Marketing: the elephant in the room on sustainability?
Without cross-functional support in the business, is sustainability comms at risk of paralysis within the marketing department? We want to hear your thoughts.
For the first email of the year, we’re doing something a little different to the usual insight digest and need your help. A simple ‘yes/no’ poll follows some thoughts on the role of marketing in corporate sustainability and a fear that progress is stalling as the marketing department trades off short-term risks for longer-term existential brand challenges.
It’s completely anonymous. We’d just like to take the temperature at this pivotal moment for progress.
Will 2024 be the year climate comms become a fixture of brand comms?
Almost a year since our own research into consumer attitudes to net zero and how it is influencing culture and purchasing decisions, the topic is in the marketing press again. Mail Metro Media & Trajectory have a report out that introduces a segmentation based on the levels of impact environmental ethics have over consumers’ purchase. The Drum claims 2024 is “the tipping point for climate comms, marketers must trust the science”.
It’s a hot topic and we hope this is the year brands come to the fore. But we fear an elephant in the room.
2023 might have been the tipping point for climate comms, if only it hadn’t actually been a tipping point for the risks of greenwashing becoming so pronounced they cast a pall of dread over marketing teams. We want to pick up The Drum’s article with the challenge of our experience in taking sustainability comms to marketing teams over the last year.
They are right, 2024 should be the year and ‘marketers must trust the science’. But marketers aren’t scientists.
Should communicating sustainability be the job of marketing alone?
This sentence caught our eye in The Drum article by Mitali Mukherjee of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University: “[C]limate change now represents a material risk for businesses… this means [brands] moving away from activist language and moving towards the language of investors.”
In our interactions with brands - offering cultural platforms like our Earthtopia TikTok community through which partner brands can communicate their achievements with a young audience keen to applaud progress - we’ve found the tension between the position of ‘activist’ and ‘investor’ to be a site of real problems.
The Earthtopia audience is switched-on and knows the difference between talk and meaningful action. They care deeply but they’re pragmatic about the pace of corporate change. A perfect place to plant seeds that grow into credible cultural communications.
But also, a risk to any brand that is not totally confident in the credibility of their sustainability messaging. Are they willing to undertake the scrutiny of this kind of audience? To risk greenwashing accusations and the unthinkable brand implications therein?
Mukherjee argues that business must diligently follow the science in pursuit of net zero targets, deploying scientific assessment of communications claims, validated by independent sources. Only then will their sustainability comms strategy have credibility.
We agree but our experience shows a barrier to action which, left unaddressed will prevent many businesses reaching this point. That is, an over-dependence on marketing (be it generalist marketing roles or sustainability marketing specialist roles) to make decisions which have brand-critical risk attached to them. There may be long-term risks in failing to communicate sustainability, but there is a sense that - right now - there’s far more short-term risk in doing just that.
Without cross-functional support in the business, sustainability comms is at risk of paralysis within the marketing department.
Short-term vs long-term (existential) risk
Let’s unpack Mukherjee’s statement a little more, starting with the ‘material risk’ to business. The risk we’re talking about isn’t that of tripping up on your sustainability messaging. It’s ‘transition risk’. The risk of failing to maintain a meaningful role for customers by losing step with both net zero transition goals and/or the expected role for business in an evolving sustainable culture, a culture that comes to define the expectations of your audience.
Former Bank of England chief, Mark Carney has said that, “companies that don’t adapt will go bankrupt, without question.”
Social stigma, shareholder exclusion, regulatory squeeze, social media outcry, all are potential outcomes of inactivity on sustainability. Marketers might be forgiven for thinking they were just getting their heads around crisis management in the social media age, now they need a strategy to head off existential transition crisis?!
Next, “activist language” vs “investor language”. The simple way to take this is a juxtaposition of ‘advocating for change’ vs ‘implementing change’.
We love working with our client, Ivy Farm, who are pioneering lab-grown cultivated meat in the UK, because their business is predicated on an investment in solving a huge global problem. Traditional meat agriculture is hopelessly inefficient - about 25 calories of feed inputs are needed to make just one calorie of beef - and this has ramifications for environment, animal welfare, health and global food security. In a very real sense, investors in their business are solving the bad maths of animal farming. When their product is on the shelves, the consumer will be making an investment in fixing the broken food system. This is the ‘language of investment’.
And we don’t have to look far to find its anachronistic cousin, the ‘language of activism’ (I did a Google News search for 'greenwashing’).
For example, in December the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) called out an ad by Lufthansa which implored consumers to “fly more sustainably.” Lufthansa claims its advert referred to ‘Green Fares’ options for European customers for which they use some sustainable fuels that reduce CO2 emissions by 20%.
But the ASA said the ad did not make it clear how the customer could have this impact (the implication therefore being that the brand sought a more general association with the warm-glow of sustainability). The change being advocated for here, we’d argue, is largely one of brand perception. At worst, the brand is co-opting the ‘language of activism’ while the advert is not in fact driving sales of the ‘Green Fares’, which is where they have made an actual ‘investment’ in sustainability.
The ensuing news story for Lufthansa, is the embodiment of the fear which grips marketing teams tasked with navigating sustainability comms. Understandable then, that paralysis is often the outcome.
Our sympathies are with teams doing their best to make changes in business and communicate successes. We believe the future brands that win in a changing world will take audiences on their journey to net zero and be rewarded for their investment in change. But brands HAVE to feel confident they can communicate this progress.
So, what’s the solution?
Is it a structural change in the internal teams? A Head of Climate Science that has regular interface with a Head of Brand? Or can agencies and consultancies like ourselves play more of a role here? Alongside the cultural execution of messaging and checks and balances provided by researching comms with credible audiences like Earthtopia, should we be providing scientific communications analysis? A service that provides marketing teams with the necessary rigour in their communication claims to protect them from brand harm?
This newsletter has a small but perfectly-formed community of readers, who together have heaps of insight and experience in these areas. We’d love to know what you want to see? If you even agree that we have a problem? And how we fix it in order that the industry can move forward with confidence and play its crucial role in the transition? Comments are open below and here’s that poll we threatened:
About 33_Zero
If you’re new here and arrived via our ‘Windows on Net Zero culture’ research report, thanks for downloading. If you’re a regular, thanks for sticking with us - we aim to be a crucial digest of the opportunities for creative business and communications as the race to net zero reshapes society and culture. By keeping our eyes on the macro forces - from clean energy and electrification to sustainable manufacture and changing diets – we front-run the big changes coming through in consumer tastes, attitudes and behaviour.
33_Zero believes the net zero challenge will reshape culture and consumer behaviour with a force brands are unprepared for. The opportunity is to move in step with these changes as they go from the margin to the mainstream.
33_Zero’s sister organisation, Earthtopia, is one of the largest eco-communities on TikTok with a far greater audience than Greenpeace or Extinction Rebellion and provides a unique window into the consumer change-makers leading the charge.
We offer brands the opportunity to research with the Earthtopia community and draw on our strategic focus on net zero culture to develop creative solutions to the biggest challenges and opportunities that face them today.
Email jamesp@33seconds.co to find out more.