Positive communication is a plastics powerhouse
Philip Law, Director-General of the British Plastics Federation, discusses PVC’s public image, and how social media movements could hold the key to promoting a more positive image of plastics across other industry sectors.
The imminence of the Brighton PVC Conference causes me to reflect on the power of industry communications. Without a doubt PVC is in a much better place than it was, say, 15 years ago. There are a whole range of factors, both internal to the industry and external, which have caused this improved positioning.
Personally, I think that the ramping up of PVC recycling in a systematic way across Europe under the aegis of Vinyl 2010 and VinylPlus have had a lot to do with it because this gave us the substance for positive communications. It was actually doing what we said, across Europe, that made the difference. When challenged ‘What is the industry doing about the PVC issue?’ the answers suddenly became very easy to construct and enabled the industry to speak with absolute confidence and conviction.
It should be feasible to do this across the board in the plastics industry. There are innovations left, right and centre to products and processes that are improving the environmental performance and profitability of swathes of customer sectors and also improving the lives of consumers. The individual firms who are making these advances daily are in the best position to communicate the benefits provided by these innovations through social media channels.
For those skeptical about the relevance of social media and its usefulness to us as an industry, I would recommend a viewing of a ‘You Tube’ video of a recent presentation given to MBA students at UCLA’s Berkley campus by Kevin Roberts, the former chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi.
Although he was based in New York, Kevin is a hard-hitting Lancastrian who ‘tells it as it is’ and his basic theme is that the attention-grabbing marketing absorbed through the classic tomes of Kotler et al. is dead. In a world which is increasingly, as he describes it, “vibrant, unreal, crazy and astounding”, he says that the products of the future, their acceptance or rejection, will be based on the creation of ‘MOVEMENTS’ through social media channels. You can watch Kevin here.
You can test the relevance of this, closer to home, by plunging into the swirling online debate about plastics. The anti-plastics lobby has a massive presence largely based on negativity or the promotion of spurious alternatives. Collectively, we have an opportunity to enter into this space and exert the influence of our positive actions and beneficial innovations, demonstrating how we really are, in the words of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation , “an innovation powerhouse”.
I see this as the next great leap forward in the industry’s communications efforts. One way of starting this off in a very modest way is by establishing a ‘Twitter’ account for your company and by sending positive messages about your company’s activities and products down a chain of followers. We have several thousand companies in the UK plastics industry alone, just imagine the weight of communication if a large proportion of those firms ‘tweeted’ positive stories which were then re-tweeted in geometric progression down supply chains.
Back to PVC then, and the industry, which traditionally gathers at Brighton, is large but close knit. Once you enter the PVC fraternity and sorority there is a strong likelihood that you will become a ‘lifer’, and this is the industry’s strength because there is a tradition of co-operation borne of this which led to the success in the UK of the BPF’s Vinyls Group and, more widely across Europe, Vinyl 2010 and VinylPlus. The PVC industry is, arguably, already one of Kevin Roberts' ‘MOVEMENTS’ and social media channels provide an opportunity for all firms in the sector to contribute to its improving image based on their actions.