It’s all about habits. I was reading a book today called Start Late, Finish Rich (it’s about becoming a millionaire even if you are currently in debt) and he was talking about habits. About how like 90% of what you think about during a day is pretty much the same as what you thought about the day before, and so on and so on and how much of that thinking becomes automatic- becomes a habit.
Take a term like brand loyalty- that’s really just a habit. Something you get used to buying and you come to trust, or at least just know what to expect, something you are familiar with. Familiarity has a strong gravity, often too strong to break until there is some good, strong, possibly painful reason to do so.

Enter climate change. Getting people to stop buying the non-green product at the corner store and start buying the green one makes objective sense, but you have to be able to explain to people in a compelling, real way why they should switch. And then they have to do it. And then they have to keep doing it, preferably until it becomes a new habit and they don’t want to switch back. It’s marketing, it’s sales, it’s political spin. It’s about knowing your audience and how to tell the story the right way- how to connect with the people you are talking to.

An interesting recent article in the Star is about how this concept- “Green-suasion,” is proving difficult and is crucial to getting people to change their habits. As we can all see, lots more people talk about what climate change is and the problems it brings but there is little immediate action happening- and a lot of that has to do with how we can and will move forward in the climate change movement.

U.S. Congressman Brian Baird is fighting for a social and behavioral research program in the U.S. Department of Energy. His perspective, that I think is an important factor, is that changes in wording and basic verbal packaging for energy-savings programs could save billions of dollars and get people excited about doing things that are good for the Earth that they probably already agree with.

(For example, think of how differently it is to say someone is “Pro-Life” vs. “Anti-Abortion.” Or on the other side, Pro-Abortion vs. Anti-Life vs. Pro-Choice. Pro Life and Pro Choice, the accepted labels for now, have withstood the brutal attacks of the other side and won out as group labels).

One great example is from a study at ASU showing that 1/3 more towels were hung up and reused by hotel guests when the sign in their room was changed to say that most prior guests had reused their towels in addition to asking guests to “do it for the environment.” If that’s all it takes, getting people to feel like they are part of the group, or doing what everyone else is doing, then this will be  a really effective strategy.

Or how about calling something climate change instead of global warming? Climate change is more accurate, as the weather changes are myriad and warming is not universal. In addition, some people who live further north may think that a little warming is not such a bad thing! 

It will be interesting to see if a Congressional bill will get the U.S. Department of Energy doing some psychological re-branding of its green initiatives.   This could get interesting.