The following assignment is a common one among art & design academies. It was proposed to me during my foundation years in Graphic Design at Willem de Kooning in Rotterdam. Unfortunately, I was not able to find to find my old manifesto, which focused on creativity and inspiration when undertaking a design project. Although it is a standard assignment, I think it is interesting to revisit this assignment because it pushes you to interrogate where you stand (what are your believes, philosophy and values?) as a citizen and as a future brand manager.
BACKGROUND RESEARCH
MANIFESTO
”A written statement declaring publicly intentions, motives, or views of its users” (Merriam Webster, n.d.). The statement piece aims to promote a new idea with perspective notions for carrying out changes, supported by the author’s believes. It is often found as a political or artistic written form/ text like the Communist Manifesto or the Dada Manifest. Used to pass down ideas and views on the world, the manifesto could lead in a change of reader’s thinking, perception and behaviour.
CHANGE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR
Companies spend time and money to segment their audiences based on the belief, values and habits to create a more effective and personalised marketing campaign to change their brand preference. ”Marketers should be asking how consumers are alike, not how they’re different. People are much more similar than we think” explains Forbes (2018) in one of its article. The article argues that all buyers have similar associations about brands, so marketing teams must use certain codes and cues (language, imagery, music etc.) to bypass the sceptical brain and create positive associations on a subconscious level, thus leading to change in behaviour towards a brand.
Joe Boyd, CEO of Rebel Pilgrim a creative agency in Ohio (USA), Boyd explains, in one of his company’s video, how to initiate change. One of the effective ways to do it is to tell the story of your preferred future that everyone would benefit from (also known as vision casting). It starts by explaining what would be the future be like for all of us when we reach to this preferred future. So, Boyd believes that the most powerful and effective way to create impact and lead to consumer change is to tell a compelling story. By using storytelling, one can create emotion and empathy leading to behaviour change. In Forbes’ article (2018), the author explains that emotion is the outcome. ” The key is for consumers to feel a positive connection with a brand, not for brands to communicate emotions”, in other words, the feelings are the result of a consumer experience not from a message delivered by the brand. A positive emotional connection is created by tapping into positive, familiar ideas in the consumers’ memories.
In the context of the research, I am looking to create a green and sustainable consumer behaviour and change. Over the last decades, the consumption of products and services has increased exponentially and worldwide. This consumerism led to depletion of natural resources, loss of biodiversity and rapid environmental deterioration (Kostadinova, 2016). There is an urge to change this behaviour to tackle and resolve our sustainability challenges.
According to Kostadinova’s research (2016), there are two categories that influence pro-environmental behaviour:
- Individual (related to the attitudes, values, demographic characteristics and other variables that affect the consumer’s decision-making behaviour).
- Contextual/ situational factors (related to external forces which may influence sustainable consumption in a positive or negative way).
”Changing consumers’ habits is a major challenge before sustainable consumption”, concludes Kostadinova (2016). She also argues that the low-involvement everyday decision-making on a good or service contributes to the significant environmental impact and is at the heart of overconsumption (this topic is still under-researched).
The conglomerate, Unilever, claimed to have used marketing and market research to promote behaviour change through their own model called Five Levers for Change. It is a tool that the company hopes will help others to tackle big sustainability challenges. The model is based on the well-known ”trigger, behaviour, reward” explained by the psychiatrist Judson Brewer in one of the TED Talk. Unilever’s model works when looking and going through the five levers (Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, n.d.):
- Make it understood: This lever refers to raising awareness and encouraging acceptance (Do people know about the behaviour? Do they believe it is relevant to them?).
- Make it easy: This lever is about convenience and confidence (Do people know what to do and feel confident doing? Can they see it fitting into their lives?).
- Make it desirable: This lever look at ‘self and society’, because we tend to emulate the lifestyles and habits of people we respect (parents or even celebrities) and follow society’s norms (Will doing this new behaviour fit with their actual or aspirational self-image? Does it fit with how they relate to other or want to?).
- Make it rewarding: This lever refers to demonstrates the proof and payoff (Do people know when they’re doing the behaviour ‘right’? Do they get some sort of reward for doing it?).
- Make it a habit: This last lever is about reinforcing and reminding once people have made a change (What can we do to help them keep doing it?).
For the following assignment, it is important to trigger the audience by bringing knowledge and positive emotions (storytelling) into the manifesto to hope for a green and sustainable consumer behaviour change.
If we want to create a behavioural change, like our attitude and excessive petroleum consumption, many people would rely on brands to reduce its use. However, is it wise to tackle this problem by leaving it in the hands of brands and designers? If we want to raise the issue, open up a dialogue, and create change in our habits, I believe that it is better to initiate this change by targetting, what I think is the core of the problem, the (future) consumers. Consumers are creating the demand and brands/companies are responding to this demand (most of the time and cases). Of course, we shall not deny companies’ effort to reduce environmental impact, but the focus is put on consumers’ moral responsibility towards consumerism in relation to a desire for a greener and healthier environment.
PETROLEUM & SUSTAINABILITY
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, petroleum is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons that occur in Earth in a liquid, gaseous, or solid state but it is often referred to the liquid form (McLeroy, Atwater and Riva, 2018).
Out of petroleum, plastic was created and mass-produced in the 1940s and 1950s and was intensively promoted because of its transparency, lightweight, malleability, and toughness properties as well as low cost of production (Rodriguez, 2018; Thompson, Swan, Moore and vom Saal, 2009). Plastic is a polymer made of hydrocarbon chains, which is often derived from liquid petrol (Plastics Make It Possible, 2011).
Did you know that 10 tons of plastics are produced every second worldwide and 1 ton ends up in oceans every 2 seconds (Cash Investigation, 2018)? Plastic is everywhere and in everything like tap water, food (salt, beer etc.), clothing, utility tools and even within you in shape of microparticles (McDermott, 2017)!
Notes from the documentary, Cash Investigation: Plastique La Grande Intox, aired on France 2
Items that contain plastic are convenient and cheap. Many activists published photos of plastics in the oceans showing the damages caused to the environment. However, we do not simply need to understand that it is happening but we need to know why it has happened. Modernized economic countries have a high degree of environmental awareness and generally good waste management practices. Most of the plastics found in the oceans come from less modernized economic countries that didn’t establish environmental standards such as awareness among the population and setting up recycling infrastructures. We should also not forget about natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, etc. which aggravated the plastic dispersion from lands to oceans.
CONCEPT
Goal: Changing human behaviour on a small scale. Nowadays, plastic prevails over traditional materials like wood, leather, metal, glass, and ceramic. How can change consumer behaviour towards a petroleum consumption-free attitude? The manifesto is an attempt to raise awareness and ”explain” how easy can it be to reduce this excessive consumption for a plastic-free world.
Message: Reduce petroleum consumption (from excessive to a petroleum-free life).
Format: Manifesto in the shape of a pin attached to the actual manifesto text.
Visuals: Ideas are formed by associating unrelated concepts in an unexpected or unusual way (Collins, 2018). To increase the change of having greater ideas, the mind mapping tool is used. A large and unclear problem generally benefit from this tool to lay out the elements. Mind mapping is useful to create hierarchy and categorisation in a visual and clear manner allowing an easier association between ideas (Collins, 2018). A couple of sketches were also done as a visual reference for the final product.
Reference: Label pins are iconic symbols that represent causes, brands, political parties or musical artists. Cristaux (n.d.) explains that the label pins’ history may date back to Egypt in 1800 B.C. who used wire to form decorative filigree pieces. Six hundred years later the Grecian artists began using powdered glass to fill in the spaces between wires in filigree designs (Cristaux, n.d.). Label pins come from the decorative enamelled objects from ancient times, where the process of enamelling is still used nowadays for colour inlay. From a functional purpose to a decorative object (accessory), the pin became a medium for making a political or social statement displaying an attitude/ membership of a movement (Malev, 2017). The pin is a very intimate act making the wearer part of something offering a way to express him/herself to a wide audience (Malev, 2017).
Reference: Pins Won’t Save the World is a project initiated by Sagmeister & Walsh, a NY design agency, and contributed by a cohort of artists like Adam J Kurtz, Mike Perry, Timothy Goodman and Jing Wei. It focused on raising funds for charities that support causes under the threat by Trump and his administration such as Planned Parenthood, the NAACP Legal Defence Fund, ACLU, International Refugee Assistance Project, the Mexican American Legal Defence and Education Fund, and the Trevor Project (Pins Won’t Save the World, n.d.).
Photo credit: Sagmeister & Walsh (2018)
First sketches
Manifesto
Layout
The pin symbolises my manifesto and the act of wearing it proves that the owner acts accordingly to the manifesto. The pin would be attached on a recycled square brown paper card. The recto side would showcase the pin and the title of the manifesto. The verso side gives a general fact about the consumption of petroleum (a.k.a. plastic) followed by the manifesto helping the reader to change his/her consuming behaviour. At the bottom of the card, a small annotated text explains where the money is going for every pins purchase. The money could be raised for social initiatives or associations like The Plastic Bank.
Second sketches
The poppy is commonly used as an icon to remember people who lost their lives during WWI in Anglo-Saxon countries. Worn during Remembrance day, the poppy is based on a famous poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae, a Canadian soldier previously known as a poet and physician (, n.d.). Looking at this example, I decided to look at something, which can symbolise adversity through the abundance of plastics on our Earth. In the flower repertoire, dandelion is very easy to grow and do not need much attention, in fact, they are often considered like nuisances. Difficult to remove, dandelion can live on acidic soil, which makes them very resistant to harsh conditions. Microplastics can make the soil less fertile leading to a long-term negative effect on ecosystems (UN Environment, 2018). From its colour and properties, this flower inspired me to be one who prevails from this land pollution.
The yellow flower head is composed only of ray flowers (Jackson, 2015), so I imagined that a pin could be a ray and by collecting them, a dandelion could be created. Thus, a larger illustration would appear before the eyes of the viewer/owner of the pins.
FINAL RESULT
Master project?
CRITICAL REFLECTION
The concept was generally well accepted. The research and logic behind my manifesto appeared to be solid taking into account the time dedicated to the assignment. However, I was not able to show the final result because I waited too long to take a final decision about the manifesto’s content. Taking quick decision is important and I hope that I can be less indecisive in the future.
Based on the feedback, the first visual draft portrays a too negative image, which may refract people from wearing the pin. This is something that I have expected, but I found the visual representation of the manifesto rather difficult. I need to stop thinking too literally but think more metaphorically. This can be done by making a connection between the problem and something else, something unusual (Barrett, 2016). ”When you use a metaphor to link two ideas together, you are combining elements that have little or no logical connection” (Barrett, 2016). Thus, it interesting to look at the relationship between the ”tenor” (object or concept) and the ”vehicle” (what is compared to) of a metaphor (Relihan, n.d.).
After discussing with my classmates, I was pointed at looking from a positive nature perspective, meaning that nature always takes back its rights. This is something that I have future developed after the presentation. Visual thinking will also be an interesting way to stimulate my imagination, especially after reading an article on 5 Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci: sketch your ideas out 4-5 times, use annotations in your sketches, collaborate with other when you sketch, engage your imagination, and look for combinations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barrett, T. (2016, September 2,4). 9 Ways to Think More Obliquely and Develop Your Ideas [Online]. Available at: https://medium.com/startup-grind/9-ways-to-think-more-obliquely-and-develop-your-ideas-6c3abe30dd09 (Accessed: 12 November 2018)
Cash Investigation. (2018, September 11). Plastique: La Grand Intox [Online]. Available at: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-magazine/france-2/cash-investigation/cash-investigation-du-mardi-11-septembre-2018_2925427.html (Accessed: 06 November 2018)
Collins, H. (2018). Creative Research, The Theory And Practice Of Research For The Creative Industries (2nd ed.). London, UK: Bloomsbury.
Cristaux. (n.d.). A Brief History of Lapel Pins [Online]. Available at: https://www.cristaux.com/blog/history-of-lapel-pins/ (Accessed: 12 November 2018)
Dermott, A. (2017, October 11). Plastic is in Everything Now, Here are Seven Places It’s Turned Lately [Online]. Available at: https://oceana.org/blog/plastic-everything-now-here-are-seven-places-it%E2%80%99s-turned-lately (Accessed: 06 November 2018)
Forbes. (2018, September 06). How and Why Does Consumer Behavior change? [Online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/09/06/how-and-why-does-consumer-behavior-change/#7be8fdbe86dd (Accessed: 05 November 2018)
, A. (n.d.). Biography of John McCrae Flanders Fields Author [Online]. Available at: http://www.flandersfieldsmusic.com/johnmccrae-bio.html (Accessed: 30 November 2018)
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Kostadinova, E. (2016). Sustainable Consumer Behavior: Literature Overview. Economic Alternatives, 2, p. 224-234.
Malev, D. (2017). To The Point, Pins Mechanisms And Brooch Back Design. Leipzig, Germany: Winterwork.
McLeroy, P. G., Atwater, G. I., and Riva, J. P. (2018). Petroleum [Online]. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/science/petroleum (Accessed: 06 November 2018)
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Plastics Make It Possible. (2011). What Are Plastics & How Are Plastics Made? [Online]. Available at: https://www.plasticsmakeitpossible.com/about-plastics/types-of-plastics/what-are-plastics/ (Accessed: 06 November 2018)
Pins Won’t Save the World. (n.d.). About [Online]. Available at: https://www.pinswontsavetheworld.com/pages/about-us/ (Accessed: 04 November 2018)
Relihan, B. (n.d.). Four Steps to Encourage Metaphorical Thinking [Online]. Available at: https://www.crresearch.com/blog/four-steps-to-a-metaphorical-connection (Accessed: 12 November 2018)
Rodriguez, F. (2018). Plastic [Online]. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/science/plastic (Accessed: 06 November 2018)
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TED Talk. (2016, February 26). A simple way to break a bad habit | Judson Brewer [Online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-moW9jvvMr4 (Accessed: 05 November 2018)
Thompson, R. C., Swan, S. H., Moore, C. J., and vom Saal, F. S. (2009). Our Plastic Age, The Royal Society, 364 (1526), p1973-1976.
UN Environment. (2018, April 03). Plastic Planet: How Tiney Plastic Particles Are Polluting Our Soil [Online]. Available at: https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/plastic-planet-how-tiny-plastic-particles-are-polluting-our-soil (Accessed: 30 November 2018)
Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. (n.d). Inspiring Sustainable Living: Expert insights into consumer behaviour & Unilever’s Five Levers for Change [Online]. Available at: https://www.unilever.com/Images/slp_5-levers-for-change_tcm244-414399_en.pdf (Accessed: 05 November 2018)
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