Helping marketers step to the right side of history!

Working for a sustainable future is one of the most rewarding things that you can do. But as anyone doing just that will tell you, it’s also really tough. Right now, it’s probably tougher than [1]?it has ever been. Despite the growing evidence of the desperate situation all around us, governments are stalling and sustainable strategies in organisations the world over are stagnating. The light bulb is going on in board rooms around that world that sustainability is more than a new function bolted onto the side of the business to do a bit of recycling and reporting. It’s a fundamental change of everything and in an edgy, uncertain, and expensive world often too complex[2]? to contemplate and the cultural default to infinite growth at all costs grabs our myopic attention.

It's all too easy to roll over and go with 'Business-As-Usual' (BAU) in these circumstances and the harsh reality is that real change is only going to come from the collective impact of personal commitments to[3]? doing the right thing. Our future isn’t dependent on governments, or miraculous new technologies, it is down to us all individually having the personal determination to acknowledge the problem and decide to be on the right side of history.

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This is especially true for marketers. Many of us remain alarmingly ignorant of the problems we are causing, but an increasing number have a growing awareness coupled with an equally powerful sense of unease, if not guilt. If that is you, now is the time to make your decisions and take your stance. As Jake Dubbins so wonderfully articulates, now is the time to set yourself on a path to be on the right side of history.

Marketing is hugely complicit in the sustainability challenges that the world faces. Although it has existed for centuries, its strategic foundations and functional role in capitalist society were laid down in the 1960s at the same time as the first manifestations of the modern environmentalist movement. Since the days of ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson, and its role in attempting to discredit her work, the marketing community has placed itself on the wrong side of sustainability.?

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In the 1960s economists and the strategic marketers of the time designated marketing as the ‘engine-of-growth’. Principally it took on board the role of delighting the customer whilst addressing two core flaws in the purist economic model, one that assumed that humans were both rational and had perfect knowledge. Marketers possessed the tools and human insight to address both and over the following 60 years have played a fundamental role in fuelling the ‘Great Acceleration’ and its associated damage.

Wind forward to today and marketing is a highly sophisticated, data and technology-driven industry worth $740bn a year. Yet despite its willingness to adopt innovative technologies such as radio, TV, digital, data and increasingly AI, marketing has failed to innovate its core principles or even contemplate the correctness of its cultural mindset. The customer is always right, the Four P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) have been tweaked but not changed and we only exist to deliver growth. Increasingly this places it at odds with a society seeking to be sustainable through the development of new economic models that address the challenges of degrowth. Marketing is an industry of growth and growth only! One that has been highly successful, whilst still being grossly inefficient in its own right. It has established aspirational lifestyles and architected consumer demand that is wholly unsustainable, yet so powerfully embedded that many of its concepts have become established as cultural norms, such as[1]? the need to buy a diamond to express love.

Yet, marketing has a role to play. The need to address the irrational human with imperfect knowledge still exists in a sustainable society. Marketing has the potential to influence behaviour positively. However, as the greenwashing pandemic has taught us, it is currently incorrectly orientated to rise to the challenge. Despite having the techniques to help change behaviour its community is devoid of sustainability knowledge, strategically lacks the remit to work in pursuit of wellbeing for all and possesses the wrong cultural mindset to drive its own transformation.

The goal of our work is to tackle these challenges straight on. The Sustainable[2]? Marketing Compass is designed to shift marketing away from the 1960’s toolkit and our book, Sustainability Marketing – the industry’s role in a sustainable future, suggests a new role for marketing that can pivot the cultural foundations of the industry. The change, however, is not instant. The simple deployment of marketing’s communications horsepower will only seek to try and sell more sustainable solutions. Marketing needs to go through its own sustainable transformation in order to better utilise those tools and minimise the damage it causes.

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Also inherent in the challenge is the need for marketing to unpick and dismantle the aspirational lifestyles and cultural norms that it has constructed over the last 60 years. Simply promoting sustainable products in this context will fail. It’s akin to attacking a fortress with a bubble blower.

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Sustainable transformation is needed at every juncture in marketing, from not working with those brands that only cause harm, to breaking the BAU and being truly innovative in what we seek to do. That starts with you, the individual full of both concern and great ideas. All our book offers is a compass that offers guidance,[3]? but hopefully that puts you on the path to the right side of history.?

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