Transcript

Bennie F. Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. 

Today is a really special episode, and our guests are the winners of AMA’s 2024 Berry Book Award, one of the highest peer review honors that we offer at the American Marketing Association, focused on knowledge creation and insights. 

Our guests today… Alexis Eyre and Paul Randale are the authors of the book, Sustainable Marketing, The Industry’s Role in the Sustainable Future. Sustainable marketing is a blueprint for embedding sustainability at the heart of a marketing organization, exposing the distribution reality of marketing’s current relationship with many of our environmental and societal problems. It challenges the traditional role of marketing its cultural norms, and the gross inefficiency. It goes on to present a compelling vision for change and a practical guide for marketing professionals, equipping them with the mindset and tools to transform their daily work and the industry as a whole into a force for good. What a great way to start our conversation. 

Alexis and Paul, welcome to our podcast.

Alexis Eyre 

Thanks so much. Thank you for having us. Very exciting.

Paul Randle 

Thank you.

Bennie

Well, you know, first, as I say, it’s an honor to actually spend some time talking this morning, but I want to take a moment to celebrate you and winning the Berry Book Award. As we mentioned before, Len Berry is one of the first guests that we had on the podcast. But, you know, as an inspiration for this award, it really is the height of AMA’s recognition of your creation and contribution to knowledge and the industry. So thank you so much.

Alexis 

Thank you.

Paul 

No, thank you. We’re kind of a bit blown away by receiving the award. It was an amazing thing.

Bennie

Well, I mean, it’s the topic itself, but the rigor and creativity and the kind of ambition to create this new vision and guide for marketers is really notable. But before we jump into the book, you know, we don’t do things alone and this is a great conversation. It’s a tandem conversation. I love the start. When did you all start working together as co-authors? What brought you together to kind of bring this book and others into the world.

Paul 

Gotta be your turn, Alexis.

Alexis 

Yeah, so I’ve worked in the marketing industry for about 20 years and I’ve worked agency, client and media owner sites. I’ve got quite a diverse experience from that perspective and I was actually at an agency at the time. Oh no, I wasn’t actually. I was at a brand at the time and I had just left there and decided to take some time out and I decided to sail across the Atlantic with a crazy bunch of people that I’d never met before. And it was the most wonderful experience. Apart from the one thing that really got to me was that I have never seen so much plastic in all of my life. And it was like Blue Planet 2 coming to life. And I think the particular one, the one that kind of finally tipped me over the edge was when I was about thousand miles from land…And a plastic chair came floating past me and I just couldn’t get over the fact that I was in one of most remote places in the entire world and there was more plastic than wildlife and that had been consistently the case and I think I basically just said to myself, I said when I get back I’ve got to do something about it, I’ve got to change my career, I’ve got to find a way and…

Bennie 

Wow.

Alexis 

I joined an agency for a while, but actually in the background I was looking for something else and actually someone that recommended the Business Sustainability Management course by Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership, which is the arm of Cambridge University and it’s a ridiculously long title. And it’s the most amazing course, sort of an eight-week course, really intense. And that’s where I met Paul and that was in 2018.

Paul 

Mm, yeah, yeah.

Alexis 

No, 2020, was it 2020? Wasn’t it? It’s 2020 because it was just coming out to COVID. So it was 2020. So that is where I met Paul and that’s really where it all started. And I think both of us felt completely disenfranchised. We definitely felt like we were the big problem in the room. There was like seven, 800 people on the course and no one wanted to meet us because we were marketing people and we were seen very much as the devils in the room. The ones that have caught, you know.

Paul 

Yeah, it was just before COVID.

Alexis 

Causing a huge amount of destruction today. And both of us were on the same trajectory that we wanted to leave marketing because we were so disenfranchised by it. And actually it was an amazing marketing professor who actually turned around to us and said, no, you have to stay in marketing, but you’ve just got to find a way to make it good, I suppose. And because it has this amazing behavior changing capability and the most effective communicators in the world come out of the marketing industry, but we’re just completely pointed in the wrong direction at the moment. And we need to find a solution so that marketing works with the movement rather than against it. Anyway, I’ll let Paul add on to.

Paul 

Yeah, no, I mean my point to getting onto the Cambridge course wasn’t quite so as adventurous as Alexis’s. I was actually in this room. So it’s kind of like nowhere near as adventurous.

Alexis

Hahaha!

Bennie 

Were you sitting in the chair that Alexis saw floating by?

Paul 

Well, if she’d collected it, we could have done that actually but unfortunately not. But mine was still quite emotionally impactful for me because I’d literally been consulting on an automotive client. I’d literally just got off a call about their supercar and my daughter walks up to me and completely out of the blue goes, Daddy, is your job good for the environment? You know, it’s one of the first times at that point when I didn’t got a good answer from my daughter and felt hugely guilty for that. And actually out of uni, I’d gone straight, I’d been really lucky to go into a role with the British Standards Institution. And I was part of the team that had launched the environmental management standard ISO 14001. And I’d got to meet some incredible people like Jonathan Poirot, who set up Friends of the Earth and things of that nature. So I’d had a bit of a sheep dip into that world, but then got excited by tech marketing and went and worked at Microsoft for a decade and things like that. And that question from my daughter brought me right back to what was important. So that was my trigger to go and enroll on the course where, you know, Alexis and I pretty much found each other cowering behind the bike sheds feeling like we’re growing our devil horns. And it was that triggered we either get out of marketing or we do something about it.

And that put us on our journey. After the course, we spent probably a couple of years doing a huge amount of research. I mean, the course taught us to be kind of like nerds, to be perfectly honest, and go and do a huge amount of research. And as a result of that, we had a bit of insight, which was there was loads of work going on in the marketing community to try and make it more sustainable, but it was very fragmented, very piecemeal. So we said, there’s nothing tying this together. So we

Alexis 

Thanks

Paul 

Pulled together, we kind of wrote a new framework, strategic planning framework called the Sustainable Marketing Compass. And we thought we could just consult on that and get one or two clients that might pay attention. But what if we just put it out open source and let people play with it? And we put it onto LinkedIn and we had 750,000 people look at it in the first 24 hours, which blew us away. I still remember that day now where it’s like, Lexus, it’s still going up. There’s still people looking. And since then, it’s been a real roller coaster. We’ve worked with some of the world’s biggest corporations. We’ve had agencies take the compass, for new clients with it, win, and then come knocking on the door going, help, how do we do this? And then working with that, we get to work with clients, we get to work with agencies. And as a result of that, we said, there’s a book here, isn’t there? And just as we’d finished writing our proposal for a book, our publisher knocked on the door and said, have you thought about writing a book? And, you know, we ended up in a place we never thought we would be.

Bennie 

It’s amazing, you know, to hear that kind of journey and be at that crossroads of either get out of the way or do something, right, and having that space in there. I want to talk about, you know, the poetry in each of your stories where there’s this provocation that comes from the future, whether it’s seeing the past and the plastics that show up or having our future selves, our kids come and challenge you and ask you that question. What are you doing about it?

Paul 

Absolutely.

Bennie 

You know, when you look at this, I think that the book provides that impulse for the rest of us as a profession. What are you doing about the future? What, you know, can you share with our group and impractical advice can you give to marketers who are hearing this, hearing our voices, hearing this story and are realizing I need to do something? How do they start?

Paul 

Well, we’d like them to start by reading the book. But actually, yeah, you start by making yourself aware. know, think, you know, Alexis and I had our personal triggers and I think there was something in our gut saying there’s something not right here. And over the last five or six years, we’ve had thousands of conversations with other marketers with that same sense of internal am I doing this right? But it’s only when you can articulate it and describe it, you know, and eventually kind of start to get to the point where you measure it, that you really get the magnitude and you really get that sense of, my God, I can’t stay on this path, I need to change. You know, I think having a personal trigger is important for lots of people. But then you build that sense of urgency and agency about educating yourself and understanding what exactly is happening.

Alexis

Yeah, I think sort of adding on to that, mean, there’s, I think the first thing is to educate yourself around what sustainability is. And, you know, there’s a lot of free courses out there, you don’t have to pay for a course. mean, the UN has an absolutely amazing suite of courses on their website, you know, that give you all kinds of stories, you know, like short and longer courses, all free that teach you about biodiversity, the broader the broader topic of sustainability is in the more holistic thing. You can dive into supply chain management and all that kind of thing. So I’d really start with something like that. I think the other one that’s really useful just to get your head wrapped around is the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, because I think it gives you a really good overarching view of where the world needs to go, what the ultimate goals are. They’re not perfect.

Bennie 

Right.

Alexis 

But they are the biggest blueprint we have. And it’s the biggest blueprint that the most number of organizations in the world use it as in educational institutions, governments, NGOs, and companies now use them quite often. So it’s a very common blueprint. And I quite like it when someone called them the world’s to-do list. And I think it’s a really, it’s, you know, it’s a nice way of saying it, I suppose, or something that’s actually quite big in terms of what they’re trying to do. But I think they are brilliant and you can look up, I think it’s unsdg.com.

Bennie 

Right.

Alexis 

And I think it’s just a really good place to start with, where do we need to get to to ensure that we get to a place where there is a future for our children and there’s a future that is worth living and not worth living in terms of, but I mean, you know, that is fair and just and it’s a healthy planet that they’re living on. They’re not living surrounded by plastic everywhere. You know, they’re not being poisoned by the food they’re eating because of the amount of chemicals in the soil. I mean, that’s what those SDGs do is give you a really good frame to understand what needs to be achieved worldwide by everyone.

Bennie

Right. Now, I’m going to ask this question from a professional standpoint. In a classic sense, marketing has always been about creating more, right? More demand, more consumption, more commerce. But in our space, it’s where we run up against this kind of classical framework of marketing generating more, more, more against how do we manage a future that needs to be more sustainable that requires restraint.

Paul

Mm-hmm. Exactly. I mean, you go right to the heart of what we’re trying to explore in the book with that many. In the first part of the book, we interrogate why that’s the case. What’s our role? Why are we so focused on growth? Why are we so focused on generating profit? And that role that marketing plays in the economy. When the four P’s were being written by Jerome McCarthy and laid down, marketeers were viewed as economists.

And the economists in the 1950s were saying that we’ll make society better by the concept of ownership and by allowing us to buy things that would make our lives better. And they had two assumptions in there that we had rational humans with perfect knowledge. And every marketeer on this call is going, well, that’s a bit stupid because we’re not rational and we don’t have perfect knowledge, but you know what? We can help. 

And we stepped in and we did help and we built a going to one trillion dollar business on the back of that, which has become the engine of growth for capitalism. And it’s kind of like we’ve got so very, very good at it over over the years. And the trouble is that excellence has put blinkers around us. So we we tend to ignore what else is going on in a macro sense. And what we do in the latter half of the book is say, look, that pure focus on just growth is harmful and there’s plenty of evidence around that but actually guess what? In a sustainable world we’re still going to have irrational humans with a lack of perfect knowledge that are trying to live in a sustainable world so actually marketing still has a tremendous amount of skills it can bring to a sustainable world as long as it’s not laser focused on profit and growth.

So the heart of the book is about giving a new role for marketing, which still has profit in there, still has commercial success in there, but balanced out with environmental goals and balanced out with sustainable goals. And we often equate the marketeer’s role to being that of a conductor. It’s like, how do I conduct performance across these three challenges? Because they’re all connected. And it’s like squashing a balloon. It’s like you do something in one place and it’s going to pop up somewhere else. It’s kind of like…

Bennie 

Mm, okay. Right, right.

Paul 

You have to be able to balance out that kind of love triangle, I suppose, between those three challenges, which is exciting, right? You know, it’s something that marketers should be excited about.

Alexis 

I think on top of that actually, I think the other big thing around this is that we have got a lot of new economic models starting to come through at the moment. So by the very nature of that, marketing’s role is going to have to change. So an example is the circular economy. You know, we’re not just taking stuff on the ground, making something, selling it and then putting it into landfill. I know, circular economy is all around keeping as much resource in system as possible. So when it comes to end of life, it is used for something else and it carries on and on and there’s loads of elements in circular economy in its own right. You know, but the whole idea is that we don’t use nearly as much raw resource, we keep as much resource within this circle and we see it as no…resources waste, waste just doesn’t exist in the natural world. And that’s what the circular economy is trying to say is that, you know, everything has a value. It just might not be valuable to that company, but doesn’t mean it can be valuable to something else. And I think when you start to consider marketing’s role, then it’s really interesting because it’s actually more around producing cadence and customer sort of loyalty so that they follow you on that entire circular journey and you keep them in the loop all the time. And I think that’s a very different role to the role right now with this linear, you know, take, make, throw away landfill. So, yeah, I think it’s really exciting. And I think we are still very much learning on top of the fact that we need to balance environment, society and commercial success as Paul, you know, was saying earlier, we also need to understand that actually marketing’s role in how it behaves is going to have to change with the very economic models that starting to come through. And there won’t be just one. There’s quite a few different ones that are starting to emerge right now. And it’s a really exciting time. It’s really a brilliant challenge.

Bennie 

Well, when I think about the challenge, your research relationship and writing relationship, that kind of serves as a model. You’re doing this in partnership. What advice do you have for marketing leaders to seek partnership in their organization? Depending on the type of business, direct consumer product business is going to have a different relationship with these triggers than a B2B concern, than a services or a B Corp space. But what advice do you have for the marketing leaders to seek out partners to achieve these aims.

Paul 

That’s a really, really good question. I think one part of the sustainable marketing compass is about partnership and that often runs completely counter to the way companies think. But actually, some of the challenges we face in sustainability are system led. And there’s a great paper that’s recently come out of Cambridge University, which talks about the fact that is it possible for one company to be sustainable in an unsustainable industry? So actually, you know, we need to look at the systems level and first and foremost, that’s a new skill. Often it’s a cultural shift within the organization to kind of even have people that can think at a genuine partnership level. Especially marketeers, they will often go, we’ll have a partnership with our consumer, which means we’re just going to sell more to them more frequently.

Bennie

wow. Yeah. Right. Right.

Paul

You know, that’s not a real partnership. So there’s a starting point in actually understanding what partnership really is, building out capability into the organization on how you would go about reaching out and establishing partnerships and broader stakeholders. But, you know, so think the first bit is make sure you’ve got the right mindset when you go into building partnerships, whether it’s B2B or consumer or NGO, it’s that willingness to look for shared goals. It’s that willingness to look for Increase scale by having more than one party in the mix. You know, it’s that willingness to kind of share and champion each other on that journey together and But also to be innovative and creative in that it’s kind of like, you know think outside of your category think outside of your standard stakeholders and You know, that’s what where the circular economy is amazingly powerful

You know, it’s because, you know, what am I doing with my old spent coffee beans? they’re actually going to a company that’s turning them into fire logs. You know, those industries aren’t proximate to each other. You know, so there’s getting your headspace, getting your cultural right, bringing in creativity and innovation into that. And there’s just as much scope for innovation in a consumer relationship as in a big corporate trade relationship.

Bennie

Right. Right, right.

Paul 

You just need to come at it with the right attitude to partnership and the right people and skills for partnership. We’ve seen some amazing work go on. There’s a brilliant organization called YouMaker. So, Y-E-W, as in the tree. And what they’ve done is they’ve brought together something like 60 of the world’s most competitive pharma companies.

Bennie

Okay. Mmm.

Paul 

This is an industry that really competes. But brought them together in a pre-competitive state to say, look, there’s a whole bunch of sustainability challenges that we’re not going to fix individually, but are a bit daft. Such as that little piece of paper that you get in your drugs packet, in your painkillers and stuff like that. It’s in 50 different languages and nobody ever reads. That’s in every packet of drugs on the planet. And if one word on that piece of paper is changed,

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Paul 

Not only does the piece of paper, but all the drugs that contain that piece of paper have to be binned. So the waste is astronomical, but legislation mandates that that’s there. No one company on its own can actually say we’re not going to do that. But by coming together as a collective, they can actually make those sorts of changes. And it doesn’t impact competition further down the further down the, you know, the sales cycle at all. But it allows the industry to be more sustainable.

Bennie 

Right, it gives you a space in there where a company doesn’t have to be completely bold on their own, but can have a common interest, right?

Paul 

Yeah, absolutely.

Bennie 

So we talk a bit about this role for companies at scale, for brands at scale for these big impacts. But another part that I think is important and we mentioned is how do we transform our daily work to impact being a force for good? I think about, I’ll speak on behalf of the guilty many times of being the marketing lead and signing off on things that are coming to trade shows or events that inevitably make it out there, are seen and inevitably make it into the landfill before it even comes back home. How do we find a way to kind of work against our natural marketing instincts?

Paul

Mm-hmm.

Alexis

Yeah, I mean, I think I think that’s the easiest way to do it is to actually do a full blown assessment of your marketing because I think that the sustainability world, you know, and we’ve really pulled this from the sustainability world, the sustainability world solely depends on the assessment they do on their company before they start, before they start actually on everything, anything, they actually look at what they’re currently doing to work out where their impacts actually are. And quite often their biggest empires aren’t where they thought they were. And this happens time and time again. So I’d actually almost say is start with a full blown assessment of your marketing, but put a sustainability lens over the top. So in the book, we’ve actually said you’ve got 11 different areas of marketing you need to look into, like the four P’s and targeting and your growth strategy and your supply chain. And you look at that all through the lens of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. So how is my growth strategy affecting health and wellbeing, how is my product currently affecting climate change? What kind of implications are there surrounding that? And by doing that, it is going to be detailed, but you don’t have to do it regularly. You probably even need to do it once and maybe look at it maybe in the next few years, but it’s to look at it and work out actually where your biggest impacts, because that will become the source of all your decisions going forward, being like, where do we need to drive the biggest change?

You know, in terms and where are the sort of like the smaller pieces that could be easy wins or they could be, you know, they could come be changed later down the line because that will massively help you if you’re thinking about your trade shows, understanding if even if you should go to a trade show. I mean, that could even be one of the questions that comes out of that assessment is that the best the best, you know, use of of, you know, how you’re trying to achieve your targets through the sort of commercial environmental societal lens that you should be looking at going forward. I’d start with the assessment and then every decision after that is, we always say, look through the three pillars, the three pillar triangle. So every single decision you make, you say, what is the impact commercially? What is the impact environmentally? And what is the impact societally? And quite often your decisions will have a good impact on maybe the commercial environment, but then when you start to look at society, you’re like, actually, that’s not very good societally at all. So that means you just have to go back to the drawing board. And quite often, it would take a while to get to those solutions until you can find something that actually helps or, you know, that passes the, ticks the box on all three areas. But it’s a really good practice, even if nothing else is that, is that that three pillar thinking, that sort of that triangular thinking all the time when you’re thinking about what you want to do going forward.

Paul

The one thing I’ll add to that is something I found really resonates with teams as a mental trick to get them into that sort of thinking. We’re quite blunt in the book. We actually do a very rough kind of back of a napkin kind of add up of the effectiveness of all marketing channels, you know, whether it’s trade shows or social media or CRM and those sorts of things. And if you broadly add up all those channels look at how effective they are. We ladder up to be in a one trillion dollar industry that’s one percent good at what it does. Yeah and because of John Wanamaker who said 50 percent of what I spend on marketing is wasted the trouble is I don’t know which 50 percent we’ve allowed ourselves to be blinkered to the fact that that one percent good is actually 99 percent waste. And what if we approached all our kind of planning, all the work we do and every time you look at something you’re going that was a five percent successful campaign and you actually go that would know that was a 95 percent wasteful campaign. So a mental trigger there because there’s also a chance to save cash in there at the same time yeah and then the second point on that is well how do I get really innovative and change that?

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm.

Paul 

Because there’s a great McKinsey article that talks about marketing being stuck on tram lines. You know, since our digital world’s taken over, it’s like, you know, it’s like all campaigns orientate around a bit of data, a bit of content, a platform to put it on and some media that kind of like puts it out there. It’s like, where’s the creativity gone? Where’s the genuine, you know, back in the, the Cola Wars, you know, we had Michael Jackson dancing for PepsiCo and kind of Coca-Cola put, you know, a tin on the space shuttle.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Paul

It’s like, you know, would that come out of your Facebook plan? You know, where’s the genuine creativity gone and the genuine use that real skill of the marketeer to be creative, but in the pursuit of real effectiveness.

Bennie

So when you think about the future and you said the skill of the marketer, one of the things that we’ve been exploring is how those skills have changed and evolved and what the market and opportunity are pulling on today. What top skill do you think marketers should be honing for a more sustainable future, for a role in sustainability marketing?

Alexis 

In collaboration. I think that is probably the, you know, it goes back to the partnership thing. is moving from that, that hiding everything and closing down and saying, you know, this is the way we go forward to actually be much more open and collaborative and thinking much further outside the box. You know, thinking outside the marketing industry for solutions. Thinking even outside, you know, your own industry, if you’re, you know, if you’re in beauty, then thinking outside the beauty industry for those solutions, it’s really that design system thinking is an amazing place to start, because it really channels your thoughts. When I say channels, it spreads your mind, I suppose, opens your mind to many other ways of thinking about things. So I think, I think that sort of collaboration, but also opening the mind is just fundamental, because we’re not going to be able to do this by ourselves and we’re not going to be able to do this with the current way we do things. It is a big mindset shift.

Bennie 

So, you know, sustainable marketing, you you land on the title that puts it straight in for it. But for many, it’s inherently a conflict when they think about sustainable marketing for those who may be outside of our space. So, as we know, as marketers, we’re the captains of influence and direction. How do we, you know, position ourselves that our other peers our other executives in the organization, when they hear us talking about sustainable marketing, they lock in instead of rolling their eyes and looking the other direction. Right? It’s the, as you mentioned before, professionally, we’ve been like the captains of waste. How do we make that pivot in this moment that’s really ripe for what we do as marketing, but to have that credibility with our peers across the executive suite?

Paul 

Mm-hmm. Is a great point with the architects of desire, right? It’s what we champion it and the rest of the corporate machine looks at us to do. But I think it’s back to Alexis’s collaboration point. There’s another function in the corporate machine that marketers often don’t know, and I mean, physically don’t know. They have the same agenda, that’s the sustainability team. And the amount of times we do workshops with…big organizations and we introduced the CMO to the head of sustainability for the first time. It’s kind of like, you know, it’s like considering we’re supposed to be these individuals and with a skill set to go out and broker relationships and things of that sort of nature, we’re actually quite blinkered and you know, luck within the organization, luck to where sustainability is already being invested in. You know, there’s a huge in big companies, there’s a huge amount of investment going into ESG and into sustainability and transforming the way we manufacture things, the facilities we use, the way we ship things, there’s a huge amount going on. And marketing’s often missing from the equation. mean, marketers like to have this kind of thought that they’re leading the organization. You know, they’re at the front of the ship charting the waters forward. On sustainability, that’s not been the case. We’ve actually been largely oblivious to it. And, you know, when we have tried to do something, we’ve done it with a lack of knowledge and just assumed it’s a messaging fad, rather than properly getting our head around it. 

And we need to get back into, we’ll need to get into that conversation. You know, we need to understand sustainability, build out those relationships with those that are changing and doing things from a sustainable point of view in our organizations and in our industries. And go in with the olive branch, which is, can we help not go in as the kind of like you know, the savior on the charging white horse. You know, there’s a lot of work being going on and marketing historically has been working against the sustainability agenda rather than with it. So I think there’s a bit of humility. There’s a bit of going and find out the network within the organization, find out what’s going on. And then I think there’s a critical bit which is getting more important as we go forward, which is actually. Don’t assume that sustainability is all about the virtue sell. You know, it’s kind of like, we’ve got to be sustainable to save the trees, save the rainforest, that kind of, you know, bunny hugging sentimentality. You know, the way that sustainability has been communicated has been ineffective. You know, we try to sell sustainable stuff by, you know.

Wacking a logo on the back of it that said eco put in you know an extra few dollars on it to premium price it and then wondered why nobody bought it and then got scared stiff when actually everybody tried to put us in jail for greenwashing you know, so we’ve got we’ve got terrified of it and What we were trying to do was sell virtue and make money out of it while then actually genuinely transform the industry and it’s like No, we can’t do that. But actually

Bennie

Hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Paul

Having commerciality and sustainability in different camps is never gonna work. We’ve got to address some of those big issues in the middle around growth and things of that nature. And marketing’s in a really interesting place to be that broker. And in a really interesting place and kind of this concept of competitive sustainability. This way we can find this common ground where we can leverage the…momentum you can get through a commercial organization to drive change by actually finding value in sustainability rather than just virtue. And marketers should be the best equipped in the organization to find that value if they partner with the sustainability teams.

Bennie

Now I asked this question, I thought about it earlier in our conversation and it keeps coming back to me that we’re talking about these levers in the space that’s constant in the organization. But the reality is our larger organizations, our larger concerns are global players and there are other regime and policy tensions that are coming in the space. You know, now we’ve come up with good direction for collaboration for marketers. Now how do you do it when the floor continues to shift? When the policies in the EU are different than AP, or different than the US, or different than Africa.

Paul 

Absolutely. You go Alexis.

Alexis 

Yeah, I think the best way of working with it is to work with wherever there are the strictest policies, because ultimately you’re going to have to change no matter what, and the level of change required. So it’s almost using the country or the region that has the strictest policies, which to date is probably the EU at the moment, and around that in terms of regulations, work that and use that as best practice going through, but also a place where they can do all the learning so that when other regulations come in elsewhere, you’ve already got that learning in place. then it means that you’re not creating loads of different sort of campaigns and assets for loads of different countries just to try and fit the different regulations. Whereas if you’ve got the one that has the strictest, then you’re always going to… Obviously, you change them depending on the local culture and everything, absolutely. But I think…

Bennie

Right.

Alexis 

Working with the strictest means that you’ll also get a sufficiency of time. Regardless of anything else, otherwise, if you’re trying to adapt it to different areas, I think you’re really struggling. It’s a huge amount of effort goes into it.

Paul 

I think we also need to understand where all that legislation and all that kind of like shift around legislation and geopolitics and things that are going on, where they play a role and when they start to not play a role. know, and I think legislation is a great accelerator. You know, it can make industries do things that it hasn’t wanted to do. But as matured and lots of industries, can see this as maturity creeps in, then actually it becomes a competitive edge. It becomes part of an economic model. And as soon as it becomes an economic model, it’s going to run on those rules more than it’s going to run on the compliance that the laws and regulations become a compliance tickboxing. That’s the bare minimum. I’ve done that. Now I’m competing. Now I’m competing for this big tender because the tenders got all these environmental requirements in it.

But actually it’s how good at that am I compared to my competitors. So, you know, then it becomes, you know, a competitive piece. Then that starts to drive innovation. And as soon as you’ve got innovation coming out and one company beating another on, you know, innovation in that space, you know, that’s, you know, where it’s more comfortable for us, but you know, that’s where it becomes sticky. And, you know, and is it going to go away?

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Well, as we conclude our conversation, I’m going to ask this one evolutionary note. What does the future look like when we go from sustainable marketing being something that’s met with skepticism to sustainable marketing being embraced as strategy?

Alexis 

My work here is done.

Paul 

Hahaha

Bennie 

What, what an incredibly insightful and wonderful note to conclude our conversation on. mean, it, it really is, but I, once again, such incredible work and forethought into bringing us to a new space. You know, once again, as the jurors and community have attested, sustainable marketing is an incredible blueprint and you have created the industry’s role in the sustainable future.

Alexis

Hahaha

Paul

Yeah, yeah, brilliant.

Bennie 

Congratulations again for the Berry Book Award. Thank you, my friends, for being on the podcast with me. We have to come back again because this is an evolving and ongoing space. I’d love for us to come back next year and see who’s getting better and who needs our help.

Paul 

Brilliant. Would love to come back and thank you so much for the award and having us on. It’s been such an honour.

Alexis

Yeah, thank you very, much.

Bennie 

Thank you all. Paul and Alexis, thank you for joining us. And I thank you all for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. We encourage you to check out the 2024 Berry Book Award winner by Alexis Eyer and Paul Randle, Sustainable Marketing, The Industry’s Role in the Sustainable Future. We encourage you to explore the AMA for resources to bring your marketing to a more sustainable space. Thank you once again.