How creativity and vulnerability drive sustainability marketing success
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“Sustainability is everything. It’s the fundamentals of human existence. I think it’s the fundamentals [to] the future relevance of business.”
Sustainability is no longer an optional add-on for businesses, it’s a core expectation from consumers, employees, and stakeholders. In the latest episode of The Persuasion Game, Simon Garnett and Laura Halliday explore this critical topic with Joss Ford, founder of Enviral. Enviral helps organisations communicate their sustainability efforts creatively, credibly, and consistently, offering services in strategy, creative execution, and advertising. Together, they unpack how creativity, authenticity, and a focus on progress can help brands thrive in a sustainability-first world.
Creativity is the key to engagement
Sustainability messaging often fails to connect because it feels dry, or even worse, depressing. Joss highlights the importance of creative storytelling, like the Big Plastic Count. This was a citizen science campaign that Enviral ran with Greenpeace, which engaged UK households to track their plastic use for one week. By collecting real data, it aimed to inform government and supermarket policies on plastic waste.?“We gamified it, made it super inclusive, brought it into schools, and universities, and it created a load of people wanting to say, ‘You know what, I want to do my bit'” Creative, inclusive campaigns can transform sustainability narratives, inspiring action and driving real impact.
It's about progress, not perfection
Progress over perfection
A recurring challenge in sustainability is the demand for perfection, which can lead to inaction. Joss emphasises the importance of progress, “It’s either you should do something, or you shouldn’t do something, or it’s this perspective of, you’re either perfect or just don’t be involved in it at all.”
Joss explains that this mindset can hinder progress, “The problem that we’ve got is that that gets amplified even further... This is about progress, not perfection.”
By focusing on incremental steps, businesses can build momentum and avoid the paralysis of trying to be perfect.
Make sustainability core, not a campaign
For Joss, sustainability cannot be siloed in one department, it must be embedded across the organisation, “You can’t do that if it’s not at the centre of the DNA of the organisation. And, you know, we’ll get briefs that come in that have been totally created by the sustainability department or the marketing department... but it needs an outside third-party organisation to actually bring these departments together… to look at the entire workforce. And that’s where that authenticity often comes from.”
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When sustainability becomes a shared mission, brands can communicate more authentically and build greater trust with their audiences.
3 takeaways for building better sustainability stories
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