| If you want a winning climate message, try love. That's the takeaway John Marshall is trying to spread after three decades advising marketing executives at big brands such as General Motors. "One day my kid accosted me and said, 'You're selling credit cards and shampoo," Marshall recalls. "'There's a bigger problem out there.'" So he teamed up with Dan Schrag, director of the Harvard Center for the Environment, to create the nonprofit marketing firm Potential Energy. "Our goal is to create demand for climate policy," says Marshall, who also teaches marketing at Dartmouth College. "We ask: How do we get people to care and act on climate change, and then design and implement programs to make that happen? … Marketing is actually a science." For decades, climate advocates have cycled through messaging strategies, each one emerging out of the frustrations of the last. In 2006, "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's data-heavy movie about a dangerously warming planet, inaugurated the effort to cast the problem in conceptual, global terms. Later came a focus on the benefits of clean energy and green jobs, followed by a heightened emphasis on climate justice. Most recently, advocacy groups have been debating the merits of prioritizing hope over fear. "I don't care about any of that," says Marshall, whose firm has served more than 3 billion digital climate ads over the last four years. "I have analytics so I can tell you what works and what doesn't work." To test this, Potential Energy recently tested different climate messages with about 60,000 people in 23 countries representing most of the world's population. On average, it found, 77 percent of people agreed with this statement: "It is essential that our government does whatever it takes to limit the effects of climate change." Only 10 percent disagreed. But not all arguments performed equally well. Limits — as in buying less, driving less and banning stoves — proved a less effective argument. The words "mandate," "ban" or "phaseout" reduced support for climate policies by as much as 20 percentage points. Yet one argument for action on climate change — "protecting the planet for future generations" — proved to be the most effective, garnering a majority in every country. That message outdid others including creating jobs, reducing social inequality and guarding against extreme weather. The findings held across age groups, levels of education, income, political affiliation and family status. | 
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