ADS USE NATURE TO SELL SUVs

  • Car companies use our love of the great outdoors to sell some of the most gas-guzzling and polluting vehicles around. (Photo by Erin Norris)

Advertisers like to push your hot buttons. One of them is your
attraction to nature. Car companies use our love of the great outdoors
to sell some of the most gas-guzzling and polluting vehicles around.
Kyle Norris takes a look at how car ads work:

Transcript

Advertisers like to push your hot buttons. One of them is your
attraction to nature. Car companies use our love of the great outdoors
to sell some of the most gas-guzzling and polluting vehicles around.
Kyle Norris takes a look at how car ads work:


Have you ever noticed that car commercials have a lot of nature in
them? The car that’s being sold is always climbing up a boulder or
ripping through the mud. Like this commercial:


(Commerical:) “The new Jeep Liberty Renegade…”


A Native-American looking man drives over some rugged terrain when he comes
across a seal stranded on the ice.


(Commercial:) “It gives you the power to conquer nature…”


As he approached the seal and raised a harpoon over his head, you
thought he was going to hurt the seal.


(Commercial:) “…as well as the ability to protect it.” (chirping and hooting)


Instead, he plunges a hole in the ice and another seal pops out its
head to be reunited with the first. Then the commercial ends with
the sound of chirping crickets and the hoot of an owl.


But listen to that announcer one more time:


(Commercial:) “It gives you the power to conquer nature as well as the
ability to protect it.”


Over the next decade, Generation Y will be elbowing out the Baby
Boomers in the marketplace. So you’ll be seeing fewer commercials about
conquering nature and more about protecting it.


Here’s why that’s happening: according to researchers, Generation Y
cares strongly for the environment and they’re willing put their money
where their mouth is. Whereas Boomers theoretically care they’re a lot less
willing to financially back that concern.


But for everyone, nature speaks to something inside us. And advertisers
know this. Art Spinelli is the president of CNW Research:


“Well, for the most part, most consumers have an enormous response to
natural settings, whether it’s the agrarian part of just human nature
or human beings.”


He calls this response a hot button. Spinelli says advertisers use it
to sell everything from beer to cars.


“…And it plays off of a really instinctive basic attitude that a lot
of consumers have. Kind of like going on vacation to somewhere and
looking around and going, gee, I could really live here. This would be
terrific but the reality is that I have a job and it happens to be in
an urban or suburban environment and I can’t leave that to live in the
desert.”


Car salespeople will also tell you we have this nature hot button. They
say it’s all about knowing you could drive in the rugged
wilderness if you needed to. Here’s a car salesman who goes
simply by the name of Mike:


“They want to be able to know they can do it um, but it doesn’t
happen. They never do it. I think I had an Explorer once myself,
and the most off-roading – it was in the wintertime – and I think
I went on the sidewalk or something. That was the most off-roading I ever did.”


So what are people actually doing with their vehicles? Is it anything
like the commercials? Well, it’s not just about conquering mountain tops:


(Consumer 1:) “I’m driving a Toyota 4-Runner. I need something to tow my boat and I was
looking for a quality car.”


(Consumer 2:) “Part of the reason I brought a little SUV is I like to sit up high and the SUV
can really offer the height.”


(Consumer 3:) “I don’t actually go off-roading with it. I can get away for weekends and
pack a load of gear. I can tow a light trailer. It’s just a good all-around sport utility vehicle.”


(Consumer 4:) “I’ve helped friends move before and all the seats, the entire back folds down and
I can fit a whole full mattress in the back.”


So, turns out most people aren’t mud bogging on a regular basis, but it’s
important to them to have the option to mud bog. And advertisers are
hip to this desire. Car buyers can keep this fantasy alive as long as
they’re willing to fork over some serious cash for the price of the
vehicle and the cost of gas.


Car salesmen say the number one thing buyers ask them about is money, as in
how much will I have to spend. They say potential buyers never
ask them about off-roading or driving through nature, but they know that inkling is there.


For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Winter Sledding Audio Postcard

  • This audio postcard captures that moment as a kid when sledding down a hill is the ultimate thrill ride. (Photo by Lester Graham)

There’s a lot of talk about the effects of global warming. But on a
recent frigid night, kids were thinking only of the cold and the thrill
of sledding down a hill. Producer Kyle Norris squeezed into the back of
a couple of sleds with the kids. She has this audio postcard
of the experience:

Transcript

There’s a lot of talk about the effects of global warming. But on a
recent frigid night, kids were thinking only of the cold and the thrill
of sledding down a hill. Producer Kyle Norris squeezed into the back of
a couple of sleds with the kids. She has this audio postcard
of the experience:


“My name is Kayli Mills and I’m twelve years old. Right now we’re
sledding and we’re actually snowboarding because last year we didn’t
really get to do much. It’s dark right now and it’s really fun to do it
in the dark not only is the hill clear, but um, and it’s quiet and
everything but it’s just really fun when you really can’t see much.”


“We’re getting on the sled and you want to sit how it’s most
comfortable to you because you don’t want to fall off, for sure,
especially with two people. Um, I’m sitting just on my butt but with my
legs hanging off. But I’m going to go on my knees in a second when we
take off, just doing this so that the sled doesn’t take off on its
own.”


(Sounds of sledding down the hill)


“Isn’t that fun? Go C.J.!”


“My name is C.J. and I’m nine years old. I smell snow and woods and
we’re at the bottom of Slauson Hill ’cause we just went down and it’s
really dark out and the clouds are white and the sky it blue. Well,
it’s creepy kind of cause, cause it’s a really steep hill.”


(Sounds of the sled thrown down on snow)


“We just sat down and we’ll probably go pretty fast but I don’t know.”


(Sounds of sledding)


“That was fun. That was really fun.”


(Kayli): “Definitely the wind in your hair is the best part….”


(C.J.): “It makes your cheek red when you go down like about five times
cause the wind blows into your cheeks really hard.”


(Kayli): “I’d say that if you look at the sky it’s very, very
beautiful I think even more than the day could even be. I mean, there’s
not really a sunset but you can kind of see the colors fading in from a
blue to a pink a yellow to a blue it’s almost like a rainbow but the
whole clouds are just a rainbow, dark skies. It’s very pretty right
now.”


(Sound of sled fades out).


Host tag: Those were the sounds of Kayli, C.J., and Austin braving the cold for
an evening sled on Slauson Hill in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Nature Therapy Breaks New Ground

A therapy session might not be the place you’d expect to hear talk about Mother Nature. But some therapists believe the natural world and our personal lives are intimately connected, and they’re finding that nature can play a key role in the healing process. Kyle Norris has this story:

Transcript

A therapy session might not be the place you’d expect to hear talk about Mother Nature. But some therapists believe the natural world and our personal lives are intimately connected, and they’re finding that nature can play a key role in the healing process. Kyle Norris has this story:


Clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Franseen talks to people about their personal problems. Over time their discussions broaden-out. They talk about relationships with things like people, money, pets, and the environment around them – the earth. But when she gets to the earth, she doesn’t ask her clients about their relationships with it.


“The only way you can have a relationship with something is if you’re separate from it. But it’s as silly as talking about, ‘yeah I have a relationship with my gallbladder, how about you?’ It’s like ‘no we don’t, my gallbladder’s just a part of me.’ And really that’s what’s going on with the earth; we are as much a part of it as everything else is.”


Franseen believes that many of our physical and mental ailments happen when we forget this connection. Several years ago, she started incorporating the earth into her work. She found that this technique helped people transform an insane world, as opposed to adapt to one.


“We can’t just stop with relationship with self, relationship with family, relationship with community. We need to just keep taking it out as far as we can go. It includes relationship with all.”


The idea that “we are the earth” can sound a little weird to some people. At least one of her clients, 71 year-old Steve Morse, thought so at first. Morse considers regular therapy to be part of his spiritual practice. He works with Franseen in both individual and group sessions. Franseen asked Morse’s group to walk into the woods, sit alone for an hour, and listen for a message. A message from the birds, trees, and sky. When he heard this assignment Morse was skeptical.


“Well as a guy, you know, you don’t do this, it’s ‘whoa!’ it’s too new agey, too off-the-page, too goofy, it’s not masculine. There’s all kinds of reasons that this is not something that you do.”


As Morse sat alone in the woods, something he saw struck him. He noticed a pine seedling that was getting choked-out by the shade of an old tree. He thought to himself that the seedling would probably die, but that it didn’t know that. Morse said that observing the trees gave him consider new ideas about anxiety and unnecessary suffering.


Experts say one of the most powerful things about the natural world is how quickly it takes us to a place deep within ourselves. Jed Swift is the director of the eco-psychology concentration at Naropa University.


“The backdrop of nature, the emersion, what we call the emersion in nature, just stirs up so much emotional and unconscious material for people about safety, about risk, about their health, their survival, about fear, about well being and wholeness and unity, that a lot of therapists are finding that it can speed up the therapeutic process.”


Swift says that far too often, people perceive nature as a backdrop to the human experience. By remembering our connection to the natural world, he says we can enhance our health and our personal sense of identity.


Therapist Lisa Franseen says that for her, nature is a teacher and an inspiration.


“You know the tree grows to be a tree because that’s what it’s here to do, so that gives me hope that like, ‘ok’, then I’m here to do something, and I will just follow through with what I’m here to do.”


One of Franseen’s clients says that her whole life changed when she realized that she was not separate from the earth. The client said that nature also helped her to hear her own answers to life’s questions.


These techniques might not be for everyone, but many people who have used them say that nature helped open their senses to something that they might have missed on their own.


For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Commentary – Learning From Dog Culture

  • Kyle's dog, Lucy, playing on a tennis court. (Photo by Patrick Sweeney)

For most people – meeting a stranger on the street isn’t something that conjures up the warm fuzzies, but if the stranger happens to be a cute dog that’s a little different. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator and new dog owner Kyle Norris wonders why this is:

Transcript

For most people – meeting a stranger on the street isn’t something that
conjures up the warm fuzzies, but if the stranger happens to be a cute dog
that’s a little different. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s commentator
and new dog owner Kyle Norris wonders why this is:


At age 30, I’m new to dog culture. Growing up my dad was pretty much
allergic to everything with fur. My childhood pets were goldfish, Lizzy the
lizard, and a tiny turtle we found in a neighbor’s pond. Lucy’s the first real
pet I’ve ever owned.


Lucy is 100-percent mutt. When I first saw her last year, my heart melted
into a puddle. She was this trembling little fur-ball with deep-brown,
gumdrop eyes. In the past year, she’s grown into a sweet, skinny, medium-
sized pup.


The thing that struck me the most as a new dog-owner was the way
strangers responded to her.


This summer I was walking Lucy through a campground with my girlfriend. We passed a
man in a lawn-chair, clutching a cold one. He looked up, “That’s a good-
looking dog you got there, lady.”


Compliments like that are small potatoes for Lucy. Another time, my
girlfriend and I were walking the pup downtown. We passed a fancy
restaurant with sidewalk tables. Suddenly this glamorous-looking woman
cried out-loud. “Well hell-o gorgeous!” It caught me off-guard. I thought
she was talking to me. For that frozen moment of time, I felt slick, and then I
watched her bend down and nuzzle Lucy’s face.


People pour their love on Lucy like butter. “Love” might not be the right
word. Maybe it’s adoration or a combination of warm gooey feelings.
Whatever it is, these people open a floodgate inside themselves, and they
do it in a way that they’d never do with human strangers.


Maybe it’s easier to open-up to creatures. The dog on the street wants very
little from us, and that is refreshing.


Sometimes the dog-walker can use this point to their advantage. On
weekends, my sister used to borrow Lucy with the hope of meeting guys.
They would walk into the heart of downtown, where things were buzzing
with foot traffic. They’d loop the main drag and then hit the smaller side
streets.


It didn’t take long until my sister became frustrated. Potential boyfriends
didn’t even notice the pup. Instead, sorority girls, couples, and families
threw themselves at Lucy—not exactly the crowd she was going for.


My sister has this theory about why people open-up to animals and not each
other. She says, “Animals are free love tied to the end of a string.”


At first, I felt funny when people gave Lucy their “love-fests.” I was on
the receiving end of their attention but I wasn’t really the recipient. Now I
appreciate their interactions for what they are—good intentions released
into the world.


I know the ability to open our hearts in us. I experience it through Lucy
every day. I just wonder why we can’t be this open and generous with one-
another. Or maybe we could. If we were cuter, fuzzier, and didn’t talk so
much.


Host Tag: Kyle Norris is a freelance writer, who lives with her puppy in Ann Arbor,
Michigan.