… not as I do.
At least that’s the idea I got the other day from a fellow motorist while on my way home from a work project. Driving down the road, I watched as the driver of the Jetta in front of me rolled his window down and threw his trash on the curb. Ironically, his bumper sticker was adorned with all sorts of “green living” and sustainability bumper stickers.
Even his license plate screamed “eco-friendly.” It was a phonetic variation of the phrase “use bio-diesel.”
This kind of behavior is what gives proponents of green living a bad reputation. On the one hand, they’re doing mountains of good by promoting positive messages, developing environmentally sound products, and generally increasing public consciousness about conservation. In the past few years I’ve seen curbside recycling bins overtake and greatly surpass their garbage counterparts. I’ve also seen more people biking to work and sharing the carpool lane than previous years.
But it’s the few that embrace this message in public and deny it in private that set things back. The idea of being one person in one environment and shedding that persona once on your own destroys many movements, and serves as a suicide pill to any brand.
When I worked for the Boy Scouts, we used the concept of on-stage versus off-stage. Whenever you were in front of the Scouts, you were on-stage, meaning you were playing the character of the upstanding citizen, prepared Scout, and roll model. When your uniform was off and you were out of town with your friends (or in the staff-only areas at camp) you could participate in off-stage behavior – less “appropriate” language and the like.
I didn’t realize until some time later that this dichotomy in our behavior was setting things up to fail. Even when you were outside of camp, you could run into a Scout. Off-stage behavior would destroy any sense of moral equity you’d built up at camp and destroy the image and brand the staff had worked so hard to create.
In reality, there is never an appropriate venue for off-stage behavior because your brand is always on-stage!
Many times, your off-stage behavior does more to define your brand than your on-stage behavior. Are you a good driver because you stop at every stop sign during the day? Or because you still stop at every one at 2am when no one is watching? As J.C. Watts once said, “character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.”
Branding is living your story when no one’s looking, too.
