Inspired marketing

A speech I gave recently at a Carbon Trust event - thought it was worth sharing given the number of conversations I've had with people in the last couple of weeks on exactly this topic.

"I sit before you today as a marketer. My first job was in marketing – firstly as a graduate at Cadbury Schweppes, then with the Saatchi brothers honing my skills, and finally in 1997 I set up my own business, Good Business, which I still run today.

At Good Business we have spent the last 14 years helping businesses become more sustainable and successful.

We are not a sustainability consultancy, nor a marketing consultancy but a marketing sustainability consultancy!!

How? Well it comes down to three basic steps. First, helping them understand what they need to do. Second, helping them change their business to do it. And finally – and this is critical– helping them explain what they’ve done, how it differentiates them from their competitors and why it’s special.

And in the past 14 years we have seen many big businesses go down this route and made a big success of it – from Santiago’s Unilever to M&S to John Lewis.

But when i survey the landscape I have a tendency to get rather down hearted because the most striking thing is not how many companies have done this but how few.

I don’t mean that few have become more responsible, because actually, while CSR / CR / sustainability has its critics and allegations of greenwashing will always fly, most businesses have taken it on board and changed in the past years, and they are, broadly, taking the steps they need to be taking.

But what most businesses haven’t done is effectively tell anyone about what they’re doing in a compelling way – through their products and services.

And – and this is where it gets really depressing - that’s because of marketing.

Because what’s marketing been doing while all this activity is going on? Well, generally, nothing. Nine times out of ten marketing hasn’t been involved at all. And if they are pulled in – and it’s normally under duress – they find one hundred good reasons why they can’t possible integrate these responsibility factors into the marketing of the products and services they relate to.

And of course this means that the whole equation falls apart – because if consumers don’t know about the things the company has done which differentiates it from its competitors of course they don’t become part of the brand and, ultimately, consumers can’t buy it as a result of them.

In fact, of all the silos in businesses, be it hr, ops or anything else, the one area that has held back sustainability the most is marketing.

And if i am honest, it makes me ashamed to be one. We have an endless stream of people come through our offices saying they just can’t get marketing engaged.

It doesn’t really seem to make any logical sense to me.

When I was going into marketing it inspired me because I thought it was the exciting bit of business. It was about being the real guardian of the brand – and this meant being future-looking, it meant seeing the big picture of people’s lives and figuring out what will make them easier and better and happier and more fulfilling and then finding the right role for the brand within this future.

To be sure it would have a future. And it meant working with innovation so that the product and service development was in place to ensure the brand could deliver against these future needs.

And it meant working with communications to make sure it was all expressed in the best possible and most positive way and really got through to people and inspired them.

And then it meant immediately thinking further and harder and wider about the next steps that need to be taken to keep guiding the brand successfully into the future.

And yet what i have seen in the last twenty odd years is marketing becoming smaller than this in some many ways. It’s been becoming more and more short term in its outlook – focusing on the next quarter and the numbers – instead of taking the long term view.

It’s been becoming a dogged follower of consumers – only daring to give them what they want right now – rather than a leader, pre-empting and even shaping future consumer wants and needs.

And it’s been trying to become more and more scientific – as if it’s trying to take the management consultancies and finance directors on at their own game.

So while once the language of marketing was filled with words like vision and values and stewardship and foresight, now its vocabulary is all metrics and analytics and performance reports and technical skills. And the words are the window on its world.

It’s all about value. Not values.

It has become sales communications.

All of which means that when sustainability comes into the picture marketers can’t fit it onto their agenda. Sustainability is inherently values-oriented. It’s all about the bigger picture of how we do things and the way that we do things and why we do things. So it doesn’t plug neatly into the newly scientific marketing model. The latest market research report has indicated that the consumer isn’t directly motivated by this right now ,they say, and that means it’s irrelevant to us.

Well, if you ask me this is all a real pity. I want marketing to rediscover its long term view, rediscover its role as the real guardian of the brand and rediscover the accompanying need to look not just at where we are now but at where we are going.

Stuart Rose speaks of needing to be 1 ½ steps ahead of the consumer (not two or you will lose them). I think that’s right. I also think consumers have to trust your brand and business before you can lead them anywhere. They have to believe in you.

And while it might not fit into the numbers obsessed model of marketing, I really passionately believe that marketing can and should and must play a big role in making this happen.

When I talk to businesses – people in every department – what they all want is to be inspired by what they do, be proud of it, and feel good about it. And that is best delivered when sustainability and marketing come together - and it’s really vital that both are involved – and work out what role the business has in society, what its purpose is, what it can do and how it can do it better. And how they can in turn use this to say something about the organisation – to its people, to its customers, to society.

And when it works, when this all comes together, as it has at M&S and John Lewis and timberland and innocent, you can feel it. It feels real and human, it has genuine direction and most importantly it feels like something you can trust, because you get – on an intuitive and easy level - what it’s doing and how and why.

So what next?

Well, I don’t think sustainability should pander to marketing – I don’t think it should try and make itself fit into the scientific, numbers-based, short term model and endlessly churn out the ‘business case’ for it.

Instead it should show the business, show marketing, how the company’s sustainability strategy can put some life into the vacuum that currently inhabits most corporate and brand values. It can provide the personality and the leadership to prove that the business is on a journey – and it is going in the right direction.

Let’s inspire marketing to be inspiring.

That’s what I joined the marketing world for.

And I believe it will lead again. It will be exciting again."