Based on a speech at Carbon Neutral event September 2010
The business world has, by and large, taken corporate responsibility (CR) and sustainability on board in recent years. The vast majority of consumer-facing companies worth their salt have developed an understanding of the social and environmental impacts of their business. They talk to their stakeholders and are aware of their issues. And they are working to address these impacts and issues. They’re actively taking steps to minimise their negative impact on the world around them and maximise the positive. Of course it’s easy to find critics, and there will always be allegations of greenwashing - some justified - but most companies are, broadly, taking the steps they need to be taking to make themselves more responsible.
What most companies are, however, resolutely failing to do is to effectively tell anyone about what they’re doing. Their activity could act as a great way to differentiate the business and the brand in an era which places value on progressive change. But it doesn’t. It could be a great source of real competitive advantage. But it isn’t. Because most people don’t know anything about it.
Of course there are notable exceptions. From M&S to John Lewis to innocent. There are companies that have successfully integrated their responsibility activity into their consumer communications and indeed made sure responsibility is a core part of what they, as an organisation, stand for.
But they really are exceptions. By far the most striking thing is not how many companies have done this but how few.
So the big question is why? Why haven’t more made more of it? Why haven’t they turned their real social and environmental progress into consumer capital? Well, this is the curious thing. Nine times out of ten, it’s because of Marketing. Any move to translate the progress that’s been made into consumer capital hits a brick wall when it gets to the Marketing department.
At this point I should tell you that I am myself a Marketer by training – so this is coming from the inside. And it’s certainly not something I take any pleasure in saying.
But Marketing, which should, surely, be the home of vision within the organisation, is the department finding small-minded reasons why they can’t possibly integrate responsibility factors into the marketing of the products and services they relate to.
What’s going on? Isn’t Marketing meant to be the exciting bit of the business? Isn’t it meant to be the place to find the guardians of the brand – which surely means being future-looking and seeing the big picture of people’s lives and figuring out what will make them easier and better and more fulfilling – and then finding the right role for the brand within this future?
Well, maybe not. Maybe the answer lies in the fact that Marketing doesn’t occupy this role anymore. Over recent years it has stopped being the home of big, leadership thinking about the brand. It’s become much smaller than that. It’s more short-term in its outlook. It’s very numerically focused. And it’s become a dogged follower of consumers – building the brand offer around what the latest research report says the core target wants right now. There’s no hint of leadership, of pre-empting and even shaping future consumer wants and needs in the standard Marketing agenda.
Evidence of this shift is everywhere. The language of marketing, which was once filled with words like ‘vision’ and ‘values’ and ‘foresight’ and ‘stewardship’, now has a whole new vocabulary around ‘metrics’ and ‘analytics’ and ‘performance reports’ and ‘technical skills’. There’s a buzz around ‘Maths Marketing’, papers on which include sentences like this: “E-commerce environments provide us with a closed-loop system, which in marketing effectiveness terms gets us close to nirvana.” (Math Marketing: The New Landscape of Marketing Analytics, by Dimitri Maex, Head of Global Data Practice, Ogilvy & Mather Wordwide 2009). And massively expanded consumer research and tracking departments rule the roost.
It’s all about value. Not about values.
Sustainability doesn’t fit neatly into this model. It’s inherently all about values. It’s all about the bigger picture of what we do and how and why we do it. It doesn’t plug into any neat model and you might not be able to find a research report that indicates that it’s top of the consumer’s immediate decision-making motivation matrix.
So sustainability gets pushed out of the Marketer’s agenda.
It doesn’t, however, have to be this way. Surely the job of a Marketing Director was better and more fulfilling when it was about being the visionary long term guardian of the brand? Surely the Marketing Department should be the place in the organisation that looks not just at where we are, or even at the next quarter or the next annual planning cycle, but looks at where we are all going?
Stuart Rose gets at this when he talks of being one and a half steps ahead of the consumer. Far enough ahead to inspire them, not so far that you lose them – what you want to do is to take them along for the ride.
When sustainability and marketing come together they can deliver this. They can work out how to tie the activity that’s designed to make the company better – for the environment, for society, for the world – into a compelling consumer narrative. They can ladder this up to the broader role of the business and its purpose. And they can work out how to use this to say something incredibly powerful about the organisation – to its people, to its customers and to society.
A company’s sustainability strategy should be able to put some life and substance into the vacuum that currently inhabits most corporate and brand values. But it needs Marketing to see the light. And show everyone how to do it.
The challenge is on. Can Marketing rise to the occasion?
