When discussing the climate crisis, Susan DobschaMetaphors matter, says Dr.
As a MarketingDobscha is a professor who understands well how language can influence consumer behavior and public opinion. And in a new chapter in “The Routledge Companion to Marketing and Feminism,” she and co-author Andrea Prothero, of University College Dublin, argue that the widespread use of war metaphors to describe climate change has done little to advance sustainability issues. Their argument is that ecofeminism principles of interconnectedness, collaboration, and collaboration are a better strategy. “Instead of ‘confronting’ the climate crisis, we need to ‘connect’ with it,” Dobscha says.
A WAR OF WORDS
“Perhaps no other metaphor in marketing has had more endurance than the war metaphor,” Dobscha notes. Indeed, military terminology is prevalent in the marketing lexicon, where companies launch strategic advertising “campaigns,” employ “guerilla marketing” tactics and engage in “price wars” to achieve victory in a business battleground where success is measured by market share.
This militaristic mentality has now “seeped into sustainability discourse,” Dobsha says, as evidenced by World War ZeroFormer Secretary of State John Kerry launched the initiative titled “The Future is Now,” in 2019. Characterized by the New York Times as a “bipartisan coalition of world leaders, military brass and Hollywood celebrities,” the group aims to raise public awareness of the dangers of global warming and achieve net-zero carbon emissions for the planet by 2050.
