Is marketing the enemy of sustainability?

For National Marketing Day (11 January), Emily Collins, Sustainability Champion and External Relations and Events Co-ordinator in Research and Innovation Services, shares her thoughts on why this doesn’t need to be the case.


When I was young, I always thought that marketing was about selling people too much of what they don’t want or need. Even now, having started a Marketing Manager apprenticeship with Cambridge Marketing College, my inner morality compass has been squirming at the conflict between this traditional view of marketing and my desire to live more sustainably.

Over time, however, I’ve come to realise that good marketing should, as defined by my College, ‘identify and satisfy customer needs and building systems around this principle’. With 65% of consumers wanting to buy purpose-driven brands that advocate sustainability (Harvard Business Review, 2019), a customer-focussed approach creates opportunities for companies to boost sustainable activity, both in terms of how they deliver services and products to customers, and influence people’s purchasing behaviour.

Take smol, for example, a business which provides ‘planet-friendly’ cleaning products. I’d never even considered switching from traditional laundry tablets until ads popped up on Facebook offering me a free trial of their plastic-free version. Tell me, who doesn’t need laundry tablets? So I ordered a pack and two years later, I’m still receiving them in the post every month, content that I’m not polluting the planet nor likely to run out of laundry tablets again.

smol’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed; Ariel have recently followed suit by developing their own sustainable ECOCLIC box. I think it’s safe to assume that Ariel’s marketing teams will be carefully analysing how many people purchase this product. If successful, it will give them fuel to influence internal decision-making in favour of widening their sustainable packaging range – putting the power with the consumer!

Despite sustainable products becoming more widespread in response to customer and legislative demands, you only need to look around to realise that they aren’t always at the top of our to-buy list. In fact, whilst 65% of consumers want to buy purpose-driven brands that advocate sustainability, just 26% of consumers actually do (Harvard Business Review, 2019). The reasons for this are numerous, but by gathering and analysing data on customer behaviour, marketers can better understand this ‘intention-action gap’ and identify the most effective ways to close it.

Of course, this needs to be achieved without falling into the ‘greenwashing’ trap – i.e. making people believe your company is doing more to protect the environment than it actually is. In 2021, the European Commission published a report suggesting that 42% of green online claims are exaggerated, false or deceptive. Large and small companies have fallen foul of this trend in the hopes of capturing the interest of eco-conscious consumers with their marketing campaigns – only to be called out and lose customer loyalty and trust in the process.

One reason organisations can get away with this is a lack of climate literacy globally. In a study of German, French, Italian, UK, and U.S citizens, only 14.2% of respondents proved to be truly climate literate. Yet it’s been shown that 94% of consumers are more likely to be loyal to a brand that’s completely transparent, so it is in marketers’ interests to use their position of influence to educate consumers (and internal staff) on the right terminology so that consumers can understand the evidence and credentials for themselves. That is, of course, if their sustainability strategy is anything to shout about!

An example of marketing packaging which promotes climate literacy: a tag from a REGATTA product which explains what their product certifications mean.

Marketing also provides an opportunity for companies to change our traditional view of consumption. We’re already seeing examples of this, from the Vinted ad campaigns for sustainable fashion app, to Octopus Energy’s Saving Sessions, which reward customers for using less power. The same data, creativity and tools used by marketers to drive consumption could prove vital to changing customer and shareholder perceptions of value and help us on our way to adopting a circular economy.

If you’d like to learn more about marketing and how it is being used to inform and drive sustainable action, I recommend you listen to the “Can Marketing Save the Planet?” podcast, founded by Michelle Carvill and Gemma Butler, which hosts guests from a range of industries to discuss the successes, opportunities and challenges faced by the marketing industry. It provides an insight into an industry which is still learning how to be good – and in which I believe being good at your job shouldn’t always mean encouraging people to consume more.

Celebrating the people who make Sustainability happen – a year of FutureProof

On June 1st we held a celebration BBQ at the Kent Community Oasis Garden in celebration of our staff Sustainability Champions Network and sustainability volunteers that are making sustainability happen across the University as part of the FutureProof project.

The June 1st Celebration

The BBQ was an opportunity to say thank you to everyone for their continued engagement in sustainability projects in what has been a year of having to adapt to a new normal. FutureProof relies on the continued commitment of our staff volunteers who are delivering sustainability projects within their teams and departments.

We had some continuing projects from previous years including the annual lecture on Computing and Climate Change; KBS’ Stage 2 Market Research Project; Anthropology and Conservation’s Sustainability Working Groups including the annual BioBlitz; embedding sustainability into the Global Officers Programme; and the Medway Green Spaces Project which saw new accessible pathways, beds and green gym equipment installed.

New features at the Medway campus.

We held three formal online workshops for champions this academic year. In autumn term we marked COP26 with a special addition to our SDG and a Cup of Tea series: The Road to Net Zero: The Role of Staff. In Spring Term we welcomed our new champions into FutureProof with a two part guide to the project and a focus on the six Sustainable Development Goals that feature in our new Sustainability Strategy.

Workshops of 2021/2022.

We also had new projects and some exciting collaborations:

  • Our first external champion, Debi Adams, who runs the Kent Community Oasis Garden (a partnership project between the University and East Kent Mind) is collaborating with Silvio Caputo, our KSAP champion on a Horizon Research Proposal looking at the delivery of ecotherapy in our garden
  • New champion Lori Fisher from Biosciences will be collaborating with champions from across catering on delivering Love Food Hate Waste engagement materials
  • New champion Margarita Prieto-Acosta has been on a mission to reduce waste and ensure the proper segregation of waste at Kent Law School during office moves
  • Champions from the Division of Human and Social Sciences Operations; Knowledge Exchange and Innovation; and Internationalisation have been collaborating on a Sustainable Events guide to support staff in making easy sustainable decisions when planning and delivering events across campus. The website for this will be launching soon
  • Champions from College and Community Life have been collaborating with the Kent Community Oasis Garden and Landscape and Grounds Champions Chris Wright to deliver Plant a Seed sessions, mindfulness session and bushcraft workshops
CCL activities.

And finally, our monthly newsletter was relaunched featuring campus sustainability updates; positive national and international news; Champion book reviews and blogs; and the much loved sustainability wordsearch.

It has been a difficult year as we navigate living with covid; adapt to hybrid working; and seek to build back the sustainability momentum we had pre-pandemic. However, it has been wonderful to get FutureProof going again and see staff reengage and build upon their projects or start new ventures despite a challenging backdrop.

A massive thank you to everyone that has been involved from the Sustainability Team. We could not do it without you!

Increasing recycling rates in the School of Biosciences

The Sustainability Champion for the School of Biosciences has led on a project that has seen recycling rates increase threefold. Alex Moore identified a problem in research labs where the layout of bins and lack of clear information meant that researchers were placing the majority of their recyclable waste into general waste bins (this waste goes to incineration with energy recovery).

On initial assessment 99% the waste in the general waste bins was recyclable. Due to the nature of the waste produced in a research lab and the lack of space Alex and colleagues from the Estates Department came up with a trial new waste scheme to test what would work for the lab users.

New small desktop bins were installed to help researchers with ease of correct disposal at their fingertips, without taking up precious desk space. The main lab bins were relabelled to ensure they were clear and to reflect how many recycling bins there should be to general waste bins. Clear communications through posters and labelling were designed to showcase the top ten lab recyclables that should be going into the green marked bins. All labelling was checked by the Safety, Health and Environment Unit to ensure that it was clear what to do with hazardous/contaminated waste.

The Kent Fungal Group were the test lab and the results after a month of trialling were extraordinary with recycling rates increasing threefold. Once the trial was successfully completed the project was rolled out throughout the School of Biosciences.

The Gulbenkian: Project Zero

Project Zero – The Gulbenkian have been on a mission to reduce all waste where possible from their café, theatre and cinema operations.  Since the start of Project Zero, headed up by Sustainability Champion Daniel Parsons, they have:

• Removed all single use plastic bottles in the café, saving an estimated 50000 plastic bottles since August 2018

• Switched to reusable plastic pint and half pint cups which has significantly reduced their single use plastic cup buying

• Partnered with ‘Too Good To Go’ and sold 626 magic bags. These are bags of food that would be thrown away and instead offer meals to customers at significantly reduced rates

• Sent all their milk bottle caps to a company that reuse the plastic, that’s about 300 caps a week

• Hosted a family day on climate change with thoughts, ideas and pledges shared on the ‘SustainabiliTree.’

The Sustainability Team at the Gulbenkian will be continuing Project Zero into the next academic year and will continue their focus on waste as well as looking at carbon.

Sustainability celebrations at Kent Community Oasis Garden

Last week, sustainability champions from across the University celebrated the first year anniversary of the FutureProof project at a garden party held at the Kent Community Oasis Garden.

FutureProof is the University of Kent’s response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and provides a framework, challenging and supporting each University department to review their impacts against the SDGs and working to create positive change.

FutureProof, which launched in June 2018, aims to inspire individuals, departments and the whole University community to take action in ensuring that our estate, our curriculum and our students are ready for the future.

The Sustainability Champions are key to the project’s success as they act as catalysts for change in their departments and conduits for sustainability information across the University. As part of their role as champions they lead on their own projects and the celebration event was the sustainability’s team way of saying thank you to them for all their hard work.

The event highlighted case studies from the year, which can be read in full in the Futureproof report

Projects have included a tripling of recycling rates in Biosciences, education for sustainable development projects at the Business School and a wellbeing project at the Medway campus.

To celebrate, the sun came out for a delicious vegan BBQ prepared by chef Ben Elsbury (from Kent Hospitality), games with prizes to be won, and a refreshing mocktail bar with fresh herbs from the garden.

In its first year FutureProof has held 6 workshops at both the Canterbury and Medway campuses with an overall attendance across them of 124, recruited 65 sustainability champions from 43 different departments, and supported 20 sustainability projects from across the University.

For more information about FutureProof please visit www.kent.ac.uk/sustainability or email sustainability@kent.ac.uk