Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to Business Insider, renowned marketing expert Seth Godin suggested in an interview that “atmosphere cancer” would be a far more engaging term to promote climate action, than “global warming” or “climate change”.

‘Call it atmosphere cancer’ – How the world’s best-known marketer would tackle global warming

Tom Turula 26 Jan 2018 6:03 PM

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Much of Seth Godin’s work – his famous blog; his books and TED talks – convey the following: No product or idea will spread just because of a brilliant technology or rock solid facts. In essence, people will respond to stories that stand out, which creates culture, changes behaviors, and leads to change.

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“Just look at what happened with gay marriage in the US in the last 10 years. It went from being safe and respectable to be against, to something that no one speaks up against anymore.”

“Did everybody change their mind? Of course not.”

“What changed was the culture, and the culture was changed because of the story,” Godin says. “People like us do things like this. That’s it, that’s all we got.”

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“For starters, global is a good thing and warming is a good thing. If [the scientists] had called it ‘Atmosphere Cancer’, they probably would have started on a better footing: because atmosphere is scientific and cancer is a bad thing. There are no cancer deniers. Everyone knows that cancer is a chronic and degenerative disease, and you need to stop it soon. ”

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