Sustainable Marketing
What is Sustainable Marketing?
Through our extensive experience in the sector, it’s become clear that many business owners and consumers struggle to understand what is meant by the term ‘sustainable marketing’. In this guide, we’ve tried to demystify the concept and provide practical examples of how you can implement sustainable marketing practices into your business and align those practices with consumer expectations.
First and foremost, let’s define what ‘sustainable’ and ‘marketing’ mean:
Sustainable means different things to different people and different businesses. For some, being ‘sustainable’ means simply focusing on reducing your carbon footprint and reducing the impact that you have on the planet. For others, being ‘sustainable’ goes beyond the environmental factors and also considers the Social and Governance aspects of sustainability, which come together to form the widely used ‘ESG’ framework for understanding and measuring sustainable outcomes.
When referring to being ‘sustainable’, we prefer to use the latter definition, as it gives a much broader scope to the concept of sustainability and considers how businesses can create positive effects on the local, regional, national and global environment, on the community, the society and in the economy.
Marketing is the activity and processes involved in creating, communicating and promoting an offering to a target audience. The widely-used ‘Marketing Mix’ is a good place to start when trying to understand the activity and processes involved in marketing, which we’ll go into more depth in the next section.
Now that we’ve established what ‘sustainable’ and ‘marketing’ mean by themselves, we can consider how they work together to form the practice of sustainable marketing.
There are two key concepts to think about when trying to understand what sustainable marketing means:
- Offering: Sustainable marketing involves creating, communicating and promoting products and services that deliver positive outcomes for the environment, for individuals, and for society.
- Methods: Sustainable marketing utilises environmentally friendly marketing methods to promote products and services.
The first concept involves marketing products and services that are inherently good for the environment, for people and for society, whilst the second concept involves utilising sustainable methods to promote a product or service.
We think it’s an important distinction to make, because a business that doesn’t directly sell environmentally friendly products can still utilise sustainable methods to market their products, such as through using eco-friendly print designs, green-energy powered web servers and digital billboards, to name a few.
Overall, sustainable marketing can mean promoting products and services that are good for the environment and society, or it can refer to the use of environmentally friendly methods to promote products and services.
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Sustainable Marketing Mix - Explained
Now that we’ve clarified what sustainable marketing means, it’s worth diving deeper into the Seven Ps of Sustainable Marketing, which we have named the Sustainable Marketing Mix. The seven Ps of sustainable marketing consist of the same seven Ps as the traditional marketing mix, but also consider the environmental and social impact of your Product, Promotion, Price, Place, People, Process and Physical Evidence:
Product
- Has it been designed with sustainability in mind?
- Is it manufactured using sustainable methods?
- Does your messaging communicate your product’s sustainability credentials?
- Is the product long-lasting?
- Can it be recycled, reused or repurposed in a circular model?
Promotion
- Does your branding clearly communicate your sustainable values?
- Do you have a clearly defined purpose and mission rooted in sustainability?
- Is your messaging aligned with your values and sustainability credentials?
- Does your brand support any sustainable initiatives?
- Can you utilise eco-conscious influencers to promote your products?
- Can you promote your products using digital instead of print?
- Do you have a presence at sustainability events and exhibitions?
- Are you featured in online sustainability publications?
- Have you received positive press coverage for your products?
- Is your website powered by green servers?
- Is your website ranking for eco-related keywords?
Price
- Where are you positioned against sustainable competitors?
- Where are you positioned against non-sustainable competitors?
- Does your pricing reflect the durability and quality of the product?
- Are you able to charge a premium to eco-conscious consumers?
- Can you offer finance to individuals on low incomes?
- Will a subscription model deliver better outcomes for People, Planet and Profit?
Place
- Is your distribution set up to minimise its environmental impact?
- Do you use an eco-friendly fulfilment partner?
- Are your products available at popular eco-friendly stores?
- Are your warehouses and storage facilities energy efficient?
- Is your retail network energy-efficient?
People
- Are individuals within your team educated about sustainability topics?
- Have they received adequate sustainability training and support?
- Is there a culture of sustainability within your business?
- Are people rewarded for sustainable behaviour?
- Are people remunerated fairly?
- Does your business follow ethical business practices?
Process
- Is sustainability embedded into your product design?
- Has research and development been carried out to ensure you are minimising environmental impact?
- Has research and development been carried out to ensure you are maximising customer benefits?
- Have you carried out quality assurance on products?
- Is your returns process frictionless, ethical, and environmentally friendly?
- Does the design process of your customer touchpoints incorporate sustainability?
- Is customer support easy to access and people-centred?
Physical Evidence
- Is your packaging eco-friendly?
- Are your physical stores energy efficient?
- Are People placed at the heart of your interactions with customers?
- Is your physical branding and image consistent with your sustainable values?
What is a Sustainable Marketing Strategy?
A sustainable marketing strategy is a plan of action that outlines how to promote your brand, product or services, whilst considering their impact on the environment, on people and on society. It involves creating a strategic roadmap for how to reach your target customers, as well as specific short-term tactics to achieve the strategy, utilising the seven Ps of sustainable marketing.
For example, you may want to create a sustainable marketing strategy to promote your new eco-friendly product. As part of developing your strategy, you may want to consider the following eight areas:
1. Marketing Goals
It’s important to set clear, measurable and achievable goals when you develop your strategy - otherwise you won’t know when you’ve finished!
2. Marketing Budget
Every penny counts when you’re trying to launch a new product or service, especially in saturated markets. You need to define a budget before you begin implementing your strategy, so that you can choose where to spend it most efficiently.
3. Seven Ps of Sustainable Marketing
Go through each of the seven Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place, People, Process, Physical Evidence) and analyse how you can organise your business, design your products or services, and build awareness amongst your target customers, whilst considering each stage’s impact on the environment and on society.
4. Market Research
Will anyone care about your eco-friendly product? You won’t know without carrying out market research amongst eco-conscious consumers. Before you spend a single penny on promoting your products, you should seek to understand if there is sufficient demand in the market to justify your spend. Market research is a great tool to uncover deeper insights into your target customers’ desires, needs and preferences too.
5. Competitor Analysis
Where do you stand in the market? Will you be able to differentiate and create a defensible niche? These are the sorts of questions that you’ll be able to answer if you carry out competitor analysis, which involves identifying competitors and analysing their strengths and weaknesses.
6. Segmentation
Customer segmentation is the process of identifying a group or groups of customers who share similar characteristics, interests, demographics and purchasing behaviour to one another. For example, you may have a more affluent customer segment that is more interested in the exclusivity and sustainability of your eco-friendly product, whereas a less affluent group may be driven by pricing and durability.
7. Targeting
Once you’ve defined your customer segments, targeting involves identifying the specific needs and profiles of those segments so that you can target them with relevant offerings and communications. Within targeting and customer profiling, you’ll also identify the specific marketing channels that are best suited to delivering your communications to your target segment.
8. Performance
Once you’ve devised all the other aspects of your sustainable marketing strategy and are ready to put it into action, you’re going to need to know what good looks like. That’s where performance comes in and in particular - Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Similar to your marketing goals, your KPIs should be clear and measurable, but they should also go into more detail about the specific figures you expect to see from different activities.
What Are the Benefits of Sustainable Marketing?
There are many benefits that can arise from sustainable marketing practices. We’ve compiled a list of our top ten benefits to give you an idea of how sustainable marketing can impact many aspects of your business:
- Contributes to larger profits for businesses when implemented as part of wider sustainable business practices
- Meets the growing demands of the eco-conscious consumer segment
- Shows customers that you’re a responsible brand with good values
- Helps to differentiate from your non-sustainable competitors
- Creates an opportunity to charge a higher price to eco-conscious customers who may pay a premium of 59% for sustainable products and services
- Vital for attracting Gen-Z customers - with 90% of the segment willing to pay a premium for sustainable products
- Can result in cost-savings through increased efficiency and reduced wastage
- Can improve employee job satisfaction and loyalty as it promotes responsible business practices within the workplace
- Positively impacts consumer behaviour and social outcomes
- Minimises negative environmental impact and protects your business against current or future regulations
What Are the Challenges of Sustainable Marketing?
Greenwashing
A key challenge for businesses looking to implement sustainable marketing is that brands can appear inauthentic or even that they are attempting to ‘greenwash’ their image. Greenwashing has become somewhat commonplace in recent years and savvy eco-conscious customers are becoming more astute at identifying brands that are merely paying lip service to sustainability. Customers don’t expect brands to be perfect but they value authenticity and transparency around your mission and your plans to become more sustainable.
Narrow Focus
A common misconception around sustainability is that it is only concerned with issues surrounding the climate and the planet. Climate concerns are of course legitimate and do generate significant coverage in the media, but there are many Social aspects to sustainability that are often overlooked. Businesses may be losing out on improving their brand image through failing to highlight the positive social impact of their operations, such as charitable work, financial support, educational programmes and employee wellbeing efforts.
Insufficient Data
Sustainability emerged as a topic of interest in the late 1980s but didn’t become prevalent within business until the early 21st century. As a result, there isn’t a huge amount of data available on sustainable consumers and sustainable marketing more generally. That being said, significant research is now being carried out by leading global organisations and over the next 5 years we expect that many of the gaps will start to be filled.
Lack of Knowledge
Growing customer demand and regulatory pressures are forcing businesses to get to grips with sustainability. However, a lack of knowledge amongst business owners, particularly within SMEs, is slowing down the transition. A recent NatWest report highlighted how 9 out of 10 business owners aren’t aware of how to measure their own carbon emissions, even though they want to become more sustainable. To overcome this challenge, the government and sustainability think tanks need to provide clear, concise guidance for SMEs on how they can stay up to date with all of the latest regulatory requirements.
Costs
Choosing the ‘sustainable’ option in a lot of cases is the more expensive choice, which can be true for sustainable marketing methods too, but it doesn’t have to be! As a sustainable marketing agency, we help businesses choose marketing methods that maximise sustainability while also delivering budget efficiency.
For example, businesses have historically printed 1000s of business cards for their employees that are often unused or redundant once the employee changes roles or leaves the business. With modern innovations you can now get a single business card made from eco-friendly materials that has a dynamic QR code for customers to scan and easily save your contact details or visit your website.
Additionally, while it’s more difficult to quantify, the significant brand benefits that come from choosing sustainable marketing methods is likely to far outweigh the increase in costs for choosing a more sustainable option.
What is driving the move towards Sustainable Marketing?
Growing consumer demand, increased investment in the sector and competition are some of the drivers of move towards sustainable marketing.
Growing Consumer Demand
A recent survey by the Harvard Business Review found that 65% of consumers want to buy from brands that advocate sustainability. Whilst there is still a gap between what customers say they want and the action they take (the intention-action gap), there has undoubtedly been a rise in consumers aligning their purchases with their values around sustainability. A 2022 IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) report affirms these findings, with 95% of consumers stating that the pandemic has influenced their views on sustainability, with environmental concerns becoming more important.
Sector Investment
Investment in the sustainability sector has risen rapidly over recent years, which in turn motivates companies to improve their own sustainability credentials in order to attract more funds. Investors are increasingly seeking to align their own sustainable values with their capital allocation through impact investing, whereby they choose to invest in companies that have a clear commitment to delivering sustainable outcomes. Access to impact investing has become much easier too, with the proliferation of ESG funds, green funds and impact funds across the world.
It’s not just impact investing driving the shift in capital allocation though. Savvy investors are recognising the growing consumer demand for eco-friendly products and services, which creates long-term financial incentives for investing into sustainable businesses.
Competition
Competition is another key driver of the move towards sustainability, with many businesses now shifting the emphasis of their marketing efforts from product to purpose. Again, businesses are looking to capitalise on growing demand from eco-conscious consumers, with significant financial rewards available for those brands that can demonstrate the sustainability credentials of their products and services.
As many businesses simultaneously seek to gain a competitive advantage through becoming sustainability pioneers in their respective sectors, this creates pressure on others within the same sector to innovate or get left behind. The innovation that comes out of this competition delivers positive outcomes for consumers, for the environment and for society.
How Big is the Sustainability Market?
According to the Better Business, Better World report by the Business and Sustainable Development Commission, achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals will open up an estimated $12 trillion of new market opportunities by 2030. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly the same size as the United Kingdom, France, Germany and India’s combined annual gross domestic product. It’s a huge opportunity that governments, brands, investors and entrepreneurs are all looking to capitalise on.
More consumers than ever before say that they’re willing to pay a premium for eco-friendly products and the intention-action gap is starting to narrow too, with the UK’s annual spending on ethical products breaking the £100 billion mark in 2021. With the aforementioned regulatory pressures, investors allocating capital to the sector, businesses prioritising sustainable innovations and consumer purchase behaviour shifting over, the sustainability sector is set to grow rapidly for many years to come.
How Can Marketing Play a Role In Improving Sustainable Outcomes?
Marketing can play a vital role in improving sustainable outcomes in society through a variety of different mechanisms. The following techniques have been utilised successfully by businesses and governments to motivate individuals and consumers to take certain actions that have a positive impact on sustainability:
Draw Attention
Marketing campaigns often draw attention to serious issues in society that need to be addressed. Leading brands will often frame a campaign around a serious issue, such as climate change, before explaining how their business is taking action to address the issue through initiatives, charitable donations, products and services. Ultimately, the aim of these campaigns is to improve the brand’s reputation, but they can often also have a profound impact on raising awareness and inspiring action amongst consumers.
Encourage Positive Behaviours
Psychological techniques are often deployed by companies and governments to try and encourage or ‘nudge’ consumers into changing their behaviours and taking more sustainable actions. As stated in a recent BCG publication, consumers are highly susceptible to environmental and social cues. Subtle cues can be used by councils to promote environmentally friendly behaviour like recycling, by restaurants to encourage customers to waste less and by brands to encourage customers to choose sustainable products.
Not only is this useful for delivering more sustainable outcomes for society, it can also be a vital tool for companies’ long-term sustainability planning and product development. Brands can use subtle cues to nudge consumers to their sustainable product lines, which in turn reinforces the demand for these product lines and the additional sales revenue can then be reinvested into further sustainable innovations.
What is Purpose Driven Marketing?
Purpose driven marketing isn’t necessarily always related to sustainable marketing, but increasingly brands are defining a purpose that is rooted in values of sustainability. Purpose driven marketing is the process of establishing a ‘purpose’ that customers, employees and other stakeholders relate to and then embedding that purpose within your organisational processes, within your strategy and within your communications.
Many leading brands have shifted their emphasis in their marketing communications from ‘product benefits’ to ‘brand purpose’, with a recent article by Forbes suggesting that ‘purpose’ should be a new addition to the seven Ps of the marketing mix.
For your brand’s purpose to be seen as credible and useful, it must be authentic and offer clear value to your stakeholders. It is the reason your brand exists beyond the commercial goal of making a profit. Once your purpose has been defined, for it to be successful it must be embedded throughout your business and it should subsequently guide your design, communications, processes and growth plan.
What are examples of Sustainable Marketing?
Nike
Nike launched its Nike Forward collection as part of its new Move to Zero campaign. The overarching campaign highlights all of the steps that Nike is taking to review and reduce the environmental footprint of its global production, with the use of the word ‘Forward’ throughout the campaign messaging being used to position the shoemaker as a forward-thinking pioneer in the sustainability space.
Through the development of new production technology and intentional design choices, Nike is aiming to win the hearts and minds of eco-conscious Gen-Z and Millenials whilst still retaining their iconic style. Nike is investing heavily in the sustainability space as they seek to adapt to the new sustainable lifestyle choices of their key demographics. For example, their inaugural fleece collection is made with an average of 75% less carbon compared to their traditional knit fleeces, with Nike also recommending that customers only need to wash the garments after every five wears with cold water and soap.
Patagonia
Patagonia was one of the first major brands to shift their emphasis from product-led marketing campaigns to purpose-driven campaigns with an emphasis on sustainability. The clothing brand has struck a chord with sustainable consumers as they pioneer the sustainable lifestyle movement - utilising production techniques and distribution channels that require less water and less plastic, whilst also focusing on delivering high-quality garments made from biodegradable fabrics and natural dyes.
Patagonia goes further than most with their sustainable marketing efforts. The brand famously sacrificed their bottom line through trying to encourage customers to buy fewer garments from them via their 2011 ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ campaign. Their goal was to encourage sustainable behaviour amongst consumers, whilst simultaneously highlighting the durability and quality of their products. It was a massive success.
In 2022 the Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard, donated the $3 billion company to charity with the famous message “Earth is now our only shareholder”. It was an extraordinary move from the founder, with the company showing total commitment to purpose instead of profit. The move garnered exceptional coverage and praise across the media spectrum, strengthening brand affinity and solidifying the sustainable community built by the brand for years to come.
Ikea
In 2021, Ikea launched its ‘Fortune Favours the Frugal’ integrated marketing campaign, which asked consumers to forget the negative connotations of the word ‘frugal’ and instead associate it with the positive notions of being sustainable and thrifty. The purpose of the home furnishing retailer’s campaign was to nudge consumers into taking more sustainable actions, such as consuming less, wasting less and reusing more.
The campaign utilised TV and OOH spots to promote the brand’s sustainability credentials as well as a range of eco-friendly products, such as bamboo straws, LED bulbs and reusable water bottles. Again, this is a prime example of a sustainable marketing campaign that combines product marketing, brand marketing and nudge-psychology to improve sales, improve brand affinity and positively influence consumer behaviour.
Alongside the marketing campaign, Ikea reiterated their commitment to protecting the planet, reducing greenhouse emissions and focusing product development on items that could be reused, refurbished, remanufactured and recycled.
What is a Sustainable Marketing Agency?
It’s easy enough to call yourself a sustainable marketing agency, but demonstrating your sustainability credentials takes time, effort and resources. A sustainable marketing agency should have extensive expertise in sustainable marketing strategies and campaign or website solutions. The agency’s team should be passionate about sustainability and will demonstrate this through their subject knowledge, certifications and communications. Most importantly, they should offer clients useful insights into the eco-conscious customers you are trying to reach.
At brytr, we’re fully committed to our own green trajectory, which is why we took the steps to become carbon neutral certified and commit to investing in renewable energy projects across the world. We’ve examined our supply chain, partners, systems and processes to identify opportunities to deliver better outcomes for People and Planet.
Our website is hosted on a server that is 100% powered by renewable energy, we adopt a remote-first work policy, we have built an extensive network of ethical businesses and charities, and we’ve partnered with carbon-neutral certification provider.
What Sustainable Marketing services does Brytr offer?
To find out more about the Sustainable Marketing services that we offer, please visit our services page or get in touch with the team today to discuss your requirements.
