Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP)
Audience Strategy • Coalition Building • Public Engagement
The Need
When BICEP - a coalition of major American companies including Nike, Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Patagonia, and eBay - set out to build business support for climate & energy policy, the conventional playbook was already well established. Appeal to people who already cared deeply about climate change and hope the movement grew from there. That wasn't going to work with multinational corporations.
On pitch day, the other firms, including some large global agencies, arrived with large teams and elaborate presentations. We walked into the room without a deck and simply had a conversation. BICEP later told us they were concerned when we arrived - and knew they had found their partner when we left.
The Assignment
Our breakthrough in crafting the message came from the pioneering Six Americas research developed by Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale University and Dr. Ed Maibach at George Mason University. Rather than treating Americans as a single audience, their work demonstrated that people occupy six distinct positions on climate change, each motivated by different beliefs and values. Working directly with Tony and Ed, we built our strategy around the audiences most likely to move - not the ones already under the tent, or the ones who never would. The objective was more nuanced than simply to persuade the middle. It was to move the center without needlessly alienating the people who were never going to agree anyway. That insight completely reframed the assignment.
The goal wasn't to make environmental organizations sound more persuasive. It was to give mainstream American companies permission to support climate action without asking them to become environmental advocates. We created the Climate Declaration around American competitiveness, innovation, leadership, and economic opportunity. Even individual words mattered. We chose "tackle" climate change because it both embraced our most popular sport and sounded like Americans solving a problem together - not participating in another political fight.
The Result
The declaration launched with just over thirty companies, many already identified with environmental leadership. Then something different happened. Hundreds of additional companies joined, including some of America's largest and most recognizable brands, like Microsoft and GM. The declaration had become a place where business leaders could publicly support climate action without feeling they had to change who they were to do it.
When President Obama introduced his Climate Action Plan at Georgetown University, he referenced the Climate Declaration by name, citing the growing coalition of American businesses supporting action on climate change. It was a gratifying moment - not because the White House noticed our work, but because it demonstrated that language developed to unite business leaders had become part of the national conversation.