What if creativity and smart marketing could be combined to help inspire people to lead a greener life? James Alexander shows how it could be done.
“I’m a naive Sagittarian optimist and I see a world of people helping one another to achieve their potential in a beautiful environment.
Others see a world to market to. And they are good at selling to it.
Take cars. They sell the seductive promise of a lifestyle. They sell on speed. They sell through oozing sexy sounds. They sell freedom. In short, they sell desire, and we cannot resist.
But in a resource constrained world, they are contributing to a problem of alarming magnitude.
Today, right now we are presiding over the first mass extinction of ants on this planet for 65 million years. And yet whilst almost all of us understand this, the truth is that in the developed world, very few of us have materially changed the way that we live.
And why might this be? In communcations terms, activists lobby, but their message does not appeal to many. Scientists, well they know the data, but their analysis and the prognosis tend to scare and paralyse rather than mobilise.
Politicians, business leaders and even celebrities often preach, and none of us like being told what to do. And as for us, we are all just too busy leading very complicated, complex lives and just juggling often competing priorities.
But perhaps great creativity can help us find a path through. Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.
Great creativity can spread tolerance, spread freedom, can shine a spotlight on social deprivation. Great creativity is the men maker that puts slogans on our t-shirts and phrases on our lips.
What if great creativity could be used to help inspire people to lead a more sustainable life? To turn it from a chore to a pleasure. To move it from being something we feel we ought to do to something that we want to do.
To make leading a greener life a little more cool, a little more desireable.
One such initiative that’s doing its bit to help on this is Green Thing, a community, a not-for profit created by Tedster Andy Hobsbawm and Pentagram partner Naresh Ramchandani Two wonderful people and creative marketeers that I’m lucky enough to work with.
Green thing aims to use creativity to inspire people to lead a greener life.
Remember the car? Here’s a little scrap of Creative Antidote: (shows video – “The Day Gusty Decided to Walk”)
Green Thing provides an Inspiration Feed: Stories, music, film, poetry and things both created and also curated, to help make people smile, think, want, act to make a difference.
Like these gloves I’m wearing. Lost single gloves, found around the world, sent in to Green Thing, lovingly mended and restored, and then marketed as something altogether more wonderful (glove love)
Or this t-shirt, found in the back of a cupboard, saved, and given a new lease of life.
Or this rather delicious light switch that we spied in Japan.
The science is done, the moral imperative is obvious. Creativity can play its part to make a difference. So this is a call, a plea to the wonderfully talented Ted Community – let’s get creative, and let’s do it soon.”
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Presented to TEDtalks on 29 Oct 2011
