Is the ‘Growth at All Costs’ Marketing Model Obsolete in the Age of Sustainability?

As a Marketer, How Can You Fight Greenwashing and Drive Real Sustainable Change?

Tired of greenwashing and a marketing model that prioritizes profits over the planet? Learn how to shift from outdated practices to a sustainable mindset that builds trust and drives real change for people and the planet. If you’re a marketer ready to move from promoting consumption to championing change, this is your guide to transforming the industry from within. Let’s explore how you can lead the charge.

Recommendation

If you don’t trust marketers to help you find environmentally friendly products, you’re not alone — and your distrust is certainly warranted given marketing’s history of “greenwashing.” But given the climate crisis and current damage to the natural world, marketing is long overdue for a mindset shift, says Eyre in her inspirational, highly informative handbook for marketers in the Anthropocene. It’s time to step up, using your platforms to drive sustainable transformations at your company and educate the public about sustainability. If you work in marketing, you can’t afford to focus only on accruing shareholder profits given the existential threats humanity is facing — start prioritizing “people and the planet” today.

Take-Aways

• Marketers should be inspiring conversations about sustainability in the age of the Anthropocene.
• Marketers have a responsibility to educate themselves about sustainability.
• Marketing is in dire need of transformation, as traditional tools are unaligned with shifting views of capitalism.
• There is widespread distrust of marketing, due to a history of manipulation and “greenwashing.”
• In the age of big data, treat customers as “real people,” rather than objectifying them.
• Commit to best practices, reducing harm to people and the planet.
• Keep your sustainable marketing transformation on track with four “activation pillars.”
• Companies pass through four stages of development on their sustainability journeys.

Summary

Marketers should be inspiring conversations about sustainability in the age of the Anthropocene.

Humanity is living in the Anthropocene, a term coined by chemist Paul Crutzen and limnologist Eugene Stoermer to describe a geological era in which human activity is the key driver of changes to planetary systems and the natural world. In order to prevent widespread damage to the environment and navigate the current climate crisis, people working across industries and sectors must collaborate to identify and implement sustainable solutions. However, marketers are often “alarmingly” out of touch with the sustainability movement, focusing instead on pushing unsustainable levels of consumption. In fact, marketing language often lacks an ethos of care and prosocial values — marketers refer to humans as “targets” and use militaristic words — such as “blitzed” and “sniper targeting” — when describing their interactions with people. It’s time for a perspective shift: marketers must start treating both “people and the planet” with an ethos of care.

“… marketing tends to treat people with the same contempt and disrespect that intensive cattle farmers can view their livestock.”

Rather than promote unsustainable brands and lifestyles, endeavor to work with companies that demonstrate a commitment to sustainability. Alternately, if you’re working with a company that isn’t taking action on sustainability, you have an opportunity to use your communication skills as a marketer to share knowledge about sustainability and trigger a culture shift at your organization.It’s time to rethink your role as a marketer, envisioning marketing as the “connective tissue” that bridges events and shifting perceptions in the external world with those in the internal world of your company. Triggering a culture change may require talking to HR and even taking the initiative to educate your senior executives about shifting stakeholder and consumer expectations when it comes to showing a commitment to sustainability. Ultimately, everyone at your company needs to be talking about the climate crisis and working to drive change in the face of existential risk.

Marketers have a responsibility to educate themselves about sustainability.

The following reports and frameworks can help you understand what sustainability looks like at a purpose-driven organization:

• United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) — The UN lists 17 SDGs, including “responsible consumption and production,” “affordable and clean energy,” “gender equity,” and “climate action.”
• “Doughnut Economics” — Kate Raworth proposes a new economic model, in which humanity and commerce work together to respect the ecological limits of nature. Economic activity should occur in alignment with foundational values such as social equity, and peace and justice, while respecting limits that show up as biodiversity loss, climate change and ocean acidification.
• “Rewiring The Economy” — The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership’s report, “Rewiring The Economy,” details 10 tasks that humanity must achieve within a decade (it first published the report in 2015, then updated it in 2017). On a business level, these tasks include actions such as “embed sustainability in practices and decisions” and “set evidence-based targets.”

Marketing is in dire need of transformation, as traditional tools are unaligned with shifting views of capitalism.

Marketing tends to center around the pursuit of profits above all else. However, this obsession with growth fails to reflect the values of consumers and stakeholders today: Many are drawn to more sustainable economic models, such as the circular economy (in which products don’t end up in landfills, but instead, their materials and components are reused) and the sharing economy (in which memberships replace private ownership). In fact, there’s a backlash to the growth model of marketing, with some embracing a “degrowth” philosophy: “Degrowthers” believe that it’s better to reduce consumerism and use less of the world’s nonrenewable resources and energy sources than it is to push an agenda of growth at the expense of planetary health.

“Marketing has an opportunity to shake off the last 70 years and enter a new golden era where it seeks humbly to partner with the rest of the global movement and proactively contribute towards sustainable and even regenerative society.”

Traditional marketing approaches center around Jerome McCarthy’s four pillars, or “4Ps,” which he introduced in 1960 — “product, place, promotion, and price.” However, marketers today must rethink their approach, considering more holistic variables. Start centering your actions around the following three pillars: People, planet, and profit. John Elkington — the founder of the consultancy SustainAbility — introduced the idea of these pillars, or the “3Ps,” in hopes of encouraging businesses to start measuring performance with metrics that reflected the societal and environmental impacts of their work.Marketing must update its role to reflect the fact that humanity is shifting away from “shareholder capitalism” — a model that benefits only a select few parties — toward “stakeholder capitalism,” a model in which the company’s success should also benefit the natural world, stakeholder communities, and those working in supply chains.

There is widespread distrust of marketing, due to a history of manipulation and “greenwashing.”

The erosion of public trust that marketers grapple with today is nothing new.In 1957, Vance Packard’s book Hidden Persuaders did a deep dive into the lengths that marketers went to trigger desired behavioral outcomes in consumers, detailing the ways marketers leveraged motivational psychology and subliminal messaging to influence audiences. While subliminal advertising isn’t, in actuality, as effective as Packard made it out to be, manipulating human psychology has long been an aim of marketing. In fact, McCarthy, a marketing professor,actually spoke positively about the Hidden Persuaders, praising Packard for his succinct explanation of “how motivation research is now being used by psychologists and sociologists to probe into a consumer’s subconscious mind, in an effort to determine how better to stimulate (or manipulate) him.” That said, McCarthy didn’t believe consumers lacked agency; he saw marketing as a means to position consumers to effectively “vote” on which products were the most useful to them via their purchases.

“The distrust of marketing in the sustainability community is heartfelt and justified.”

However, in today’s world, which is oversaturated with products and full of marketers adept at selling nearly anything — aided by masses of consumer data — you should reflect critically on whether marketers actually help people find solutions — or simply maximize the “lifetime value” of each customer, without actually helping them. Marketers have a long history of lying to the public about the sustainability of products via “greenwashing,” or misleading advertising, preventing consumers from making informed choices. In a famous example, Monsanto — a company selling chemical pesticides — misled the public with a factually inaccurate campaign depicting a world without Monsanto: In this fictitious dystopian future, insects ravaged crops, leaving Americans without food.Rebuilding public trust after the damage done by companies such as Monsanto requires embracing a new mission: helping people achieve their potential with dignity and equity, while making the world a healthier place.

In the age of big data, treat customers as “real people,” rather than objectifying them.

Marketers must shift away from their obsession with growth and shareholder profit and toward the “real people duty-of-care model.” This model invites you to treat customers with humanity, considering their well-being much like you would the well-being of a friend, family member or colleague.Leveraging this new model requires marketing agencies and departments to cultivate a “genuine appreciation for the individual and the multitude of roles that they can play in our society.” Rather than using data in a way that objectifies customers, marketing has an opportunity to use data insights to provide “contextual care,” by considering factors such as people’s individual preferences, the influence of their peers and their access to resources and support.

“Marketing will value and honour the choices that each person makes for themselves. It needs to listen with an open mind to their point of view, avoid making assumptions and celebrate the diversity of human experience.”

Treat customer data with care, enhancing your understanding of people, by embracing the following pillars:

• Curiosity — You won’t fully understand the complexity of individuals and their worlds without possessing a genuine interest in their lives.
• Empathy — Rather than simply try to manipulate behavior change, develop your capacity to understand others’ feelings and perspectives.
• Intuition — Don’t outsource all decisions to AI algorithms, as your human intuition is still valuable.

Marketing bodies must commit to best practices, to reduce harm to people and the planet.

Follow sustainable marketing governance guidelines in the following areas:

• Purpose — Marketers can refer to the guidance document “PAS 808: 2022,” which BSI Standards Limited, Anglian Water, and The British Standards Institution drafted to describe what it means to be a “purpose-driven organization.” The ultimate objective of a purpose-driven organization, according to this document, is the long-term well-being for humans and the planet.
• Mindfulness of your impact — If you’re not careful, many of the behaviors you promote as a marketer could have a detrimental impact on living systems and the environment. For example, the ubiquitous ‘buy one, get one free’ promotions encourage excessive consumption. In 2019, the organization Purpose Disruptors gave marketers the means to calculate the “uplift in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that resulted from the increase in sales generated by advertising.” Calculate your impact using the following formula, which they created: “Advertising spend (£) × Advertising return on investment (£) × GHG emissions per product/service sold = Advertised Emissions.”
• “Brainprint” — Your “brainscape” refers to the values, motivations and beliefs you have. The collective influence that brands have on your brainscape is a “brainprint,” a term coined by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to shed light on unsustainable consumption patterns. Carefully consider the brainprint you’re marketing, and avoid misleading the public into believing products are more environmentally friendly than they are via ”greenwashing.”
• Compliance — Work to establish compliance and risk frameworks to ensure legal compliance in activities impacting people and the planet.
• “Efficacy and environment” — Marketing departments and agencies must partner with sustainability leads, putting plans in place to reduce waste. For example, the Advertising Association’s initiative Ad Net Zero aligns marketing with sustainability, giving marketers resources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Keep your sustainable marketing transformation on track with four “activation pillars.”

Ensure your marketing department or company markets products in a genuinely sustainable manner, by prioritizing the following “activation pillars”:

• Purpose — Your purpose should be bigger than securing shareholder profits. Reflect on ways your business improves the world (or could do so), as your purpose should reflect the “why” behind your company’s positive actions.
• Partnerships — Start thinking of partnerships more symbiotically, finding ways to create value for both you and your stakeholders.
• Participation — Eschew traditional, status quo approaches to marketing, inviting people to engage in “out-of-the-box, truly innovative thinking.” Encourage disruptive, “breakthrough” moments and transformative ideas.
• Performance — While marketers possess a myriad of tools to measure commercial success, they need to develop metrics to measure societal and environmental performance as well (such as Advertised Emissions).

Companies pass through four stages of development on their sustainability journeys.

Using the following sustainable marketing maturity model, you can assess which of these stages your company is in regarding your sustainability transformation:

• “Compliant and quiet” — At this stage, companies tend to embrace transparency, committing to disclosure and reporting. However, they still prioritize profits and do little to drive people and planet-centered initiatives.
• “Defensive and dangerous” — Companies in the second stage of development have a tendency to greenwash while defending themselves against accusations that they could be doing more. In fact, 58 percent of global executives admit their companies have engaged in greenwashing (according to Google Cloud’s The Harris Poll).
• “Efficient and effective” — Companies market products that are genuinely sustainable, while communicating their efforts to drive sustainability with honesty and accuracy.
• “Regenerative and revolutionary” — In the final stage, companies operate in a purpose-driven manner, placing sustainability at the center of their business model. These companies work to catalyze meaningful change, attracting the best creative minds as leaders in innovative marketing.

About the Author

Alexis Eyre is the founder of Green Eyre, and a co-founder of both Sustainists Consultants and the Sustainable Marketing Compass.