J840 Communicating Social and Environmental Initiatives

Since this week we’ll be looking at strategic communication in the context of environmental media and business, I thought I’d spend this post looking at these forces through the prism of a wonderful book called Get Back in the Box by noted writer, lecturer, theorist Douglas Rushkoff of NYU. The main premise of the book is that business is so obsessed with out-of-the-box thinking and increasingly interruptive marketing that they have become divorced from what Rushkoff calls their “core competencies.” In other words, they don’t actually do the thing they do. Instead of pouring money into research and development companies divert funds to strategic campaigns or hire outside consultants to reimagine their enterprise rather than actually trying to make something good and useful – something that has value and solves real needs. In terms of environmental media, treehugger seems to be a textbook example of an online mediaspace that embodies the power of what Rushkoff calls “social currency.” Treehugger has been wildly successful because it offers a place where passionately involved members can go to pursue a common interest. Treehugger content itself, to use Rushkoff’s words, is a “medium for interaction.” Treehugger marketing and strategic communication may have helped their awareness level, but it was Treehugger’s own competency as a marketplace for interaction, education, and subtle activism that made it valuable to people. Treehugger is a good website and that’s why people visit it. That seems naively simple, but it’s a surprisingly elusive concept for many in business to grasp. Rushkoff brings up Patagonia as an example of a business whose commitment to their own values as an organization of environmental stewardship and ethical business managed to build up a culture around their products and weave their own passions into the operation. They’ve managed to profitable without compromising their own scruples or neglecting their original interests.

One of the things that made my work last semester with CReSIS so valuable was that the core “get back in the box” elements were already in place. CReSIS researchers were deeply committed to science and genuinely passionate about their work. To have that sort of culture already in place was inspiring. It would have been irresponsible “out of the box” thinking to suggest they reinvent themselves through a superficial “rebranding” or an ill-fated attempt at positioning them for media celebrity status. They weren’t made for that and quite frankly they were not interested in the first place. We asked Dr. David Braaten, CReSIS geographer, what his goals for CReSIS were. I expected something like “to be on the front page of the New York Times or featured on the Discovery Channel.” Instead, Braaten said his main goal was for CReSIS to master their latest radar sensing technology to effectively map the undersides of polar ice sheets. CReSIS was already back in the box without any of us knowing it. For the first few months of our project I think my group, and probably the whole class, were preoccupied with reinvention. We had advertising consultants from Dallas come in and talk about corporate leveraging to attain media status and “brand awareness” nonsense, as if making the CReSIS’ logo bigger on the scientists’ lab coats would make them better scientists. It was preposterous. We had to tweak the way we thought about the entire project. Eventually, our team decided to go with the slogan “visionary science that inspires” because we finally realized that in order for CReSIS to be successful it must continue to innovate and research and that that alone had societal value irrespective of how much publicity it got or prestige it brought to the organization. We seemed to forget initially that prestige and acclaim come by actually being good at what you do and offering something categorically different than research findings that currently exist. In essence our campaign was telling CReSIS to “keep being good at science.” After months of trying desperately to strike gold outside of the box we realized it might be better just to climb back inside and let CReSIS be CReSIS.

Here’s Rushkoff explaining the Jeffersonian origins of “out of the box” thinking and our current “new” renaissance:

-Vince Meserko