• by Benny Thomas , Op-Ed Contributor, May 14, 2014

Sensationalist? Moi? You may have worried about the potential effect of carcinogens in the water supply, or the possibility of a terrorist attack in your home town, or GMO foods and the effect they have on your endocrine system, but I’m willing to wager that you have rarely, if ever, considered this particular cognitive bias a threat to your existence. 

And yet. 

Just today, I was at a business dinner with some colleagues, when one of the gentlemen at the table made an extraordinary statement. “I hear everything they say about global warming and climate change”, he pronounced, sagely. “And I take it with a pinch of salt. You know why? Up in my state, we had record snowfall this year.” He also went on to say something about conspiracies and ancient theories and other realities of life, but I had zoned out.

I was at the table, but really, my thoughts were with, yes, you guessed it, Nobel prize-winning behavioral economist, Daniel Kahneman. A man any marketing strategist must know, even venerate. I will confess that when I first heard he had won his Nobel for showing that people were biased by their emotions when they made economic decisions, I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. They’re giving away Nobels for showing up this year, would be what I muttered. But when I actually started reading Kahneman, there was no doubt that his work was a breakthrough – a crucially important breakthrough that could influence the future of our species. 

And that brings us back to the availability heuristic. This is broadly defined as making a decision or leaping to a conclusion based on the most immediately recalled memory that relates to that idea. In one of the examples, a person might say people who drive red cars get more tickets, because she has a friend with a red car who gets a lot of tickets. However, there is no data to actually support it and the reality is that it is the friend’s speeding that wins those love-notes from the justice department, not his car’s pigmentation. So if the last winter in your city was excessive, every scientist in the world must be wrong. 

(My next epiphany was that policy is formulated by politicians in very cold parts of their country. Causation! Prediction: this may be why India will soon lead environmental reform. Unlikely but logical.)

Unfortunately, there is another bias that might be enhancing the availability effect: it’s called “optimism bias” and it is a belief that we can control our future. Although we demonstrably cannot. And finally, our brains may be too small to apprehend the enormity of the disaster awaiting us. (To clarify, “smallbrainitis” is not one of Kahneman’s terms). 

Enough theories. I’ve been thinking about how marketers can address this problem. It is one they face in their own commercial sphere all the time. People make up their minds about products based on the last thing they heard. How do you correct that?

By shifting the most available memory. We need to use all of our skills at making ideas come to life, our abilities to differentiate the homogenous and commoditized, and bring that to the facts of human-caused environmental damage and its consequences. 

By making it easy to get your hands and head around. Where is the climate change equivalent of the Deficit Clock in Union Square? For that matter, where is the simple metric that signals that things are not headed in the right direction? And who is the modern-day Don Draper who will boil the matter down to its simplest, most compelling essence and spin an unforgettable morality tale around it? 

Unilever already uses the triple bottom line (people, profits, planet) in its reports to shareholders. It’s a start. 

By re-branding global warming. This tends to make every cool gust of breeze our enemy. Let’s rally behind a more potent and universally understood title, less abstract than climate change – earth crisis? World’s end? Collective suicide? 

You tell me. 

So there you have it. Who would have thought it was behavioral economics that could help us save the planet? In other words, let’s get to it, marketers.