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♻️ "Rethinking Marketing" - Alexis Eyre and Paul Randle about Sustainable Marketing
131 Plays8 months ago
Alexis Eyre and Paul Randle wrote a book together: “Sustainable Marketing” - The industry’s role in a sustainable future.
Both assess on the Sustainable Marketing, Media and Creative course at the Cambridge University Institute for Sustainability Leadership. They co founded the Sustainable Marketing Compass.
Alexis is also the co-founder of Sustainists. Based in the UK, she has worked on all three sides of the marketing triangle - agency, client and media owner side - and has spoken at the Business Green NetZero Festival. Paul is the CEO of Pickle Consulting Ltd also based the UK. He has worked with global brands like Microsoft, BSI, Philips, VISA, Omnicom and Dentsu.
Are you curious to make your company’s marketing ready for the future? Then I have the some simple and exciting options for you:
First, this is exactly what I do for my clients - I help them build their future strategies with workshops and coaching sessions.
I also have a very simple entry offer for founders and aspiring marketing experts: The Simple & Sustainable Marketing Academy, with a ridiculously cheap entry ticket price, because I love sharing what I have learned.
And if you enjoy reading: Check out my newsletter where I write about marketing, strategies and sustainability available every two weeks in the FutureStrategies newsletter.
About Florian Schleicher: I'm a marketing strategist - over the last 15 years I've led and helped shape marketing at McDonald's, Greenpeace and Too Good To Go. Now I help forward-thinking companies take their marketing to the next level.
With FutureS, the Impact Marketing Studio, I help brands achieve their goals and sustainable growth. All without the usual hustle.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sustainable Marketing
00:00:00
Speaker
For me, the most simplistic term is that sustainability is embedded into every single aspect of marketing. It's not just your promotional area. It is about everything. It's embedded into your branding. It's embedded into your strategy. It's embedded into how you go to market. It's embedded in your governance. It's embedded in your metrics. And most importantly, ensuring that your marketing is aligned with your sustainability objectives, so your wider company sustainability objectives. So you're actually all working towards the same common objectives.
00:00:27
Speaker
First and foremost, it's that mindset.
Mindset Shift in Marketing
00:00:30
Speaker
Every decision you come to, it's what's the environmental, societal, and commercial question that we're asking. That's a mindset shift. Welcome to Future Strategies. I'm your host, Florian Schleicher.
00:00:48
Speaker
And this show is my gift to you. In honest conversations with inspiring marketing leaders, we explore how marketing and strategies can achieve sustainable growth. If you would like to apply this to your own projects, that's exactly what I do as a strategist, coach, and workshop facilitator. I'm here to help you build the marketing of your futures. So let's jump right into it.
00:01:21
Speaker
This is a very special episode.
Authors & Book Overview
00:01:23
Speaker
Why? Because I have two guests and we talk about a book they wrote together. The book is called Sustainable Marketing, the industry's role in a sustainable future. And the authors, Alexis Eyre and Paul Randall, are my guests here today. So both assess on the Sustainable Marketing Media and Creative course at the Cambridge University Institute for Sustainable Leadership.
00:01:45
Speaker
They co-founded the Sustainable Marketing Compass. Alexis is also the co-founder of Sustainists. Based in the UK, she has worked on all three sides of the marketing triangle, agency, client, and media owner side, and has spoken at the Business Green Net Zero Festival. Paul is the CEO of Pickle Consulting Limited, also based in the UK. He has worked with global brands like Microsoft, BSI, Philips, Visa, Omnicom, and Dentsu.
00:02:14
Speaker
It's so great having you with me here today. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to be here. So I thought we could structure this interview along the four main chapters of your book, but before that, why did you write a book about sustainable marketing?
00:02:31
Speaker
So yes, just to give a bit of history about us, because I think that might give the context slightly better. We actually met the Cambridge's Sustainability Leadership on one of their courses, Business Sustainability Management. We basically came across as devils, according to most people. Most people looked at us like going, oh goodness, you're marketing, you're one of the main problems.
00:02:52
Speaker
We actually came out of that course feeling just horrific, wanted to leave our careers. Actually, it was a professor there who said that you can't leave your career, you've got to find a solution. Because actually, now you know what the problem is, go back into marketing and find out how to make it become a force for good. That became our North Star for the next couple of years, well, ever since. But the next couple of years, we spent researching the entire industry, looking into all kinds of things, what's going on,
00:03:21
Speaker
where we found it was amazing, pockets of amazing work going on, but we also just started to truly understand the complicity that marketing has in how many of the problems we have today.
Sustainable Marketing Compass
00:03:32
Speaker
And it was then that we came up with the Sustainable Marketing Compass, which is a framework which basically encapsulates a lot of the work that we found that was amazing, but there was nothing that pinned it all together. So if someone came in and said, how do I make my marketing become more sustainable?
00:03:50
Speaker
Or how do I embed sustainability into my marketing? How do I do that? At the time, all we found were these sort of pockets of stuff, but there was nothing that linked all of it together to say, if you follow this one plan, this will help you start to rethink everything from branding strategy right through to tactics, governance and performance metrics. And so that's basically what we did. We designed this framework and then
00:04:11
Speaker
carried on working, you know, worked with some clients, did a shed load of talks for different events, and then a publisher approached us and said, you know, I think you've got something here, I think you should write about it, because actually there's a much bigger concept in here, and that's basically why we wrote sustainable book.
00:04:29
Speaker
But actually, I mean, just to build on that, it came at a really interesting time for us because we'd launched the compass and we'd had a huge amount of traction with that. I mean, when we when we nervously press the go live button, we had 750,000 people look at it in the first 24 hours. I mean, it was like
00:04:48
Speaker
Oh, we've tapped into a nerve here. And with the amount of marketers we get contacting us every week saying, I'm having to leave my career. I'm feeling guilty. I've got this sense of worry and that I'm doing more harm than good.
00:05:04
Speaker
It's your advice. It's almost like being a career counseling service. So we'd obviously
Marketing's Environmental Impact
00:05:10
Speaker
tapped into something, but we'd put a load of thought leadership into the compass. But to help it resonate for people, we had to really interrogate where marketing came from in order to understand why it's so complicit in the challenges we had today. And the opportunity to do the book gives the need to go and do all that proper investigation properly. And that's where we
00:05:32
Speaker
really solidified our thinking about the role of marketing. That's what our professor at Cambridge was asking us to consider was, what's marketing's current role? Why does it exist today? What is it there for? What should it be? Through the book, it gave us that real opportunity to properly interrogate that, understand that, and bake that into our thinking.
00:05:56
Speaker
And what sparked your curiosity when it comes to sustainability? Paul, you mentioned in the short pre-talk we had that your daughter actually also influenced you heavily. And I'm just reading from Solitaire Townsend, The Solutionists, where it's written also that everyone has like a point where they have some kind of inspiration or where they think, okay, this triggers me and I now have to become active. So what was that for you guys?
00:06:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Solitaire is 100% correct. It's exactly the case for the pair of hers. I'll let Alexis give her story too, but everybody we meet has had that moment, has had that trigger point. And it's the wonderful Jonathan Wise at The Purpose Disruptors describes it as having the light bulb going on and then realizing you can't turn it off again.
00:06:45
Speaker
And mine, as we were chatting about before, mine was my daughter. I was consulting on an automotive client, slightly concerned about what I was doing through that in my personal life, being as sustainable as I could. And my daughter just asked me outright, she said, Daddy, is your job good for the environment? And I had no good answer, but I had no detail behind that answer. So that's why I went and did the Cambridge course and started to understand just exactly how bad it was.
00:07:13
Speaker
How was it for you, Alexis? Well, I was I was taking a career break and I sailed across the Atlantic, which had been a lifelong dream. And I saw more plastic than wildlife by a thousand times. I've never seen so much plastic in my life. Actually, it was just extraordinary. And I think the worst point was when I was a thousand miles from land and we hadn't even seen any other boats, let alone anything else for like three or four days. And
00:07:41
Speaker
we'd seen so many plastic bottles and everything come past us and then a plastic chair came past and I just thought how can I be in one of the most remote places on the planet and see more human destruction than natural wildlife than anything else on this planet and I just it just I just thought I came home and I was just got to do something about this so yeah that's that that was my that was my trigger point
00:08:05
Speaker
I can so much relate to that because for me it was I just finished working for McDonald's, also not the most sustainable company, and I took some time off and went to Australia because it has been a lifelong dream going there once and I was there for four months and actually driving through the outback where there is nothing left and right, but there were lots of cans,
00:08:28
Speaker
plastic bottles and bags. And then we also came to the coast and we wanted to go into the ocean. The water was nice, but there were so many jellyfish and the jellyfish haven't been there before, but because the ocean temperature increased, they went further south and they came to the shore. And we were standing at those beautiful endless beaches and we were not able to go into the ocean. And that's
00:08:51
Speaker
Those things were when I said, okay, I think I need to dedicate myself also to doing something good for this. I think it's important that everybody finds those personal reasons. I think that in the course at Cambridge that we're very alert to and we hear it.
00:09:08
Speaker
from every single student,
Challenges in Integrating Sustainability
00:09:10
Speaker
there's some kick, there's some trigger, that light bulb is beginning to go on. And it's important to really acknowledge that and the importance of that. Before we go into the solutions, because there are lots in your book also, I would like to stick just a little bit longer with the problem. Because you also mentioned that everybody or most people have some kind of a connection to sustainability.
00:09:35
Speaker
And I've read about this in a BCG and MIT study that it's called the knowing-doing gap. So 90% of executives find sustainability to be important, but only 60% of companies incorporate sustainability into their strategy, and only a quarter of companies have it actually incorporated into their business model. Correct. Why is that?
00:09:58
Speaker
I mean, that's a huge question. I mean, I'll give you my take. And then Alexis, you can add your take if you want. I think individuals, as we've just talked about, are increasingly aware. But there seems to be this disconnect between personal life and professional life. And there's some evidence that actually, most professionals are far more damaging in their professional lives than in their personal lives. Yet we all focus on those individual changes we can do at home.
00:10:24
Speaker
rather than bringing it into our careers where it's suddenly actually a lot harder. The thing you face most in a corporate environment, a business environment, the biggest challenge you will face is business as usual. And breaking away from that has always been hard. It was hard when we did digital transformation. It's 100 times harder trying to break away from this into sustainability.
00:10:53
Speaker
I think also on top of that, I think, firstly, there's a lack of knowledge in sustainability. So although when people say they understand sustainability, I'm always slightly skeptical to the level of which they understand it. So that might be one of the reasons for inaction because they don't understand the full scale of what it is or the areas that they might know more about. They can't relate it to their own business. They can't see how the two are connected to their own business.
00:11:20
Speaker
Let's stick with that problem because we don't have a universal definition for sustainability.
00:11:27
Speaker
I mean, no, I mean, there's the great one that came out, the Brundtland Report, which kicked off a lot of the sustainability agenda, which is living today, and I'm paraphrasing, I can't remember it exactly, but you know, living today in a way that our ancestors will be able to live as well, and the planet will be able to cope with too. Very, very simple. And you can get a lot more granular, a lot more technical about it, but it's
00:11:53
Speaker
kind of living and behaving in a way that allows your ancestors to behave and live in that way at the same time. Yeah. And so moving on a little bit to like the first baby steps into a solution, why do we need a new perspective for marketing now? What's the role of marketing when it comes to sustainability and what was also the history from what you have learned on what marketing's role was in the past?
00:12:20
Speaker
Well, I think a couple of steps into that, the first bit of work that Alexis and I did coming out of Cambridge was actually really interrogate those impacts of marketing. And we put them into three big buckets really. You've got that operational impact of what marketing does. The fact that if you add up all the response rates and success rates of campaigns and marketing activities,
00:12:46
Speaker
globally across all channels, you very roughly get to 1% success rate. So we're an industry, a $740 billion industry, that's 1% good at what it does. That's a bit alarming. And actually, more alarming is the fact that we're blind to that, that actually we're so focused on getting the 1%, 1% to 1.1%, we're ignoring the 99% waste. And when you cast that across exhibitions and campaigns and media and websites,
00:13:15
Speaker
and think of the volume of work that goes on.
00:13:18
Speaker
majority of which is wasted, you've got that huge waste there. I mean, there's some data that points to the fact that only 3% of all creative assets are ever seen by a human. So you've got that carbon footprint, that waste that comes out of that inefficiency. The second one is probably more potent than that, at least we personally think so, is the idea of brain prints.
00:13:46
Speaker
We have a global industry that subjects human beings to 4,000 to 10,000 media impressions a day, the majority of which, something like 72% of which use the concept of inadequacy marketing, which basically says, you're not good enough, you haven't been out for a run, you haven't been out for a ride, you haven't got the latest shoes, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:14:05
Speaker
It makes you benchmark yourself against your peers and come up wanting. That has an emotive impact. That makes society feel down. That has a well-being impact. At the same time, what it's doing is cementing in society cultural norms, these aspirational lifestyles that are wholly unsustainable.
00:14:28
Speaker
And yet, we expect them all to now become part of our lives. So the example I always use is, if I need to express or want to express love, I have to buy a rock and put it on somebody's finger. That's entirely a marketing construct.
00:14:43
Speaker
with all the associated damage that goes with that. And you've got everything from the two-car family to Father Christmas being turned red. You can look across the whole of society and find these examples. And then the final one is the sales we drive and the impact of that. And this is the work that the Purpose Disruptors have done where they
00:15:03
Speaker
took an add to sales attribution methodology and applied that across the UK's advertising and identified the carbon footprint of those products that were being sold and actually identified that in the UK advertising contributes to 32% of the carbon footprint of every single individual.
00:15:21
Speaker
Wow. And it's kind of like you add those three impacts together, and we're not doing a good job. You know, to come back to my daughter's question, no, it's not good for the environment. Yeah, so that's, that was our start. That's your starting point in understanding how complicit the marketing role is. And then what we do in the book, you know, Alexis got to dive into this one is explain why we've ended up in that place.
00:15:46
Speaker
Based on that, back in the 75 years ago, when the 4Ps first came out, it was all driven around the consumer, as they called it, which in its own right, we should not be consumers anymore. We're citizens. We have thoughts and feelings. We don't just consume products, which is just
00:16:03
Speaker
That's one massive change that needs to come about in marketing, but that's an entire different topic. And it basically said that, you know, that person, well, we are not rational people and we do not have perfect knowledge. And if we're going to get people to buy stuff, then we need to use marketing to steer people towards
00:16:22
Speaker
towards the right information to get them to think about things properly because they can't consider that. And that's, I suppose, where the four P's came from in that hole and tie structure. And that's why marketing became the engine of growth. You know, the whole, the whole perspective of marketing was to drive growth, drive sales, drive products, no matter what. But unfortunately, you know, with no respect to society or to the environment, you know, as long as sales were going over the line, it did not matter what was happening, environmental or societally.
00:16:50
Speaker
and, you know, put out every tool in the toolkit to make sure that sales were driven. Unfortunately, what happened is, well, these days is that we have a monumental lack of trust in marketing and completely understandably. There's a wonderful article that came out at the beginning of COVID.
00:17:06
Speaker
the first lockdown, which was talking about the gaslighting of the advertising industry in particular, and just saying how utterly peaceful it was and how everyone was just enjoying this, you know, I'm not saying COVID itself was easy, it's nothing to do with that, but the fact that they weren't being targeted with four to ten thousand adverts every single day, telling them how they should live their lives or how they should act, how they should behave.
00:17:31
Speaker
but also the impending doom of what happens when that advertising switch gets turned back on towards the end of lockdown and how so many people are really fearing that because it just disturbed their own way of thinking, their own thoughts and everything. So there's a massive
00:17:47
Speaker
lack of trust in all of that and I suppose also this complicity and everything that Paul went into and all the problems are now starting to be spoken about and marketing is starting to really come under the firing line for all of this and people are starting to become more and more aware of what the problems are.
00:18:03
Speaker
it's creating.
Redefining Marketing's Role
00:18:04
Speaker
And so within that, if we're going to rethink of what the role of marketing is going forward, then we need to think, well, we need to include environmental society within our thinking. We need to rethink what our KPIs are, what our targets are, because we can't just think about growth. We've got to have taken the other impacts we're having. And so that's what our huge area, if we're going to rethink marketing, we've got to rethink the role. And if we're going to rethink the role, we've got to think of it as an orchestrator of performance between
00:18:32
Speaker
the environment, society and commercial so that we are actually working towards metrics on all three pillars rather than just driving growth you know or commercial performance I think is a better way of saying it's not necessarily growth I think that's the absolute key behind that.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. And also what you said is how we chose our words in marketing. We were talking about career marketing. We were talking about market penetration. We were talking about a target audience. So it's always the big companies we know how it works and we're talking to consumers and their obligation is only to buy. And in the end, what marketing is really good at and what's the superpower is we can change people's behavior.
00:19:18
Speaker
And for the last decades, we changed it for buying stuff that maybe they needed, maybe not. And I think we now have also as a potential and like the responsibility of marketing is, we can use that power for something good.
00:19:34
Speaker
Absolutely, completely, completely right. And I think we're beginning to see the industry wake up to that kind of potential of being a behavioural change agent in the pursuit of sustainability, which is phenomenal and really good. But I think we've stumbled in the first couple of steps. We've stumbled into greenwashing
00:19:55
Speaker
Because to Alexis's earlier point, sustainability is massively complex and the knowledge in the industry is just not there. So we've done a few daft things. We've gone out and made claims that are just ridiculous. And thankfully, the EU has now come out and said, carbon neutral, no such thing. Let's stop that. Let's get that clear on the table.
00:20:19
Speaker
So we've stumbled by not understanding the topic.
Greenwashing and Misconceptions
00:20:24
Speaker
And we've also stumbled because our mindset is still a growth mindset. And for some bizarre reason, because we think with these behavioral change agents, we've only focused it using one of the levers we've got to change behavior. We've actually gone, well, let's raise awareness.
00:20:43
Speaker
We will raise awareness that if we get on a plane that it's bad for the environment. And it's like, yeah, I think most people know that. And actually just raising awareness on its own, putting a motivation in place, never actually changes behaviour. Lots of behavioural change studies show that actually you only change behaviour when you have motivation and capacity for change.
00:21:05
Speaker
And what most marketers have forgotten or not realized is that we also have levers for capacity for change. So yes, our promotional P can put the motivation in place, but then we have product, price, place, all these levers and the ability to partner with civic society to actually change behavior.
00:21:23
Speaker
And that's why we're failing at the moment because we've gone in, tried to do some messaging around products that's ended up with a whole bunch of greenwashing. And because we've got a commercial mindset going, oh, well, that didn't sell anything, so it's not working. And it's not, we haven't taken the full challenge of sustainability to the heart of marketing in the way that the digital transformation we took to the heart of marketing, we need to do that for sustainability.
00:21:50
Speaker
I think also it has not helped at all that sustainable marketing as a term has been kind of like, I'm not hoodwinked, that's the wrong word, but it's been completely taken over by
00:22:06
Speaker
people that actually don't understand what sustainable marketing is. So they've, I was just, I wrote a LinkedIn post about this the other day actually. Basically just say that it's like, if you type sustainable marketing into Google, some of the top links that fire a hub spot being one of them, and they've written a definition just to get to the top of the algorithms to say what sustainable marketing is, but they're just saying that sustainable marketing is a company promoting sustainable products.
00:22:33
Speaker
Well, if people are starting to hear about sustainable marketing and then they're thinking, I need to start learning about this. I'm worried a bit about greenwashing. I need to learn a bit more about sustainable marketing. And we've got some of these massive companies telling them that that's what sustainable marketing is. We are really stuck until we
00:22:53
Speaker
start changing the narrative at that sort of global level around what sustainable marketing is. So it almost gives people that kind of North Star to work towards because at the moment that is what the main message is going out, even in the media that sustainable marketing is just promoting sustainable products, which I think that alone is a big area that we really need to work on changing so that the narrative
00:23:15
Speaker
Yeah, I read that post that you wrote, sustainable marketing is not just about communicating a company's sustainability plans, products and services. And now that we have also talked a lot about what sustainable marketing is not, what is it? What can it be? Or what do you want it to be?
00:23:32
Speaker
I think, well, for me, the most simplistic term is that sustainability is embedded into every single aspect of marketing. It's not just your promotional area. It is about everything. It's embedded into your branding. It's embedded into your strategy. It's embedded into how you go to market. It's embedded in your governance. It's embedded in your metrics. And most importantly,
00:23:54
Speaker
ensuring that your marketing is aligned with your sustainability objectives, so your wider company's sustainability objectives. So you're actually all working towards the same common objectives. I think for me, that's probably it in the most simplistic terms. Paul, do you want to add to that? Yeah, no, I agree. I think, you know, first and foremost, it's that mindset, you know, it's every decision you come to, it's what's the environmental, societal and commercial
00:24:19
Speaker
question that we're asking. It's not what's the commercial, what's the campaign performance in that traditional thing. So that's a mindset shift.
00:24:30
Speaker
We try to help inform that in the book by articulating a new role for marketing. And we have a vision that marketing is there to drive the wellbeing of people on the planet. But we give it three missions. So we absolutely still have a commercial mission. We're not saying marketing can't talk about selling things anymore. Of course it does. But it has to work more in the pursuit of prosperity.
00:24:56
Speaker
rather than necessarily growth. This is kind of like what's equitable prosperity and distribution of wealth. What does that look
Framework for Sustainable Marketing
00:25:04
Speaker
like? How does that work across new economic models such as green growth, degrowth, donut economics, those things. But then also you have a environmental mission, which is where marketing itself actually seeks to aid the regeneration of the environment and respect the environment for the value it delivers.
00:25:22
Speaker
So this could be down to actually doing the production of a photo shoot and not going out into the Himalayas to shoot a model on the top of a mountain wearing a jacket. There are other ways to do those things nowadays. And then the other one is a societal one. How do we actually engage with the human, engage with the citizen in a way that's equitable and fair and respectful of their individual personality and requirements?
00:25:47
Speaker
You know, so actually give ourselves these three parameters for defining success that always surround the marketer and their thought making process.
00:25:56
Speaker
I think on top of that actually, I'm building on again what Paul was saying actually, and back to that sort of what we call the sustainable marketing lens or sustainable marketing triangle, we kind of call it a number of things, is that when you are, every single marketing decision you're feeding through that triangle with those three roles on either edge, is whenever you've got a decision, you've got to consider it from each of those angles.
00:26:19
Speaker
you might find as it often does is that it works really well for say commercial environmental but there might be a big red flag around societal and that means you have to go back to the drawing board you can't continue you have to go back again and go okay right back to the drawing board we need to rethink about this how do we come to a solution every single time that is good for all three areas because if it's only two then you'll continue to cause a negative impact on that third one that you haven't
00:26:45
Speaker
you know, where the red flag sits if you just carry on. So in part three of the book, I think you talk about the tools for sustainable marketing and you start with the standard marketing compass that you also mentioned in the beginning. What is the compass and how does it work actually?
00:27:00
Speaker
So the compass, the first part of the book gives you a new role for marketing. You've then got to figure out, well, how on earth do I do that? And as Alexis said at the start, we spotted loads of pockets of excellence fragmented across the industry. But nothing that was tying it all together. So the idea of the compass is not to give you any descriptive answers. It's more to guide you in the areas to look and guide you into the spaces where you need to have answers.
00:27:29
Speaker
It's a planning framework. It's open source. Anybody can go and use it.
00:27:34
Speaker
We welcome that. We also welcome people coming back with their opinions and thoughts on it. But the idea is that the first thing it does is embed the UN SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, at the heart of your marketing. And then if you go north from there, you go into something we call redefine success, which basically asks you to bring those three parameters to the table we talked about and redefine within that middle between commercial society and environmental. What does success now actually look like?
00:28:02
Speaker
because you don't just have a profit or commercial success goal anymore. You have a far broader one. And then we take on a journey to say, okay, so once you've redefined that success, does your current way you think about your product or your service actually still make sense?
00:28:19
Speaker
Or actually, is it better to take a step back and consider the value that you actually could be generating across your customers, across your employees, across your shareholders, your stakeholders, across your supply chain, across community, across a far broader framework. And back to this thought that we're signposting excellent work, this concept of shared value was first explored by Michael Porter in the early 2000s.
00:28:46
Speaker
didn't necessarily lean into the environment that much, but it's a great way to re-conceive what your product is, re-conceive what value you're generating. Then you have to come to the individuals you're engaging with. So we call that real people. So exactly to your point, we're not targeting the consumer. It's not using that military phrase about going into combat. We're actually saying, who are these real people that you're actually developing a relationship with?
00:29:15
Speaker
How do you approach them with a duty of care? You genuinely have a duty of care for them, which marketers don't have. Considering that we're supposed to satisfy the needs of our customers, we don't actually have a duty of care to them. We borrow from places outside of marketing here, like the healthcare sector, where your doctor, your GP, has a duty of care to patients, which is very informed on how you do that.
00:29:41
Speaker
And we argue that marketeers should have that towards the individuals that we're talking to, but we don't at the moment. So you're looking at success, you're looking at the value, you're looking at the human beings you're engaging with, and then you're putting governance around that to make sure you're doing it properly and appropriately. And that forms the inner ring of the compass, which is what we call the strategic foundations.
00:30:02
Speaker
So it puts you in a far different place from where you were, where you had a target audience and a sales objective and a product attached in there in some way. So it puts you in a completely different place. Then we move into the outer ring of the compass, which is called the implementation pillars, where, and they're actually strategically aligned between those inner pieces, so a kind of north-east one. You never get that right.
00:30:27
Speaker
That's where we start saying, what's your purpose? If you've got new vision and success and you've got a new sense of value that you're delivering, how does that manifest as purpose? And then as you go around, it's like, so what's your purpose? Then we explore partnership rather than what am I selling to you because we're between value and real people. What's the genuine partnership that we actually
00:30:51
Speaker
seeking to have with you? What's the two-way one plus one equals three relationship that we generally want in a partnership sort of scenario with your customers, but also with your stakeholders?
Innovating Audience Engagement
00:31:03
Speaker
Then when you get between governance and real people, it's about participation, which is often where people want to start.
00:31:11
Speaker
is, what's my comms? Tell me what I'm going to say. Tell me what I need to say so I'm not greenwashing. And we really, really, really kind of encourage people not to start there, or if that's where they want to start to take them on this journey. Because by the time you've gone through the compass, you have a new role for your communications. And we seek to drive radical innovation in participation. So there's a brilliant couple of articles by McKinsey that talk about marketing being stuck on tram lines.
00:31:42
Speaker
And you can see it's not easy to hide. Think about bog standard comms across the industry. You need a website, you need a social media strategy, you need some content, you need some data. And increasingly all that's automated through some sort of agency that the corporates go, right, we don't have the people. So you in agency land do that for us. People in agency land are going, yeah, brilliant.
00:32:05
Speaker
Let's make as much money out of that as possible, so we'll give the reins to our genius staff, and then turn it on auto, so I think it becomes automated, and we all do the same thing. Probably they then delegate to chat with you or some kind of AI service. Increasingly. I definitely know that some of the agencies have been asked by clients, can we use AI to automate all of our marketing?
00:32:30
Speaker
with the idea being we don't need humans in it. And it's like in that world, there's no real innovation. There's no real creativity. And just been on a two-day workshop with a client, I can't give you details obviously, but got them to reevaluate their exhibition strategy because exhibitions are horrendous. The global exhibition industry has the same carbon footprint as the entire United States of America.
00:32:58
Speaker
So take a second to digest that and then go, why are we doing exhibitions in the first place? The conversation started, well, how can we reduce the footprint? How can we take less people? How can we have a higher standard that's reused rather than similar, blah, blah, blah? But very quickly, you get teams going, well, why are we going in the first place? You know what? We only actually got 10 leads from that last show. And it's like most of the people we're talking to, we already know, we're already on a call with them before and after the show anyway.
00:33:28
Speaker
Why are we doing this? It's only when you get them off the tram lines that you actually start driving real innovation. And then to complete the compass we have performance, which is where you make sure you're doing the right things. But this in its own right is huge. Because if you're plugging together those three pillars that we were talking about, you need a whole new world of data to inform that. A lot of it's coming from way outside of marketing. So you got to bring all that into one place.
00:33:55
Speaker
That sounds like a super well thought through model and I can't wait to have a more detailed look also now with your explanations at it. There's also part four in the book where you talk about building sustainable marketing capability.
00:34:10
Speaker
But I think we'll just have to have this as a teaser here for people to check out themselves, because I want to ask you one more question about also implementing sustainable marketing. So looking at the industry, we see that a lot of people are aware that things need to change.
00:34:28
Speaker
And you talk obviously with a lot of big companies. Do we have the awareness from CEO levels that things have to change? Because I like this quote from Bill Birnback from DDB who said, it's not a principle until it costs you money. Do we have this awareness in the C-level or are we still building that?
00:34:49
Speaker
I think back to what I said previously on this is that sustainability is absolutely on the agenda. We get that. It's up there. It's every single report that comes out on an annual basis about what are the top five priorities from C-suite. Sustainability is up there.
00:35:06
Speaker
every single time in the top five. I think back to what I was saying around what the definition of sustainable marketing is, that's what's not on the agenda because people do not understand the role that marketing plays in this entire sustainability transition within companies. Because they still think it's just about promoting sustainable products that someone else in the company is involved with because marketing, sadly, is predominantly a comms role these days. It's lost a lot of its big strategic role that it used to have
00:35:37
Speaker
So I think what we really need to do and I think that's what's been so fascinating is some of the webinars we run and sort of, you know, events or spoken at is people are so fascinated that they can actually bring marketing on board to help them with the agenda going forward because they've never even considered it. They didn't even think that marketing had a role to really play in all of this apart from shouting about a couple of products and services. So I think
00:36:02
Speaker
No, I don't think the C-suite knows actually really yet. I don't think it's fully known at all actually. And I think that's the big thing that we really need to get on top of is to drive that sustainable marketing message forward.
Marketing's Role in Sustainability Change
00:36:13
Speaker
How can you bring your marketing team on board so it becomes an absolute weapon of choice in terms of driving change forward? So yes, we've got to shout from the rooftops.
00:36:26
Speaker
I totally agree that having also discussed beforehand what marketing can already achieve and what it achieved in the past, it can be a massive driving force for good. And when companies recognize that and when they also see that probably the potential of economic growth that will derive from sustainability is huge.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And this will be a massive driver in the long-term, but the problem is a lot of companies are still fixated on the next quarterly results and you need to invest first and then you can harvest.
00:37:03
Speaker
Exactly. I think it is beginning to change that last piece. I think marketing has to also reckon that it's catching up. As Alexis was saying, big corporates have had sustainability strategies for years, if not decades in certain sectors that have been driven by legislation and compliance. And marketing has been able to blissfully ignore a lot of that, apart from maybe reference a bit in the report and accounts if it was designing that up.
00:37:31
Speaker
You know, what we're trying to do is make it aware that marketing has its own impacts that need at some point to be put into that report. But then also the role it has to play. And this year is going to be really interesting. 2024 is actually a really critical year. You've got a lot of legislation getting proper teeth for big companies this year.
00:37:50
Speaker
which makes a lot of the sustainability reporting and communication of it mandatory, which is really starting to make it a competitive edge. And we've really seen this driven by procurement and supply chain in B2B.
00:38:06
Speaker
where brand companies being told, what's your answer to these supply questions? And you know, different companies are tackling it in different ways to get those messages across. So sustainability is becoming a real kind of competitive edge and pillar. But then the other thing is scope three is going to get far more important this year, thankfully. And finally, and scope three, it's about behavior change.
00:38:29
Speaker
But to that point again, it's all well and good having a new sustainable widget. Are you getting people onto that widget? Are they using that widget appropriately? Are they actually reducing your scope three emissions correctly as a consequence? And if you don't bring marketing into that, like we've said earlier, you're not going to change those behaviors. So all of a sudden, if marketing isn't dragged up to speed quickly in the organization, you're going to undermine those sustainability strategies. Yeah, definitely.
00:38:57
Speaker
So I think we could go on and on. It's really delightful talking with you. I would, because in terms of time, we're almost up, switch to the final three questions that I always ask everyone. And I will ask you to answer them as briefly as possible. So first question is, what is good marketing for you in three words? I was thinking about this. I'd be mulling over this. I think sustainable would be a first good one. Makes sense. Yeah.
00:39:26
Speaker
I think, yeah, it's three words, but they are linked by hyphens. So I'm going to say force for good. And I think citizens is the final one because I think if you do not consider people at a citizen level, then it's never going to be good marketing. I like that. Paul. I think I might get it down to two words. Cool. All right. Which is beyond growth.
00:39:57
Speaker
So how does marketing move from purely thinking about growth? Nice. What is the future of marketing? Very different than what it is today. Very different. I think we often talk about those sort of moonshot innovations and I don't think we've even seen the start of where marketing is going to go actually, I think. By laying down the foundations of where it should be going in the new role, where it's going to go, I
00:40:20
Speaker
It's really exciting. I think if people see it as a really exciting stage, it's one of the biggest changes in marketing for 75 years. If people could just embrace that and think, my gosh, options are endless in whichever way we decide to go, and people start thinking along those kinds of lines, I think it's a really exciting era. But what it actually looks like, well, let's just hope that marketers no longer have devil horns on their heads.
00:40:48
Speaker
But I can proudly come to a sustainability event and say, I work in marketing and people actually don't look at me with disgust, would be my dream. Fun story, I was at an event last year and it was not a marketing conference, but there was a lot of talk about sustainability there. And I sat down with some people, participants there, and they asked me, okay, what do you do? And I said, I work in marketing. And afterwards, one of the people came up to me and said, hey, would you please quit your bullshit job?
00:41:16
Speaker
And then we got into a very heated discussion and now we're super good friends because we agreed that marketing can play a role. And she also had this very bad perception, which was also rightfully. And I think we need those discussions and we need to accept as marketeers that we have a better reputation. We have to do something good for all the harm we cost.
00:41:44
Speaker
Absolutely. And I'm glad you're not the only one getting that challenge. We get asked all the while, why is marketing still a thing? Can we not just stop marketing? And for all the reasons we've talked about and the brilliant challenges, we've got far more positive in the way we talk about the future of marketing.
00:42:05
Speaker
You know, we often used to talk about marketing becoming a stranded asset, becoming irrelevant because it doesn't support, you know, and it's like, it's absolutely essential if it changes its role. And it's massively exciting if it does. So why wouldn't you want to change its role? Final question.
Concluding Recommendations
00:42:23
Speaker
And I think one part of the question we can already answer easily, what is a book that you've recently read, apart from sustainable marketing, your own book that you would like to recommend here?
00:42:33
Speaker
I think Citizens by John Alexander.
00:42:36
Speaker
Oh, John Alexander and Ariana Conrad. I think it's absolutely amazing. I think actually all marketers should read it. It's about why we need to think of people as citizens and not consumers and why we're going to have to rethink marketing as we talk about in this entire podcast, but how much that ties into the narrative in this book around this sort of intrusion of personal space, everything else that advertising marketing has done to the individual to date. It's a fascinating read, really good.
00:43:06
Speaker
Paul? For me, just because I think it's just a genius bit of work, it's The Solutionists by Solitaire Townsend. I think it really taps into the opportunity of many marketeers to become solution-orientated and it just gives you a brilliant interrogation of how to be a solutionist.
00:43:26
Speaker
Very good. Thank you guys again for coming on the show. It was really delightful as mentioned before, super inspiring. I can't wait to read the book and I hope a lot of people will get a recommendation from here to read the book also and may it have a good effect on the future of marketing. Thanks guys. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you.
00:43:50
Speaker
That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you have enjoyed this episode, please give me a rating and a review. This means the world to me, as I really pour my heart into the production and the interviews with those brilliant minds. If you are looking for an easy way to learn strategic marketing, check out the Simple and Sustainable Marketing Academy, where I share the basics of strategic and sustainable marketing in an online life setting.
00:44:19
Speaker
You can also sign up to my inspiring newsletter, where I deliver valuable thoughts to your inbox on how to achieve sustainable growth. I promise you will like it. And if you want to get in touch and find out more about me and my projects, just have a look at the links in the show notes or find me on Instagram and LinkedIn at Florian Schleicher. Thank you so much for listening and I look forward to sharing more with you in the next episode.