Late last year, independent consumer trend analysts trendwatching.com issued a briefing on five major trends facing the marketing world. One of these trends was “eco-fatigue”. For regular readers of the monthly reports, the appearance of eco-fatigue was a shock – as was the revelation that this particular briefing was meant as a tongue-in-cheek prank to marketers, CEOs and researchers.

The satirical report announced that: “Serious eco-fatigue is upon us, as independent and experienced consumers are fed up with being told what to do, or, more specifically, told what not to do. Treated like unruly infants, the eco-fatigued increasingly rebel against the green movement’s obsession with ‘no’.”

The report surmises that this was a trend waiting to happen, since the eco-mentality clashes with two of the most profound consumer drivers of all time – the feeling of independence, and a desire for the original, real-deal version.

“In short: being told to make do with half-baked versions—or even to entirely forgo one’s pleasures and indulgences—is just, well, not cool,” deduced the briefing. 

Trendwatching.com was making a cheeky jab at the current state of overzealous marketing and blatant opportunism – but as with any good satire, it was a joke based on nuggets of truth.

What began as warnings from scientists and conservationists has become one of the most powerful tools in marketing, creating a wave of green-washing campaigns by such unlikely sources as car manufacturer General Motors and oil company BP.

The collective message that seems to come across – beyond that we should only be buying their green-related products – is that if we don’t listen and do as we’re told, apparently, the world will end. The environment will collapse, and we’ll guzzle every last resource on the earth while the planet sinks below an ocean of melting ice.

The fact is, the end of the world is a pretty hard notion to wrap your head around. There’s simply no frame of reference when speaking in terms of such magnitude. Wars, economic depression, these are catastrophes that people can grasp because we’ve seen them before.

So if Al Gore and a bunch of scientists and Hollywood celebrities announce that an ecological Armageddon is upon us, that just seems a little out of the average person’s league, and such hyperbolic threats tend to put people off.

Former director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Mike Hulme, has warned scientists and the media against the use of such extreme language when speaking about climate change scenarios. His own research showed that words like  “disaster”, “apocalypse” and “catastrophe” generated apathy among the intended audience.

Fact or fiction
Like that song you’ve heard too many times, or that show you’ve seen a thousand times before, it’s plausible to imagine that overexposure to green media could wear a person down. But is it something marketers around the world feel the need to address? Are they really moving away from eco-friendly messages because they’re worried about boring people to tears?

“The short answer is that no, we don’t see that actually,” says Laura Weeks, project manager for the first-ever Earth Hour in 2007. Held in Sydney, Australia, Earth Hour encouraged residents to turn off their lights for one hour to make a bold, collective statement about the need to address the problem of climate change.

Word spread following the event and for the 2008 event, 50 million people in 35 countries joined Sydney in dousing their lights. Far from finding people unreceptive to its eco-friendly message, Earth Hour has developed a massive following, with organisers aiming to reach more than one billion people with the next Earth Hour on 28 March.

Weeks, who now works as director of marketing and fundraising for WWF Hong Kong, says that with an issue as big as climate change, many people feel a sense of disempowerment of what they can do as an individual: “People say to themselves ‘I know it’s wrong to leave lights on or not recycle, but what can I do as one tiny individual when China is starting up new coal power stations every couple of weeks?’” To combat this, she says the key is to keep the message positive and focus on solutions to the world’s problems.

“What we find,” Weeks says, “is that the voice of the individual is extremely powerful in raising awareness. Maybe it’s just one person going into a restaurant and asking the waiter where a particular fish is sourced from, and then that waiter asks the chef and they decide to make a change because they realise that clients are asking for a change.”

“We really don’t see the overload in Asia,” says Weeks, regarding excessive eco-marketing. “When we launched our Climateers initiative in Hong Kong, we found that people here did not have a real understanding of things like their personal carbon footprint. Over the last 18 months there’s been a huge change in terms of recognition and we find that extremely positive. In Asia, we would actually like to see a lot more messages out there, especially in developing countries like India and China.”

A recent global study on climate change also does little to prove that eco-fatigue is a trend that exists in the real world. The second annual Synovate and BBC World News climate change study showed that, actually, more and more people are concerned about climate change. But more significantly than that, they are doing something about it.

Synovate spoke with over 18,000 people across 22 nations, which revealed that the global level of concern over climate change has risen to more than seven out of every ten people. Concern within certain countries showed even more dramatic results, most notably in the United States where concern shot up to 80% in 2008, versus 57% in 2007. 

As the world’s leading emissions culprits, it seems that rather than tiring of environmental issues, people in the US are now ready to take responsibility. The study showed a more than 100% increase in Americans saying they inform themselves about climate change, from 31% in 2007 to two-thirds of all Americans in 2008.

Fuel prices and the economic climate have also helped make the green decision for a lot of Americans, and almost 40% said they would switch to a smaller, more cost efficient car in 2008. And as far as reducing carbon footprints, more than a third of Americans opted to change their travel habits in 2008.

“Americans have become much more concerned about climate change and how their choices in day-to-day living might affect future quality of life for them, and for their children,” says Bob Michaels, Synovate’s Senior Vice President of the US-based Consumer Insights group.

So while eco-fatigue may exist in people’s minds, and even their attitudes, it isn’t stopping them from doing their part to solve some of the planet’s problems – and it isn’t stopping them from heeding messages that offer them green solutions. According to Michaels, this is down to that fact that some issues are simply too important to ignore.

“It’s clear that the planet is changing. And when something changes, something or someone must be to blame. After a year of unprecedented media coverage, Americans think human behaviour is the major factor in climate change. This also means climate change could potentially be controlled if people behave differently, something we saw reflected in the rise in people taking individual actions.”