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Tell A Different Story: Words To Use And Lose For Sustainability Comms

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The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or two — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

With everyone telling their sustainability story, are you cutting through the crowd? Have you found one bold idea to center your communications around? It used to be that sustainability experts evaluated how companies were performing in this area.  But now, customers and employees alike are paying attention. The old language of sustainability doesn’t work now. This week on HearSay, Michael and Lee welcome back podcast alumni Will Howard and Sachi Pettit to talk about all things sustainability, including how to respond appropriately to your critics, examples of successful corporate sustainability communication frameworks (from programs/products like Starbucks’ Shared Planet, Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan, and Adidas’ Ocean Shoe), and how to depoliticize your sustainability language.

Listen below or on your preferred streaming platform:

LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

maslansky + partners newsletter

Apple’s sustainability language

Adidas’ Ocean Shoe

EPISODE 9 TRANSCRIPT:

Will Howard:
There’s just been that Mother Jones piece that says that you’re evil and your company doesn’t care about the planet, and you just immediately want to respond with, “Oh yeah. Would an evil person do this?”

Lee Carter:
They said what? Welcome to Hearsay. A podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we provide our take on the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the market today, and what you can learn from their experience. Our philosophy is it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And that’s why we call this Hearsay. I’m Lee Carter, president and partner at Maslansky and Partners, and author of a book called Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter.

Michael Maslansky:
And I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of the firm that invented language strategy and author of the Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics.

Lee:
So today we’re talking about sustainability, or more to the point, we’re talking about how to talk about sustainability. Companies, industries are doing so much to really make an impact on the environment and sustainability initiatives. And they really are. We’re seeing huge results. We’re seeing companies really step up and have huge goals around sustainability, but they aren’t necessarily getting credit for it because their communications in some ways are falling short. I think the more that people talk about, the more that people talk about the good stuff that they do, sometimes it’s really hard to break through because everybody’s almost talking about the same thing. So it’s hard to remember who’s doing one thing over another.

Michael:
Yeah, but I think we are we’re at a real inflection point when it comes to sustainability communications with the Biden administration in place, launching an incredibly ambitious plan for us to get to net zero in the foreseeable future. It’s creating much more momentum than we had during the Trump administration for companies to take sustainability initiatives, to talk about them, to get credit for them, and really almost to compete in the marketplace for communications around sustainability. And we know that perceptions about climate change and the need for action on sustainability is increasing, that skepticism is lower than it’s ever been. And that we’re seeing employees say that they care about their company’s environmental record. We’re seeing customers say that they care about what companies are doing on the environmental front. Now, what that translates to when they’re actually making a decision to purchase is probably a conversation for another day. But what we want to focus on today, I think is really about how to make the most of the work that is being done, how to make sure that you’re being recognized for all the sustainability efforts that are in place. So we are here to help and talk about sustainability along with our colleagues Will Howard and Sachi Pettit, who have worked with us on some great challenges over the years for brands like AT&T and Procter & Gamble, and Toyota, and Kaiser Permanente, and Enterprise Community Partners, and a whole host of energy companies and many others, and both Will and Sachi are vice presidents at Maslansky and Partners, and are podcast veterans. Welcome back to both of you, and thank you for being here.

Will:
Great to be here. Excited.

Sachi Pettit:
Yeah, so ready for this.

Will:
Always fun.

Lee:
Didn’t sound fun Will. Are you ready?

Will:
It was genuine. Always fun. Always a good time. Bring it on.

Lee:
All right, let’s do this.

Lee:
So I want to jump in really quickly here because I think it’s really important that we clarify what we’re talking about here. When we say sustainability communications, what exactly are you guys talking about?

Will:
I always try to think of it in terms of, generally speaking, there is a narrative out there which is that large companies are always interested in maximizing short-term profits and returns, and they’ll really do whatever it takes to do that. They’ll burn resources, take advantage of people, they’ll harm the world in some way. They don’t really care what damage they do so long as they can maximize those profits and have their kind of Scrooge McDuck money pit to swim in. That’s really not a very fair picture but it does make for a really good story, people love a good villain. Sustainability communications are any effort to go out there and tell a different story, a story that shows the ways that companies are actually thinking long-term, investing in things today, spending money today in some cases to reduce their use of resources, to replenish resources, restore damage, basically take care of the world for the long-term instead of just focusing on the short term. The obvious things are like recycling, green energy, those are kind of the obvious ones, but I think you can lump other things like investing in communities and people in there as well, in some cases.

Michael:
Yeah. And so as we look at that broad bucket of messaging around sustainability, and all the efforts that that companies are working on, they are often criticized for not doing enough, or not doing the right things. Or what we see all the time is that they’re doing all of these things, they have scientists and technical experts and engineers inside trying to figure out how they can have the greatest impact on the environment at the lowest cost and without hurting the quality or taste of the product, depending on what it is, and yet they’re not getting credit for it when they do all this. Or, and this is my favorite, one company believes that their competitor is getting all the credit even though they’re not doing the right things, and our client is doing all the right things but not getting the credit. So what’s going on here? Why is it hard for communicators to communicate about sustainability?

Sachi:
Yeah. It’s such a great question. I think it’s hard because you’re doing good. You’re doing the things that you should get credit for and there are so many discussions internally, they have scientists, they’re working on these huge efforts, so it seems simple of, “Okay, let’s go talk about it.” There’s a lot of excitement internally, generally too. But that’s exactly where you start to have the challenge is that everyone else is doing it. So if you’re out there communicating, whether it’s moving to zero carbon, or hitting a specific target by 2030, chances are your competitors are going to be talking about that too. And to Michael, your point about what we hear often is, “Well, my competitors getting tons of credit for their sustainability efforts but we’re actually doing more.” What the difference is what they found is how to tell it in a way that’s sticky, that really cuts through the crowd and leaves an image in consumer’s mind that when they think about sustainability it’s not this broad bucket anymore, but really it’s a specific image, or action, or something to hold on to. And I think that’s really the key when we talk about this topic.

Michael:
So part of it is that you’ve got competitors in the field, and some are better at standing out than others, but we know that there are other things that make it hard as well. Will, what else makes it hard?

Will:
When you start looking at the way that companies talk about these issues, and especially when you start contrasting the way that they talk about these issues with some of their other communications where they spend so much effort to be simple, and pithy, and customer friendly, is that you see a ton of jargon, and you see a ton of complex scientific language around issues like renewable energy, around issues like water quality, around issues like waste, and all of these really important topics that have a heavy scientific community behind them. The main reason you see this comes down to the people who are working on these messages, it often tends to be either business executives who are in charge of setting corporate targets for the company and they talk about it in a certain way, or it’s people who are really passionate, deeply involved specialists who have been hired to be the sustainability person. And they are, and I say this with all the love in the world, wonks. And I say that as a word wonk myself, there are people who are very deep in this and very deep in the community, speak a certain language. Both of those audiences are very used to talking to other people like them.  And when it comes time to communicate externally with a lay audience who doesn’t speak that same language, or have the same level of literacy in some of these issues, that’s how you end up with terms like deep de-carbonization, or carbon sequestration in the green energy space, or like responsible discharge and effluent treatment in the water quality space, which are just rough language. But they mean something to some people, they just don’t mean much to most people.

Lee:
When we started doing this work a decade ago it was you wrote a sustainability report for other sustainability experts so that you would get a rating that would say, “You’re an environmentally friendly company.” And that’s the history of this communication. So it’s the legacy here is that we’re stuck with all of this old scientific language and people inside organizations saying what we must talk about it this way, because that’s how we’re measured. When really when this started, we were being measured by experts. Now we’re being measured by the general public. Now we’re being measured by our employees, who are demanding more from us. So we have to translate that very complex language into the language of the people, whether it’s our customers or employees, so that it makes sense to them and really can have an impact.

Michael:
Yeah. I would go even further on that. I think we’ve evolved to a point where even the scientific communications, even for the sophisticated communities, you do a disservice to your goals if you are speaking in complicated language, if you’re just focused on the facts, if you are not trying to make your idea sticky, we see this all the time. In every industry that we work in pretty much, if you look at pharma, if you look at energy, if you look at agriculture and food, where you have these technical experts and the focus is on getting the information right, as opposed to communicating in a way that’s really going to resonate, you often end up not getting credit for your message because it’s much harder for those kinds of messages to break through.

Sachi:
Yeah. And I think too, Michael, another challenge companies face is that they’re doing lots of good things, and we hear it when we talk to them, starting off about what are all the things you’re doing to help us credibly tell your story. They pull out document after document of the different efforts they’re doing. But what we find out is many of them are not doing the one big bold thing that is easy to communicate, that the entire strategy is based on. They’re not building this like a product that you would sell, so the result is laundry listing, that what they have in their toolkit is that entire list. But when you talk about everything, nothing has an impact.

Michael:
And that’s one of the most difficult challenges for communicators in these organizations to deal with because they probably have stakeholders who are leading these different efforts. Everyone wants recognition for all the great work that they’re doing on this front, but you have to make strategic choices.

Will:
I really get it too. I think another way that it comes about a lot of the time is you’ll be in a situation where you’ve just been criticized, and you’ve just been attacked, and you want to respond in some way and communicate about all the good things that you’re doing, or debunk something that you feel is a myth. There’s just been that Mother Jones piece that says that you’re evil and your company doesn’t care about the planet, and you just immediately want to respond with, “Oh yeah. Would an evil person do this?” And just blast them with all the good things that you’re doing, and you start rattling it off.  When your critics are coming after you, they are telling a story. They’re telling us some sort of story about who you are, what you care about, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it.  Part of what gives it power is the fact that it is a story and it integrates into people’s perceptions of you. You can’t just hit back with a list of items on a bullet point list. You have to tell your own story.

Lee:
When I think about what you’re describing there, it’s the if they only knew syndrome, right? Which is our reaction is they’ve told this bad story, people don’t understand. Or there’s a company that doesn’t do as much as we do, but they’re getting more credit, then we just want to say, “But if they only knew?” And then you want to list out the five, 10, 20 reasons why, and that’s just not memorable. But when you look at the one company that is getting the credit, usually they have the one thing, they have that story that makes it sticky. We can have a debate about whether or not Toms, or Patagonia, or some of these other companies can be inspiration for sustainability comms, I think the reason that they’re able to be so sticky in it is because they have that one symbol that everything else hangs off of. We know what the value proposition is there. And people are afraid sometimes to dumb things down. They’re afraid to say like, “I want to pick one.” Or “I want to pick three different things.” Because you’ve got the whole list, and it’s going to take away or detract from your whole story. And so I think that as communicators we have to exercise that discipline in saying that less is more, and that we’ve got to find the thing that’s going to make everything else be unique for us and memorable for our audience.

Michael:
Some organizations do a really good job of either distilling down all their efforts into what really matters, we’re finding a common thread and umbrella narrative under which they can tell their entire story, but whether you do one or the other, it’s certainly critical to do one of them. Examples are… Unilever, I think, was one of the first organizations to really launch an effective sustainability message with their sustainable living plan. It was simple, it was clear, it had numbers. They were going to double their business and half their environmental footprint within a certain period of time. So it made it easy for people to dig in and start to look at what did that mean to have a sustainable living plan.  Coca-Cola, a number of years ago launched a platform, maybe not their entire sustainability message, around world without waste, where they just literally took everything that they were doing associated with waste and put it under an umbrella that made it easier to communicate about. PepsiCo actually just launched a positive agriculture platform. Again, what it does is it makes it easier to tell a whole bunch of stories in a way that aligned to this common message about, in their case, positive agriculture. And I’ll just give one more right now, and that is going back now a number of years. We worked with Starbucks on what became Shared Planet, and they had a whole host of initiatives that they weren’t really talking about, everything from responsible sourcing of their coffee beans, to how they were managing their waste, to all of their other environmental efforts, and they had no way of kind of bringing it together, and ultimately launched Shared Planet and brought those together and could tell a coherent story. And each of those examples are situations where maybe not everything fit within it, but enough fit within it that they could tell those stories and get some recognition for what they were doing.

Lee:
Yeah, and I think the Starbucks example is a really good one just to spend some time on, because Starbucks didn’t tell their story, right? This was all embedded in who they were. They had cafe practices before anyone else had cafe practices. They were partnering with Conservation International. They were doing all of the right things. And then in comes McDonald’s to the coffee business and they start talking about their sustainable practices, and Starbucks is like, “Wait a second. We have all of these things.” This is exactly what we’re talking about. “We’ve done all of these things all along, and nobody knows. And here, everybody’s talking about this.” Well, it was giving them that platform of Shared Planet that allowed them to tell their story, that was big enough for them to get the credit that they need, and that message lives on today. We’re talking, this was 12, 14 years ago.
Will:
Yeah, and when we were first setting up part of this challenge, I think we talked a lot about you doing a lot of things, you might have to make some cuts. I would just raise that even before you make any cuts, it doesn’t even really have to be about making cuts. It can be about prioritization and it can be about framing. I think some of what Sachi alluded to is the idea of having a flagship or having a core effort that you can build around. Some big ticket item is always nice. But even in the absence of that, I think you can do a lot of work to take a step back, look at this scattered array of efforts that you’re making, and try to find some commonalities or some ways that you can tee up a story that’s going to connect the dots for people or find a common thread that you can hang all those beads on. We worked with a telecommunications provider a few years ago who was doing a ton of great things, but they were extremely scattershot. They were helping job seekers get trained for new jobs, they were helping firemen communicate with the station on emergency calls, and they were giving farmers smart equipment for agriculture. They were doing all these different things, and we tested a couple of different ways to help draw a line through those things. It all came back to connectivity, connecting to opportunities, connecting to people in need, connecting to your equipment. Whatever it was, the common thread was connection. And all of a sudden, instead of having four different stories, you have a single story with a couple of different incarnations, which means that those three different efforts are cumulative instead of competing.

Lee:
And it really helps ladder up to your broader reputation. Because at the end of the day, part of the thing that you want to have happen is for people to remember that it was you that was doing it.  So that when people are going to make a decision about which provider to choose for their cell phone, or which product to pull off their shelf, or which cup of coffee, that they’ll remember, “I feel good about this decision because of that.”

Michael:
On a slightly different topic, Procter & Gamble, less than a year ago, launched their Responsible Beauty platform in the personal care space, where they were trying to take all of the efforts that they were undertaking and the commitments that they had made as it related to ingredients and packaging and how they’re approaching their beauty business, and just tagged it with responsible. And it begs the question then of, “Well, what do you mean?” And if stakeholders have asked that question, then you’re kind of halfway towards winning the battle.  One other thing that comes to mind, and be interested in your take on it, is the idea of symbols in this space and where we see companies that effectively use symbolism as a tool for establishing their kind of sustainability bonafides. So any thoughts on where companies have done that well?

Lee:
So if you think about the sneaker wars that exist in all different kinds of ways. Adidas came out with the ocean sneaker, the ocean shoe, that was a real symbol of a sustainable shoe, of sustainability. They got a lot of attention and they made a big splash, if I’m allowed to say that, can I say that without being too punny?

Will:
I allow it. Unconditionally.

Lee:
But they did, it got a lot of attention. And there are some others in the category who might say that Adidas doesn’t do as much for the environment as, say, Nike does, or Reebok, or some of the others. And yet a lot of the conversation was around Adidas because they had the symbol of that shoe.

Sachi:
One of the things that made it so powerful too, is that they elevated the cause and the solution together. So the problem was that there’s plastic waste in the oceans, so they really zoomed in and made it so narrow that you could visualize the ocean, so you could visualize plastic in the oceans. And then they talked about it as intercepted plastic waste and told this whole story about how, if it were not for using that plastic waste to make the shoe, it would end up in the ocean. So really tied it deeply into the whole story around the product.

Lee:
Also, can we just sit on that language of intercepted plastic? Because I think it’s so smart. Instead of ocean-bound plastic, which I think has a whole different image, intercepted plastic I think is a really, really smart word choice there.

Will:
I think it’s extremely illustrative of one of the other problems in addition to just jargon being boring and difficult to understand, there is such an accepted language of the way that you talk about these things, like responsible, sustainable target, reduced. And it’s a litany, and there’s so many sustainability sites that you could take the name and the logo off and they would all look the same. And the ones that really stand out, I would advise anyone to go to Apple’s sustainability page today, are the ones who have invested time and effort in getting their voice and their personality into the language. Not just because it’s cute and creative and catchy, which it is, and give credit where credit’s due, that’s important. But I think more than anything, you talk about symbols, that shows that they took the time and the energy to think about what they thought about this issue and think about what they had to say it, and say it in their own words.
Michael:
Yeah. I mean, I think that that’s totally right. And you know who else did a great job of doing that was BP when they launched their beyond petroleum campaign. And we all saw how that played out, right? They had done a fabulous job of telling the world that they were beyond petroleum, that they were the most environmentally kind of forward-thinking energy company, and then Deep Water Horizon happened and everything came unraveled. And really, I think launched some of the skepticism that, Will, you referred to early on about greenwashing and about not being authentic in your messaging communication. And so in many ways, it’s kind of raised the bar, I think for other companies, or at least made them a little bit more concerned about going out and really making these big, bold claims if they can’t support it. And so what do you do if you’re worried about establishing credibility, you’re kind of ready to make a big statement, but you’re worried that you’ll either be accused of greenwashing, or you don’t think that your audience necessarily is going to believe what you have to say?

Will:
I think one of the most important things to do is to think really hard about what your credible entry point is, and I think that that has two main elements. One is what is your superpower? What is your thing that people already know you for in a positive sense? We worked with a car company once who was very well known for efficiency, and what really unlocked a lot of their CSR messaging was to say, “Hey, we do efficiency really well. We’re making energy more efficient. We’re making non-profits more efficient. We’re making whatever the cause might be. And our super power, our thing that we’re known for is efficiency.”
Lee:
I think it’s interesting to slow down on the idea of your superpower. When you know what that is, and you can lean into that, then you’re going to enter into your permission place. And so I think back to some work we did in the financial crisis with banks who wanted to do the right thing for the long term to rebuild our economy. Where could they play? What they had to be playing in was investments. They had to be playing with going into and dealing with what they were best at, whether it’s giving loans to the communities that needed it most, or whether it was stopping foreclosures, whether it was creating a more sustainable community town square by investing in the small businesses and giving them loans. Those are the kinds of things that they had permission to play and that they could talk about. And I think that is what’s so important as an element. Now, if you’re in an industry that’s financial services, how do you talk then about sustainability? And that to me is a really interesting challenge as well, because there’s a whole trend in sustainable investing. And on the one hand, a lot of people are really excited about sustainable investing. I think Sachi and I had a conversation with a client about this. There’s a whole set of people who think that you’re going to get better returns in sustainable investments. And then there’s a whole bunch of people who are on a different political affiliation who hears the term sustainable investing and they hear, oh wait a second. That must mean that it’s going to be more expensive and I make less money, but I’m going to feel good about it. So on the one hand, you’ve got people who are really excited about it. On the other hand, you have people who politicize it. But if you think about the impact that financial services organization can have by saying, we’re going to invest in companies who do right by the environment, you can have a huge impact and you can really change perceptions. So that is a place that a financial services company can really own the sustainability conversation. And so I think it’s looking at your business, understanding what you can own, and it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have zero waste in your offices. And it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to reduce carbon, and you’re not going to do all of those things, but if you want to be famous, or if you want to be known, or if you want to have a conversation, what is the thing that you can do that no one else can do?

Michael:
And I think that that people will associate with you intuitively. I think the more work that people have to do in order to understand why you’ve chosen a certain cause or direction, the harder it’s going to be for you to get recognized for the investments that you’re making in time and energy and money. And so look for those short distances. We know in the food and beverage space when they start talking about water, you take a Coke or a Pepsi. Even though they own water companies now, which may make it easier, for a long time if you had said that they were focused on water, there’s not an immediate recognition that their products are almost entirely made of water. Or PepsiCo, who says that they’re trying to make the potato farming less bad for the environment, and you’re like potato farming. Then you realize that they own Frito-Lay, and Frito-Lays the biggest manufacturer of potato chips in the world. But you got to do that extra work and you can’t assume that people are going to make the connection unless you make it for them.

Michael:
So there’s another area that I think is really important in the context of sustainability, and we can’t have this conversation without it. And that is the language of sustainability, the language of climate. And this is an area that has been controversial since the seventies and we’re still saddled with a lot of language of that era, and companies have to wrestle with the question of, how do we communicate effectively in order to talk about these topics and to avoid hitting a third rail? So what do you do? How do you navigate this? What are some of the words and phrases that we’ve seen that are really challenging in this space?

Lee:
There’s still a deep politicization. Earlier today, I was having a conversation with a client who is in the clean energy space. And what she said to me is, 93% of Americans support clean energy. And yet, over 200 clean energy projects have gotten killed in America this year because it’s so politicized, because this is our idea that we want clean energy, but we don’t want it in our backyard because on the one hand, we want it, but then where we need it the most is maybe in a red state where people don’t want to have anything to do with it. And so if you think about the language of sustainability, you think about clean energy. When you think about all of this, a lot of people out there think that means it’s going to be more expensive, right? It also means that it’s a luxury. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a necessity. There doesn’t necessarily urgency around it. And so we have to consider that when we’re framing it. And I know that, in this same conversation, the person I was talking to is actually a team of folks who were saying, “And it’s almost impossible to have conversations with people who disagree.” Right?  They said that there’s no way that you can ever engage with someone once they’ve decided clean energy or wind energy or solar energy or whatever that kind of energy is, is not as reliable and it’s not affordable, it’s impossible. We just need to write them off. And I said absolutely not. There are ways to engage them, but you have to understand what parts of the conversation are making them feel that way. And how do you do that? And Sachi, I know you’ve worked on some projects and I actually talked to them about this, where it isn’t impossible to talk to people, but how do you take the politics out of the conversation and how did you do that?

Sachi:
We talk about how words are empty and that we can see them in so many different ways. The word itself isn’t communicating something at us. We’re the ones who are interpreting something with the word. It’s why people can hear climate change. And some people say, “Yes, that is something that I support.” Or hear it and think, “That’s just Al Gore. That’s not me or my politics.” But I think here is starting with understanding our audience, where we always start with any communication. And it’s understanding that people who we assume may not support the policies or views around climate change that maybe we believe in, questioning that belief and seeing that we don’t need to give people reasons to care because they already have those reasons. There’s always something that we can find for common ground. And so when we went out and talked to people that were climate skeptics or maybe wouldn’t support climate change policies, what we found is we weren’t speaking their language. We weren’t speaking to their values. So what we did, using language not climate change, but talking about protecting lakes or clean air or drinking water, the lands that they hunt in, that was stuff that they cared about. And as we know, that’s stuff that’s supporting the environment and sustainability. So I think it’s really making sure that we’re speaking the values of our audience and not just speaking to our values.

Michael:
Yeah. I mean, I think in that work, we talked about the fact that no one ever changed their mind by being told that they were wrong. And so much of the discussion about climate, and even sustainability in some cases, presumes that anybody who disagrees with them is wrong and that the success of that effort, of that reframing, it was about putting a positive spin on it, about aligning with something that they cared about and presenting it in that way. And I think we’ve seen in research that we just did recently, building on a thread that we’ve seen for a while, is really just where you start on the topic of climate change has a big impact on where people come out. And so we’re now unfortunately seeing lots more episodes of extreme weather around the country. When you go into a lot of markets that may have historically been a bit more skeptical about climate change, but you talk to them about extreme weather, when you talk to conservatives about extreme weather, they are much more likely to want to see action to address the risks or the impacts of extreme weather than they would for climate change. And so it’s a reframing in a way that that becomes more positive and we’re better able to address these topics.

Will:
There’s part of me that gets so frustrated too with people who are trying to communicate around this because you don’t have to use so many of those political terms to say what you want to say, right? We’re preparing for water levels are rising and we’re going to help you deal with that, right? That’s important to do. You didn’t have to take it to the next level of, because of climate change, water levels are… similarly, we’ve tested in the past that you can talk about reducing greenhouse gas emissions or you can talk about cleaner air. Everybody wants cleaner air. Same team, high five. Very easy conversation. But as soon as it’s now greenhouse gases, now people will ascribe motive and values and make assumptions about you as a communicator as to why you’re asking and what you actually want when you come in with that simple of a different word.

Lee:
I think it’s really important when you’re going through this kind of an exercise to go through what you’re trying to communicate and try to figure out which are the political terms because all of these terms that we’ve just talked about are laden with political baggage one side or the other. And they’re just as easy to reframe in another way. I’m not just saying call us if you have this challenge, but I think that there are-

Michael:
Well, you can call us if you want.

Sachi:
We’ll answer.

Lee:
Because each one of these phrases has a flip that’s going to take the politics out of, that’s going to be resonant. And it’s just a matter of saying, in some ways, of letting go and saying these aren’t necessary. They’re actually doing more harm than good, and there’s some freedom in that.

Sachi:
I think a really interesting example, Lee, to your point of understanding what the trigger words are, what those political words are, is when we had a client come to us and they were doing this huge effort they’re launching around environmental justice and they wanted to name it. The question is, what could be the name? They knew that there are these polarizing terms and they were working with people across political aisles. So we knew the stakes were high, and we used this linguistics methodology called corpus analysis, where we gather people’s immediate gut reactions, free associations to different words and phrases, in this case, names. And then we code it and start to analyze both for sentiment and for themes to help them make an informed decision about what name to go with. And what we found here was super interesting. We went in with a couple of naming options that had the word climate in it, and a couple that didn’t. And it turned out the names that had the word climate, even if it was in a positive context, even if it didn’t even have climate change as part of the name, had the most negative associations. People immediately free-associated to doom and gloom. And overall, the sentiment was more negative for those names. So our recommendation for them was to go with the options that were most inspiring and still captured the spirit of our client’s efforts without triggering those negative gut reactions.

Michael:
Sachi, it’s just a great illustration of where, what a client either wants to communicate or think is the thing that they need to communicate is not actually the best message. And I often say that there are messages that make you feel good and there are messages that work, and they’re usually not the same thing. And this is one of those examples, and in a political context, like climate or like sustainability, it’s just particularly important to remember.

Lee:
Okay. So you guys are repeat guests on our show, so you know what’s coming. But I’m going to ask it in a different way. I love this part of our conversation because we get a little bit more into the window of how our colleagues think, and you can really see what kind of word geeks we truly are behind the scenes.  But I know I’ve already asked you guys about your favorite words or your favorite superpowers, but what I’d love to know what your least or favorite word is related to sustainability. And you didn’t know that that’s what I was going to say. So I’m going to put you on the spot, your favorite-

Michael:
I have mine, I’m going to jump in.

Lee:
Okay. Do it.

Michael:
De-carbonization is my least favorite word when it comes to sustainability. We’ve tested it about 50 times against the simple, plain language approach of calling it carbon reduction or lower carbon emissions, and it loses every time.

Lee:
All right. I’m with you. I don’t like that one either.

Will:
I do a lot of work with water quality related issues, and I’m very passionate about them in my own life. And I think the ability of people who care very much about water to talk about liquid in a way that isn’t gross is, it’s dismaying. The amount, I just can’t stand the word effluence, which is a big one, discharge is a big one. There’s a lot of talking about water in a way that just… There’s got to be better alternatives. And I know for a fact that there are.

Michael:
But is it moist?

Will:
It certainly is.

Lee:
And what about you Sachi?

Sachi:
I think it has to be closed loop. It feels like such an opportunity to tell a powerful visual story. But all I see is an oval in my mind.

Lee:
Amazing. There’s a lot of opportunity, I think, with this category on a reframing a new language.

Michael:
Well Will and Sachi, thank you both so much for joining us on this episode of Hearsay. And thanks to everybody listening and playing along as well. If you want more language insights and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, please follow us on LinkedIn, at Maslansky-Partners and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. If you’ve got questions or feedback or ideas, words, phrases, anything interesting that may get our attention, please reach out to us at [email protected]. That’s all for now. Join us next time on Hearsay because it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.