Kissmas

Covent Garden is famous for wowing tourists with its extravagant Christmas decorations each year and currently stealing the show is a sustainable Christmas tree. The innovative tree, from designer Paul Cocksedge, lights up when two people kiss underneath. It works by channelling the electricity generated from the kiss into powering 50,000 red and white LED lights! So for all the lovers out there this Christmas head to Covent Garden and create some magic…

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."

Fuel efficiency for free

Fiat have just released details of the first ever large scale real life study into eco;driving, gathered from their eco:drive system, and it makes for interesting reading. The stand out fact for me, beyond the impressive 6% average improvement in fuel efficiency, was that although journey distances remained the same, journey times actually decreased. Counterintuitively, eco-drivers turned out to be speedier drivers, getting to their destinations quicker, due to an average 13% decrease in stop time. So drivers are saving money, reducing emissions and getting there faster - where's the catch!

The big difference between this and other studies is that this was not based on test conditions, but real life. Car companies have spent billions achieving a 20% improvement in average fuel efficiency over the last 15 years years. Here's a way of getting another 6% average improvement, in a matter of weeks that doesn't cost a thing. Car makers are waking up to this; as Andrew Humberstone, Fiat UK's MD said at the forum on Wednesday, even the most efficient cars can be driven poorly, so if the question is "how can we improve the vehicle's fuel efficiency then we can no longer avoid the fact that the answer must include driver behaviour."

For eco-driving to fulfil its potential though it needs to be publicised to a wider audience and to be factored into everything from driving tests to road planning, sat-nav systems to arcade games. Fiat made a commitment on Wednesday that the launch of the data would mark the start of a forum to try to bring these different ideas together and coordinate activity across different sectors. Sounds like it could be the start of an interesting dialogue.

More details about the report here.

FTSE4Good not quite so good

BP has been taken out of the FTSE4Good Index, however in contrast to United Parcel Service, DuPont and Bridgestone, it has not simply been ‘deleted’, it has been ‘suspended’. The difference is purely semantic, as, in order to qualify for re-inclusion, BP has to go through the same assessment as the other companies. So, with this ‘unprecedented’ measure following, the index is simply making a point.

Fair enough? Perhaps BP does deserve to be singled out for the failings that led to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. However, by making such a show of suspending BP, the index is also highlighting the problems inherent in its criteria for inclusion. According to David Harris, Head of Responsible Investment at FTSE, the FTSE4Good committee had taken the decision following a review of the number of past events that had taken place and BP’s poor response to their aftermath. Therefore, why is it only now that BP’s inclusion has been called into question?

Perhaps the FTSE4Good committee should also consider suspending and reassessing its own criteria to ensure that it maintains its credibility and continues to contribute to the development of responsible business practice worldwide.

We bonus against sustainability...until it looks like we won't get our bonuses

One of the key questions when it comes to true business sustainability is whether it is part of the way a company remunerates its staff. If all the drivers related to the way you pay and bonus your staff are short term in nature, it is fairly likely that the only results you will see emerging from your staff will be short term. Just take a look at the financial sector if you need a clue to what happens when you reward short termism!

So when you see a company who has incorporated sustainability metrics into the way they reward their staff, it may make you think that they are on the right track. Surely once you have made a public commitment to a metric you should stick by it.

Not so if you are Shell. This is taken from their 2009 Sustainabilty Report:

"Shell uses a number of key indicators to evaluate the company’s overall performance across financial, operational and sustainable development (SD) areas.This evaluation is then used to determine bonus levels for employees, including members of the Executive Committee. Sustainable development accounted for 20% of the scorecard for 2009. As in previous years, safety was the key measure,supplemented by other aspects of HSSE & SP performance.For 2010, an assessment by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes of our performance in sustainable development will account for half of the SD element in the scorecard for members of the Executive Committee.Successful delivery of major projects will be part of the scorecard for all employees, with early engagement with communities one factor considered."

Having just been dumped out of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Shell is now believed to be reviewing whether this is used as a bonus metric, with claims that the rejection from the Index was subjective. I'm sure if they were not out of the Index and the bonuses got paid we would not be hearing complaints about how subjective it was. Rather than kicking up a fuss about how subjective the measure is, surely they should be working hard to get back on the DJSI.

I, for one, would certainly have more respect for Shell's corporate sustainabilty commitments if they stood by them accepting that perhaps this year bonuses weren't going to be as high as previous years, but this has flagged that there needs to be more real focus on the long-term impacts the company has on society and the environment.

Missed our last e-bulletin?

Where's the world's biggest windfarm? Who's the most generous giving nation? What's the future alcoholic fuel source for our cars?

These, and many other questions, are all touched upon in our latest e-bulletin. Missed it? Fear not, you can check out all our previous e-bulletins here.

Fixing the leaks in a global debate

Water is storming its way up the sustainability agenda – and with good reason.

Almost one billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation – that’s well over a third of the world’s population.

Last week, the UN insisted that unless we pay attention to the global water crisis, the Millennium Development Goal for environmental sustainability will be missed.

Surely such water issues don’t have anything to do with soggy Great Britain! Well, they do actually. Water is a local issue on a global stage – affecting our economy, our security, our environment and our global impact. Why? Because it’s not just about the liquid in our taps. It’s about the water used by other countries to produce the goods we buy, the food we eat, the bottled water we enjoy. It takes 3 litres of water to produce your 1 litre bottle of water. No wonder water is being called 'the new oil'. The team at The Story of Stuff have created this brilliant video about the issues.

Raise a cheer, then, for Paris. The city has unveiled its latest tactic to persuade Parisians off bottled water: a public drinking water fountain offering free sparkling water. It's called Petillante - "she who sparkles". Let's hope it sparks similar innovation across the Channel.