 hi allan, wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs, ac yn gweithio i'r CIM marketing podcast. Rwy'n gweithio yw mae'n gofyn ychydig, a yw'r gofyn yn gofyn, a'r gofyn yn gofyn yn gofyn yw'r gofyn, y cewd yn gwneud y cyfans, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n cyfans, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n cyfans CIM marketing podcast. Mae'n Gemma Buttler. Gemma, mae'r gweithio'n gweithio? Mae'n gweithio hynny ddweud wedi gwneud yn y mawr hwn. Mae'n adgen o ddaint wrth gwerthwyd. It's fantastic to be here, and Gemr As You Or Know, if you're a seasoned listener to this show. I was former director of marketing here at Morhol for CIM and is now working again with CIM as an educator in the area of sustainable marketing. So what better way to start our spring season and I've already been in touch with you all indirectly by reading your article in the latest catalyst about green后ing Ac y% perna y flwysg c Personally I'm quite ironic that we're here to talk about sustainable marketing We want people to talk more about sustainable marketing We want people to do more about sustainable marketing And lots of companies you're telling me in your recent article Have stop talking about sustainable marketing Well, green hushing is a choice organisations and making Not to make green claims or talk about what they're doing in relation to their ti'n meirion i gyntafol'r gyflu amser. Roedden nhw'n oes iawn o'r llwyddonion respectsau druau ac esgolwyr, ac aelod yn cael yr yma mae'r gyflu'r gyflu'r gyflu'r gyflu yn ymhori. Dyflu'r gyflu yw'r gyflu sy'n ei masaf i'ch arwain yn nhw wedi wixam ar gwyseidu, ar y ddau sy'n ddalol i'r amser, a'r goddau ar hyn i ddod o hynny i ddigon gwaith gydliadol. Dyma, allan floedd yn gennym gael gweithio gyda pawr llog. Mae wedi fawr, mae'r fawr nesaf arfer. Mae'n hanen, mae'r fawr yn cynhwys iawn. Felly, wrth gwrs, mae'n gweithio drilid yn fawr fl confused â'r ei ddweud â'r icin ac yw'r cynnig. Yn arfer, mae'r lles yn gweithio'r icin, a mae'n gweithio cyhoeddiu, ac mae'n gweithio'r icin wedi'u llyfrgellu'i ymddangos hwn. Ym maeth iawn, a rôl eich cynnwys ac mae gael'r byddweithiowynt ac mae'n gael'u gael'u gwirionedog. Byddwn ni'n gael yn gynhyrchu. Yr gofydd, sef yn amlwg gwn y gyleu'r gweithio, roedd eich cynnwys i newid dyma. Roedd eich gael sydd gyda aheadd. Roedd yn fwy o'r bwysig yn y brwyff sydd cyntaf o fynd y bwysig o'r yn abordg ysbytym. Byddwn ni'n credu addysgu'r ysbytym. If you start with the evidence and then work back on what claims you can make from that, you should be completely sound in terms of the green claims you make. I think what organisations are doing is thinking that they have to fix everything now and that's impossible. If there's so much decarbonisation, biodiversity, all of these different elements packaging waste that they need to deal with and I think what they're saying is we won't talk about any of it because if we come out and talk about our decarbonisation targets, we'll get called out for other things. I think there's this balance. There is no 100% way to be sustainable. It's impossible. That's quite interesting isn't it? What you're saying is that there are areas in which companies are doing good and doing well. There are some areas and this applies probably to every company in the world where they're not doing as good and they're not doing as well. There's this phenomenon where if they start shouting about the things they're doing well, which actually you want to hear about because it's best practice and other companies can follow it, the blogosphere, the internet, etc etc, social media will then say the things that they're not doing well. If they put their heads above the parapet and they get shot down, in fact in many cases they are doing some good things but because they're not a universal good behaviour it's very easy to shoot them down. That's the world we live in sadly today isn't it? So how do we combat that as marketers? I think this is where we need to go back to looking at why we exist as organisations and our purpose. I think it's really important when you are, there's sustainable marketing and there's marketing sustainability and I think it's really really important that we broaden out the narrative and as marketers we go beyond our products and services and we look at how we can have a conversation about this, an ongoing conversation. Marketing sustainability is not a campaign and it should never be approached as a campaign. We have to have this consistent conversation and only through having that dialogue and that shared value and that two-way conversation can we talk about things and talk about our progress and be transparent. I think transparency is probably the number one thing that organisations need to be around this, a sustainable agenda. Lego tried something and it didn't work and they came out and said it wasn't going to work and it didn't work and there was a whole load of people that jumped on that but they were brave enough to say it didn't work. I think the next step is to come out with what they plan to do next around it. That's quite interesting though isn't it? So as long as you start by establishing an ongoing dialogue with your customer you can be pretty honest about what you're doing well and you can be honest about what you're doing less well and you can actually have a conversation with the consumer about how you can improve those areas, what would work for them as customers and you're less prone then to just being shot down as if you were strictly about what you were saying was that it should never be a campaign. So if we're going to do a campaign to show how green we are then you are putting your head up of the parapet and to be shot down because this is a one hit, you're trying to do it in one hit but if you're having an ongoing consistent dialogue with your customer around these areas you're much less at risk to those sorts of attacks. Absolutely, as I said it can't be approached as a campaign because you will essentially lose the essence. The focus has to be on sustainability if you're talking about sustainability not that you can make a claim about sustainability. Therefore by understanding your own impacts within your organisation having a sound sustainable development plan and they can change and they do change and targets move in and out and things don't work and things do work but unless we have these open and honest conversations I mean look how if sustainability was easy to solve we would have solved it by now but it's one of the biggest conversations happening in the world today it's one of the biggest challenges we face as humanity and we have to start talking about it. Do you think there are any or many companies that get the difference between treating it as a campaign and treating it as a conversation? I think there are many companies out there that do understand it absolutely and they are pulling together sound and strong sustainable agendas I think there is just this barrier when it comes to talking about it within society which is where marketing comes in, raising that S in ESG that we seem to be hitting a bit of a wall. So what would be your measures then to overcome that do you think? You've spoken in the past about changing narratives, talking more to the consumer understanding a little bit more about how consumer behaviour can be tweaked and changed so what measures would you employ to get from, to move from the campaign model to the conversation model to make the conversation model the default rather than the campaign model which we know is very flawed? I think from a start point marketers need to educate themselves on what's happening in the broader operating environment because there is so much changing consumer behaviours are shifting, what they want we're seeing that people want to live with purpose we're seeing that people want to shop with purpose and we need to look at that action, intention, intention, action gap and how we close that so I think marketers need to get educated and understand the wants of the markets which is their role and they need to bring those insights back in as a connective tissue between the organisations and society and then I think within the organisations they need to understand what's happening on their sustainable agendas and work with the sustainability teams or whoever is responsible for that and then sit down and think about the ways that they can have that dialogue how they can as we say more sharing less broadcasting and I'm not saying that you can't do a campaign on sustainability but where I would come in with that is you look at things like social marketing where you have that ongoing campaign that runs consistently at certain periods but then look at what you do on your social channels how do you talk about things, social impact companies do this brilliantly they talk about everything from their products, how they're made through to how you get people to engage on more sustainable behaviours you know refill and recycling and all of those models around circularity you know you're not going to change the narrative overnight but I think you've got to plan ahead and think about how you keep this conversation going It's interesting isn't it because you spoke in the past about things I've read from you and heard from you, this tension at the moment in the market between awareness and understanding so awareness is increasing amongst the consumer and also amongst the marketing industry but understanding is not necessarily increasing or certainly not increasing at a quick enough rate and what I mean by that is people are aware of the problem they're very very cognisant of the problem but they're not always clear as marketers or as consumers what they need to do to solve the problem Yeah and it's really interesting because that trend so Deloitte, Cantar, Porto Nevelli, an agency called Savanta is coming out with the same trend which is awareness and concern around climate change is growing and growing at quite a rapid rate and rightly so I mean you only have to look out of your window and it's affecting everybody across the world but a lot of the research that's coming out around terms associated with sustainability and sustainability terms is still incredibly low and if you think about the terms net zero, circularity, carbon neutral, carbon offsetting they're quite technical terms and was having conversation just yesterday around the fact that do consumers actually have to understand what these technical terms mean and I would say no because as marketers we should be the ones to almost explain and interpret those terms in a way and translate them into a way that consumers can understand so instead of talking about circularity we talk about reuse, refill, repair, all of those things and we focus on the behavioural side so they don't necessarily need to know what the circular economy is it would be great if they did but you have to meet people where they're at you have to meet people with something that's relatable to them to get them to engage There's a lot of professional scientific jargon around this stuff isn't there so the patois has developed that sustainability experts use and that doesn't always resonate with the consumer and that's a problem because you're hitting a brick wall and you don't understand these terms like circularity and what it means to them in terms of changing their behaviour I've got a real problem How big do you think marketers are so far at making those translations? I think some organisations, some marketers are doing it very well and it's a bit of a woolly answer but others are not thinking about it like that and I think that's because there's this focus on other things AI is also a massive conversation there's a lot of distractions out there but I think those that are doing it well are effectively using the right words and language and again I go back to the social impact companies if you look at the likes of who gives a crap Tony's Chocoloni, Too Good to Go, Olio just the words and language they use in relation to sustainability they don't use the S word they don't talk about sustainability they literally talk about behaviours Too Good to Go talk about rescuing food I think it's a really lovely way of talking about something they're saving 300 odd million meals as opposed to tackling food waste So what do they do Too Good to Go? Too Good to Go take food that is about to go off itself by date or they work with the likes of the coffee chains and independent retailers and independent cafes and things like that and they work with them in a partnership whereby food that is going to go off they bag that up in Not Too Good to Go themselves but they all got the independent coffee houses and such they bag that up and then they sell that off through the app and people go along and collect those bags of food they're almost like blind bags you don't know what you're going to get So similar to what you get if you sort of like me go to the supermarket at 9 o'clock at night because it's the quietest you often get these sort of bins where there's a whole bunch of bread and so on and so forth and you can get for tuppans and if you don't buy that evening it gets destroyed but they're actually automating that process and happy-fying that process so they can get that stuff out do you mean not working with the big multiples the big supermarkets as yet? When we interviewed Jamie Crummy the founder of Too Good to Go he talked about the fact that they've removed the stigma from the yellow labels in supermarkets people are now proud to go and rescue food when I go into the supermarket with my daughter to rescue some fruit and vegetables and it's a really great way to engage with but they have amplified it but they've also just started or not just recently they announced their partnership with Unilever and they work across Europe with massive, massive retailers so they are growing and they are doing things in different ways but they ultimately are tackling food waste It's interesting isn't it the language that you use there makes a huge difference you know, rescuing food rather than collecting waste food or reducing waste it just sounds more visceral it sounds like a positive step something that's fun to do that you're going to benefit from it's a great example of how marketers are going to introduce better language to change behaviours but we're still a long way aren't we from making that the norm Yes we absolutely are it's about, and I get this, the wrong way round all the time so you might need to cut this bit out but John Grant said to us we need to stop trying to make normal things seem green and make green things seem normal Yeah, yeah so if we're going to do that as marketers we need first of all to make people aware of what is green and what is not pre-pod you said something to me which absolutely resonated because I think it's one of those things where people do not realise they're having an impact I think people know that if they're chugging food away at home that's not green they know if they're buying stuff that is more packaging than food that's not green they know if they're buying stuff that contains lots and lots of chemicals that's not green but there are a whole bunch of activities that happen day to day which people aren't even aware of have a big environmental impact and give us some of those that perhaps might surprise our audience I think you're talking about marketing's carbon footprint aren't you I didn't want to put too fine upon to that and that's so there's marketing sustainability which is how you talk about your products and services and what your organisation does and the purpose and you go beyond those product services then there's sustainable marketing and that's aligning your marketing to the organisation's sustainable agenda and supporting it but that's also making sure that your marketing activities are sustainable and for example when we interviewed the environment agency every department in the environment agency has a carbon budget exactly the same as a finance budget you get x amount of carbon and if you go over that you can't do any more activity or you have to borrow it from another department can you buy it from another company no so you've got your carbon budgets and you've got your finance budgets so when we talk about carbon budgets and all organisations will need to have decarbonisation targets in place at some point moving forward and you know 2030, 2050 they're around the corner aren't they so when we talk about marketing's carbon footprint digital now has if you look at the numbers and believe the numbers and they do very slightly but ultimately digital not just digital marketing digital as a whole so all the streaming and the videos and the servers and everything has a bigger carbon footprint than the aviation industry but when you take marketing let's just put that one down and make sure that everyone who's listening to this pod has heard that digital marketing no digital not just marketing digital has a bigger carbon footprint than the aviation industry the latest figures I saw was around 2.5% for the aviation industry about 3.2 3.5 for digital you see I'd think that if you took 100 people off the street and asked them that question you would probably get something close to zero people thought that that would be the case that it was outstripping aviation I mean think about the power that AI requires and it's only going to get more power hungry or intense should we say but if we think about it from a marketing carbon footprint perspective the majority of what we do in marketing is digital why because of the reach because of the eyes and because the fact that in many cases stuff like email marketing doesn't cost an awful lot of money you can reach a lot of people in one go and every email has a tie everything in the world has a carbon footprint and emails have a tiny carbon footprint but we send last year we sent 322 billion emails a day How many of those were read? I think the latest click through figures is down under double digits and the bounce rates over 10% and if you imagine your own email habits how many people have email boxes that are just dedicated to spam how many people sign up to stuff that they never ever read the waste is catastrophic if you add all of that up and there's loads of debate over whether email is damaging or isn't damaging but ultimately if you were to put a cost against every email you sent you would have a very different behaviour so why do we not associate the same thing with carbon websites are the same so I looked at figures where it's estimated 576,000 websites a year are a day are created only 15% of websites actively in the world are are active only 15% of websites are active across the world and then we've got to think about things such as our advertising all of this comes with a carbon footprint associated with it so we do a lot of work with marketers around greening your channels do you even consider the impact your marketing is having and actually as marketers we should be looking at the impact of what we're doing is having naturally to see if it's having any cut through but I think the world of digital has opened up this spray and pray approach hasn't it you know you throw enough spaghetti at the wall and hope that some of it sticks it certainly has opened up the spray and pray approach we don't necessarily think that's a good thing in terms of marketing outcomes nevertheless never mind sustainability outcomes but it does strike me that if you are trying to make those changes you are looking at a huge culture shift in the sector that you've got to affect, where do you start? I think we go back to the basics don't we of right message right audience, right time and apply those and I think we just need to be much more mindful of our activities you know and this is where we also have to marry up you know out of home versus there's an interesting organisation called Unifida who do a carbon calculator and they have looked at the cost of traditional channels is higher in terms of monetary cost but the cost of carbon when it comes to digital is you know it completely flips that on its head so I just think as marketers it is something to consider we absolutely need to be thinking about how we green our channels we need to be thinking about the activity and also reducing that noise as well which we've been talking about for years there is so much noise we are served ridiculous numbers of ads every day the numbers vary depending on which report you read but ultimately when there's something like a 0.2% click through on ads that's a lot of waste and I think like the demand side emissions that marketing is responsible for with people purchasing products and the waste of those products generate I think we have to look at digital waste because it's it's off the charts it's interesting isn't it because we've moved from a sort of an attack on merch waste that people can see and that's in many ways easy for people to understand that you know you've got a conference to get a bag of plastic goods most plastic goods sooner or later end up in landfill people can see that that's wasteful and to some degree we've as an industry reduced that this is harder to envisage in your mind because you can't see it I mean does it actually is it ultimately going to come down to the heavy hand of regulation that you know governments are going to have to say two companies as you say you've got a certain carbon budget you've got so many employees you've got this is your turnover ergo this is your budget and you've got to stick to it and once you've been out of that budget you can't continue any activities unless you can find budget from somewhere else I'm not sure that government would be able to do that I think organisations need to take responsibility for that I think there's a lot of organisations out there who because of scope 1, scope 2, scope 3 emissions and those organisations that have decarbonisation targets there's very much you know when they go out to tender for business unless the organisations that come into to you know want to bid for that business don't have decarbonisation targets they are being they're not getting past the first gate so I think this is where within the business world pressure between organisations is going to hopefully come into play because your scope 3 emissions are basically out of your they're your supply chain they're all of the things outside of your control therefore you can work with somebody if they are not looking at their emissions that could blow your scope 3 emissions likewise marketing if they're not aware of their own carbon footprint couldn't blow the organisations scope 1 emissions because it is essentially you know not aware of the emissions that it's putting out there so we talk about the fact that the need for marketing to support it's organised sustainable agenda goes beyond just talking about sustainability and what the organisation is doing there is that physical carbon budget there that they also need to be aware of and support it's fascinating isn't it because the market the market is starting to work in some regard there with the SG reporting as you say and the fact that if you're a supplier you are contributing to your clients own carbon budget and if you are the client you also have your own carbon targets your own carbon targets to deal with so everybody in that supply chain is contributing to each other and it becomes a commercial imperative presuming that's the great hope is that that commercial imperative becomes ever stronger as we move forward and almost the market drives this rather than having to rely too much on government regulation and I think there is a place for regulation but we shouldn't be waiting to be regulated into doing the right thing let's talk about you it's fascinating stuff you're working with CIM Academy you're working separately partnering with CIM as an educator in the area of sustainable marketing people want to take one of your courses and they're going to need to load this stuff for the reasons we've discussed what sort of courses you're offering what are you doing so I teach for CIM Academy on their sustainable marketing qualification but with Can Marketing Save the Planet we are partnering with CIM on a range of online courses ranging from two hour bite size courses to eight hour full courses and they're accessible, they're scalable and we cover topics such as effective sustainable communication greenwashing 101 and they're just there they are there essentially to educate marketers to make them aware and to enable them to do sustainable marketing and market sustainability and presumably enhances their understanding greatly in a relatively small space so for a small amount of learning they can enhance their understanding very quickly Absolutely and we absolutely as marketers need to place a responsible lens over the work we do ask a different set of questions but to do that we need to be more aware and we need to assess Godin said when he came on our podcast to first of all we need to talk about it but to talk about it we need to understand it You need to understand it and there's a separate point here isn't there if you once you gain that understanding as marketers you are able to communicate that understanding better to the rest of the business which of course is a key role of marketing in so many areas you've got to manage up, you've got to manage sideways you've got to be able to know this stuff to communicate it and sometimes that's a great challenge isn't it for marketers? Absolutely I mean if you don't understand your organisation's sustainable agenda and it's not being talked about internally internal comms are just as important how can you effectively talk about what you're doing externally and I think that's a really really key point you raised there because marketing should be working with H as well as sustainability departments should be working with the HR departments on how do we break down that narrative and start that conversation internally because everybody's roles and the amount of which department you work in has sustainability in them What are the key mechanisms then to make the CEO listen to make the CFO listen to make the CHRO listen to make the key tools what are the tricks to get that communicated across It goes back to the age old we have to build a business case for it it's all well and good saying that this is the right thing to do for the planet this is the right thing to do for society but that will not ultimately get the buy in will it it has to also be a good business case and I think you can bring in the pressures that are mounting from investors from consumers wanting to live more sustainably shop more sustainably and also employees employees want to work for organisations that align to their values and there is a huge amount of climate quitting happening at the moment and if you look at the latest report from Deloitte GenZ and Millennials will walk away from organisations or not accept roles organisations that are not taking sustainability seriously so there is the stakeholder chain there's pressures at each stage of that stakeholder chain I think it's really incumbent on organisations if they want to get the best talent and retain that talent they have to take this seriously and they have to be seen to be doing something about it so building that business case you say for the boardroom there is plenty that can go into that business case from a regulatory point of view from a stakeholder pressure point of view but also good business is good for business there is so much evidence out there that those organisations who are taking sustainability seriously are making much more profit but it's not just about making profit often we forget that if you are more sustainable you are also more efficient and there are a lot of cost savings to be made as well so my business partner is incredibly optimistic I am incredibly pessimistic by nature but I am optimistic and I think that there is no better placed person than an aware and educated marketer to drive a more sustainable future That's a great call to arms Chairman but thank you very much indeed what an amazing conversation Thank you very much Thank you Ben