Earth hour
Rosie Baker is Marketing Week’s specialist on sustainability and retail – and the two topics often go hand-in-hand. Her blog focuses on all things to do with sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility and ethical business.
I feel bad because I forgot Earth Hour.
On Saturday (26 March) hundreds of thousands of people around the globe switched off their lights and electricals for an hour to mark Earth Hour. The Eiffel Tower did it, The Sydney opera House did it, the billboards in London’s Piccadilly did it.
Hundreds of thousands more people, myself included, didn’t do it.
What’s my excuse? I don’t have one. I just plain forgot. That’s despite talking about it in the Marketing Week office the week prior, telling my boyfriend why it was a good idea and making a note to myself to remember.
I fully support the idea, I buy into the concept of encouraging mass action to raise the issue in the mind of consumers, but it still slipped my mind.
I know that the campaign isn’t just about this one hour, it’s about sparking long term behaviour change, however small, but what could the campaign have done to engage me and make me follow through? And what realistic steps can I take every day to contribute?
As an aside, there was a certain unavoidable irony to there being a global TV ad campaign to push Earth Hour via the very medium that would be switched off.
