I went to Brighton recently and I have to say, I quite liked it in a try-hard-to-be-cool kind of way.
And while there was a bunch of things to see and explore, one thing stood out from all of them.
This …
I have to be honest, while I am all for sorting out your rubbish, a public bin just for BBQ food is pretty spectacular.
Especially as I didn’t spot a single place selling BBQ food anywhere near it.
But as I wrote about the bins in LAX airport, by not labeling it simply as ‘rubbish’, it did stop me in my tracks.
Made me look more closely.
Made me think.
Which begs the question, for all the logic we are approaching the challenges of the environment – maybe the best way to get people to actually think and reconsider is not to bathe them in facts about our self-created, impending apocalypse, but to use language and imagery that cracks the firewalls we have put up around ourselves to manage this sort of information on our own terms.
It might be counter-intuitive, but as the Ice Bucket Challenge and the Doncaster County Council grit machine campaign showed, sometimes the most sensible thing we can do to create change is to embark on utter madness.
Just like my Boaty McBoatface argument that I am absolutely not bitter about in any way, even thought they completely ignored it and dismissed it out of hand.
Oh no.
When will authorities appreciate that humans are hypocritical.
That common sense is often in the eye of the beholder rather than their being some uniform fire of how everything should be.
This is why we have rubbish ads, rubbish politicians and rubbish products … because while I appreciate we need certain benchmarks to move forward, so many of the things we rely on are as fake as the Emperors New Clothes.
Designed to hide our truth rather than to reveal it.
That doesn’t mean you should stop talking to people, far from it, it actually means you need to spend even more time with them so you can get even closer to them. Understand their realities, their contexts, their truths and dramas and all the nuances and personal rabbit holes they go down to manage what they think and decide to do.
People are fascinating, but it needs more than a fucking focus group or poll to discover it.
As I’ve said before, if you want them to respect your clients brand, start respecting them~.