Nuclear Needs a Rebrand

Mary Carpenter  

This is Fissionary, a show exploring how nuclear powers your world. I’m Mary Carpenter. 

Jordan Houghton  

And I’m Jordan Houghton. Let’s jump in. 

Mary Carpenter 

Hey, Jordan, and hello, Fissionaries! Thanks for joining us today. Jordan, how are you? 

Jordan Houghton 

I’m doing great, thanks for asking. I am really excited about our episode today. We’re talking to John Marshall, who is the founder and CEO of Potential Energy Coalition, which is a nonprofit that has done some really exciting research into marketing around the conversation of climate change, and it’s fascinating to me to look at it from a marketing and branding angle when you’re talking about clean energy. 

Mary Carpenter 

Yeah, marketing and branding is so important, and I am the perfect example of people that they’re trying to reach because I am such a sucker for good advertising, good branding, I mean, I will drink Coke till the day I die because of those polar bears. I mean, there’s just something about ads that really draw me in and if I feel kind of like a connection to them, I will be brand loyal forever. 

Jordan Houghton 

It’s really interesting drawing parallels because, yes, to your point, if you’re—I don’t know when the last time we saw the Coke polar bears.  

Mary Carpenter 

It’s been a while, sadly.  

Jordan Houghton 

Perhaps we have some younger listeners who don’t quite know what we’re talking about. But if you saw the Coke polar bears, they pull at your heart strings, you have, like, a little soft spot for them, and I just think it’s fascinating to look at clean energy through the lens of corporate branding, which is how John has spent his career, working with some of the world’s biggest brands. 

Mary Carpenter 

Yeah, he talks about his experience marketing for big brands and how he sees nuclear being able to use kind of the same tactics that these big brands are using that are creating lifelong followers and people who really support the brands, and that’s exactly what nuclear needs right now as we’re going through this transition, creating new technologies—really exciting stuff that we want to be able to share with the public, and we need to be smart about it. And there’s—it’s a really good opportunity to learn from these big brands that have been really successful in that space. So, John actually—his company, Potential Energy, just put out a report earlier this year with Third Way, RePlanet, and ClearPath called The World Wants New Nuclear. It’s a really interesting report, we’d recommend everyone check it out if you have some time, but they reached out to people in eight countries on three continents. They polled people in the USA, France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, UK, Japan, and South Korea, so they had a good mix of countries that are very supportive of nuclear, countries that are not supportive of nuclear, countries that are kind of going through—are seeing change of support right now, so it was a good test sample, and they found some really interesting stuff. 

Jordan Houghton 

One of the interesting tidbits that I took out of the report is that 85 percent of people are open and receptive to nuclear energy, which is obviously a huge majority of people, and I think that there is a misconception among people who are supportive of nuclear that they’re maybe the only ones. In their social groups and their work groups and their communities, they still feel, perhaps, like a minority, and I think it’s interesting that this shows that is very much not the case, that most people are open to and supportive of nuclear as one of our best clean energy options. And I hope that that gives people some confidence in standing up and showing their support, knowing that they do have a large community around them that agrees. 

Mary Carpenter 

There is strong support for advanced nuclear in every country they tested, with an with an average of five supporters for every opponent. They also found that environmental group members or strong supporters of advanced nuclear, and that young people are particularly receptive, with little opposition anywhere. So, it’s a good place to start for nuclear, but I think there’s always more we can do. 

Jordan Houghton 

I love that you brought up young people from the report because John got into this because his son actually urged him to do it, and said, ‘climate change is critical, it’s devastating, it’s going to get worse, and we need your help’. 

Mary Carpenter 

Yeah, I think even in the interview he says his son, like, locked him in the house and was like, ‘Dad, you need to do something about this’. So, young people have a voice, and it’s really cool to see how older generations are listening to what young people are saying and really trying to make a difference, so, love that story. Really excited to jump into the interview with John today. 

Jordan Houghton 

Our guest today is John Marshall, the founder and CEO of Potential Energy Coalition, a nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition that brings together America’s leading creative analytic and media agencies to shift the conversation on climate change. Potential Energy aims to develop new narratives that help people better understand the issue, engage audiences on a personal level, and build demand for a better, cleaner, and more prosperous world. John, thanks so much for joining Mary and I on Fissionary today, we’re really excited to chat with you. I’m wondering if you could just start by telling us a little bit about your background and your career journey and how you ended up here. 

John Marshall 

I’m delighted to spend time with you all. Yeah, I was I was corporate guy, was a management consultant and then a marketing consultant for big companies for thirty years—you know, helped big brands like Starbucks and Walmart and Bank of America and Comcast, companies like that, with their messaging and brand positioning and communications. So, that was my life, helping big companies with their communications. And then one morning, my seventeen-year-old confronted me and actually locked me in the house for two days and said, ‘Dad, you have all these marketing skills. Why are you not doing something about the thing that actually matters, which is climate change and clean energy?’ So, he literally did lock me in the house for a couple of days and said, ‘I want you to call all your marketing friends and see if you could fix the terrible communications on climate’. So, that was the moment that seeded the beginning of Potential Energy. And so, we’re basically a bunch of commercial, professional marketers who want to work on climate and clean energy and try and bring the best practices of what large companies do and really strong marketers do into, you know, the climate change world. And we so we formed a firm, basically, I think of it as a marketing agency that is a nonprofit, but it’s singularly nonpartisan, and we’re trying to get—we’re trying to increase the capability of the sector to connect on the core issues. So, that’s our founding story. We run a series of campaigns to try and basically do education. 

Mary Carpenter 

I love that this came from your son! Where did his passion for this come from? 

John Marshall 

Yeah, well, you know, he took a course, a university course called—it’s called The Climate Energy Challenge. And in that course—it was with Dan Schrag, one of the leading climate change professors—and in the course, you actually have to try and—you have to build a spreadsheet where you actually solve the problem, and it’s really hard! And so, he was, like—he was coming home, wringing his hands, thinking, wow, there are so many transitions that actually need to happen here with our energy system. People don’t really know how big and complicated a challenge it is. And so, that was kind of an eye-opener for him, so he was bringing back that news every day from school, and then decided to pull me into the problem. 

Mary Carpenter 

That’s amazing! He’s actually trying to create solutions, which is awesome to see the youth of America doing. 

John Marshall 

It’s interesting. Like, I think many people who get involved later in their careers, as I’ve had, have had a kick in the butt from younger people, so, I think that’s true in a lot of cases. And also true in—you know, we’ll talk about the things we’ve learned about nuclear, but I think it’s true as well. You know, forcing us to look at the problem in different lights. 

Jordan Houghton 

And good for them, because they’re inheriting the earth from the older generation, so I love seeing this younger generation so engaged. I’m curious, through your work with Potential Energy Coalition, how you found the average person views climate change? 

John Marshall 

I think it is changing. I mean, sadly, it’s changing because every year that goes by, we have more extreme weather moments, and so the salience has been going up in America. It is an issue that people find overwhelming and complicated. The climate sector’s done a really poor job communicating, so most people don’t really know what causes it. They think the solution is a whole series of things, like, one of the top, like—among the top three solutions for your average citizen are recycling and plastics. People realize it’s a growing problem. They see it, but they haven’t quite connected the dots between clean energy and climate as much as they might. But I think that’s changing, it’s getting less politicized over time and people are caring more about it, but we still don’t have a population that’s really got their head fully around it. 50 percent of people think nuclear, or know that nuclear is clean energy, as an example. 50. So, there’s just a whole bunch of educational opportunities and that’s we exist to try and help identify those places in society where good marketing and good educational materials can actually really help advance the cause. 

Mary Carpenter 

So, what exactly does Potential Energy Coalition do to make that happen? 

John Marshall 

We do two things. We do a tremendous amount of research and analytics to understand, what are the frames and words and approaches we can use to better communicate both climate and clean energy. Our observation is that no one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘What a great day for some decarbonization!’ And so, the climate sector’s done a pretty darn poor job with their decarbonization and their net-zeros and their—all that stuff. And so we’re trying to build a fact base to help guide—you know, whether you’re in the industry, or whether you’re in the climate movement, or whether you’re a political leader or a local leader, to guide people to connect better on the issue. And then we run campaigns. We were in marketing campaigns to educate citizens so that they understand the nature of the energy transition and they’re more supportive of that. We’re sitting on a big body of research, and this is where the nuclear thing came in, because we got very interested in that. We served and measured about three billion ads. And so, we serve a whole bunch of advertisements to people, and then we watch and observe what happens so we can learn, you know, what resonates with people and what they don’t connect with, and we’ve run probably about 150 focus groups to date on a whole series of issues, including wind and solar and climate change and nuclear and, you know, just a whole bunch of facets of the clean energy transition. We’ve tested probably over 500 messages to date to understand, like, what works for people, what causes backlash, what’s political, what’s not political, how do you get a human being to care more about the issue. 

Jordan Houghton 

I want to talk about the research that you’ve done in a moment, but I’m wondering if you’ve looked into why you think the communication has been poor or insufficient to date in this space. 

John Marshall 

I do think climate and clean energy attracts some very smart people, and they have some very technical and conceptual answers to very simple questions! And so— and then they write books saying the hundred things you need to do to solve climate change when, you know, you could just say it in one phrase, ‘so let’s reduce carbon pollution’. And so, I think we haven’t had a lot of marketers in the energy and clean energy fields. And what happens is these concepts get birthed out of academia and out of policy spheres, and they’re just confusing. Like, ‘net zero’. I mean, I’m all in favor of net zero as a goal. But as a communications concept, it’s pretty bad because, A, no one knows what it means, and nobody wants to go to zero! We want to go to a good place, not a place where there’s nothing! So, we just haven’t had a lot of, what I would say, customer-driven thinking. And so, when I’m working in my corporate life with brands, you know, we start with segmentation, we start with understanding people’s needs, we understand their values and their identities, the things that they care about, and then we say, how can we relate to them in terms of what matters in their lives? You know, as I said, nobody wakes up in the morning saying, ‘It’s a great day for decarbonization’, it’s just—we just haven’t connected very well, and I think the nuclear industry is guilty of that. I was at a conference a few weeks ago, and somebody got up on stage and proudly announced the exciting moment when the plant was going to go ‘critical’. I’m like, well, that’s not the word you should use! 

Mary Carpenter 

Yes, ‘critical’! We talk about that all the time, the word critical. 

Jordan Houghton 

It sounds scary and bad, not a celebratory thing, which it is. 

John Marshall 

A maxim I really love from my friend, Mike Maslowski, who’s a super good communications consultant, is, ‘It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear’. And I don’t think most communicators use that maxim. So, we’re trying to do that in climate and clean energy. 

Jordan Houghton 

You mentioned people thinking about recycling as a way to solve climate change. Do you think that’s because it was something that was more easily communicated and tangible for people? 

John Marshall 

I think, well, there’s been a frame on environmentalism for 40 years, which is the reduce, reuse, recycle frame. That’s been a dominant frame. And it’s actually not a bad frame for some particular problems. It’s not a bad frame for polluting a stream or, you know, cleaning up litter, and so forth. The overall mental model, we’ve got to—there are a bunch of ecological things that we should be doing. It is not a terribly good frame for climate change, where we need to upgrade the world’s energy systems. What’s interesting in our research is most people really agree with the statement, we need more energy and we need more growth, and we need to solve the climate crisis in a way that accommodates growth, as opposed to one that sacrifices our standard of living, and so people haven’t necessarily thought about the ecological frames from the point of view of, how do you have both? Like, how do you have growth and jobs and prosperity as well as lower pollution. So, I think we’re inheriting—especially on nuclear, so we’re inheriting some frameworks that were around in the 1970s. It’s basically the older people who are who have got these, kind of 1970s frames in their head about what’s good and what’s not good. Whereas younger people, they tend to want to embrace new technologies as a way to solve problems, which is not necessarily some of the standard ecological frames. 

Mary Carpenter 

But we know PEC is heavily focused on climate change, and you recently collaborated with ClearPath, RePlanet, and Third Way on the World Wants Nuclear report. Is nuclear something that PEC’s been interested in in the past? 

John Marshall 

We initially were asked by a couple of folks to look into a fairly specific question, which was—there are a series of retiring coal plants in America. How do the people who are living in the community feel about the option of replacing their source of energy, you know, with advanced nuclear? And so, we did it, we said, though, that’s interesting, that sounds important. And then we’ve just seen the pure carbon impact of this, so we thought, well, we should look into this, we’re being asked to do it. So, we did a study in coal communities in the US, a smaller study than the than the bigger one that we’ve just published, to understand, how do local communities feel about the possibility of having small modular reactors in the community as a—you know, as a way to keep the tax base up, keep the jobs going, and remain an energy town. And it was very—I wasn’t expecting the result that we saw, which was really four-to-one support versus opposition for advanced nuclear in all of these coal communities. And that’s, like, in—like, down the road, right? Like, support would dramatically—I always thought, oh, it’s like, some people are opposed to it, some people are worried about it, some people are against it, but the data came back—and the other thing about the data that got me really interested is the predictor of support for nuclear in these coal communities was incredibly correlated with degree of knowledge, like I’ve never seen before. And so—very low support with low knowledge, extremely high support with high knowledge, a really strong linear relationship. And so, we then got kind of interested in it, and—like, any good marketer wants to get their mitts on nuclear because it’s like, oh, it’s a brand, like, what does that brand mean as it exists in people’s minds? And you always think, oh, I could just rebrand it, that would be a great idea. Like, we should call it something else. And so, I thought, this is exciting. So, after having done that work, we realized there have been some smaller studies that have been done on nuclear, but no one had really done a large-scale brand study about how does the world perceive it? What does the word nuclear mean to people, what’s the support, what’s the opposition, what are the attributes, what are the feelings that evokes, the imagery that we use, the cooling towers, or the electrons going around the atom, like, what does that do when you see that? And that’s what we do when we do brand work. That’s what we do for Coke, or any big brand, is really understand, what does the brand mean? So, we then decided on a partnership with these other organizations. Let’s go do what I think is the world’s largest brand study on nuclear, with a particular emphasis on new technologies, to understand how the world sees it. So, we did an eight-country study, which has a big sample size, it’s around 17,000 people in eight countries throughout the world with a big sample in the US, so we know a ton about the US citizen, but we looked into France and Germany and Japan, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, Britain, and the US. And that’s the essence of this report, that we decided to entitle The World Wants New Nuclear, because I think if there was one conclusion, it would be, woah! The world is really supportive of nuclear technologies, much more so than you would perceive to be the case. 

Mary Carpenter 

You said that people were more supportive, the more knowledge they had. Did you look at why they were supportive? Was it jobs? Was it clean energy? Was it safe energy? Did the studies show why they were supportive of nuclear? 

John Marshall 

All three of those, I think, are the case. I’m asserting, based on the data, that nuclear energy is not perceived as clean energy. So, clean was a big part of it. The second thing that we saw in that study, but also in the subsequent study, was that when you talk about safety and waste, you dispel concerns about safety and waste, you don’t create concerns about safety and waste. And that’s long been, I think, a debate in the nuclear sector, but we have pretty high confidence that when you talk in very factual, plain spoken terms about the risks of safety and waste, you get more support, not less. There are some folks that say, well, you’re activating a concern in people’s minds, but that’s not the case from the data. When you put waste in context and when you put all the record in context, then you increase support for nuclear. I think both of those things, cleanliness and safety and waste have been under communicated. 

Jordan Houghton 

Do you think that’s because people already come with a negative perception of those things? So, when you talk about it, you’re clearing up a preconception? 

John Marshall 

Maybe, like Mr. Burns and the Simpsons and so forth where those things get exaggerated, but they’re not that hard to dispel, like—from purely looking at the analytics. I say this respectfully to the nuclear community listening, but the nuclear community hasn’t done a great job with marketing. Like, the cooling tower as a concept is a big scary thing that people think pollution is coming out of. They don’t see it as an integrated part of a plant that’s emitting steam. And so, the imagery and the associations are large and maybe scary, and even the words that we use, like a ‘reactor’. We found that the word reactor is not a super great word because reactors react, and there’s something mysterious about that. I’ve talked about ‘critical’ before—a lot of the terminology, the imagery, and the way it’s portrayed hasn’t been very human, hasn’t been very approachable, hasn’t been very benefits-oriented. And so, I think our feeling was, well, we could use more marketing. We could use more customer-driven—what does good marketing do? It talks about the benefits to you and your community in customer driven language. 

Mary Carpenter 

Did you test what imagery would work better than a cooling tower? 

John Marshall 

We—well, we had some fun with this. We did the kind of experiment I used to do when I was in the corporate sector, where you’re trying to get—how do I describe this? It’s an experiment where I will create a series of names and then a series of logos or images. And then I’ll swap those out, and then I’ll ask you the same question, but I’ll show you a different name for the category and a different logo for the category. And then I will derive, subconsciously, the impact of that name or that logo on your favorability for the category. So, we may have eight names, different things you could call nuclear. You could call it elemental energy, or clean fission, or power scale. And then we put small modular reactors in there. So, we put a whole series of names for the category in and then I had my—one of my designers designed a whole bunch of different symbols for nuclear. One was the atom, one was the cooling tower, and then we made a whole bunch of modern things that could evoke newer, and more human, and, you know, a set of different brand attributes. We basically created, I think, called the utility curve for eight different names and eight different identities. And what we found was everything we did was better than the cooling tower. And in fact, everything we did was better than ‘small modular reactor’. If you’ve got wind, you’ve got a windmill, and if you’ve got solar, you’ve got a solar panel, and there’s not like an obvious image, and so people pull from the obvious one, which is, you know, put that in there. But it was—it really depressed favorability. And not surprisingly, it and the word ‘reactor’, because they feel big and scary and could do something that you’re not expecting and feels like a polluting thing. And so, it’s—like, all the things that did really well are super human. And we’ll talk about how to get to the report so people who are listening can go look at the different—what logos do the best for the category. But, you know, approachable, benefit oriented, you know, that have attributes that that aren’t big and scary did way better. Interestingly, because this—my original conceit of this thing was, oh, the word ‘nuclear’ is a problem. I’ll just come in as a marketing expert and try and think about, what should we call it? And so we, as I said, we created a whole bunch of different terms, but nuclear actually tested very well. In fact, the leading way to describe nuclear was ‘new nuclear’. And then the idea of clean fission did pretty well. What the industry is using for the for next technology reactors, like ‘small modular reactors’, did very poorly. It just feels tech-y and not very approachable. And then I thought a lot about it. And I thought, well, my career in marketing, how many—in marketing, how many times have I relaunched a product and called it new? Right? And it always works. Well, it didn’t work for New Coke! And there are a bunch of technology advancements that have happened in the nuclear category, but they have been under positioned. What does America experience? They experience innovations that make a product new and improved. So, when you talk about the category as ‘new nuclear’, you actually get people’s attention and it has a lot of appeal, as it turns out. I didn’t expect that. 

Jordan Houghton 

That’s really interesting. I love the idea of just adding ‘new’, it’s so elementary in a way. But if it works, it works. Would you tell us a bit more about the top takeaways from the report? 

John Marshall 

Yeah. I’ll give you three that I thought were really interesting, what I’ve touched on. Takeaway number one is there is a really significant amount of support across these eight countries. In every country in the world, the number of supporters for new nuclear outnumbers the number of opponents pretty significantly. On average, it’s four to one or five to one; it’s ten to one in Poland. But even in countries where you would think—where one perceives there to be a fair amount of opposition, like the Germanys and Japans, it’s actually two to one in those countries. So, conclusion number one is there are way more supporters than opponents out there. That’s not how it feels in the popular media. The second one is it’s the one thing you can talk about at your Thanksgiving dinner! Because regardless of your political party, there’s support on the other side. So, this is true in the US. There’s over fifty percent support, whether you identify as a Democrat or Republican, but it’s true throughout the world. We looked at 38 political parties—and we have a large, large sample for people who vote as a member of those parties—in 32 of 38 political parties in these eight countries, you have more than 50 percent of voters who support advanced nuclear. Now, their reasons are different, but it’s one of the few nonpolitical issues of our time. Yeah, I think the world’s changed with the energy crisis, with the climate—set of climate commitments that are hard to meet. And then, with what’s happening with technology that we’ve now had a confluence of alignment across political parties. So, that’s a relief because we’re working on climate change, and it is a place where the people agree. The third one, which is I think the biggest, and the biggest surprise to me, is that environmentalists are more supportive of new nuclear than non-environmentalists by a significant margin in the US. And the support across the globe for nuclear is very strong among environmentalists. There there’s a perception, I think, in culture that, oh, it’s an anti-environmental thing, but that’s not the case. I’ll give you the piece of data here. Okay, so in the US, you have 30—65 percent of people who are members of environmental groups—that’s like, Nature Conservancy, or Greenpeace, or WWF—65 percent are supportive of the latest nuclear technologies and 60 percent of nonmembers are supportive. So, it’s high on both, but it’s actually something that environmentalists really want. And that’s not something that people perceive. And I think there’s a set of environmentalists who remain vehemently opposed to it, but that is a small portion of the global population. It’s a small and loud portion of the global population. 

Mary Carpenter 

I want to dive a little deeper into that. I know the report said in some countries, not only do advanced nuclear supporters outnumber opponents among environmental group members, but the level of support for advanced nuclear is higher among environmental group members than in the population at large. Tell us a little bit more about that. Were you surprised to see that? 

John Marshall 

I was surprised to see it. I think things have changed over the last ten years. Younger people want us to take—to do the things that we need to do to solve the climate crisis, and so that’s a big motivator, and that’s changed over the last decade. And many of the anti-nuke sentiment is aging, and it’s not necessarily kind of rejuvenated, and so I think there’s been a cultural and a generational shift. 

Jordan Houghton 

Did you get into how many people, or what percentage, are on the fence about supporting nuclear? 

John Marshall 

If you give people a choice of, you know, you’re either supportive or you’re on the fence or you’re opposed, you’ve got about 15 to 25 percent, depending on what country or kind of on the fence. Here’s the thing that we did though. We said, well, let’s ask you to get off the fence. And so, it’s like, we’re gonna give you a yes or no question. Yes or no: are you supportive of new nuclear? And then we asked also about in people’s communities because that’s, like, a slightly higher bar, like, down the road as opposed to conceptually. And we—across the sample size, we saw, when we asked people to get off the fence, from 65 percent to 92 percent, depending on the country, said ‘support’. Okay, so you’ve got 92 percent, when you force people off the fence in Poland, were supportive. And in the US, when you ask people to get off the fence, you’re looking at almost 80 percent. We did the type of segmentation I did with the corporate brands where we, like, grouped people, and, like, your people in your group are the same, and people outside their group are different, and we came up with these four different segments. There’s one particular segment, which exists in all eight of these countries, which we call the ‘determined skeptics’, who are vehemently opposed to nuclear, and nothing I tried with message testing would move them at all. All—the other 85 percent were like, ‘Okay, that’s interesting’. And they moved up by six, eight, ten percent in terms of their support after they received a message, but the 15 percent were completely immovable. And in fact, everyone else, on an argument on safety and waste, everyone else, the 85 percent that said, ‘Oh, that’s valuable to know’, and they became more supportive. But the15 percent were singularly immovable, and they made up almost all the opposition to nuclear. So, they are older. They’re actually quite concentrated in certain pockets, and we need to be respectful of all the different viewpoints, that people have, but it is—it’s a little bit of a vestige from a time gone by, before we have the awakening about the climate crisis, and it’s a decently small number of people where all the opposition is concentrated. That’s also true for clean energy overall, by the way. There’s a segment of 13 percent of America that’s, like, really opposed to clean energy, and all the opposition sits with that group, and everyone else embraces it. So, I think it’s just important to think about the fact that you do have a, you know, 80 percent plus people who are either highly supportive or movable on the issue. 

Jordan Houghton 

You mentioned the demographics, and I wanted to ask you about that. What does the demographic split look like among supporters? Is it even? Is one generation more favorable? 

John Marshall 

On the demographics, it’s reasonably even across age and income. The strongest opposition is definitely older, particularly in Germany and Japan, but other than that strong opposition, support is reasonably uniform across ages. Men are more supportive than women. Women—they’re not more opposed, they’re more gathering information. By the way, I found this with all the testing that I’ve done, is that men have already made up their minds on things, and I’ve statistically proven that men are stubborn and maybe full of it with all my work! I was quoted in the New Yorker saying that men are useless with respect to climate change. We’ve never done a test where women don’t absorb the information and move more than men, not once. So, on nuclear, the interesting thing is that women aren’t more opposed, they’re just more on the fence. And they actually move more when they’re exposed to different messages, whereas men kind of made up their mind on things. So, we’ve made, you know—men are, you know, a few percentage points more supportive than women. 

Mary Carpenter 

What messages get people off the fence? 

John Marshall 

That’s a good question, and it depends what segment you’re in. There’s a pretty large segment of the population that we call ‘concerned professionals’, who tend to be, you know, concerned about climate, concerned about energy, tend to be a little higher income, who, you know, are quite movable from this as a critical solution to stopping climate change. There’s also a pretty large segment of the population, we call them ‘pro-growth establish’, tend to be a little bit more conservative, who are very much moved by, you know, we need the power to make our own energy independently. Of all the messages that we tested, the leading message was an energy independence message—had a lot of lift. We do these tests all the time—as I said, I’ve done a few hundred—on average, if you see a message, you don’t see a message, you’ll get three or four or five percent lift. The energy independence message for nuclear had an eight point lift. So that’s, like, twice as productive as your average clean energy message. And that, I think—people will particularly resonate with the fact that dependence on foreign sources of energy that expose us to potentially high costs and unreliable energy sources, and so that’s that that was the number one message across the board. The climate message works for some, but not necessarily for all. 

Mary Carpenter 

We talk a lot about engaging youth and changing their perception. I feel like I don’t hear as much about changing the mind of the older population, and you said that they’re—people that are more set in their ways, you know, how do you address them? How do you get the benefits of nuclear across effectively to that age group? 

John Marshall 

It’s not dramatically different by age cohort, the few points less support as you get older, but I wouldn’t say it’s—and it’s stuck in the single digits. There’s a perception that there’s a throng of young people who are, like, twenty points more supportive of the stuff, and there’s a bunch of old people—it doesn’t turn out to be the case. It turns out that it’s like, a few percentage points here and there. I think—I don’t know that age is the primary variable. I think what we found—different messages work for different segments. What we found is the message for what we call the ‘concerned professionals’ is different than another group that we call the ‘hardworking pragmatists’. The hardworking pragmatists tend to be more labor oriented. They want prosperity in their community. Many of—if you’re in an energy town, they want their energy town to thrive, they want a thriving tax base. And so, the economic message works well for the hardworking pragmatists, and then there are concerned professionals who are, you know, more climate and environmentally oriented. 

Jordan Houghton 

Mary and I, obviously, we’re communicators in the nuclear industry. Are the greatest challenges you think nuclear communicators face based on the research that you did? You gave us the takeaways, I’m curious what you think our biggest challenges are going to be and what are the best next steps? 

John Marshall 

The nuclear industry’s single biggest challenge is that the nuclear industry is too cautious about its communications. That is my conclusion from this because when I give someone a message, I move them significantly, and I’ve done a lot of this stuff. And so, I think the context has changed over the last decade. We’ve had both energy crisis and climate crisis, and also technological advancements, and the degree of understanding about nuclear’s role as a technology in the mix is low. And so, I think the biggest challenge is doing more rather than doing less. And then I think the next one is humanizing it. Like, any good marketer can talk about the benefits in terms of the economic benefits, and the clean energy benefits, and the climate benefits, and we’re leaning really hard into those. 

Mary Carpenter 

So, I know you work for big brands. What are some lessons, tips, tricks the nuclear industry can take from, you know, marketing that Coke did, or some of the other big mainstream brands that you’ve worked for? 

John Marshall 

I mean, I always talk about simplicity and humanity with respect to climate and clean energy, but also just in general, you know, and so the best brands in the world have one idea, right? So, you said Coke, I’ll say ‘refreshment’. Right? And so, they—you say Nike, I’ll say, like, ‘authentic athletic achievement’, and so, the best brands have much more of a singular idea. And I think that’s—I’ve thought a lot about this with respect to nuclear. I think if I had to pick one word, I probably would just go with ‘clean’. Just go with ‘clean’. Because it moves it a lot. Maybe not for all segments, but it’s a big misunderstanding. Nuclear’s on the fence between one of the clean industries or one of the dirty industries, and so simplicity and owning a word, and repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition is 90 of the game in marketing, and so I think we—there’s so much complexity to this product that’s a massive, wonderful technological breakthrough. We’ve really harnessed the power of the atom to, like, power human prosperity. We get lost in all the different aspects of that, and technocratic, and—you know the old adage in marketing is, ‘When you’re explaining, you’re losing’. There’s a lot of explaining going on in nuclear communications. 

Jordan Houghton 

If our listeners want to look at the report themselves, where can they find it? 

John Marshall 

It’s on the website of our four partner organizations—so that’s ClearPath, Third Way, RePlanet, and us—and just Google ‘the world wants new nuclear’. And those four websites will pop up, and you can go grab the report. 

Mary Carpenter 

And you just mentioned one word, ‘clean’. We’ve been asking all of our guests: in one word, describe the future of nuclear energy. 

John Marshall 

That is a great question. I think for my—I’ll give you a today answer, which I’ve already mentioned, which is under communicated—and I think I’ll give you a tomorrow answer. I’ll go with foundational. 

Mary Carpenter 

That’s a really good word to use. And I guess, since you have done all this research, we’ll go a little bit further with this question we’ve been asking everyone. Does your research tell you what’s the best word to use to describe the future of nuclear energy? 

John Marshall 

I mentioned the word ‘clean’ before. I have two that I think—and they were super simple—one is ‘clean’, and the other is ‘new’, which I mentioned before, because there have been a lot of technology breakthroughs on the modularity side, on the safety side, on the waste side, on the fuel side. And I think, what are we trying to do, if we’re communicators, we’re trying to ask for reconsideration, right? We’re trying to say, ‘look at this product’. ‘New’ is a word that gets people to realize that this actually—there’s actually work going on, and innovation going on, and ingenuity going on that makes this part of the future energy solution. And you’re not gonna be part of the future if you’re not part of an innovation program, and so I think ‘new’ and ‘clean’ are two really good words. 

Jordan Houghton 

The simplicity of those are amazing. And this whole conversation has reminded me that sometimes we overthink things, and that sometimes that the simplest answer is the best answer, and the best way to approach something. ‘Clean’ and ‘new’. Thank you so much to John Marshall for having this conversation with us today. Always wonderful to talk to him. If you are interested in viewing the report, you can check the show notes, and we have it linked there. You can also find out more about Potential Energy Coalition on their website, potentialenergycoalition.org. 

Mary Carpenter 

Thanks everyone for listening. Rate and review the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, it really helps us out. See you next time!