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| Earth Hour 2011 |
Equally, it could be called a marketing disaster.
Earth Hour was developed and promoted by the World Wildlife Fund but as WWF campaigner Josh Laughren acknowledges: “Most people who participate in Earth Hour don’t know that WWF is even behind it.”
Does that mean his group has failed basic marketing?
“If we were a business that would be true,” he says. “If you’re part of an environmental movement, and your mission is not about branding your organization but avoiding the worst effects of climate change, then that’s success.”
While the non-profit organization might be content to remain in the background, businesses are eager to associate their brand with Earth Hour.
Indeed, as a marketing event, it ranks highly on most corporate scorecards. Much like major sporting events, such as the Olympics, Earth Hour is a highly visible, feel good event, corporate backers noted.
“It’s got the kind of mass appeal flavor to it. I’m going to run home and do it. And hopefully everyone on my street is going to do it. And so businesses are getting on the bandwagon as well,” said Jim Hart, a senior manager in commercial banking at RBC Royal Bank.
Some 90 per cent of Canadians are aware of Earth Hour and about 50 per cent participate, Sears Canada noted.
“We felt the reach is good and the messaging fits with our brand,” said Sears’s vice president, sustainability leader, James Gray-Donald.
Whether it’s the Royal Bank, Sears, Mill Street Brewing, or consulting firm Accenture, companies want to trumpet their involvement.
It can also help boost their business.
Earth Hour gives them an opportunity to encourage customers to buy more energy efficient appliances and light bulbs, take out bank loans to finance energy-saving initiatives, and even drink a more earth-friendly brand of beer.
“Businesses are increasingly concerned about future energy costs,” said the bank’s Hart. “They’ve seen a number of energy price spikes. And they’ve had the HST added to their bills.”
It’s also an opportunity to talk bout what they’re doing within their own businesses during the rest of the year.
The consulting firm Accenture, for example, has set a goal of reducing its carbon footprint by 40 per cent within five years, by doing things like monitoring its energy usage, turning off signage and putting printers in sleep mode.
For most companies, the cost to participate in Earth Hour is fairly low. Few would say how much they spend promoting it or whether they lose business while the lights are out.
But unlike the Olympic logo, which costs corporate sponsors millions to adopt, the WWF is happy to give away its Earth Hour images for free.
“We don’t want to spend a lot of our hard-earned donor dollars on advertising. What we do is create the materials and then put them out there and let people use them,” he says.
Having business take those materials and make them available to their staff and clients and on their web pages “is a huge part of how the message of Earth Hour gets out.”
Mill Street Brewing said it’s trying to keep the cost of promoting its “Lights Out” event to a minimum. The Toronto-based craft brewer is planning to donate 50 cents a pint for every Mill Street beer sold in participating restaurants and pubs to Earth Day Canada. The brewer is also supplying the venues with free candles.
Steve Abrams, co-founder of the country’s largest organic beer maker, said aligning its business with Earth Hour is good for its brand.
“Being a craft brewer, part of our mission, in addition to making great small-batch beer, is being involved in the community as much as possible,” he said. “Earth Hour just tied it all together. Everyone agreed this is an issue that needs to be addressed.”
The WWF’s low-key approach to Earth Hour is probably one of the reasons it’s so broadly attractive, said Alan Middleton, a marketing expert with York University’s Schulich School of Business.
“The more it (an event) gets defined with an organization, you’ll get a negative response by some,” says Middleton.
He also noted that Earth Hour’s founders, the Australian chapter of the WWF chose a Saturday evening when few businesses are likely to be disrupted by a power shutdown.
“Business would get very upset if anyone talked seriously about enforcing it. But as long as it’s quiet, as a gentle nudge, it’s not a big issue,” Middleton said.”
The WWF’s Laughren readily acknowledges that Earth Hour is symbolic: The amount of energy saved even by a billion people turning down the lights for an hour is negligible on a global scale.
But turning out the lights does help people to see that individual actions multiplied by millions can make a difference – in this case, darken a city.
The success of Earth Hour in a wider sense is harder to measure.
“If the next morning everyone goes back to their lives and forgets why they did it, and isn’t willing to make changes and request changes from governments and businesses, then it won’t have been successful,” says Laughren.
“Success is measured ultimately in emissions going down.”
That means pressing the federal government for carbon emission caps and a carbon pricing regime, provincial governments for more renewable energy, and local governments for conservation and efficiency measures.
“It’s hard to draw a direct line from Earth Hour to any one of those specific actions,” says Laughren.
“But it’s also fair to say that we will not see those kinds of large scale actions by governments and businesses without those large scale shows of support. That’s why I’d say Earth Hour is necessary even if it’s not on its own sufficient.”
Sources: http://www.thestar.com
