“Marry Me” and CO2

In 2010, a Japanese artist named Yassan proposed to his girlfriend by spelling the words “marry me” employing several GPS routes inside Japan. The feat also earned Yassan the Guinness Record for world’s biggest GPS drawing. As Yassan completed a big part of his journey by foot, he was later contacted by a sports company, probably seeking some branding boost. A few months later, Japan Airlines sponsored an even bolder enterprise: spelling the word “peace” on the surface of the earth. Here’s a snapshot of the story:

Inspiring, right? As a marketing strategy, this seems to be on point. After all, recent studies have shown that corporate social responsibility efforts promote a positive brand image among customers (Chattananon, 2007). Being linked to the advancement of world peace is something a company definitely wants. However, as praiseworthy and inspiring as this journey might seem, there are other aspects of it which are controversial.

While watching the video, I could not help but wonder about the amount of CO2 emissions that resulted from all these flights. I decided to crunch the numbers based on the figures at the beginning of the video. Yassan travelled more than 105734 km. At about 0.0001588 tonnes per km flown (assuming Yassan flew coach, which I doubt), the CO2 emissions of the whole journey total 16.79 tonnes, approximately. Just to have a reference point, this is more or less equivalent to four years of emission of an average Chinese person.

My numbers could strike some people as plain stupidity. After all, the guy is promoting world peace, something that more than offsets his emissions. (By the way, if you want to do something about your emissions, go to myclimate.org, where you can calculate your emissions and help fund sustainability projects that can help reduce your environmental impact). However, there are good reasons to doubt this conclusion. It all comes down to the uncertainty issue. There is simply no way to know the impact the peace message had on the artist’s audience, and I suspect it was insignificant. As psychologist and marketers know, people are not very good at connecting abstract messages with action. This means that if you want to create any kind of behavioural change, you have to be as specific as possible and tell people exactly how they should proceed. This is the idea that drives effective calls to action in things such as webpage design, or SMART objectives or goals in management (including personal) settings.

On the other hand, I cannot even think of a way that could have been possibly used to measure the societal impact of a peace message. And, conceding Yassan’s drawing can be considered art, other art forms are in a similar position. How we should go about measuring the impact of John Lennon’s “Imagine”, or Mike Wells’s “Starving boy and missionary”? It seems that uncertainty is unavoidable and should not be an obstacle for art. Nonetheless, uncertainty cannot justify art when certainty stands in its way; we can quantify very accurately the amount of CO2 emissions of several of transatlantic flights around the world.

References

Chattananon, A., Lawley, M., Trimetsoontorn, J., Supparerkchaisakul, N. & Lackana Leelayouthayothin, (2007) “Building corporate image through societal marketing programs”, Society and Business Review, Vol. 2 Issue: 3, pp.230-253, https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680710825442