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Since, as we know, there’s a complex matrix of need, disposable income, identity, and desire usually present in most market transactions, getting people
initially interested in a product or brand is difficult enough. But
what happens when what you’re marketing doesn’t exist yet, and may not
exist even in the future? To make things worse, what if what you’re
marketing is really just an idea, and on top of that, will only
marginally benefit you, the average consumer citizen who is being asked
to invest in it?
That is exactly the conundrum Al Gore faced leading up to the launch of the “We” campaign (short for “ We can solve the climate crisis”) in recent weeks. And much thought was put into the above set of thorny rhetorical questions, apparently. The “We” campaign logo, as the New York Times reported last Sunday, is the product of a very clever typography created by Chester Jenkins. Of extreme though subtle importance is that the “w” of the “we” features an intentionally displaced serif at the front-lower portion of the letter (in many fonts, the “w” has no lower serif, or at least not like this one placed singularly on the left-hand side), which makes the word catchy and memorable and admittedly bizarre.
As it is, the “We” logo is somewhat jarring and disorienting; it closely resembles the word you’ve always known, and yet, because of the oddly placed serif, it’s also vaguely unfamiliar. Your first instinct, then, when looking at the “we,” includes a desire to turn the word upside-down to make it read “me,” but that, too, doesn’t work because the “me” is still backward, as if in a mirror, when the logo is turned over. So, you try something else: leaving the “e” in place, you begin mentally twisting the “w” over on its own horizontal axis so that the “m” rolls into place. Over and over you spin it, watching the words interchange with themselves, which, it turns out, is the point. In participating in this flipping and flopping of the letters of the logo, you’ve played the game of seeing the “me” in the “we,” even if the two only ever line up in a sort of visual slant rhyme.
Grammatically speaking, “me” is always part of “we,” of course; that is, you can’t utter the word “we” without also including yourself—you and I are both built into the collective pronoun. Gore’s campaign, then, might be fairly regarded as an ambitious attempt at marketing pure ethical suggestion: you should take personal responsibility in our global community. The insinuation is obvious: your actions affect the world whether you realize it or not, though hopefully for Gore and everyone else, you do. At its root, “We” asks that you join a cause that is not in essence nor wholly your own. Though its website never explicitly states that the climate crisis is one that will affect the next generation more severely than the current one (probably because such a statement can’t be proven), it’s the unspoken basis of the entire project. “WE have a lot of work to do,” reads the website, and “WE is a growing number of people who believe we can solve [global warming].” Call it, if you will, the me-we-them predicament which involves, as Gore’s nonprofit agency the Alliance for Climate Protection might testify, getting us to individually buy into an idea of a future that we, in all likelihood, will never see.
The “We” campaign fundamentally markets the promise of livable future by using rather aggressive philosophical evocation. In fact, it implicitly asks, “Do you care what happens to the planet and those people who will be living on it 25 years from now?” In contrast, many scientists—James Lovelock most notably—believe it’s already too late to save the planet as we now inhabit it. And yet Al Gore perseveres in the face of such predictions. As if he’s driven by something greater than himself, he hopes that you, too, will invest in a future that you may or may not encounter in your lifetime. That investment, moreover, is not a monetary one, but rather a theoretical one that will alter how you live your comfortable life in the present. How’s that for abstract narrative marketing?
In the end, the “We” equation looks something like this: I (me) must change my behavior in hopes that others around me (we) will also do the same, the affects of which will make this place livable for people who aren’t even alive yet (them), thereby making theirs lives that much better, even if I myself will have long passed on.
You and I, the argument goes, must stop global warming for them. Now that’s a grand marketing experiment if I’ve ever seen one...especially given the consequences if it fails.
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