Episode 89: Deep dive into sustainable marketing

00:00   

Intro: 

Welcome to the CIM Marketing podcast. The contents and views expressed by individuals in the CIM Marketing Podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the companies they work for. We hope you enjoy the episode.  

00:17  

Host: 

Hello everybody, and welcome to the CIM marketing podcast! I hope you had a good Christmas and a good winter – if it is possible to have a good winter. Spring is now sprung, as evidenced by the torrential rain outside the window. And we are back with one of the greats of the CIM Marketing Podcast, Miss Gemma Butler. Gemma, how are you? 

00:39  

Gemma Butler: 

I'm good thank you – from a flooded Moor Hall! 

00:43  

Host: 

Yeah, we're back at Moor Hall. It's fantastic to be here. And Gemma, you'll know if you are a seasoned listener to this show, was the former Director of Marketing here at Moor Hall for CIM and is now working again with CIM as an educator in the area of sustainable marketing. So, what better way to start our spring season? And I've already been in touch with you indirectly by reading your article in the latest catalyst about green hushing. And it struck me as quite ironic that we're here to talk about sustainable marketing. We want people to talk more about sustainable marketing. We want people to do more about sustainable marketing. And lots of companies you're telling me in your recent article have stopped talking about sustainable marketing. 

01:33  

Gemma Butler: 

Well, green hushing is a choice organisations are making not to make green claims or talk about what they're doing in relation to their sustainable agendas, for fear of being called out for green washing. We have seen a rise over the last two years of green claims, an explosion, in fact, of green claims – and whilst the majority of green washing is generally unintentional, green washing is now subject to stricter regulations, tightening of guidelines around certain terms you can use, and that has pushed organisations back to essentially not want to talk about it. But greenhushing is as damaging as greenwashing in some ways because it slows down progress and education and awareness.  

02:20  

Host: 

Could you even argue it's more damaging? Because green washing, although it's empty promises, at least it's raising the agenda of sustainable marketing. It's a negative, it's a bad way of doing it, but at least it's putting on the agenda. And what seems to be happening, from what you're telling me, is, in boardrooms, people are saying, if we make this claim and we can't properly stand it up, we can't properly substantiate it, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. Ergo, the easiest thing to do is just not make a claim, not do anything, and not say anything.  

02:48  

Gemma Butler: 

I think it's more complex than that in terms of the breadth and complexity of the subjects of sustainability. I think what organisations are doing, if you start with the evidence and then work back and what claims you can make from that, you should be completely sound in terms of, you know, the green claims you make. I think what organisations are doing is thinking that they have to fix everything now, and that's impossible. You know, there's so much decarbonization, biodiversity, you know, all of these different elements, packaging, waste, that they need to deal with. And I think what they're saying is we won't talk about any of it, because if we come out and talk about our decarbonization targets, we'll get called out for other things. And I think there's this balance, you know, there is no 100% way to be sustainable. It's impossible.  

03:32  

Host: 

Well, that's quite interesting, though, isn't it? So what you're saying is that there are areas in which companies are doing good and doing well, and there are some areas, and this applies probably to every company in the world, where they're not doing as good and they're not doing as well. And there's this phenomenon where if they say, start shouting about the things they're doing well, which actually you want to hear about, because it’s best practice and other companies can follow it, the blogosphere, the internet, etc., etc., social media, will then say the things that they're not doing well. So they put their heads above the parapet and they get shot down. In fact, in many cases, they are doing some good things, but because they’ve not got universal good behavior, it's very easy to shoot them down.  

04:13  

Gemma Butler: 

And that's the world we live in, sadly today, isn't it?  

04:16  

Host: 

So how do we combat that as marketers?  

04:20  

Gemma Butler: 

I think this is where we need to go back to looking at why we exist as organisations and our purpose. There's sustainable marketing and there's marketing sustainability. And I think it's really, really important that we broaden out the narrative. And as marketers, we go beyond our products and services, and we look at how we can have a conversation about this, an ongoing conversation. You know, marketing sustainability is not a campaign, and it should never be approached as a campaign. We have to have this consistent conversation, and only through having that dialogue and that shared value and that two-way conversation can we talk about things and talk about our progress and be transparent. I think transparency is probably the number one thing that organisations need to be around their sustainable agenda. You know, Lego tried something and it didn't work, and they came out and said it wasn't going to work, and it didn't work. And there was a whole, you know, load of people that jumped on that, but they were brave enough to say it didn't work. I think the next step is to come out with what they plan to do next around it.  

05:23  

Host: 

So that's quite interesting, though, isn't it? So if you start by establishing an ongoing dialogue with your customer, you can be pretty honest about what you're doing well, and you can be honest about what you're doing less well, and you can actually have a conversation with the consumer about how you can improve those areas, and you're less prone then to just being shot down. What struck me about what you were saying was that it should never be a campaign. So if we're going to do a campaign to show how green we are, then you are putting your head above the parapet to be shot down because it's a sort of one hit. You're trying to do it in one hit. But if you're having an ongoing, consistent dialogue with your customer, you are much less prone to those sorts of attacks. 

06:07  

Gemma Butler: 

Absolutely, as I said, it can't be approached as a campaign because you will essentially lose the essence. The focus has to be on sustainability. If you're talking about sustainability, not that you can make a claim about sustainability. Therefore, by understanding your own impacts within your organisation, having a sound Sustainable Development Plan, and they can change, and they do change, and targets move in and out, and things don't work and things do work, but unless we have these open and honest conversations, I mean, if sustainability was easy to solve, we would have solved it by now. But it's one of the biggest conversations happening in the world today. It's one of the biggest challenges we face as humanity, and we have to start talking about it.  

06:51  

Host: 

Do you think there are any or many companies that get the difference between treating it as a campaign and treating it as a conversation?  

06:59  

Gemma Butler: 

I think there's many companies out there that do understand it absolutely, and they are pulling together sound and strong sustainable agendas. I think there is just this barrier when it comes to talking about it within society, which is where marketing comes in. You know, raising that ‘S’ in ESG, that we seem to be hitting a bit of a wall.  

07:19  

Host: 

So what would be your measures then, to overcome that do you think? To make the conversation model the default, rather than the campaign model, which we know is very flawed. 

07:30 

Gemma Butler: 

I think from a start point, marketers need to educate themselves on what's happening, you know, in the broader operating environment, because there is so much changing. You know, consumer behaviors are shifting, what they want, we're seeing that people want to live with purpose. We're seeing that people want to shop with purpose. And we need to look at that action, intention, intention, action gap, and how we close that. So I think marketers need to get educated and understand the wants of the markets, which is their role, and they need to bring those insights back in as the connective tissue between the organisations and society. And then I think within the organisations, they need to understand what's happening on their sustainable agendas, you know, and work with the sustainability teams, or whoever is responsible for that, and then sit down and think about the ways that they can have that dialogue, more sharing, less broadcasting. And I'm not saying that you can't do a campaign on sustainability. But where I would come in with that is you look at things like social marketing, where you have that ongoing campaign that runs consistently at certain periods, but then look at what you do on your social channels. How do you talk about things? Social impact companies do this brilliantly. They talk about everything from their products, how they're made, through to how you get people to engage on more sustainable behaviors, like, you know, refill and recycling and all of those models around circularity. You're not going to change the narrative overnight, but I think you’ve got to plan ahead and think about how you keep this conversation going.  

08:57  

Host: 

It’s interesting, isn't it, because you spoke in the past about, and things I've read from you and heard from you, is there's this tension at the moment in the market between awareness and understanding. So awareness is increasing amongst the consumer and also amongst the marketing industry, but understanding is not necessarily increasing or certainly not increasing at a quick enough rate. And what I mean by that is people are aware of the problem. They're very, very cognisant of the problem, but they're not always clear, as marketers or as consumers, what they need to do to solve a problem.  

09:32  

Gemma Butler: 

Yeah and it's really interesting, because that trend – so Deloitte, Cantar, Porter, Novelli, an agency called Savanta – have all come out with the same trend, which is awareness and concern around climate change is growing and growing quite a rapid rate, and rightly so. I mean, you only have to look out of your window and it's affecting everybody across the world. But a lot of the research that's coming out around terms associated with sustainability and sustainability terms is still incredibly low. And if you think about the terms Net Zero, circularity, carbon neutral, carbon offsetting, they're quite technical terms. And I was having a conversation just yesterday around the fact that do consumers actually have to understand what these technical terms mean? And I would say no, because as marketers, we should be the ones to almost explain and interpret those terms in a way and translate them into a way that that consumers can understand. So instead of talking about circularity, we talk about reuse, refill, repair, all of those things and we focus on the behavioral side. So they don't necessarily need to know what the circular economy is, it'd be great if they did, but you have to meet people where they're at. You have to meet people with something that's relatable to them to get them to engage.  

10:50 

Host:  

Yeah, there's a lot of professional scientific jargon around this stuff isn’t there? A patois is developed that sustainability experts use and that doesn't always resonate with the consumer. And that's a problem because you're hitting a brick wall if they don't understand these terms like circularity or what it means to them in terms of changing their behavior. You’ve got a real problem. How good do you think marketers are so far at making those translations?  

11:16  

Gemma Butler: 

I think some organisations, some marketers, are doing it very well, and it's a bit of a wooly answer, but others are not thinking about it like that, and I think that's because there's this focus on other things. You know, AI is also a massive conversation. There's a lot of distractions out there. But I think those are doing it well, are effectively, you know, using the right words and language. And again, I go back to the social impact companies. If you look at the likes of, who gives a crap, Tony's chocoloney, too good to go, OLIO – just the words and language they use in relation to sustainability. They don't use the S word. They don't talk about sustainability. They literally talk about behaviors. You know, too good to go talk about rescuing food. I think it's a really lovely way of talking about something. You know, they're saving 300 odd million meals, as opposed to, we're tackling food waste. 

12:14 

Host:  

So what do they do, Too good to go?  

12:15 

Gemma Butler: 

So too good to go take food that is about to go off its sell by date, or they work with you know, the likes of the coffee chains and independent retailers and independent cafes and things like that. And they work with them in a partnership whereby food that is going to go off, they bag that up, not too good to go themselves, but the independent coffee houses and such, they bag that up, and then they sell that off through the app. And people go along and collect those bags of food. They're almost like blind bags. You don't know what you're going to get.  

12:43  

Host: 

So similar to what you get if you if you, like me, go to the supermarket at nine o'clock at night, you often get these sort of bins where there's a whole bunch of, you know, bread and so on and so forth that you can get for tuppence. Yeah. And if you don't buy that evening, it gets destroyed, but they're actually automating that process and amplifying that process so they can get that stuff out, presumably not working with the big multiples, the big supermarkets as yet? 

13:08  

Gemma Butler: 

When we interviewed Jamie Crummy, the founder of too good to go, he talked about the fact that they've removed the stigma from the yellow labels in supermarkets. People are now proud to go and rescue food. When I go into the supermarket with my daughter, I say, she would go and rescue some fruit and vegetables, you know. And it's a really great way to engage with but they have amplified it, but they've also just started, just recently, their partnership with Unilever, and they work across Europe with massive, massive retailers. So, they are growing and they are doing things in different ways, but they ultimately are tackling food waste.  

13:48  

Host: 

It's interesting, isn't it, the language that you use there makes a huge difference –  rescuing food rather than, you know, collecting waste food or reducing waste. It just sounds more visceral. It sounds like a positive step. It sounds like something that’s fun to do that you're going to benefit from. It’s a great example of how marketers can introduce better language to change behaviors. But we're still a long way, aren't we, from making that the norm?  

14:20 

Gemma Butler: 

Yes, we absolutely are. John Grant said to us, we need to stop trying to make normal things seem green and make green things seem normal.  

14:30 

Host:  

Yeah, yeah. So if we're going to do that as marketers, we need first of all to make people aware of what is green and what is not. And when we were talking pre-pod, you said something to me which absolutely resonated, because I think it's one of those things where people do not realise they're having an impact. You know, I think people know that if they're chucking food away at home, that's not green. They know if they're buying stuff that which is more packaging than food, that's not green. I. And they know, if they're buying stuff that, you know, contains lots and lots of chemicals, that's not green. But there are a whole bunch of activities that happen day to day which people aren't even aware of have a big environmental impact. 

15:13  

Gemma Butler: 

I think you're talking about marketing's carbon footprint, aren't you? 

15:16 

Host: 

Well, I didn’t want to put too fine a point on it. 

15:18 

Gemma Butler: 

So there's marketing sustainability, which is how you talk about your products and services and what your organisation does and the purpose, and you go beyond those product services. Then there's sustainable marketing, and that's aligning your marketing to the organisation's sustainable agenda and supporting it, but that's also making sure that your marketing activities are sustainable. And for example, when we interviewed the Environment Agency, every department in the Environment Agency has a carbon budget, exactly the same as a finance budget. You get x amount of carbon, and if you go over that, you can't do any more activity, or you have to borrow it from another department.  

16:00 

Host: 

Can you buy it from another company?  

16:02 

Gemma Butler:  

Nope - so you’ve got your carbon budgets, and you've got your finance budgets. So when we talk about carbon budgets, and all organisations will need to have decarbonization targets in place at some point moving forward. And you know, well, 2030, 2050, they're around the corner, aren't they? So when we talk about marketing's carbon footprint, digital now has, if you look at the numbers and believe the numbers, and they do very slightly, but ultimately, digital, not just digital marketing, digital as a whole, so the streaming and the videos and the servers and everything, has a bigger carbon footprint than the aviation industry.  

16:38 

Host: 

Goodness me.  

16:39 

Gemma Butler:  

But when you take marketing’s carbon… 

16:41 

Host: 

Let's just put that one down and make sure that everyone who's listening to this pod has heard that digital has a bigger carbon footprint than the aviation industry.  

16:53 

Gemma Butler:  

The latest figures I saw was around 2.5% for the aviation industry, about 3.2/3.5% for digital. 

17:02  

Host: 

You see, I'd think that if you took 100 people off the street and asked them that question, you would probably get something close to zero. People thought that that would be the case, that it was outstripping aviation.  

17:12  

Gemma Butler: 

I mean, think about the power that AI requires, and it's only going to get more power hungry or intense, should we say. But if we think about it from a marketing carbon footprint perspective, the majority of what we do in marketing is digital. Why? Because of the reach, because of the eyes, and because the fact that, you know, in many cases, stuff like email marketing doesn't cost an awful lot of money. You can reach a lot of people in one go. Everything in the world has a carbon footprint, okay, and emails have a tiny carbon footprint, but we send, last year, we sent 322 billion emails a day.  

17:53  

Host: 

How many of those were read or acted upon?  

17:56  

Gemma Butler: 

I think something like the latest click through figures is down under double digits, and the bounce rate is over 10%, and if you imagine your own email habits, how many people have email boxes that are just dedicated to spam? How many people sign up to stuff that they never, ever read? The waste is catastrophic, okay, if you add all of that up, and there's loads of debate over whether email is damaging or isn't damaging, you know, but ultimately, if you were to put a cost against every email you sent, you would have a very different behavior. So why do we not associate the same thing with carbon? Websites are the same, so I looked at figures where it's estimated 576,000 websites a day are created. Only 15% of websites are active across the world, and then we've got to think about things such as, you know, our advertising – all of this comes with a carbon footprint associated with it. So, you know, we do a lot of work with marketers around greening your channels. Do you even consider the impact your marketing is having? And actually, as marketers, we should be looking at the impact of what we're doing is having naturally to see if it's having any cut through. But I think the world of digital has opened up this spray and pray approach, hasn't it? You know, you throw enough spaghetti at the wall and hope that some of it sticks.  

19:21  

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19:34  

Host: 

It certainly has opened up a spray and pray approach. We don't necessarily think that's a good thing in terms of marketing outcomes, never mind sustainability outcomes. But it does strike me that if you are trying to make those changes, you are looking at a huge culture shift in this sector that you've got to affect. Where do you start?  

19:54  

Gemma Butler: 

I think we go back to the basics, don't we? Of right message, right audience, right time, and apply those, and I think we just need to be much more mindful of our activities, you know. There’s an interesting organisation called unifeeder who do a carbon calculator, and they have looked at the cost of traditional channels is higher in terms of monetary cost, the cost of carbon when it comes to digital, it completely flips that on its head. So I just think as marketers, it's something to consider. We absolutely need to be thinking about how we green our channels. We need to be thinking about the activity and also reducing that noise as well, which we've been talking about for years. You know, there is so much noise. We are served ridiculous numbers of ads every day. The numbers vary, you know, depending on which report you read. But ultimately, when there's a something like a 0.2% click through on ads, that's a lot of waste. And I think, you know, like the demand side emissions that marketing is responsible for with, you know, people purchasing products, and the waste that those products generate, I think we have to look at our digital waste, because it's off the charts.  

21:09  

Host: 

It’s interesting, isn't it, because we've moved from a sort of an attack on merch, you know, actual physical waste that people can see, and that's in many ways easier for people to understand that, you know, you go to a conference to get a bag of plastic goods, those plastic goods sooner or later end up in landfill. People can see that that's wasteful, and to some degree, we've, as an industry, reduced that. This is harder to envisage in your mind because you can't see it. Actually, is it ultimately going to come down to the heavy hand of regulation that you know governments are going to have to say to companies, as you say, you've got a certain carbon budget, you've got so many employees, this is your turnover, ergo, this is your budget, and you’ve got to stick to it. And once you run out of that budget, you can't continue any activities unless you can find budget from somewhere else.  

22:00  

Gemma Butler: 

I'm not sure that government would be able to do that. I think organisations need to take responsibility for that. I think there's a lot of organisations out there who, because of scope one, scope two, scope three emissions, and those organisations that have decarbonization targets, there's very much, you know, when they go out to tender for business, unless the organisations that want to bid for that business don't have decarbonization targets, they're not getting past the first gate. So I think this is where within the business world, pressure between organisations is going to hopefully come into play, because your scope three emissions are basically your supply chain, they’re all of the things that sit outside of your control. Therefore you can work with somebody if they are not looking at their emissions that could blow your scope three emissions, likewise, marketing, if they're not aware of their own carbon footprint, couldn't blow the organisation's scope one emissions, because it is essentially, you know, not aware of the emissions that it's putting out there. So we talk about the fact that the need for marketing to support its organised sustainable agenda goes beyond just talking about sustainability, and what the organisation's doing. There is that physical carbon budget there that they also need to be aware of and support.  

23:28  

Host: 

It's fascinating, isn't it, because the market is starting to work in some regard there with the ESG reporting, as you say, and the fact that if you're a supplier, you are contributing to your client’s own carbon budget. And if you are the client, you also have your own carbon targets to deal with. So everybody in that supply chain is contributing to each other, and it becomes a commercial imperative. Presumably, that's the great hope, is that commercial imperative becomes ever stronger as we move forward, and almost the market drives this rather than having to rely too much on government regulation.  

24:08  

Gemma Butler: 

Yeah, and I think there is a place for regulation, but we shouldn't be waiting to be regulated into doing the right thing.  

24:15  

Host: 

Yeah. Well, let's talk about this fascinating stuff. You're working with CIM Academy. You're working separately, partnering with CIM as an educator in the area of sustainable marketing. If people want to take one of your courses, and they're going to need to know this stuff for the reasons we've discussed, what sort of courses are you offering? What are you doing?  

24:33  

Gemma Butler: 

So I teach for CIM Academy on their sustainable marketing qualification. But with “Can marketing save the planet?” we are partnering with CIM on a range of online courses ranging from two-hour bite sized courses up to eight-hour full courses. And you know, they're accessible, they're scalable, and we cover topics such as effective, sustainable communication, green washing 101, and they are there essentially to educate marketers, to make them aware and to enable them to do sustainable marketing and market sustainability. 

25:12  

Host: 

And presumably it enhances their understanding greatly in a relatively small space of time. So for a small amount of learning they can enhance their understanding very quickly. 

25:21 

Gemma Butler: 

Absolutely, and we absolutely as marketers need to be placed a responsible lens over the work we do, ask a different set of questions. But to do that, we need to be more aware, and we need to, you know, as Seth Goden said when he came on our podcast to first of all, we need to talk about it, but to talk about it. We need to understand it.  

25:41  

Host: 

We need to understand it, and there's a separate point here, isn't there, that once you've gained that understanding as marketers, you are able to communicate that understanding better to the rest of the business, which, of course, is a key role of marketing in so many areas. You've got to manage up, you've got to manage sideways, you've got to be able to know this stuff to communicate it. And sometimes that's a great challenge, isn't it, for marketers?  

26:04  

Gemma Butler: 

Absolutely, I mean, if you don't understand your organisation's sustainable agenda and it's not being talked about internally, and internal comms are just as important, then how can you effectively talk about what you're doing externally? And I think that's a really, really key point you raised there, because, you know, marketing should be working, as well as sustainability departments should be working, with the HR departments on how do we, you know, break down that narrative and start that conversation internally, because everybody's roles, no matter which department you work in, has sustainability in them.  

26:34  

Host: 

What are the key mechanisms then to make the CEO listen, to make the CFO listen, to make the CHRO listen? What are the key tools? What are the tricks to get that communicated across?  

26:45  

Gemma Butler: 

It goes back to the age old “we have to build the business case for it.” You know, it's all well and good saying that this is the right thing to do for the planet, this is the right thing to do for society. But that will not ultimately get the buy in, will it? It has to also be a good business case. And I think you can bring in the pressures mounting from investors, from consumers wanting to live more sustainably, shop more sustainably. And I think you can bring in employees, you know, employees want to work for organisations that align to their values. And there is a huge amount of climate quitting happening at the moment. And if you look at the latest report from Deloitte, Gen Z and millennials will walk away from organisations or not accept roles at organisations that are not taking sustainability seriously. So there is, you know, the stakeholder chain. There's pressures at each stage of that stakeholder chain. I think it's really incumbent on organisations if they want to get the best talent and retain that talent, they have to take this seriously, and they have to be seen to be doing something about it. So building that business case, as you say, for the boardroom, there is plenty that can go into that business case from a regulatory point of view, from a stakeholder pressure point of view, but also good business is good for business. There is so much evidence out there that those organisations, who are, you know, taking sustainability seriously, are making much more profit. But it's not just about making profit. Often we forget that if you are more sustainable, you are also more efficient, and there are a lot of cost savings to be made as well. So we need to put all of those different lenses over this, which we call a responsible lens, and just start asking a different set of questions. 

28:24  

Host: 

Are you optimistic for the future? 

28:27  

Gemma Butler: 

So my business partner is incredibly optimistic. I am incredibly pessimistic by nature, but I am optimistic, and I think that there is no better placed person than an aware and educated marketer to drive a more sustainable future.  

28:41  

Host: 

Well, that's a great call to arms. Gemma Butler, thank you very much indeed. What an amazing conversation. Thank you very much.  

28:50 

Gemma Butler: 

Thank you, Ben.  

28:51 

Outro: 

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