The Art of Persuasion-Lable Yourself as Green

 

Lable Yourself as Green

Get A GGB Seal by Making A SMALL Change in Your Office

A TRUSTED ECOLOGICAL LABEL

http://www.ecolabelindex.com/ecolabel/gbb

 

 

 

 

 

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