Tess Ariotti is the Lead Consultant at Salter Baxter, which is part of the Publicis Groupe of companies. They specialise in developing sustainability strategies at the global, local, corporate, and brand levels and activating them across the value chain.
Sustainability is a hot topic. The UN Sustainability Goals set a global agenda for 2015 to 2030. Almost two-thirds of the way into that agenda, progress has been slow but steady. Some blame the worldwide pandemic, others the subsequent economic slowdown.
But where are we today? What are companies and corporations doing? And what could they be doing? And for us in marketing, what is the role of marketing?
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When you look at how they affect business, when you look at what’s going to happen over the next kind of 5 – 10 years to our society and to our economy, large scale change is needed.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing – a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you are enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.
Sustainability is a hot topic. The UN Sustainability Goals set a global agenda for 2015 to 2030. Now, almost two thirds of the way into that agenda, progress has been slow, but steady. Some point to the global pandemic, others to the subsequent economic slowdown.
But where are we today? What are companies and corporations doing, and what could they be doing? And for us in marketing, what is the role for marketing?
To discuss the state of play for corporate sustainability, I have a guest from Salterbaxter, part of the Publicis Groupe of companies, who specialise in developing sustainability strategies at global and local, corporate and brand level, and activate these strategies across the value chain.
Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, Tess Ariotti, lead consultant at Salterbaxter. Welcome, Tess.
Tess:
Great to be here, Darren.
Darren:
Tess, look, this is such an important topic. There have been some big things happening in the marketing world recently with Ad Net Zero announcing that they’re launching, the AANA have updated their guidelines around greenwashing.
But the conversation I wanted to have with you is in the broader sustainability area, not just the environment.
Where do you think we are today from more a corporate perspective? And I’d like to explore how marketing fits into that. So, let’s start with the corporate perspective.
Tess:
Yeah, of course. See where we’re going and where we’re at with corporate sustainability. Sustainability in business is changing, and it’s changing pretty rapidly, actually. If we think back to maybe 15 years ago and before that, sustainability might have been corporate social responsibility, corporate philanthropy, or a social impact marketing campaign.
And that was really about developing a social license to operate – building your reputation. It was sort of an add-on. A tool you could use if you wanted, because that’s what made sense to the brand, or that was a good campaign idea, etcetera.
Then it sort of evolved a little bit. It might have been in response to knowing that we had to be a bit more cognisant of how we’re using resources. There was a big push on energy efficiency and water efficiency that was really led by facilities teams in businesses.
And usually, businesses made changes when they understood the kind of financial payback period. Like if we use less resources, we’ll pay less. Those things are still around and they’re not bad in themselves, but corporate sustainability has evolved a lot.
So, now, it’s much more a whole of its own business function. It’s a whole of business approach. And the reason for that is because businesses are starting to wake up to the idea that these things aren’t just a tool to use or a nice to have. These are issues that will have a real impact on your business.
And by real, I mean it will affect the things that businesses care about. It will affect things like profitability. It will affect things like wellbeing, safety, and productivity of employees. It will affect things like consumer preferences. Are consumers wanting to buy the same things in the same way?
And, importantly, it will also affect the supply chain. So, even if consumers want to buy the same thing, will they be able to keep on buying that thing? Will they be able to keep on buying it at the price point that they’re used to?
All of these matters have been affected by sustainability issues. And so, businesses are realising it’s a business problem and it needs a business response.
Darren:
It’s interesting, Tess, because I think it was 30 years ago, I first heard the phrase the triple bottom line – profit, people, planet. It was this idea that business had a responsibility.
But the UN Sustainability Goals really consolidated that, in a way, into the 19 different goals, which includes clean water for everyone.
But the consolidation of those was one thing, and then the buy-in to actually have a trickledown effect. Because we’re seeing countries legislating to actually meet these standards now, aren’t we?
Tess:
It’s interesting, because the UN are working at a society level in a sense. And sometimes it’s hard to make the jump from that society level issue to what that means for business or the economy. And then, even more specifically, what that means for my business.
So, maybe if we like unpack that a little bit and think about, well, what is sustainability? The definition that we tend to use is from about 30 years ago (maybe more now) from the UN, which is that sustainability is being able to meet your needs and meet the needs of the world’s population without impacting the ability for future generations to meet their needs.
And that raises two things. It means we need to be able to meet our needs and we need to be able to keep on doing that forever. So, it raises the question, what are our needs? How do we define what humans need?
And, luckily, there was a really smart fellow called Maslow who figured that out for us. That is a good framework to think about. The Maslow Hierarchy of Needs starts with things like, do you have air to breathe? Do you have water to drink? Very base level…
Darren:
Basic survival.
Tess:
Survival, exactly. Which we have in common with every other species on the planet. And then it works up to, do we have shelter? Can we build communities? Can we support ourselves? Do we have a sense of wellbeing? Do we have a sense of identity? And it works right up to self-actualization.
And, so, when you look at it in that way, sustainability sometimes gets understood just as the environmental side of things. Just as climate. And, obviously, climate change is affecting all of the rungs of that hierarchy. But when you start looking at, well, actually, it’s can we build communities? Can we make choices, and can we feel a sense of belonging? Then it becomes very clear how there are environmental and social implications when we’re looking at sustainability.
Darren:
It’s interesting from my perspective, what you mentioned earlier about translating that societal need and desire into how that impacts business.
And here’s why; the original idea of a company or a corporation was to be existing in society for the good of society. Now, somewhere along the way, it was all about shareholder profit.
So, in some ways, you could frame this as really getting back to the original role of the corporation, which was to enhance society. Part of that is delivering profits to the people that own it, whether that’s shareholders or whatever. But businesses don’t exist in isolation. Society is the very place that their customers live.
Tess:
Yeah. I think that that’s such a good point – that trying to separate them out is sort of this futile exercise. And I’d love to stop having that debate about whether it’s just going after profits, or whether a company should understand these wider issues as well. Because it’s the same thing, when it comes down to it.
And we can see that in Australia, for example. In our company law, there is an expectation that directors of companies, their key responsibility is creating returns for their members or shareholders. That’s how our company law is set up. No one is questioning that.
But there are also, other laws now. Particularly about having to understand the context and how that affects your business – what issues might affect your ability to deliver those returns.
More specifically, there’s laws about modern slavery as a risk to businesses and the economy, and to people. So, you need to have a look at what that means in your supply chain.
And then, very recently, the climate disclosures. Companies are now having to record their climate-related financial risks and opportunities. So, there’s now specific laws that call out how climate change is affecting your financial state of your company.
So, both things exist at once. And if you pretend like, “Well, the only thing I’m going to worry about is money, I’m not going to worry about anything else,” you won’t make money. Or you’ll make some money now, but not anything in the future. It’s a mugs game.
Darren:
It is interesting that they’ve made the mandatory reporting on the environment at the same level as financial reporting. I mean, it is now a part of the accounting standards.
So, it means that if this applies to your business (and I think there’s a threshold of size), you have to meet both standards as an obligation for being in business. It’s part of the responsibilities that come with the rights of the corporation or company.
Tess:
Yeah. And there’s some things that are even more stringent or greater expectations than just reporting standards. So, for example, if you’re a privately held company, you don’t have to publish publicly your financial statements. You might have to submit them to ASIC, or whatever your company needs to do.
But if you have to do these climate related disclosures, you have to make them public. So, I’m sure we’ll get to the role of marketing communications more later, but there’s some red flags about how this might affect them, because there are public disclosures. I.e. communications being made about these topics that have to be published in regular intervals every year.
And while there are thresholds, so it isn’t the really small businesses that would have to report, there’s a couple of caveats to that and it comes in three tiers. Over the next few years, it will roll in. The lowest threshold involves three criteria, and you have to hit two of them related to number of employees, revenue, and assets.
If you are a company with a 100 or more employees and 50 million in revenue a year, you’ll have to report, which isn’t a particularly high threshold. Obviously it’s not the smallest businesses, but it does capture quite a number of businesses.
And that includes whether you are a family-owned business, privately held, ASX-registered, or owned by a foreign company.
The other thing that is probably worth calling out is that companies will have to report against their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, which is jargon that you might have heard.
But, essentially, it means you have to understand what’s happening in your supply chain, and you have to understand your relationship to your supply chain.
So, even if you are a small business who doesn’t have to report, there might be implications for you if you are part of a supply chain. If you supply to a bigger player, for example. If your key clients are the bigger-sized businesses, they might want data from you. They might want information from you, and over time they might expect your approach to business to evolve.
So, the implications for business are going to go beyond just kind of ticking that compliance box of working through those standards.
Darren:
And look, I actually really like that. Not just the environment, but almost all of the sustainability goals identify that business is part of a community. Whether it’s a B2B community and your suppliers, or other businesses, or wider society, as we discussed a minute ago. That we’re all interconnected.
It’s not enough to sit there and try and be an isolationist that says, “Look, I’m doing my thing about modern slavery,” for instance. Because modern slavery is about your supply chain. It’s what’s happening out there in the environment, not just what you’ve done for your immediate control, but the influence you have.
In fact, there’s various movements around the world that are even doing the same when it comes to gender equality, and are prioritising requirements for businesses to choose businesses that are, for instance, majority women-owned. And I know in the US, veteran-owned, or owned by people of colour, or BIPOC.
So, there is a general trend happening, particularly in western economies, that are saying these are behaviours and considerations that are now part of the right to be in business or to run a business, aren’t they?
Tess:
Yeah. And it is related to that more ‘old school’ concept of the right to be in business. Your social license to operate, that’s very related to your reputation.
But if you think about some of those issues as well, it does affect your ability to run effectively. So, if you have a board of directors who are all (to use the stereotype) old white men…
Darren:
‘Pale, male, and stale.’
Tess:
Exactly. And maybe your consumer base is not ‘pale, male, and stale’. Maybe they are representative of the Australian community more broadly, who are quite multicultural. Or maybe your consumers are…
Darren:
Gender balanced.
Tess:
Maybe there is gender balance or maybe it goes the other way and, actually, all your consumers are women. And you’ve got just men in charge of making those decisions. How effective is that going to be for the long-term success of your business, if you don’t have any wider views? It makes it very hard to sustain your business over time.
And I use that phrase, ‘sustain your business over time’, on purpose, because this is talking about the sustainability of business. And for businesses to sustain their success over time, they need to be responding to these sustainability issues, because they’re both risks and opportunities.
People are seeing there’s an opportunity with having a more diverse boardroom and employee base at every level. They’re seeing an opportunity in understanding how climate change will affect them and affect their consumers, so that they can make better choices about how they supply their products and services over time.
Their understanding that these issues are going to affect society, and society is made up of their employees, who need to be able to get up and come to work every day without having wider impediments to be able to do that.
They need to be productive, they need to understand their role, and they need to have the right training and resources to be able to deliver what the company needs. And that’s changing over time.
Society is also made up of their consumers and their investors.
Darren:
The thing that I like and needs to be challenged is that business, like most things, fits in normal distribution. You’ve got the leaders out the front that are embracing ESG. They’re building their businesses around environmental or social sustainability and governance. Then you’ve got the mass in the middle, and then you’ve got the tail end.
Now, the thing that annoys me sometimes about the conversation that we’re having is that people always point to those companies that are way out in front and hold them up as the prime example. Only to then, naturally, have the middle (the massive businesses) go, “Oh, yeah, but they’re different. They’re special. That’s not us.”
I’d really love to explore with you now, Tess, what are some of the things that businesses are doing? Not just those way out there leaders of sustainable change, but the businesses that you probably think they’re sort of average, but they’re doing interesting things.
Because I think that’s part of the conversation we need to have more and get people realising that there are actually things that all business could be doing.
Tess:
Yeah, I love that so much. And it’s such an important point that we can’t just have leaders, a couple of anomalies doing this, and affecting the level of change that we’re needing.
These are issues that will affect the whole of economy. It’s never going to be successful unless there are ways for all players to be involved. So, we really need to be looking at what does that mass middle look like.
I’d also, say in terms of corporate sustainability in Australia (and probably globally), leadership still up for grabs, guys. This is your time – run and get it. No one’s really leading in this space. There are some companies that have done some really good things. There are some people that might have been a leader on a certain topic, but it’s wide open.
And if you look at consumer research – which I’ve looked at different types of consumer research done by different groups over the years – it always comes back to, ‘Well, there’s not really anyone leading in this space. We wouldn’t really know how to say it.’
So, if this is an area that you want to lead in, there is an opportunity for you. Please go for it. We do need the leaders as well.
But coming back to that middle and what they’re doing, I think it really comes back to, do you have a whole of business approach? Are you starting to look at how this affects your whole business?
And what role does corporate sustainability have for each of the different business functions? Therefore, what responsibility does all the different people in your organisation, all the different functions in your organisation, have to it?
So, that’s probably the strongest business response that can be taken at the moment. In terms of using business practices and tools that exist at the moment, there’s ways of doing that.
That is what’s going to create the strongest foundations to move in step with the level of change that’s happening. Keep up with different compliance and different regulations, but also protect your business.
I’ve spoken to quite a number of companies recently, and there is a lot of ‘waiting to see’. I mean, we all like to benchmark ourselves against our peers and understand what our competitors are doing. That’s normal business practice.
There’s probably a little overreliance on that, I would say, when it comes to sustainability. I was speaking to a risk leader the other day and he was saying, “Well, we don’t really want to do anything before everyone else does, because then we pay a premium and people don’t understand it and it’s hard to sell in. But also, if everyone else is doing it, we definitely want to do it!” And…
Darren:
I see the business lined up at the starting line and it’s, ready, set, set, set… No, no, we’ll go tomorrow.
Tess:
It’s like they want to be at the horse race where they just pull all the barriers, so everyone knows exactly when to go. That’s what they want. Unfortunately, they’re not going to get that. They have to find another way.
And maybe you can just wait until you feel like there’s almost like a tipping point – this is when we’re all going to go, and then go then. But that’s a bit risky, to be honest.
Because when your business needs you to go is when the business needs it to happen. And, then also, you could get left behind in some of these changes that we’re talking about.
Darren:
Or you could be caught wrong-footed. If everyone else goes, you could be the business that’s left standing there going, “Oh, hang on, we’re almost ready.”
But you do understand their risk perception, which is (and particularly in Australia) the ‘tall poppy syndrome’. If they’re the business leader that runs out in front, they’re risking being shot in the back, possibly by their own colleagues and friends.
Tess:
It’s really true. In Australia, it’s ‘tall poppy syndrome’. I think this is also true across APAC actually, and different cultures. We are really seeing it. We are in a region that is a more conservative and traditional approach to business.
In Australia, it’s the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome, and in some of the Asian cultures it’s that very humble, deference kind of culture. It is affecting innovation and change, and there is a need.
It’s very clear when you look at those SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) across the 17 different categories. When you look at how they affect business, when you look at what’s going to happen over the next kind of 5/10 years to our society and to our economy, large scale change is needed, and transformational change takes time.
So, really, the best time to start was 30 years ago, when the world came together, and we agreed that climate change was something that we needed to work on. Or 40 years ago, when we first saw the photo of the earth from outer space.
I don’t know if you know that famous photo – the blue marble?. And we went, “Oh, we live on a blue marble that seems so small and insignificant and finite.”
Darren:
And when the phrase, ‘There is no Plan B’ was first cast. That this is it. What we live on. Except that Elon Musk is doing everything possible to help us go and live on Mars, maybe is his vision of the…
Tess:
Maybe that’s Plan C?
Darren:
Yeah, interplanetary. It’s still a while off.
Tess:
That’s a while off.
Darren:
There’s always someone coming up with another plan.
Tess:
There’s always other options. But at the moment, we’ve gone, “Oh, like the best time to start was 30 years ago. The second-best time is now.”
Fine, there might be some wild solutions like that. But, at the moment, the best solutions we have are to live within the planetary boundaries, respond to the SDGs to promote equality, have strong institutions, provide decent work and employment for people, and give them access to that.
Letting people live the life that they want, which is basically comes down to, can people have a job? Support their family? Get about their day? We haven’t changed that much as a race, have we?
Businesses want to get on and they want to deliver for their customers. They want to deliver for their shareholders, and they just want to do business. That makes sense, and that’s what they should be doing. But the reality is, how they do that and the things that are affecting their ability to deliver against those core objectives is changing.
Darren:
It is interesting because I remember reading the history of Cadbury in the town of Bourneville. We’ve all heard of Cadbury Bourneville Cocoa. That was in an era when the company built a village and built high quality homes for the staff, and created a community that was near the factory so people could get to work and get home.
It had all of the facilities and utilities that weren’t widely available in society at that time, to make it an attractive place to live and to look after the quality of life of staff.
It’s almost like, along the way, we lost sight of that sort of thinking. But, in some ways, that’s the opportunity today, is to really reposition the company as thinking about the people and the planet. And out of that, making profit.
They’re not mutually exclusive, are they? There’s quite a lot of evidence that embracing ESG principles can actually drive profits.
Tess:
Yeah, absolutely. It absolutely can. It can drive profits, and it can protect your ability to create profit over the short, medium, and long term. I think that is the key way of saying it. And that’s a great story – I love that story about Cadbury. There are other examples as well.
Previously, I worked at Samsung, and they will talk about that the company. We all know their technology, but it actually started selling flour and rice.
And a key motivator was to use the business to help pull South Korea into a developed nation from a developing nation. And, obviously, it’s had a long history since then. But there are a lot of companies that start with a particular purpose, or to solve a particular problem.
And that needs to remain true. Human ingenuity wants to keep on evolving and creating better ways for us to live our lives. We want to have products and services that help us do that, and businesses want to fill that need.
I’m sure there are some businesses that have started because someone said, “I want to make a lot of money.” But I would suspect that far more have started because they’ve said, “This is a really cool idea.” Or, “Wouldn’t it be great if we did it this way?” Or, “Hey, there’s a problem here and I can solve that and here’s how I do it.” That’s where the business comes from.
And that’s sort of what you’re saying. You’re saying, this is a society, this is how we live together, and this is business’ relationship to the community.
Darren:
Yeah, absolutely. And when you see founder stories, almost invariably there is a thing that they were passionate about or something that they wanted to change. Even Jeff Bezos, he was a bookseller that saw an opportunity.
Now, originally, Amazon was about books. But it very quickly turned into a business that was supplying everything anyone would ever need through that online delivery system.
You mentioned earlier that it’s a whole of business approach. Do you think it’s particularly a top-down transition? Or can it also, be grassroots up? Could a business actually transform from an employee movement? Or does it have to have board or C-suite commitment to get it going? I’m not saying sustain it, but to get it going.
Tess:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I would say maybe historically, the bottom-up approach was probably more prevalent.
Often sustainability as a function, or as a role in an organisation, would come about because there was someone in marketing or in HR that saw some ESG environmental or social matter that was relevant to their role. Or they had a particular passion, and they really drove that.
And that was really successful for getting some traction – getting that grassroots movement or getting it on the radar.
In my opinion, it’s very hard to embed that into an organisation, sustained or not, without executive support. I think you do need senior engagement, whether at the executive or board level (preferably both) to be able to have this make sense for your business.
It will inevitably fall over if you don’t have that – unless it’s really built into your business practices and how you do business.
So, it’s got to start somewhere. And it can just as easily start from a really strong leader – a CEO with a clear mission to become more sustainable – or a pocket/handful of employees that really care about it. I’ve definitely seen both.
But you do need leadership on this for it to translate into business practice. And what businesses need now, is for it to translate into business practice. It can’t just stay with the annual clean up a beach day for employees.
I’m not saying don’t do that. Definitely clean up beaches if that’s a part of your plan, but it can’t just be that for this to be an effective business function now.
Whole of business for me really is about that it being in your business strategy. And your sustainable business strategy has to be a useful document.
One of my favourite sustainable strategy-related anecdotes is an organisation I was working with at some point in my career. I was helping them with their sustainability strategy to try and improve the governance around that, and then the idea was that, over time, we would evolve that strategy.
The first step was to understand, okay, there’s the strategy that exists now, how has it been used by the people in the organisation?
Because a good strategy is only as good as people using it, and only good if it sets a vision and helps people make decisions about what they need to do relevant to their role. That sort of flag on the hill, something to work towards. No matter who’s making the decision, you’re all working towards the same point.
And I asked numerous internal stakeholders, including the core sustainability team but also more broadly, “How do you use this strategy? What responsibility do you have to the actions? What accountability, and how do you use it to make decisions?”
And without exception, they said, “No, this strategy’s not for me. I think that someone else did that. Oh, we don’t really use that.” Or “I didn’t really understand it. So, I just created my own plan with my own team.”
And this was not a small organisation, I would say first. This was an organisation that should know better. And after drawing a deep breath, it really stuck with me all the time since then.
Because a powerful strategy is so effective and so helpful to a business. It really can rally your employees, it can communicate well to your stakeholders, it can help you make decisions. It gives you something to work towards, even when there’s a lot of ambiguity. And boy, is there a lot of ambiguity in the world right now. That is what a strategy should do.
But, more often than not, we are seeing strategies being done that nobody understands, nobody is engaging with, and it’s left in a metaphorical draw and not used.
So, when we talk about whole of business, it’s really about saying, do you have a strategy and approach that is useful to your business? And I think that that’s going to be the key difference going back to leadership versus what can everyone do.
Everyone needs to have a way that they understand their business, understand their business in the context of the world around them, and help their employees and their stakeholders contribute in the way that makes most sense. When we are all doing that, we’ll have the level of traction that we need.
Darren:
I remember a paper in Harvard Business Review more than a decade ago, 66% of CEOs said their biggest frustration is the failure of strategy to be implemented. Sixty-six per cent! That’s a pretty big failure rate.
What I like about what you were saying there is that it solves one of the problems that we often hear from marketing, which is marketers are getting more and more responsibility for driving company growth. Justifying the investments that they’re making in marketing, and particularly advertising, because they’re held to a KPI that is around profitability or revenue growth.
Whereas if you have a strategy built on including sustainable goals, suddenly your KPIs would actually open up opportunities for marketers to deliver beyond just profit. Profit within a sustainable framework.
Because marketers are sitting there going, “Yes, I want to do something about diversity, equity, inclusion. I want to respond to net zero.” But, at the moment, that’s over there in ESG, or over there in legal, or over there in corporate strategy.
What is the role for marketing in all this?
Tess:
The key thing that I want marketers to hear is there is absolutely a role for you in this. And the skills and the things that marketing and communications professionals are good at are so desperately needed in this sustainable transition that we’re on. So, I guess that’s the key thing.
I would say at the moment, unfortunately, a lot of marketers and communicators are switching off from sustainability. And I get it. If we’ve come from that place that we were talking about before, that was the corporate philanthropy and social impact marketing.
And now, we are getting to a very regulated compliance bog, shall we call it. I’m in favor of mandatory disclosures and I think that they’re really useful, but, at the moment, they are creating a bit of a compliance bog. Everyone’s just in a ‘tick the box’ mentality.
And marketers are switching off because they’re like, “Well, that’s not for me. That is for legal or risk or compliance to deal with. There’s not a role for me in that place.” And why would they want to find a role? Because it sounds really boring. So, I get it.
But, actually, we need a whole of business response. We need to understand what makes sense to this business and how to get traction. There absolutely is a role for marketing.
I do think that a massive opportunity for businesses is for their sustainability team (or people who own that) to work much more effectively and to collaborate much more deeply with marketing and communications. If we can do that, we honestly will get a lot more traction. I really believe that there’s a lot of room for better collaboration between those functions.
So, if we look at what that might mean and what that might look like. Sustainability is complex. It’s necessarily complex. We’re talking about the big wicked problems of the world – dense scientific knowledge and information.
And sustainability professionals often are really good at accepting that complexity and sitting in ambiguity. They are often deeply knowledgeable in their technical areas, but sometimes that can get a bit overwhelming.
And where they need a little bit of help is making it make sense and making it simple. Marketing and communications professionals are excellent at making the complex simple and making a clear, simple message.
And that’s really what we need, because just leaving it in the complexity and in the quagmire of scientific knowledge isn’t translating to business practice. So, there is a really big role for marketers in that.
Related to that, it can make sense all if you want, but if your stakeholders aren’t bought into it, it’s not going to go anywhere. That is both internal and external stakeholders.
So, that’s going to be having all the different parts of the business working together. In my experience, that is also, something that marcoms are good at. They’re used to working across business functions and bringing stakeholders together and bringing different disciplines and diverse thoughts into a room.
So, to get buy-in from those diverse stakeholders, we kind of need to make it desirable, and we need to make it make sense for each different stakeholder group.
Sustainability professionals can be really good at understanding their stakeholders or understanding what needs to be done, I should say. But marcom professionals are really good at knowing how to understand and engage an audience. Sustainability people say stakeholders, marcom people might say audience. In a sense, there’s a lot of similarities about what those different things are.
Understanding an audience, understanding what matters to them, how they make decisions, how to engage them, how to make something really desirable for them is exactly what marcoms people are excellent at. That’s what we need.
We need to have simple messages that make sense to the audience. That gives them a clear cause or action about their role in it – that is all working towards that North Star. They are all things that marcoms, in my opinion, kind of skill sets can absolutely help deliver.
Darren:
It’s interesting, from my perspective, you talking about comms or strategy and marcoms working together, because often there’s a polarising effect happening in there. That often corporate comms or corporate strategy will not want to talk about anything publicly or, even broadly internally, until it’s completely done.
Perfect is the enemy of progress, because they’ll hold off promoting or talking about something until it’s exactly right for fear of criticism. Whereas marketing will often want to run ahead and see an opportunity.
And I remember, I’m not sure I can talk about the brand, but they’d done so much work with reforesting areas for koalas, but no one knew about it because it was never told.
And yet by making an ad that used the metaphor of ‘the koala’s home is like your home and we’re looking after it’, suddenly just put the perception of that business off the scale for caring about the environment.
Now, it’s interesting. It is a traditional problem, isn’t it, between corporate strategy or corporate comms and marcoms.
Tess:
I really wanted to emphasise the point that I think there’s an opportunity for corporate strategy and sustainability people to work better with marcoms, because it’s not really happening as well as it could right now. There is a tension and there has been a tension. But I’d love to try and resolve that better.
I can see both perspectives. There are risks with going too early or communicating about things that aren’t properly understood or thought through. But there are also opportunities that are going to be missed unless you know how to talk about something well.
I think that it comes down to understanding why a particular action is being taken, the benefits of that action, the limitations of that action. It might be a great action, but there’s lots of things it might not do.
Then making sure that any communications or celebration or storytelling about that is told in that context. And that does require collaboration between those functions.
But there absolutely is a need to communicate more about sustainability, because people want to know. People want this information, consumers want this information, investors want this information, employees want this information.
And I think unless a business can really clearly articulate why they’re doing something – why that’s the right thing for their business, and how it’s making a difference or progressing against the areas they want to progress – they probably don’t understand it in a deep enough way that they’re going to be able to get the benefits from.
So, continuing to engage with stakeholders or audiences internally and externally means really effective communication. I think that there’s a lot that we can do there.
Darren:
Particularly this idea of ‘perfect being the enemy of progress’ reminds me of a very famous pitch story from the UK. British Rail were pitching their business and the senior management turned up to an agency.
The receptionist was sitting there filing their nails and on the phone call, and ignored them while they were trying to get the attention. “Excuse me, we’re here for a meeting.” “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be with you in a minute.” Not responding to them at all.
And just as they were about to walk out, the agency burst out of the boardroom and said, “This is pretty much how the public see you at the moment.” And then went on to present to them a positioning line for British Rail, which was, “We are getting there.”
Tess:
Oh my God. I’m giggling behind my hand. That’s such a good story.
Darren:
Right! But what I love about it is that it’s proof that as a corporation, if you’ve got a vision, and a strategy, and a direction, you don’t have to wait to actually achieve the strategy. You just have to be committed to it and implement it, then make that as a promise of, “Yes, this is what we’re doing.” Then your comms strategy is just keeping people up-to-date with the progress you’re making.
Because I don’t think anyone in the world exists that thinks that everything’s perfect. We’re all willing to accept that corporations are just as imperfect as we are in our day-to-day life. But if they’re committed to getting better, then we’ll be inclined to cheer for them and want them to succeed.
Tess:
And at this point of the transition to become more sustainable, particularly on matters like climate change, no one is doing enough. We will all have to do more over time, and we will continue to accelerate.
So, anyone that’s representing this view that, “Yeah, we’ve got this under control, we know what we’re doing, we are good,” is not. They might not be intentionally lying, but that is not an accurate statement. There is more that everybody will need to do over time.
And surely that’s a better story as well for marketers and communicators. Is it a good story to say, ‘This really awesome company did a really awesome thing and everyone was really happy with them, the end’. No one’s watching that movie. That’s boring.
What’s interesting is this issue occurred, and we fought through it together, and it was ups and downs, and we’ve persevered and we’ve progressed. The struggle and then the lesson, and then, eventually, progress.
That’s a great story. And surely that is a more interesting thing for marketing teams to be working with, but also for people to be hearing. I think that exactly what you’re saying goes to that authenticity of the action.
I remember once — I didn’t think it was the key reason that they created a role, but a part of the reason I created a role that I ended up taking on – there was a company that were looking to work with more community partners, and not-for-profits (NGOs) were pitching different program ideas.
And this senior person at this company cut them off and said, “Oh, I think you’ve misunderstood the brief. We don’t want to do the right thing; we want to be seen to be doing the right thing.” Which is just wild thing to say aloud!
But anyway, they thought, “Oh, maybe we need someone who’s got expertise in this area to be looking after this part of our business.” So, I got a job, there which was very exciting.
But that being seen to be doing the right thing has been a bit of a preoccupation. And, of course, you want people to understand what you’re doing, but you have to back it up with the action. That, again, goes back to that whole of business approach.
Darren:
Well, Tess Ariotti from Salterbaxter, we’ve run out of time. This has been a fantastic conversation. I’ve really enjoyed your perspective and I’m sure people are thinking deeply about where they are. I really appreciate you spending some time on Managing Marketing.
Tess:
Thanks for having me. And I wish all the marketers and communicators listening well in getting involved in the sustainability transition.
Darren:
I have got a question for you before you go. That is, there is (as you pointed out) no one outstanding in leading sustainability in business. So, if there was a company listening to this that thought about making a leadership stand, how could they contact you?
