Selling planet Earth: re-purposing geoscience communications

Abstract Earth scientists have a critical role to play in communicating to the public and policy makers what we know about present and future geo-environmental threats and challenges, such as climate change, extreme natural events, resource conflicts and the energy transition. However, whilst geoscientists are being encouraged – and, increasingly, trained – to ‘go public’ with our science, it is less clear to what extent our current geo-communications are effectively addressing the long-term planetary concerns that confront society. In this paper we argue that scientists are the interface between the research organizations that produce knowledge and the wider public who could use that knowledge, and in that regard are akin to marketers in the business world. Drawing from the dominant paradigms that shape business marketing, we re-consider the prevailing models of science communication and their consequent sense of purpose. We identify three dominant approaches of marketing-led science communication: ‘make-and-sell’; ‘sense-and-respond’; and ‘guide-and-co-create’. We judge the first two to be incompatible with delivering long-term sustainability, in contrast to the emergent guide-and-co-create mode – purpose-driven, interdisciplinary, participatory, and reflexive – which we contend is best placed to tackle long-term geo-environmental concerns through having a clear wellbeing-focused objective whilst co-creating the path to achieving it. We conclude with the contention that adopting a guide-and-co-create approach to science communications will require not only re-thinking of communication practice within universities but also radical institutional regime change towards universities becoming purpose-driven organizations.

As society faces up to looming geo-environmental threats from climate change, extreme natural events, and resource conflicts whilst negotiating a troublesome energy transition, Earth scientists have a potentially critical role to play in communicating to people what we know about planetary wellbeing and stewardship (Rockström et al. 2009;Acocella 2015). For some, however, the geoscience community has been largely ineffective in conveying that broader message to the wider public.
Geoscience was driven by a need to support discovery of raw materials and energy, and a need to understand Earth processes in order to support engineering and hazard reduction. As geoscience matured, it became sophisticated, specialized, and controversial. Unfortunately, geoscientists increasingly looked inward rather than outward and became increasingly isolated from society and regionalized. Since the 1990s, geoscience has been at a crossroads, struggling with diminishing funding reflecting the inability of society to recognize its value. This is unfortunate since geology is relevant to modern life in many ways. A wealth of geoscience knowledge is available, but the geoscience community has done a poor job of communicating its relevance to modern society; thus future vitality and relevance are dependent on developing systems and products that meet the needs of the 21st century. (Broome 2005, p. 51) The perceived communication gap between geoscience and society is arguably most clearly manifest in the apparent inadequate uptake of existing expert knowledge by the public and policy makers (e.g. Liverman 2008;Marker 2016;Beer et al. 2018). In climate-related decision-making, for example, the urgency of projected climate change impacts demands a step-change in our knowledge communication and yet the requirement for usable climate information threatens to outstrip our ability to produce it using conventional approaches (Kirchhoff et al. 2013). Attempts to close this communications gap have led most academic institutionsalong with the funding agencies that support themto encourage their research scientists to actively engage with the wider public. For many, it is a major shift in the academic outlook. According to the historian of science Naomi Oreskes (2015, p. 257) 'scientists do not often consider communication to be part of science; science graduate programs only very rarely incorporate communication as part of students' So, to what extent are our current communications addressing the messy, contested geoscientific issues that are of grave concern to society? Are the communication techniques in which we are being avidly schooled really those that are most appropriate for confronting the complex geo-environmental crises that await humanity in coming decades? In raising these questions, we do not attempt to review how (geo)scientists might communicate, but rather we offer an inquiry about how (geo)scientists should communicate. Our paper explores the ethical underpinning of our current science communication praxis and considers how that reflects recent shifts in science's relationship with society.
In particular, we set out a fresh conceptual framework for re-thinking the purpose of science communication, that is, the reason for which it is done or created. We do so first by acknowledging two competing drivers that define how scientific knowledge is produced and communicated (Kirchhoff et al. 2013). The first relates to motivation: the extent to which scientific endeavours are driven by curiosity, serendipity and blue-skies thinking (pure or basic research) or by practical application (applied research), which, in turn, reflects whether motivating problems are conceptualized as 'knowledge-driven' or 'solutions-led'. The second driver relates to engagement: the extent to which external stakeholders or 'users' are actively engaged in the scientific pursuit and the underlying knowledge that drives this. Figure 1 depicts those two axes of influence, showing the complexity of knowledge production increasing from 'low' where production is predominantly focused on expanding our fundamental knowledge, to 'high' where production aims to help solve societal problems, whereas the complexity of user engagement rises from 'low' to 'high' as external stakeholders change from passive recipients of produced knowledge to active participants in knowledge creation. Academic research is traditionally dominated by a knowledge-driven agenda with minimal public input. Recent years, however, have seen research funding directed more towards addressing societal problems, shifting the end-user emphasis from promoting a passive 'public understanding' of science to an active 'public engagement' in science (Nisbet and Scheufele 2009;NAS 2017).
Within this evolving landscape of knowledge production, scientists and researchers occupy the intersect between the organizations in which scientific knowledge is conceived and produced (universities and research institutes) and the intended end users of that knowledge (key stakeholder groups, news media, students, general public). In that academicpublic borderland it is scientists that, by and large, have the power to shape what knowledge is produced, how it is produced, how and where it is made available, and increasingly, how it is made public. In the wider business world that intersectional role is taken up by 'marketing' -'the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large' (American Marketing Association 2013, p. 1). This is traditionally understood within the 'marketing mix'a toolbox that includes what products or services are created (Product), their cost (Price), how they are made available (Place) and how they and the identity of the company or brands are communicated (Promotions); within the Promotions bucket the 'promotional mix' includes communication tools such as PR, advertising, sponsorship and others. Hence marketing influences the material aspects of a value chain through which products are designed, distributed and disposed of, as well as creating a mental imprint on identities, culture and societal behaviour (Hurth and Whittlesea 2017). Viewed through that commercial lens, we contend that scientists are increasingly the 'marketers' within the academic 'business', engaging with press teams and PR departments but essentially responsible for the original design of research products, for making them accessible and for communicating their worth.
No doubt the notion of scientists as marketersand of science itself being marketableis one that is likely to be deeply uncomfortable with most geoscientists. After all, for many, public relations and marketing are the root cause of many of the planet's most acute problems, cynically driving a global consumerist/materialist culture of economic growth predicated on unsustainable resource use. Using the ways and wiles of marketing, therefore, to communicate the importance of geoscience knowledge and understanding for wise planetary stewardship would seem ironic at best, and deeply unethical at worst. Indeed, marketing and public relations are somewhat on the dark side of science communication, meriting only a few sentences in the recent state-of-the-art review, Communicating Science Effectively (NAS 2017). According to this influential report, they 'offer insights into several aspects of science communicationfor example, understanding audiencesbut the goals of marketing and public relations professionals may differ from those of many science communicators' (NAS 2017, p. 15). Those marketing-led goals centre on the science and art of 'persuasion'encouraging people to change their attitudes or perceptions or to take particular courses of action. However, an economic system where a company's reason to exist is profit maximization has led to this particular version of marketing being dominant. Decades of marketing research and social/societal marketing practice in charities, social enterprises and other realms have shown that the tools of marketing can be sharpened for outcomes other than profit maximization (Kotler and Levy 1969;Andreasen 1994). For example, marketing has been widely used to advance social change in the context of public health (Doner and Siegel 2004;Grier and Bryant 2005) and blueprints for how to reform the day-to-day practice of marketing to drive sustainability exist (Van Dam and Apeldoorn 1996;Belz and Peattie 2009;Peterson 2012;Hurth and Whittlesea 2017;Hurth et al. 2018). Meeting the challenges outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction will arguably require new 'people-centred' approaches that promote large-scale behavioural change and radical courses of collective action (Fig. 2). So, might marketing be a potentially useful lens through which to view and re-imagine our geoscience communications?
With this provocation in mind, we examine the prevailing paradigms that guide marketing thinking and shape the relationships between businesses and the consumers they serve. We use these paradigms as conceptual frames to compare with science communication paradigms, particularly in terms of their long-term purpose, to explore how different geoscience communication strategies might be advanced. Following the typology of Hurth and Whittlesea (2017), we define those conceptual marketing frames as 'make and sell', 'sense and respond' and 'guide and co-create'.

Make-and-sell communications
In marketing studies, the dominant theory of 'the firm', rooted in classical economic theory (Smith 1776), emphasizes how a company's role is to efficiently design, make and then sell products (Haeckel 1999(Haeckel , 2010. Many large corporations of the twentieth centuryautomobile manufacturers, appliance manufacturers, even the computer makers of past decadeswere 'make and sell' organizations. They were product-focused, their core concern was growth through increased efficiency of production to decrease costs or increased volumes sold, and hence company value rested in the reduction of price and increase in turnover (Hurth and Whittlesea 2017). This gives rise to an internal productionfocused approach, aided by a company-customer relationship that starts internally with the company and resonates outwards. In this approach, marketing's main purpose is sales and promotionan 'end of pipe' function that drives (usually near-term) profits and growth (Haeckel 1999(Haeckel , 2010. It is tempting to see the bulk of science communication practised in most universities as conforming to this production-oriented 'make-and-sell' paradigm. From this perspective, scientific knowledge is the product and communications are the externalfacing 'sales' arm of a knowledge production process that is internally focusedacademics design their research around what they already know and what funders want to buy (Maxwell 2007(Maxwell , 2014. The internal knowledge factory is oriented towards cutting-edge questions and new knowledge (Firestein 2012) 'made' via a production process largely driven by internal design (intellectual curiosity, opportunistic technological innovation, intellectual and path dependencies and the pragmatic considerations of funding and career advancement) and accrued in publications in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (Hering et al. 2014). Despite generating active debate within specialist scientific circles, little of this cutting-edge research is intended to provide directly actionable information for policy and management (Hering et al. 2014) and it is hard to see how it could, as the disconnect between production and use means that deep understanding of what is relevant and useful is lacking. Viewed from the academic shop floor, the key objective of science communication therefore is to 'sell' this new knowledge back to the public, who ultimately paid for it. Thus, when scientists are surveyed on their decision to 'go public', their impetus often reflects top-line organizational motivations: a desire to 'educate the public', 'influence the public debate', foster 'a more positive attitude towards research' and 'increase the visibility of sponsors and funding bodies' (Royal Society 2006;Dudo and Besley 2016). Simply put, at its most meaningful, the academic communication mission is to enhance 'public understanding of science' (Bodmer 1986;Durant et al. 1989;Ziman 1991), which is best achieved by  Fig. 3). Although both 'ideal types' greatly oversimplify reality, the comparison highlights how responsibility redistribution, stakeholder relationships and scientist-public interactions become more complicated with people-centred approaches. making complex scientific information more digestible for popular consumption.
Viewed through a 'make and sell' lens, therefore, science communication is an 'end of pipe' approach designed to promote science and to persuade people of its societal value. The priorities of communication are often to defend science from misinformation (fake products) and bolster public support for original knowledge production, rather than encouraging the public to participate in and to critique scientific endeavours. This could be likened to a Corporate Social Responsibility approach to sustainability where the intent is to be seen to be doing the right thing and thereby bolster corporate reputation (Hurth 2020).
Because scientists are trained to emphasize knowledge acquisition and empirical evidence, their working assumption is that the public are similarly wired (Simis et al. 2016). Therefore, so the assumption goes, if scientific information can be communicated 'better' then people will know more about science and cease to be in a state of knowledge deficit. Emerging from this 'healthier' relationship between science and the public, scientists will see an increased uptake of sound science in environmental decision-making and find greater acceptance in society (Mooney 2010). However, this 'deficit model' thinking, intricately connected to the 'rational man' view of human behaviour promulgated by dominant economic thinking, has largely faltered on real-world application (Sturgis and Allum 2004;Bubela et al. 2009) including in a social marketing domain (Wellings et al. 2006).
Aligned to this promotional objective, science communication is valued by institutions as a worthy endeavour, aided and abetted by training courses that are not entirely embraced. According to Besley et al. (2015, p. 200) 'one common theme that emerges from many initiatives that involve scientists in communication, outreach or informal science education is not only the need for basic communication training, but also a reluctance of scientists to receive such training'. Surveys of those taking training indicate that most participants prioritize communication designed to defend science from misinformation and educate the public about science; they least prioritize communication that seeks to build trust and establish resonance with the public (Besley et al. 2015;Dudo and Besley 2016). Often, such courses are grafted onto training on conventional peer-to-peer research communications (how to write an academic article, make a poster, give a technical talk, etc.), but extended into the practices of popular print and broadcast journalism (e.g. prepare a press release, write a popular news article, or give a media interview; Mulder et al. 2008). The rise of online media at the expense of traditional news outlets has changed the nature of science journalism and encouraged many researchers to communicate directly to public audiences via blogs, vlogs and social media posts (Brossard and Scheufele 2013). Nevertheless, a cornerstone of many courses remains 'media training' or 'communication training', often used interchangeably. The former tends to focus on speaking with journalists, dealing with unpleasant questions in live broadcast TV shows, etc., whereas the latter tends to be more about helping scientists to communicate with the public, focusing on abilities such as creating trust and appearing empathic (Baram-Tsabari and Lewenstein 2017a, b) .
Underpinning 'make-and-sell' communications, therefore, are long-standing tenets of print and broadcast journalism (NAS 2017). Appropriate language is critical for accessibility and impact, with Somerville and Hassol (2011) advising climate science communicators to 'craft messages that are not only simple but memorable, and repeat them often. Make more effective use of imagery, metaphor and narrative. In short, be a better storyteller, lead with what you know, and let your passion show'. Story-telling devices in particular offer important ways to improve the public impact of our communications (Martinez-Conde and Macknik 2017). Narrative formats offer increased comprehension, interest and engagement, even for complex ideas; non-experts get most of their science information from a mass media that is constructed around storylines; and narrative formats are intrinsically persuasive, offering tactics for winning over otherwise resistant audiences (Dahlstrom 2014). Despite the rise of online media channels and platforms (Schäfer 2012;Brossard 2013), most scientists tend to draw on narrative communications rooted in this traditional media model: Despite obvious changes in science and in the media system, the orientations of scientists toward the media, as well as the patterns of interaction with journalists, have their roots in the early 1980s. Although there is more influence on public communication from the science organizations and more emphasis on strategic considerations today, the available data do not indicate abrupt changes in communication practices or in the relevant beliefs and attitudes of scientists in the past 30 yr. Changes in the science-media interface may be expected from the ongoing structural transformation of the public communication system. However, as yet, there is little evidence of an erosion of the dominant orientation toward the public and public communication within the younger generation of scientists (Peters 2013, p. 14102)

Sense-and-respond communications
The second major paradigm of marketing -'sense-and-respond' (Haeckel 1992(Haeckel , 1995(Haeckel , 1999)arrived in force in the 1950s with the dawn of the 'marketing concept' (LaLonde 1963;Schutte and Wind 1968;Haeckel 1999) and the associated rise in the neo-classical economic view of company value creation (Hurth and Whittlesea 2017). This paradigm which continues to dominate business aspirations todayturned the value creation model on its head by primarily seeking to mould the company to satisfy customer demands as the key route to growth. Hence, sense-and-respond firms operate from the 'customerback' not from the 'firm-forward' (Haeckel 1999), attempting to 'continuously discover what each customer needs, sometimes even anticipating unspecified needs, and then quickly fulfilling those needs with customized products and services delivered with heretofore unavailable capabilities and speed' (Bradley and Nolan 1998, p. 4). Marketing became focused on techniques to accurately sense market desires, get into the shoes (and heads) of customers and adapt the organization and its offerings nimbly to this, thereby allowing companies to target customers more specifically. In this new 'customer is king' business mindset, the role of marketing, at least in theory, shifted from being an end-of-pipe tool connecting pre-existing products to markets via clever sales, to being the strategy setterplacing customers as a primary stakeholder, with the expectation that creating value for them would secure tactical and strategic advantage and ensure maximized profitability. Consequently, in the second half of the twentieth century, marketing principles and practices became central to determining a company's business model and success.
While in many ways an important advance in connecting a company with its stakeholders, the sense-and-respond approach did not reflect a deeper shift in business purpose, which remained shareholder value (Table 1). Aligned with the neoclassical economic information deficit view, consumers were also still predominantly regarded as self-interested rational beings who, with the right information, can maximize their welfare through decisions they make from alternatives offered in the marketplace (Sen 1977;McFadden 2006). Importantly, the role of the firm was not to (overtly) influence what people demanded, which would distort the free market; public needs were private affairs. Instead, the aim was to first understand market requirements and then deliver them. This approachpeople-focused but at arm's-length and for private gainprovided the basis of the manipulation reputation of modern marketing.
The sense-and-respond business mindset has affinities with a people-centred Public Engagement model of science communication which emerged in the 1990s as the strict knowledge-deficit dogma faltered (Weigold 2001). Public engagement 'describes the myriad of ways in which the activity and benefits of higher education and research can be shared with the public. Engagement is by definition a two-way process, involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit' (NCCPE 2018). By more effectively sensing people's views and concerns, ideally through empirical inquiry, scientists could respond with communication practices and products that are more appropriately targeted. Social scientists led the charge, systematically studying the 'science of science communication', evaluating many of the factors that shape individual and societal decisions, and appraising the implications for effective communication (Burns et al. 2003;Sturgis and Allum 2004;Bubela et al. 2009;NAS 2017). With due attention paid to public attitudes and interests, science communication evolved into 'the exchange of information and viewpoints about science to achieve a goal or objective such as fostering greater understanding of science and scientific methods or gaining greater insight into diverse public views and concerns about the science relate to a contentious issue' (NAS 2017, pp. 1-2). Whereas make-and-sell marketing has parallels with the 'public understanding of science' approach to communication, sense-and-respond marketing is akin to the 'scientific understanding of the public'. Whilst sharing the make-and-sell assumption that people are, at heart, rational decision-makers, sense-and-respond communications focus on understanding how individuals process scientific information, and the influencing role of values, attitudes, beliefs, norms and personality traits (Dietz 2013). Psycho-social research revealed cognitive biases and short-cuts in decision-making, showing how experts and non-experts alike misconstrue scientific information (Slovic 1987). This, in turn, underlines the critical nuances of 'framing', recognizing that the way a given piece of information is presented in the mediaeither visually or textuallycan significantly impact how audiences receive the information (Nisbet and Mooney 2009). Borrowing directly from commercial marketing (known as STPsegmentation, targeting and positioning), audience segmentation was used to distinguish multiple publics, allowing science communicators to design and develop messages tailored to different subsets of the population, or crafted to resonate with all groups, thereby increasing the probability of influencing individuals' attitudes, beliefs and behaviors (Kahan et al. 2009;Cormick 2014). Increasingly, the utilization of 'consumer behaviour' inquiry into social influences has widened to encompass how online social networks, memberships and loyalties shape public responses to scientific messaging (Brossard 2013;Brossard and Scheufele 2013). Drawing from behavioural economics and the work of psychologist Kahneman and colleagues (e.g. Kahneman et al. 1982), the prolific use of heuristics in decision-making showed how communicators could adjust their social messaging to 'nudge' people in the right direction and highlighted how science messages ought to be socially and culturally targeted to connect to the audience's experience of the world rather than the scientists'. The headline messages emerging from this substantive body of social science inquiry are summarized in Figure 3   Public engagement, through its sense-andrespond approachis overtly people centred. Putting people front and centre in science communication, however, requires technical specialists to establish partnerships with practitioners in the human sciences, not least because these disciplines have the methodological know-how to engage diverse and hard-toreach publics in authentic dialogues. There have long been calls for geoscientists to more explicitly borrow from and integrate social and behavioural science thinking (Lubchenco 1998;Moser and Dilling 2011;Pidgeon and Fischhoff 2011;Palsson et al. 2013;Rapley and De Meyer 2014), although Oreskes (2015) notes that the real-world application of the Earth sciences as a social science raises concern: Many major questions in earth science research today are not matters of the behavior of physical systems alone, but of the interaction of physical and social systems. Information and assumptions about human behavior, human institutions and infrastructures, and human reactions and responses, as well as consideration of social and monetary costs, play a role in climate prediction, hydrological research, and earthquake risk assessment. The incorporation of social factors into 'physical' models by scientists with little or no training in the humanities or social sciences creates ground for concern as to how well such factors are represented, and thus how reliable the resulting knowledge claims might be. (Oreskes 2015, p. 246) In the emergent sense-and-respond landscape of science communication, not only social science but also the humanities and creative arts offer up alternative ways to engage the public (Nisbet et al. 2010;Fig. 4). Borrowing oral, written and visual practices from the creative arts and media professions, along with data gathering and analytic tools from computer science (Brossard and Scheufele 2013), dramatically expands the public engagement toolkit, allowing connections to be made with new audiences and fresh ways to visualize and imagine scientific information (Sheppard 2012). This exciting new transdiscplinary culture of society-science interaction is eloquently imagined by Nisbet et al. (2010, p. 330) through the lens of climate change: Allies in communicating about climate change will be found among society's storytellers, including novelists, poets, and other creative writers; journalists; musicians, documentary filmmakers; film and television producers; visual artists; and practitioners of the burgeoning variety of online social media. With the aid of environmental and social scientists, and inspired by moral and religious philosophers, these creative artists and associated professionals can accurately communicate about science in imaginative, compelling and novel ways. Perhaps more importantly, they can provide the context for values-based discussions about how we ought to act in the face of the challenges presented by climate change, and increasingly through digital media and innovative deliberative forums, the resources and opportunities for direct participation by the public.
The result has been a creative blossoming of popular science outreach activities, aiming to engage an ever wider public about scientific topics and counter the perceived rising mistrust in science and scientists by reaching out to people on their terms and in their social spacesfrom museums and festivals to cafes and bars (e.g. Tan and Perucho 2018). However, whether it is Cafes Scientifique, Nerd Nites or Science Fairs, the extent to which the resources invested in public engagement by scientists and universities is broadening end-user participation in science is uncertain, with indications that outreach activities disproportionately reach affluent and educated audiences already invested in science (Kennedy et al. 2018). Arguably, much public engagement endeavour still aligns with promoting and celebrating existing institutional models for sciencesimply a sophisticated 'user-oriented' extension of 'make-and-sell'. This apparent reluctance to move beyond an internal-focused sales orientation is also reflected in the business sector (Haeckel 1999;Kumar 2015) where, despite decades of desire to become truly customer-led, in reality 'make-and-sell' appears a more comfortable mode that sits more easily in a system of self-interest (Hurth and Whittlesea 2017).
Both sense-and-respond and make-and-sell paradigms are based on an assumption that the purpose of an organization is to optimize its own success, judged over short time frames and within narrow terms. In make-and-sell communications, it is the public consumption of academic endeavours that provides the institution with its reward, whereas in sense-and-respond communications it is bending scientific resources to the public's concerns that brings organizational benefits. Hence, although it is peopleoriented, sense-and-respond marketing also operates at arm's length, and focuses on immediate concerns, driven by current demands of customers or possible anticipation of what they might want next (Table 1) in order to apply the resources the institution can command to underpin its own success and growth. Given that the underlying purpose of marketing in both approaches is for those internal ends and assumes an instrumental view of people, Hurth and Whittlesea judge that both of these organizational/ marketing paradigms are incompatible with delivering against an agenda of wellbeing for all in the longtermwhich they argue is the essence of the focus of both sustainability and a healthy economy (Hurth and Whittlesea 2017).
On that basis, we question whether our current make-and-sell and sense-and-respond communications are 'fit for purpose' in tackling Earth science's priority challenges. Many of the most high-profile issues in geoscience concern societal acceptance for untried and untested technologies (geo-engineering, 'fracking', carbon capture and storage, radioactive waste isolation) whose novel technical risks go beyond the professional protocols and expert judgements of geoscientists and extend into the values of organizations and of the public at large (Fig. 5). These controversial geoscientific interventions are dependent on public choices and hence it would be easy for us to rely on the art of persuasion. However, these societal concerns involve moral and aesthetic choices that reflect a deeper set of questions about  fig. 19). equity and ethics (Oreskes 2004 ), including central  questions of what solutions, technical or otherwise,  are being pursued by academia, for what ends, and with what assumptions about what is a valuable set of outcomes for society. In other words, they are issues that require reflection and discursive deliberation by different stakeholders balancing up potential benefits and risks of the associated technologies, rather than abstracted manipulation of the 'customer preferences' these produce. In that context, we contend that geoscience communication ought to have a deeper starting place and a broader set of cultural assumptions, beyond just that of human behaviour, that root into the fundamental purpose of that communication in the first place.
In summary, our proposition is that conventional make-and-sell (public understanding of science) and sense-and-respond (public engagement) models of communication, both aligned with and driven by the underlying, self-determined mission of academic organizations, are incompatible with delivering a sustainable future. Instead, faced with 'wicked' environmental crises that are long-term, difficult to define and sprawling in their complexity, a new paradigm for science communications in the twenty-first century would seem to be needed.

Guide-and-co-create communications
The answer may be emerging in the less noticed but parallel paradigm of marketing which has been growing in recent decades, where the role of marketing has been conceived in relation to genuinely socially oriented ends, rather than as means of capturing financial value for the firm and its shareholders. Examples include concepts such as 'societal marketing' (Kotler and Levy 1969;Kotler et al. 2010), where marketing offerings are designed to meet the long-term wellbeing of end users, and 'social marketing' by which social objectives (e.g. safe driving, healthy eating, family planning, sexual health protection for HIV/AIDs, etc.) are advanced through the application of marketing principles (Andreasen 1994;Peattie and Peattie 2009).
Social marketing approaches have been recently extended to geoscience concerns, notably climate change interventions (Maibach and Parrott 1995;Maibach et al. 2008). Whilst acknowledging the effectiveness of social marketing in achieving specific behavioural goals, Corner and Randall (2011) argue that the approach is insufficient to drive ambitious climate policy changes. In part, this relates to the tendency to co-opt conventional techniques and tools from make-and-sell and sense-and-respond marketing, e.g. utilizing arm's-length market research, defining targets, identifying desired behavioural outcomes, promoting benefits that reinforce self-interest and decreasing the barriers that inhibit behaviour (Siegel and Doner 2007). However, the extent to which such tools and techniques are appropriate and effective, or new marketing tools are needed, is dictated by the ultimate objective that marketing is set up to create, and the fundamental view of human behaviour it is based on. These foundational aspects are beginning to change, and with them the role of marketing and marketing communications.
Conventional economics limits the role of an organization (and associated marketing practice) to maximizing the capture of financial value (which indirectly is assumed to deliver optimized wellbeing through a free market of rational consumers). However, this role is beginning to be overturned in favour of a 'purpose-driven' approach to business, whereby profits are the result of a company that exists to solve problems of people and planet (British Academy 2018) as a way to serve the long-term wellbeing of society (Hurth et al. 2018). Indeed, the bastion of conventional company thinking, the US Business Roundtable, recently declared that the purpose of business was no longer to maximize profits for shareholders but to serve all stakeholders (Gartenberg and Serafeim 2019).
Alongside the rejection of the traditional economic paradigm, a second, related, core shift is in the dominant view of human motivation and behaviour. Whereas the traditional economic view of humans is as bounded-rational, self-interest decision-makers served by exchange mechanisms, the emergent purpose-oriented view of humans is of relations enacted through co-construction of identity, values and behaviour, situated in more holistic and systemic understanding of society, (e.g. Arnould and Thompson 2005;Grönroos and Voima 2012), which is where purpose rests.
As a result of these twin shifts in how value and value-creation are conceived in business, a new aligned paradigm of marketing is beginning to be conceived and put into practice. In the purposedriven paradigm, the notion of 'wellbeing' becomes the central value focus of the organizationaddressing real long-term human needs rather than shortterm wants ( Table 1). The very reason for an organization to exist is defined in terms of its specific contribution to solving recognized problems for long-term wellbeing, as understood by society at the time. This radical change in the core value objective has been found to direct an organization's activities to: 'a transcendent, meaningful and enduring reason to exist that aligns with financial performance, provides a clear context for daily decision making, and unifies and motivates relevant stakeholders' (Hurth et al. 2018, p. 5).
Marketing is the engine room of value creation for an organization, so a purpose-driven organization still relies on marketing to create the value it is seeking, but the change in the central value objectives of an organization demands a different kind of marketing from make-and-sell or sense-and respond. A purpose-driven organization is intent, primarily, on leading society towards a better future, and as such imbues marketing primarily with a societal leadership (as opposed to response) imperative. Marketing success in a mature purpose-driven organization can only be viewed against how well the value it creates aligns with the organizational goals for wellbeing outcomes. That includes not only what products and services marketing designs and delivers but the social, cultural and psychological effects it has on society during that process. Whilst having a vision of what wellbeing outcomes look like and focusing efforts towards that is critical, the more realistic perspective of human behaviour precludes merely coming up with the solution and 'selling' it to customers. Instead, if human behaviour is understood as being based on a co-constructed reality in which people's identities and cultures shape how they consume and act (Firat et al. 1995;Wilkie and Moore 1999), then an organization cannot simply 'design' the desired behaviour and persuade people to adopt it. Instead marketing becomes viewed more as the negotiation and facilitation of co-designed outcomes through close partnership with those who are taking the journey. Hence, purpose-driven marketing is conceptualized as about leading the way to socially beneficial outcomes, but via co-creating the path to this outcome with beneficiariesin short, a 'guide-and-co-create' approach (Hurth and Whittlesea 2017).
The guide-and-co-create marketing paradigm has much in common with 'mode-2' or 'post-normal' models of science-society engagement that are emerging from the field of sustainability science (Gibbons 1999;Kates et al. 2001;Nowotny et al. 2001;Schneidewind and Augenstein 2012;Miller et al. 2014;Schneidewind et al. 2016a;König 2017) (Fig. 6). Mode-2 science is that which is primarily aimed at responding to questions from society, rather than following the precepts of 'blue-skies research' (Gibbons et al. 1994), whereas post-normal science confronts situations 'when facts are uncertain, stakes high, values in dispute and decisions urgent', tackling systemic uncertainty by integrating different and often conflicting interests in an 'extended peer community' (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, p. 752). Such communities, or 'thought collectives' (Schneidewind et al. 2016b), involve all those who have a stake in that systemfrom the experts of various scientific disciplines to stakeholders, whistle-blowers, investigative journalists and the community at largeand do so by working collectively to develop new knowledge through social learning. Under post-normal conditions, the knowledge base is pluralized and diversified to include the widest possible range of high-quality, potentially usable sources of relevant wisdom, and thereby avoid the demand for science to speak with one voice. Scientists from different disciplines and nonacademic stakeholders from business, government and civil society cooperate in socially deliberative research processes that are challenge-led and solution-oriented (Lang et al. 2012;Dietz 2013;Schneidewind et al. 2016b). Fig. 6. Evolution in the complexity of knowledge production and user participation. On the vertical axis, the complexity of knowledge production increases from low (where production is predominately focused on increasing our fundamental knowledge) to high (where production aims to help solve societal problems). On the horizontal axis, the complexity of user participation changes from low to high as users become increasingly active agents in the knowledge creation process. Redrawn from Kirchhoff et al. (2013, fig. 1). This twinned approach of 'co-design' and 'co-production' is finding its way into mainstream research funding strategies, notably within the European Commission's Science in Society programme and in the context of the Horizon 2020 Strategy through the notion of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) (Owen et al. 2012). In the frame of RRI, scientists, citizens, politicians and businesses are encouraged to collaborate on the research process, a partnership that allows science to fulfil its tasks responsibly and legitimized by society (Glerup and Horst 2014;Guston et al. 2014).
Co-design and co-production are the centrepiece of 'transformative science' -'a specific type of science that does not only observe and describe societal transformation processes, but rather initiates and catalyses them' (Schneidewind et al. 2016b). Transformative research 'is driven by ideas that stand a reasonable chance of radically changing our understanding of an important existing scientific concept or leading to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science' (NSF 2007, p. 10). Ultimately, it goes beyond RRI, not simply exploring but actively initiating and steering radical societal change. In that regard, transformative science requires a deep-seated academic reconfiguration, since 'the silo-based approach to science and expertise, government and practice, with strict separation of research in the natural sciences and social sciences and the humanities that has co-evolved with industrialization, is no longer adequate for our civilization to cope with twenty-first century challenges' (König 2017, p. 13).
In this realignment of the academic mission, science communication fulfills a far broader set of assumptions and core motivations. Despite potentially accommodating the systemic and pluralistic ambitions of transformative science, guide-andco-create communications will be quickly limited unless part of an academic system that is itself authentically focused on delivering the wellbeing value as its ultimate purpose. Universities that are genuinely focused on leading towards explicit wellbeing outcomes will require a much broader repertoire of research approaches, developed in partnerships with the beneficiaries. Extending the skillsets of make-and-sell and sense-and-respond communications, public scientists would be expected to additionally amplify their 'interpersonal competence' (Wiek et al. 2011), developing 'communication, collaboration and related skills necessary for constructive involvement with other professionals, a range of stakeholders and the public in general' (Crofton 2000, p. 400). Since a key part of working out research possibilities and actions will involve resolving tensions between stakeholders, facilitative and conciliative skills will be critical (Kearins and Springett 2003).
By engaging in genuine dialogues with stakeholders, researchers would accept the challenges that come with this by explicitly questioning and reflecting their own implicit assumptions (König 2017). This would include the recognition of, and adaptation to, different cultural traditions, contrasting aesthetics and alternative cognitive approaches, fusing knowledge and experience into a common pragmatic approach. It would also involve identifying new social spaces in which to embed research, possibly through the creation of 'real world labs'testing grounds for new knowledge and solutions that can serve as natural laboratories for mutual learning (Schneidewind et al. 2016b). Finally, and perhaps most significantly, it would establish new social contracts between scientists and 'the public'.
At the social level, the success of scientists' communication depends on their awareness of the role that their work plays in the public discourse. Although scientists may know more than anyone about the facts and uncertainties, applications of that science can raise complex ethical, legal, and social questions, regarding which reasonable people may disagree. As a result, if scientists want to be effective in their communication, they must understand and address the perspectives of interest groups, policy makers, businesses, and other players in debates over decisions that require scientific expertise. (Fischhoff and Scheufele 2013, p. 14031) Conventional (normal) science sees scientists as operating between two end-member modes (Scholz 2017): (1) the 'knowledge workers' who indulge in self-enhancing and value-capturing behaviour (e.g. writing articles and present conference papers for consumption by other scientists); and (2) the 'luggage carriers' who act as a lobbyist tool by serving society directly (e.g. through contract-based research and development) (Fig. 5). Transformative (post-normal) science, however, imagines the scientific process as an active driver for social change and envisages scientists as being reflexive in that endeavour, as facilitators, catalysts or activists (Wittmayer 2014)in other words, working to guide-and-co create. Whereas 'facilitators' act as knowledge brokers, fostering mutual learning from multiple stakeholders to develop socially robust sustainable solutions, 'catalysts' take an active role in instigating change processes to increase a stakeholder's capacity for reflexivity and promote collective social learning. 'Activists', in comparison, are the most socially committed scientists, taking direct action to mobilize stakeholders and purposefully drive sustainable transitional change (Fig. 7).
In transformative science, confronting long-term issues of sustainability and environmental wellbeing will require scientists to assume very different, even deeply conflicting, societal roles. In his book, The Honest Broker, the geoscientist Roger Pielke, Jr, draws attention to several of these contrasting roles: the Pure Scientist seeks to focus only on facts and has no interaction with the decision-maker; the Science Arbiter answers specific factual questions posed by the decision-maker; the Issue Advocate seeks to reduce the scope of choice available to the decision-maker; and the Honest Broker seeks to expand, or at least clarify, the scope of choice available to the decision-maker (Pielke 2007). These distinctions are deeply ethical and personal to the individual researcher, so the starting point for any science communicatorand arguably every science communication courseought to be a discussion questioning what kind of public scientist they want to be, and based on that, what the requisite skillsets are to support that decision.
Although these choices would appear to be personal, a scientist working within a university cannot separate these questions from what kind of ultimate value their organization wants to produce (its purpose) and what assumptions, behaviours and outcomes that organization therefore drives. Despite guide-and-co-create communications offering the potential for a new breed of science intermediaries steeped in the ethical considerations of both the science and the public, critical reflection around the purpose of public engagement is currently missing from our culture of science communication training. Equally missing is the more foundational conversation about the purpose of academic institutions. We would argue that these are missing because our public interventions are rooted and routinized in a wider academic culture that remains largely tied to traditional knowledge-deficit thinking (Besley and Tanner 2011;Simis et al. 2016). Any academic shift to a 'guide-and-co-create' mindset and skills (Fig. 8), therefore, will first require universities to embrace their potential as purpose-driven organizations.
Final remarks: towards an institutional re-purposing of science communication Over 30 years ago, the environmental scientist Jane Lubchenco used her Presidential Address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science to advocate a 'New Social Contract for Science', calling on all scientists to 'devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day in proportion to their importance' (Lubchenco 1998, p. 491). Three decades on, and, impelled by the 2015 global road maps of the Paris Climate Agreement, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, it is difficult to argue that the geoscientific community has not been given clear new rules of societal engagement at an international governmental level.
We question whether, as presently configured, the Earth sciences is up to this challenge. Like other physical science disciplines, the bulk of our public engagement remains at arm's-length to societal concerns and tied to a redundant deficit-model that advances the contributions of geoscientists and their organizations but maintains a largely ineffectual one-way transfer of knowledge to a dissonant public. Communications that move people to action are those that align with particular social, economic, political and cultural frames, yet this 'science of persuasion' tends to be viewed suspiciously by physical scientists as ethically dubious. If a self-serving objective is suspected, it is easy to see why this is the case. Perhaps for this reason, the crossdisciplinary fusion of academic cultures as envisaged in Figure 4 has so far been largely resisted by universities that remain partitioned in conventional (normal) disciplinary silos that curate entrenched modes of knowledge production. To more directly confront societal challenges, therefore, 'scientists and their institutions must set up an integrated system of research and action that will anticipate future problems and determine how to handle them' (Mooney 2010, p. 14).
The idea that universities need to re-purpose their role in society at the deepest level is not a new one. In 1970, the scientist, engineer and futurist Erich Jantsch introduced the notion of society as a user (or client) of science, and suggested that 'the university will have to adopt a new purpose which may be recognized as a means of society for continuous renewal' (Jantsch 1970, p. 7). Along similar lines, Nicholas Maxwell's decades-long philosophical enquiry into the mission of science argues that the methodological assumptions that academia has adopted have led to an irrational pursuit of knowledge without a meaningful human aim, and that universities need to be reoriented to confront 'the problems of living' (Maxwell 2007(Maxwell , 2014. Universities clearly have enormous potential to address the problems of living. Realizing this potential, however, is hindered by institutional structures, review and reward systems, and funding mechanisms (Whitmer et al. 2010). Although the sector is diversifying, the success of most universities remains measured, implicitly or explicitly, on higher production levels (league tables of research quality and volume) and reduced production costs (financial sustainability). Research that has brought in the most surplus funds is usually viewed as the most valuable. Bounded by that narrow organizational mission there is a heavy reliance on 'selling' to persuade people that they should want the knowledge that has been most convenient or rewarding to produce. Although attentive to public needs, universities that are 'research-led' do not operate from the 'customer-back' but rather from the 'firm-forward'archetypally make-and-sell. We would argue that in shifting towards a senseand-response model they are not so much directly satisfying public needs but rather better gauging public attitudes to science in order to ensure a market for their products, thereby maintaining the conventional organizational model of knowledge production. In short, whether make-and-sell or sense-and-respond, current science communication would seem to serve institutional purpose more than social purpose: In the not too distant past, researchers toiled in ivory towers, presenting findings at meetings of learned societies and publishing in obscure journals, often entombing information. As the need for stakeholder and public accountability grew, public relations and 'big C' communications departments flourished. They trumpeted the scientific discoveries of their institutions to demonstrate the excellence or relevance of their research and, of course, to generate more funding. In government settings, in particular, their role evolved from broadcasting or 'pushing' the scientific advances of their parent organizations to creating and ensuring consistent, overarching messaging about those institutionsboth internally and to the public at large. This resulted in 'closing down' the science communications process, effectively burying uncertainty and staving off debate. (Bielak et al. 2008, p. 202) Opening up science communications to directly tackle acute societal problems will require the institutions in which geoscientists work to overturn their operationalized assumptions about human behaviour and the purpose of research. Based on the comparative experience of organizations in the business sector, our analysis of marketing paradigms emphasizes that this will need universities to re-appraise their reason to exist, to continually question if this is the best articulation of this common good and devise the best educational and research approaches to dealing with the most challenging threats to this. Purpose-driven universities would not be expected to deliver meaningful and measurable long-term wellbeing only for society but also for specific stakeholders, including researchers. They would have at their heart a clear organizational direction that sets out their unique contribution to the global wellbeing agendas and an explicit operational structure to implement that topline strategy. Collaboration across departments and institutions would ease as narrow disciplinary interests were transcended. Trust would be heightened as research projects would be co-created through deep relationships formed with those they serve and those they rely on to help them serve. Within that re-purposed guide-and-co-create academic culture, research practices of geoscientists would become, by design, overtly interdisciplinary, participatory, reflexive, innovative and ethical.
In 1783, the father of modern geology, James Hutton, opened his seminal 'Theory of the Earth' with the remark that 'this globe of the earth is a habitable world, and on its fitness for this purpose, our sense of wisdom in its formation must depend' (Hutton 1795, p. 1). Almost two and a half centuries on, geoscientists appear once again eager to convey to society their key role as essential workers for the planet. In this modern context, arguably the first step in effectively communicating what we know to help maintain sustainable human progress is for geoscientists to recognize that, at heart, we are the marketers for Planet Earth.