How to Create a Sustainable Marketing Strategy

Welcome to Conscious Marketing Insights! Every other week, I share actionable conscious marketing insights to help you deliver digital experiences that matter. My goal is to inspire brands to adopt a more positive, sustainable, impactful, accessible and inclusive approach to marketing.?

This week, I'm happy to introduce Michelle Carvill l, who is speaking at an upcoming event hosted by the Conscious Marketing Movement .?

I've been a huge fan of her and Gemma Butler for their incredible work on the Can Marketing Save the Planet? podcast and their fantastic book, "Sustainable Marketing: How to Drive Profits with Purpose." Michelle is such an inspiration, and I’m so grateful for her participation.

Event Details

Date: Thursday, 26 September 2024

Time: 6 PM CEST (find your timezone here )

Duration: 1 Hour

Why Attend?

A relaxed conversational opportunity to ask questions directly to Michelle Carvill about how to craft and mobilise your Sustainable Marketing Strategy.?

What Will You Learn?

In this 1-hour session, you'll learn:

- The role marketing plays to support, mobilise and optimise your organisation’s sustainability agenda.

- Insights, tips and ideas about how Marketers can utilise methodologies and models such as Sostac and the 7Ps adding a responsible, sustainability lens to support driving impact.

- The components of the Sustainable Marketer Action Plan - Inwards, Upwards, Outwards

Interested in Attending This Event? Here's How.

If you're part of the Conscious Marketing Movement, you can join this event for free. Go to the community to get the details. ??

Not part of the Conscious Marketing Movement yet? We’d love to have you!? Check out our membership options to suit every budget and need, starting at €15 per month. Learn more here:

Interview with Michelle

… And I had a chat with Michelle Carvill to give you a sneak peek into what you can expect:

What is the driving mission behind your business or work?

M: Around 6 years ago, when Gemma and I started research for our first book, Sustainable Marketing - How to Drive Profits with Purpose, it became increasingly evident that Marketers and the work we do have been a significant part of overconsumption and unconscious convenience.

As seasoned professional Marketers, we were well aware that the KPIs around successful marketing focus on getting people to have, do and consume more. When we started to look in greater detail around the impact of the marketing function - we realised that, like us, there were millions of Marketers around the world, probably totally unaware of the negative impact of marketing.?

So we set about putting that right - our first book was the catalyst for change, quickly followed by our podcast so that we could keep the conversation going. As trainers and consultants, we quickly developed learning programmes to support education, working with leading academic bodies and building professional qualifications and open courses.?

The driving force behind the work we do is to bring education and awareness to Marketers so that they can see the role they play, care about making a difference and understand how they can use their skills, creative problem solving and influence as a real force for good. Supporting both the future-proofing of the profits for the businesses they lead or serve as well as supporting people and the planet.?

Why is sustainable marketing important to you?

M: There are approximately 10.6M Marketers (capital M = Marketers professionally qualified in some way) on the planet. That’s a lot of Marketers.?

Marketers have a unique role in that they sit within the organisation - understanding values, purposes, mission, strategic intent, brand, culture, internal value chain relations, products and services features and benefits - they have to understand these aspects in detail so that they can bring their creativity, problem-solving and influence to the party.

They’re well-versed in working across the value chain of the business and navigating fundamental business operations. They need this deep understanding because Marketers are the fundamental interface, taking the inside to the outside world - sharing brands, values, products, and services via various communications/campaigns to meet the hearts and minds, needs and desires of key audiences.

So, as well as operating across the ‘inside’ of a business, marketers also have to understand what’s happening on the ‘outside’ of the business. What are the latest trends, what’s the sentiment of audiences, what’s changing, how do we meet needs, what opportunities do shifts enable, what new innovations or solutions exist, what are our competitors doing. Insights from this continuous curiosity, learning, and listening can then be brought back into the inside of the business, informing strategy, product development, etc., ensuring that the organisation remains relevant, compelling, and commercially viable.?

Given the important role Marketers play, it’s critical that they now understand that the landscape they operate in is fast changing. There are increasing external pressures of the organisations they lead or serve - stakeholder pressure, investor pressure and of course, climate pressure.

We’re at a pivotal time in history where businesses have to respond urgently to a very real climate crisis, and our operating systems are being severely shaken. It’s an exciting time for Marketers to get their creative problem-solving hats on. In our view, once Marketers understand the challenges, they’re very well positioned to start developing creative solutions - solutions that can drive meaningful impact and positive behaviour change.?

What are some key metrics that businesses should use to measure the success of sustainable marketing? How do these metrics differ from traditional metrics?

This is a challenge - and there’s a real challenge for Marketers when it comes to how to measure success and what matters to the organisation. Of course, profits matter.

Organisations and brands need to keep the doors open, but of course, as commitments to sustainability grow, then new metrics and measures of success also need to be incorporated.

As part of our COM1 (Conference of the Marketers) conference held last March, one of the topics and continued working party subjects is around defining what those metrics could look like. We’ve been assessing the frameworks that are already out there - and also considering metrics to focus on ‘return on purpose’.

The metrics piece is challenging because it’s going to be contextual - for example - if a brand/organisation is committed to supporting to being accountable for their customers returning empty packaging as part of their sustainable marketing strategy - then a measure of success would be how many units were sold versus how many were successfully returned. That would then give a measure of customer participation / or customer behaviour change (ordinarily, they may have thrown it away, and now they’re doing something responsible).

Many of the metrics will be a case of considering the tactics being deployed, overlaying a responsible lens across them, and building metrics that align strategically. It’s an area we’re continuing to work on as a collective. So when we nail our framework, we’ll be sure to share it with your community. And it’ll be a continued conversation in COM2 in March 2025.?

Can you share some examples of marketing campaigns or strategies that embody sustainable marketing strategies?

In our latest book, "Can Marketing Save the Planet - 101 Ways to use Sustainable Marketing as a Force for Good", published earlier this year (Jan 2024), we cite a number of examples.

One example is from Boots, the chemist. They have a ‘Rewards for Recycle’ scheme, whereby customers can return difficult-to-recycle items, lipsticks, nail polish, etc. - and they get rewarded with ‘advantage points’. The interesting aspect is that the advantage card was already in place to encourage loyalty, but now the card is being used for dual purposes, and the return of items provides more advantage points than the purchase.?

Another great example of an end-to-end sustainable marketing strategy is Upcircule. And for more on this, I’d encourage your members to have a listen to the podcast we did with their founder. Episode 75 can be found here:

What are common mistakes businesses make when trying to implement sustainable marketing strategies?

A mistake we see is very simple. Marketers seem to forget that sustainability needs to be marketed in the same way as anything else. Finding out what people care about and then meeting audiences where they are at. Good marketing still applies. Understanding audiences, understanding what they care about, meeting them with stories and narratives that compel them.?

If someone's new to navigating sustainable marketing, what resources would you recommend?

On the Can Marketing Save the Planet website, we have a Learning Zone and a 100 Points Challenge. This is a great starting point as it’s all free to access. We have many teams taking our 100 Points Challenge - which encourages them all to start learning and sharing and once you start… you just want to keep going.?

Our Can Marketing Save the Planet podcast is an absolute fountain of sustainable marketing knowledge. Gemma and I have learned so much over the years of interviewing many brilliant minds - and we’ve got much more to come...

Marketers, academics, social impact organisations, researchers, ESG strategists - there’s something for every Marketer. I would encourage your audience to dive in and explore the topics and learn. The podcast is on all the usual podcast platforms, including Global Player and The Marketing Society podcast.?

Finally, we have our Online Sustainable Marketing Training Hub - here we have formal training courses, which we’ve designed to be scalable learning resources - fully online. Some of these online training courses are certified programmes, such as our Carbon Literacy for Marketers.?

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Interested in Attending This Event? Here's How.

Not part of the Conscious Marketing Movement yet? We’d love to have you!? Check out our membership options to suit every budget and need, starting at €15 per month. ??Learn more here

Become a part of the Conscious Marketing Movement

Transform your marketing from manipulative to conscious. Join our online community, listen to our podcast, or come to our coliving retreat! We bring purpose-driven entrepreneurs and conscious marketers together to learn, connect and grow so that we can create social impact and profits.? ??Learn more here

That's all for today!

Psst… Want to meet me in person?

I’ll be speaking at the Climate & Social Justice Summit, organised by the Ethical Assembly bly, in Lisbon on 2 and 3 October. I’ll join over 150 speakers — click here for more details!

See you soon ??