Lable Yourself as Green
Get A GGB Seal by Making A SMALL Change in Your Office
A TRUSTED ECOLOGICAL LABEL
PART ONE LABEL INTRODUCTION
- How It Works
Studies show that if people
don’t see an organisation as “green”, they won’t fully trust that it’s an eco-friendly
organisation, even if what they are doing is actually “green”. The way
that the ecological label of our chosen organisation works is exactly through the
easiest, most direct method of communicating the green status of businesses by rewarding
them with a green ecological label.
Social
cause
In these
rapidly developing economic times, businesses are looking to not only protect
the environment but also participate in the benefits of reduced energy and
material costs.
Impact
Our
chosen organisation--the Green Business Bureau helps companies implement environmentally responsible
practices in the workplace and gives them visibility for doing so. Making them
to realize that being
good to the environment is good for business and helping companies to excel their
success along both dimensions.
Workings
1. Supporting
companies by recognising their commitment to environmental responsibility
2. Guiding
businesses to reach their goals by providing eco-friendly programs
3. Keeping
member companies informed about the latest environmental news and regulations
that affect their businesses.
PART TWO PERSUASION VIDEO
PART THREE PERSUASION PHILOSOPHY
Before analysing the details of our video, we would like to share a bit
about our persuasion philosophy with regard to making this short video.
We believe that making a
persuasive video is not so much about how long it takes. It’s about involving —
taking the selected audience into our wonderland by using the art of persuasion.
Persuasion
is the process of negotiating the acceptance, that in order to persuade people
to pay attention to our ecological label, we want to lead them into an ontology
of emotions—both cognition and emotions. Therefore, instead of advocating the
benefits of getting one of our ecological labels or the importance of being
eco-friendly through the whole video, we focused on one specific theme of
environmental depredation—deforestation, following by a fairly elaborate part
of exactly how people could save the environment by changing a little bit of
their behaviors.
Cognitive Part
The late Harvard Business School Marketing Professor, Ted
Levitt, once commented, "people buy 1/4-inch drill bits not because they
want a 1/4-inch drill bit, but because they want a 1/4-inch hole". We
applied Mr. Levitt’s idea by showing a big picture of the seriousness of
deforestation without mentioning directly of saving resources in working place,
whereas our ultimate intention is to persuade people to take some actions of
doing so.
Emotional Part
We have learned a persuasion process that generates positive
emotions has a greater ability to engage audiences, thereby making emotional video
more memorable. Millward Brown, a global brand consultancy, found that
emotional appeals have greater audience involvement than those who focused on
delivering a rational message. Therefore, instead of repeating the same message
during the whole video, what we decided to do is to provide our audience a
journey, from knowing the world’s deforestation status along with the
consequences of that, so as to make our finally statement of reducing paper-waste
stronger.
Mutual Co-existence
Finally, we believe that the two parts enjoy mutual
co-existence. It is by putting the two of them together that makes our video
more persuasive.
PART FOUR VIDEO ANALYSE
l Logos
The simplicity and clarity of
the claim
There
are several parts in our video that show simplicity and clarity. One of them
would be at the very beginning, instead of using a complex definition of
deforestation from Wikipedia, we chose to explain it in the simplest way—the trees
on earth are disappearing.
Authority/Credibility
Since
we are no expertise in environmental field, we tried to add more accurate
information into our video. For instance, showing figures about deforestation
helps to add credibility of our movie. These figures will make our audience be
more sure about the things they are watching and seeing are based on scientific
facts.
l Ethos
Listening and Personalising
After
telling the story about deforestation status, we asked a question to our
audience about what they can do to help, which will be able to get our audience
more involved into our process of persuasion.
Humor
As
heavy as the topic of deforestation is, we would NOT like to torn down the emotions
of our audience too much. Therefore, we adopted a comic style video by using
some funny pictures like “a bunch of sad trees being cut off” to make this
video a bit more humorous.
l Pathos
Pathos
is associated with emotional appeal. But we think that a better equivalent
might be 'appeal to the audience's sympathies and imagination.' We used the
most common way of conveying a pathetic appeal through narrating the
seriousness of deforestation, which can turn the abstractions of logic into
something palpable and present for our audience.
In
our video, there is an amazing scene of our mother planet seen from the
universe.
It helps to evoke a strong feeling of how lucky we are to live on such a beautiful planet. Moreover, the values, beliefs, and understandings of the intention of our video are implicit in the narrative and conveyed imaginatively to our audience.
And
finally we believe that both the emotional and the imaginative impact of our
video on an audience will move the audience to decision or action of changing
their behaviours.
PART FIVE A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE OF PERSUASION
As has been presented in our video, we use the hyperbole to show what we want to tell. People can be
shocked by the consequences of deforestation through the pictures in the video,
and as the daily workers in the office, what we can do to do something positive
is saving typing papers.
At the first sight of the logic of what we put in the
video, people may be surprised about the power of saving typing papers can
influence the protection of forest. Hong Kong is a financial metropolis, the
rhythm of life and work is very fast, the consumption of typing papers is huge,
the main of which is used by office workers, such us faxing, typing daily
agenda, printing documents and so on.
If we just make change in one office, it
may not able to produce much effect, but there are humorous numbers of offices
in lots of companies in Hong Kong, then what we can do in just one office can
lead to a huge consequence, which must help to reduce the consumption of wood,
and we can protect the forests indirectly.
Based on our life experiences in Hong
Kong, paper is needed everywhere, and we can do something to save them.
Handerchief for food, we can use it two persons with one piece; Toilet paper
for WC, we can pull it out slower to save it; And also we can use e-books to
substitute a part of primary books, and save the paper. So in the offices, we
use even more papers than what I mentioned before, we have to do some job to
save papers without hesitation, and adjusting the printing style is simple and
effective, why not putting it into practice?
In our video
clip, the audience can see the harm from deforestation, the bad condition of
cutting down lots of trees, the horrible sand storm, the greenhouse effect, sea
level has risen a lot and so on.
All of what we can see is terrible and severe,
it may let most people think about what on earth the place we live in is, and
then we may think about the real action we can do proactively. Our group
chooses the specific point, which is saving the printing papers in offices, and
we tell everyone the action about adjusting the paper before printing out,
everyone can know it clearly in the video. And how about the real effect of
this action?
There is a simple calculation in the video, just “minus 1” can
save almost 20 billion sheets of paper for just one year. We think the specific
figure is the powerful evidence to let people realize the effect.
So even
though the action of individual is small, and it’s easy to get it, but the
effect is huge. What a simple effort to make a big influence on reduce
deforestation. Above all, we think that the impact of the vision, the influence
of the real characteristic, and the simple action will make sense among the
audience, they could learn something useful from our video, and then put it
into practice.
REFERENCE
1 Bobert.
Cialdini, Harnessing the Science of
Persuasion, HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, October 2001(72-79)
2 David A.
Garvin, Michael A. Roberto, Change
Through Persuasion, HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, May 2009 (104-112)
3 JAY A.
CONGER, THE NECESSARY ART OF PERSUASION,
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, May-June 1998(86-95)
4 Samuel Nii
Ardey Codjoe, Long-term Determinants of
Deforestation, African Development Review, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2009, 558-588
