Country music and climate conversations

If the crowd at last week’s Chris Stapleton show was any indication that his unabashed, Kentucky-rooted form of country music has crossed audiences, then I’d say he’s one of the more widely accepted artists of our time. From my little corner of the arena, I spotted the over-50 crowd (yes, that would be me), a row of high school kids in wannabe college frat t-shirts, belt-buckled boot-wearing rail riders, fancy folks, country folk, girls in cutoffs, moms in cardigans. All singing together about Tennessee Whiskey.

The collective effervescence of that night felt less about music that’s crossed genres and more about broad audience appeal within a narrow category. It’s nothing new. Lady Gaga and Tony Bennet brought jazz standards to a young pop audience, Jimmy Fallon brought The Roots to The Tonight Show, NBC brought Snoop Dogg to the Olympics. But it left me wondering how I’d ended up there.

I grew up across Lake Pontchartrain on the North Shore of New Orleans, which any true New Orleanian will tell you is not New Orleans. And even though New Orleans is in the coastal south, many southerners will tell you it’s not the south. So being “not from the south,” my musical upbringing leaned more Neville Brothers than Waylon and Willie and the boys. Maybe that’s how I developed a sort of allergic reaction to country music and why it’s a bit jarring that some country has started to creep into my musical tastes.

Chris Stapleton says he welcomes everyone in with music that’s real, even if it’s not your world. It starts with a lyric that speaks to you, then a song that stirs you, then another and another, and the next thing you know you’ve bought tickets to an arena show that starts at 9pm on Tuesday night.

The same kind of welcoming can and should happen with climate conversations. For as much as we hear about the world on fire, wildfires aren’t in everyone’s back yard.

But we still need everyone to care.

That’s why we’ve got to ease people in, we can’t expect them to go straight to boots and a belt buckle just because they like one country song.

Strategy One: Create connection.

As communicators, it’s up to us to create a connection that will welcome audiences into the conversation and then ultimately, and maybe a lot further down the road, spur action that will result in change. It’s a process. As my favorite climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says, when talking about climate every one of us has some way to connect with another person. On a personal level it could be a shared love for a special place like the mountains of Colorado, or a favorite food like summer tomatoes, or a water sport like diving. Find the connection, then gently move into the conversation.

For marketers it could be enticing audiences with a metaphor like Ben & Jerry’s did when they explained a warming climate with a melting ice cream video. Sure, it’s an ice cream ad. But it’s also an opportunity to connect over a shared love of ice cream while introducing the concept of a warming climate to a wider audience.  

Strategy Two: Start small.

Unless you have the time, budget, and firepower to reach all of your audiences across various channels in one fell swoop, then taking a small bite at a time is a pathway to progress. We’ve seen clients who need to make inroads with a key stakeholder group around a key topic area, so they’ll focus communication efforts there first. It could be a series of thought leadership pieces directed at C-Suite leaders to generate buy-in around a specific topic like the impact of corporate travel on the company’s carbon footprint. Or it could be a campaign to inform and engage your employees around climate initiatives. Yes, big campaigns are powerful, but hyper-targeted ones that are easier to execute can be equally effective for communicating on climate.

Strategy Three: Say it with a story.

You had to know I was coming back to storytelling. To bring more people into the conversation we have to speak with messages that light up their brains. Rolling Stone agreed (yes, they’re talking about climate in Rolling Stone!) in a recent piece on climate-driven storytelling: “Whether storytelling is immersive or investigative, scripted or unscripted, or fact or fiction, if a moral argument is at play and if a character is transformed, consumers will be captivated. If the world can come together to form a united front addressing climate change, it could be the most transformative story of our time.”

If a moral argument is at play and if a character is transformed, consumers will be captivated.

I’m here for the transformation. I mean, if this pseudo southerner can find her way to country music, anythings’ possible.