Daniel's), including many leading social mission brands (Patagonia, Ben & Jerry's, Zipcar, New Belgium, REI).  For two decades I taught at leading business schools (Harvard, Oxford) and have presented seminars to executives in many countries.  Please take a look at my bio for more information.

The branding model that I pioneered--what I call cultural branding--is particularly suited for movement building. So I've spent the last few years working pro bono on the same level of research and strategy development work that I usually devote to corporate clients to develop a new brand strategy to pass a major carbon tax.  Along the way I show why the efforts of so many others have failed.

No one is paying me to do this.  I'm not working for any organization. Rather I'm doing this work out of deep concern and frustration, seeing how much effort has been wasted over the past 8 years pursuing strategic dead-ends. We can't waste another year, working with weak ideas that will get us nowhere.

On this site you'll find the strategy in various forms: an overview video of the strategy and campaign prototype, a video of a seminar and a 50-page strategy document both of which provide much more detail on the brand strategy, and a few creative examples from the campaign.  As we officially "launch" the strategy this month I will begin regular blog and vlog posts.

My hope is to start a new strategy conversation amongst all of the organizations and activists that are working to stop climate change. We need to get everyone focused on a single goal--a major carbon fee-and-dividend scheme--and we need to unite around the strongest strategy to build a powerful political movement. We need to put pressure on the major environmental organizations and foundations, influential leaders and wealthy benefactors to stop wasting scarce funding and resources on flawed strategy. If you're persuaded by the content here, please sign up, tell your friends and social network contacts about what we're doing, and lets work together to finally build a real political movement.

WHY AMERICA HAS NO CLIMATE MOVEMENT

We have no climate movement today.  This is not intended to be an inflammatory statement.  We need to be reflexive and accept the facts if we're going to revise our approach to succeed: we have groups that are working hard to become a movement. But they have not been able to apply any pressure on Congress to pass the one policy that is essential to stop climate change. They've not been able to influence the media to present climate policy in a way that Americans will resonate with (just the opposite in fact).  So, no movement that matters.  As you scroll down the site, you'll get to deeper and deeper into this analysis and new strategy. If you have limited time, please watch these two videos, which overview the strategy and then the prototype campaign as fast as I'm able! 

Climate Brand Strategy Overview

Prototype Campaign Tour

We've just started to apply this strategy to develop an entirely new kind of climate campaign to pass a fee-and-dividend scheme.  This is a prototype to demonstrate how the strategy works.  But I think you'll see that we get to a much more powerful approach than what's been tried before, guided by the strategy.   With proper funding we can quickly build out this prototype into a powerful campaign and organizing platform.  

Strategy Deep Dive

Here are two much more detailed versions of the brand strategy, which gets into the theory and research, and also presents an historical genealogy of the climate movement in the USA.   If you want to fully grasp the strategy framework I overview in the first video, you need to dig in here. 

 This is a lecture I gave in April at the University of Wisconsin:

And this is the written version of the strategy for those who want to go even further into the details of the framework and analysis, which you're welcome to download:

Sample Ads

In the prototype work, we've developed a few simple print ads to show how we could develop the campaign.  

Here is a sample ad from the campaign, which we are running now in Mother Jones magazine.  This ad targets the "Symbolic Greens" segment--upper-middle class citizens who are politically progressive and support environmental causes. They're very much on our side, except that they direct their efforts on climate change toward a handful of green consumption symbols that have no impact.  They think of climate change as a consumer issue, not a political one. So this part of the campaign works to transform this segment from ethical consumers to political activists:

 Another key focus of the brand strategy is to shut down "Carbon-Right" attacks on the policy as some sort of socialist big government boondoggle, a tried-and-true counterbranding weapon in the era of right-populist politics in the US.   We can effectively counter any such attacks by working with the intellectual roots of the fee-and-dividend policy, and driving with branding.  Pricing carbon is an axiomatic solution within neo-classical economics.  It is THE free market solution to a market externality such as CO2 emissions.  So let's claim this mantle, and call out the fossil fuel companies and right-wingers who oppose fee-and-dividend as the folks who really don't believe in the free market: