Marketer and sustainability are often synonyms of greenwashing. This is because people usually think of marketing just from the communication point of view, leaving behind the marketing strategy.
In this interview, we will focus on explaining what a marketer can do about reaching the company’s sustainability goals.
Specifically, we will look at how:
- Marketers can implement sustainability if they help to forge a strong sense of purpose in the company.
- Consumers are positively responding to brands with a strong environmental sustainable purpose.
- Not all Companies can achieve all ESG goals overnight, so it is important to clearly communicate the steps towards those goals even if they are years away.
Transcript of: How can a marketer help implement sustainability?
[00:00:07 –> 00:01:21] Edmund: Well, Hello, everyone. Welcome to Video four in a short series of videos about sustainability and marketing. I’m Edmund Branford. I’m a director of the Good Growth Academy. And I’m delighted to have with me again, Stephen Mangham, who’s a branding expert and is perfect for this little video because he’s also a master at Masters of Scale International. And in this video, we’re going to be talking about how we scale up, how do we get sustainability as an initiative that is implemented and going in our organization, or maybe going faster in our organization? So, Stephen, if I’m a Chief Marketing Officer in an organization of any size, shall say, What of the kind of advice would you give to me if I say I’ve given some earache from my customers about the fact that we need to be more sustainable; otherwise we risk being deselecting? Or maybe my consumers are slowly defecting to other, more purposeful brands. What can I do about it? Who do I need to talk to? And what are the kind of things that I need to be saying? Everything moving my company.
[00:01:22 –> 00:02:41] Stephen: You need to start with a clear strategy articulated in a compelling way to your staff, to your team. There are lots of companies when they define a powerful sense of purpose or a strong mission that can galvanize their employees. So, for example, I once heard that at Disney, they define their mission like that. They were there to make magic for kids of all ages, which is, I think, is a great reason to get up in the morning to go to work. It’s a galvanizing mission. Famously, at NASA, NASA’s single-minded mission was to put a man on the moon in the Sixties. And everybody at NASA, from the janitor right up to the director, saw it as their job to put a man on the moon, which is an inspiring mission. So I think if you can define that purpose in a way that is attractive and inspiring and communicate that strongly to your team, I think that could go a long way to not just getting them on your side, but getting them really excited about it.
[00:02:42 –> 00:03:19] Edmund: By the way, I think the good news here, Stephen, is there’s more and more research now on how for example, consumers respond to purpose-driven brands. I saw some excellent research from Ernst and Young a few months ago talking about it as a global study. They were saying something like about 40% of consumers would like to move more spend to purpose-driven brands. So there’s more and more evidence when markets are making this case to the leadership team. There’s more and more evidence that they can be using, I think, to support it.
[00:03:21 –> 00:03:46] Stephen: Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the there’s plenty of studies, actually. But for example, the one that springs to mind for me is the Good Purpose Study by Edelman; they’ve done that over a number, and now they started that in 2008, I believe. And there was already evidence back in 2012 that there were significant moves towards those trends you just mentioned.
[00:03:46 –> 00:04:32] Edmund: So persuading the board, Let’s see, to reexamine the mission or purpose and to think about their purses being more especially viable that’s a key area to look at, Let’s say, for example, there’s a good presentation is being put down, and the board now I’ll give you some priority in our organization. I’ll give you some resources to get this thing going. What’s kind of like the next steps he’s got approval if you like to proceed, how can Chief Marketing Officer, or where does he go from there in terms of getting a thing going?
[00:04:33 –> 00:05:11] Stephen: Well, I think it’s essential to have a plan, very tangible results, a different plan, which is what are we going to stand for. So that’s the defining the brand and articulating what we stand for, our objectives in terms of targets, as a result of how we’re going to be representing the brand to our consumers and what our action plan is to get there to achieve those targets. So that’s the first place to start from.
[00:05:11 –> 00:05:58] Edmund: A concrete plan to do that. And I think my experience, it doesn’t be not necessarily talking about changing the world overnight. Are we? For example, the plan can say, well, we’re going to test this out in a unit or geography or a product line on one of our brands, and we’re going to make some progress over the next 12 months on this issue. And all the lessons that we learned would be like a pilot exercise be all lessons that we learned. We’re then going to feed that into later stages in our rollout. So they don’t need to try and change the world, if you like, overnight. There’s a lot of work involved in this, and they can start playing around with some ideas and on a smaller scale.
[00:05:59 –> 00:06:45] Stephen: Yes. I mean, first of all, it’s important to listen to the consumers. So whether that be a pilot or other form of testing or whatever it may be, but listen to the consumer number one and learn from their response number two, except that this is going to be an evolution, perhaps not a revolution, and that there are things that you can do in the short term that will be if you like, quick wins. But there may be other things that will be trickier to achieve and require more thought, more time, and won’t happen as fast. And that’s okay. It’s not about achieving perfection immediately. It’s about taking steps in the right direction and sticking with it.
[00:06:46 –> 00:07:17] Edmund: And one of our good friends, Dr. Pooja Khosla, at Entelligent. She always says, actually, don’t worry too much about where your metrics are today. Think about the Delta. The rate of change and make sure that you’ve got a good rate of change as you go through this process. Because of the nature of the beast, it’s not something that you can expect to change overnight. It’s going to be a long journey. And even the measurement of success is going to be over many, many years.
[00:07:17 –> 00:08:02] Stephen: Absolutely. And then there are going to be aspects of changes that you would want to make that may not be simple to achieve. There may be real thorny issues in the brand and the business that can’t be solved overnight or may not have a solution today. So you solve what you can, and you work to a solution on the things you don’t yet have a solution for. And I think as long as you’re being seen in all sincerity to take the right steps and to do what you can and be open about what you’re going to try and do next, I think your people will respond well to that.
[00:08:03 –> 00:08:23] Edmund: Thank you so much, Steven. Although I feel like I could talk to you for about half an hour, we really want these to be little short bite-size exercises. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and wisdom with our audience. And I very much look forward to seeing you again for some more videos in the future.
[00:08:23 –> 00:08:25] Stephen: Thank you. Nice to be here.
[00:08:25 –> 00:08:26] Edmund: Thank you.
