Advertising, Greenwashing, and Shoe Brands to Watch

Materials & Sustainability: Routes to Responsible Manufacturing is coming out in 2024. My co-author Paul Foulkes-Arellano and I have been conducting lots of interviews as we’re writing the book. I’m sharing excerpts from some of the interview transcripts here so my blog readers can get a sneak preview.

The following is an excerpt of a transcript from my interview with Alexis Eyre and Paul Randle, co-creators of the Sustainable Marketing Compass. They are doing brilliant work that re-imagines the role of advertising and marketing. 

Julia: Alexis, I remember seeing your social media posts about advertisements and what companies are inadvertently saying or promoting. It's about transparency. There are situations where companies are not purposely trying to hide everything, but that's what they're doing accidentally.

Alexis: A lot of companies are kind of promoting sustainability and also conflicting with it massively at the same time. To your point, they aren’t realizing they're doing it. They’re talking about their company's sustainability objectives, and then using disposable plastic glasses at their event. Now, that's a really minor example. But they don't see the connection the whole way through. They just say, we've communicated that [our sustainability plan] over here. But we're going to carry on with our marketing without thinking that we need to connect the dots. That's what we're seeing the most, it's that lack of understanding that marketing needs an entire sustainability lens for every single decision, not just communicating the company's sustainability objectives.

Paul: There’s a lot of talk about greenwashing. And it's a huge problem. To your point earlier, though, most people aren't doing that maliciously. We can all think of a couple of industries that might be, but most industries and most marketing teams are absolutely not trying to do that. They just don't know the best way to talk about it. Talking about sustainability as a job done, for example, is always going to fail because we're never finished on the transition.

The pace of change in sustainability itself means that what you're communicating today can suddenly become wrong tomorrow, but not for any fault of your own. What we realized through the development of the compass was that we ask companies at the start to redefine success. We will define success across commercial success—because we will still need that—environmental success and societal success. When you're trying to think about what you are doing in those three areas, you suddenly come to the realization that you can't stretch the balloon across all of them equally. Sometimes you might be overcooking on your commercial performance to the detriment of your environmental performance. So you need to rein in your commercial performance. And that really pivots the role of marketing. 

Rather than just being about a growth engine, which is the whole way that people think about marketing at the moment, it's more of a kind of regulator valve that says, we need to de-perform here to increase performance there. So you actually kind of shape the success footprint of the organization. And that leads to some phenomenal briefs. You know, lots of people have talked about the Patagonia campaign, “don't buy this jacket.” That was saying keep brand loyalty, but don't sell anything. There's some brilliant new challenges for marketers in there, we've just got to realize that the world is changing.

Julia: How can consumer-facing brands help their customers understand the difference between this certification and that one and figure out which eco-friendly claims actually have anything behind them? People don’t want to spend ten hours researching to figure out what type of shampoo or shoe to buy.

Paul: That is a massive challenge. I think it's going to be about that kind of shift where brands start to really stand for something and deliver against societal things and deliver against their environmental objectives. It becomes fundamental and part and parcel of what they do and what their products and services are. And therefore, it becomes inherent in that. At the moment, industry standards are just a hygiene level, really, getting to the bare minimum. Ideally, you're going a lot further. Certification marks are great, but they all just highlight the lowest common denominator. What you want are companies that are going way beyond that, and being transformative. And you only get to that place when it becomes truly part of your ethos and your culture of what you're doing. 

Julia: Do you have examples in manufacturing industries of companies that are doing a good job of telling stories about the sustainability benefits of their products, about what they've done and about what they haven't done?

Alexis: VEJA is probably one of the best examples I've seen. I love when you get a pair of trainers [athletic shoes], and it goes through everything. What happens if you get a hole? It tells you how you repair it. It tells you exactly where every single material in your shoe has come from, why they've chosen that material, the benefits, the downside. It's all encompassing, it tells you everything you need to know about your shoe, how you prolong its life, what you do with the end of life. It’s a full double-page spread of information. But in a really interesting, wonderful way that you're actually quite interested in because they set out like a page from the New York Times. I think they're absolutely brilliant.

Paul: What about Allbirds? What I like about Allbirds is that they got commercially successful and then gave all their IP to Adidas to enable Adidas. They are stepping beyond competitive territories to the betterment of society. They say, our commercial successes allowed us to develop these technologies. We can now be big enough and bold enough and brave enough to give them to one of the biggest competitors on the planet, to help them do it.

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