Tell the story

A lot of sustainable travel initiatives and technologies are inherently interesting. You can weave stories around them.

To take SAF as an example: In a previous section we mentioned both Swiss company Synhelion which turns sunlight into fuel, as well as Fulcrum, which takes household trash and uses it as the basis for SAF.

United is doing exactly that. As part of its “Good leads the way” advertising campaign, the airline produced ads saying, “this is the story of trash becoming fuel. It’s sci-fi without the fi.”

Then it says it is, “investing more in sustainable aviation fuel production than any other airline in the world.”

Note that the United ad doesn’t say anything about ‘carbon neutral flying.’ Instead it talks about trash into SAF, which is a thing. And then it highlights its investment in SAF..

It says in concrete terms what it’s doing to make flying less carbon intensive, and presenting it in an interesting way.

If anything, we think United can go further and actually involve the consumer in showing how his or her trash becomes jet fuel through videos, graphics and articles.

Activists might challenge the fact that household waste into fuel is a viable solution, in the past they’ve done so, but they can’t challenge the fact that it’s happening.

How much of a difference it makes in reducing emissions (and it does make a difference) can then be debated.

But the point is, it’s then a completely different debate to the one about whether ‘carbon neutral flying’ is true or false.

Similarly, earlier on we mentioned the report from Greenpeace Netherlands and DeSmog about airline advertising, which cited the fact that SAS talks about electric aeroplanes a lot.

That report was released in May 2022 and looked at ads that ran in 2021 immediately after the end of the COVID travel restrictions.

Since then, there has been a lot of progress when it comes to electric / hybrid-electric and hydrogen-electric aircraft, and again there is potential to tell a story.

In particular, if we take SAS as an example, it’s intending to buy the new Heart ES30 hybrid-electric aircraft, and is a Heart shareholder.

How can that agreement be brought to life? Here are a few examples.

First of all, new technology is interesting to the consumer and media if presented in the right way. Trevor Noah even did a segment on Air Canada’s commitment to buy 30 ES-30 aircraft on the Daily Show.

Sure, he had a lot of fun with it, joking for example if the pilot would have to ask passengers for their spare charging packs when the plane runs out of power, but the end result is a lot more people ended up knowing that Air Canada will be flying electric (or hybrid-electric) aircraft.

Electric aircraft also solve many of the problems associated with regional and subregional aviation - noise, operating cost and emissions.

The result is that many moribund commuter airports could be brought back to life.

NASA produced a report on this, looking at how more sustainable ‘Regional Air Mobility’ could result in you flying from the closest airport to you “that you never even knew you existed” (we discuss the NASA RAM study in our next generation aircraft report ).

As a result, use your investment in next generation aircraft to talk about how they can be transformational for a lot of communities, and how flying will become both more convenient and less carbon intensive. This can have a real impact, for you.

Also, talk about what the passenger experience will be like in flying in an aircraft with drastically lower noise levels - magniX and Harbour Air have some research here around their retrofitted Beaver aircraft, “showing noise energy levels that are at least 100 times lower.”

By doing all this, you make the customer part of your sustainability journey, while sticking to what you are actually doing and avoiding vague and easily challenged statements about being ‘CO2 neutral’ or similar.

Developing sustainability story-telling campaigns is one of the themes of our sustainability marketing master-class. See the end of the document for more details.