Marketing has gotten a bad name. But what if it could be a catalyst for positive change? Let's explore how we can use the power of people and planet centered marketing approaches to build a fair and sustainable future.
Defining Marketing in the context of sustainable innovation
First things first. What is marketing, really? There are a million and one definitions out there, each with its own level of complexity. We could go with the Chartered Institute of Marketing's classic: "Marketing is the management process for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements profitably." It's simple, yet encompasses all the things marketing needs to achieve. Marketing is not just about promoting and selling stuff, it's also about understanding the deepest needs of your target audience(s) and crafting solutions and user experiences that engage, convert and retain them.
But let's tweak it a bit to adapt it to the environmental and social impact sector. Instead of "requirements," let's use "needs." Needs better reflects the importance of focusing on personal, deep desires and motivations. It’s also about coming back to the basics of Needs rather than Wants. And instead of "profitability" - which still matters, let's focus on the imperative of creating "net positive impact", ensuring benefits to people and planet exceed the negative impacts to people and planet.
So, here's our updated definition:
People and planet-centered marketing is the management process for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer's actual needs - using user-centered design methods - while creating net positive impact.
Eureka!
The Why: using marketing to launch & scale real net positive solutions
Not all sustainable solutions are worth marketing
Back in the days when I graduated from Business School, marketing was all the rage, and everyone wanted to work for FMCG giants. Well, those days are over. Many of those companies have done more harm than good, exploiting consumer desires, promoting retail therapy and fueling overconsumption that destroys our life supporting systems.
Marketers- including myself- certainly have done some harm but this doesn't mean marketing cannot be used to undo this damage and support a shift of consumption towards real net positive solutions.
This means sustainability focused marketers need to have a basic understanding of environmental science, planetary boundaries and frameworks such as the doughnut economics to do their due diligence on the impact of what they are asked to market. Let’s be honest, there are many “sustainability branded” B2C and B2B solutions that are just greenwashing or do more harm than good. Let’s have the courage to stay away from them.
Sustainable marketers need to understand environmental science, planetary boundaries, and frameworks like doughnut economics. We need to do our due diligence, avoid greenwashing and market only solutions that allow us to operate within the doughnut.
The other aspect that does not only apply to sustainable tech is making sure the solution design process allows to really understand the problems that needs solving before designing the solution and then marketing it.
We need to market the right solution before we can market it right.
Even the best solutions need to be marketed properly
When I transitioned into climate tech 8 year ago, I saw an opportunity to align my personal values with my professional skills while supporting like minded entrepreneurs. I realized most impact pioneers were super excited about launching tech-led solutions but lacked the user centered approach to marketing innovation.
Now, I think most sustainable tech leaders have understood that crafting compelling stories, inspiring brands and user-friendly products is key to scaling their ventures.
No matter how groundbreaking an innovation is, if the target audience hasn’t heard about it, does not understand its benefits and why they should switch away from non-sustainable incumbent solutions, you’re never going to scale and reach your desired impact.
Having a good planet saving solution is not enough, you need to market it properly.
This is why, marketing, when done for the right solutions and in the right way, can be a force for good.
The how of people and planet-centric marketing
My love for customer-centricity stems from my graduate job as a store manager at Orange and my days working in a service design agency. I learned firsthand the importance of understanding your customers and delivering exceptional experiences.
These experiences convinced me that combining the best of marketing and user-centered design approaches is the key to outstanding end to end user experiences.
People-centered marketing taps into the user-centered design toolbox to create a seamless buying journey.
The key tools we use are:
· Qualitative user research to understand and document the deeper wants and needs of your target audience.
· Buyer personas and user journey maps to identify who you need to engage and create marketing campaigns around those needs.
· User testing to evaluate with real people your brand creative routes, content topics or ads before production.
· Evidence-based analysis to assess the performance of marketing
Uncovering the actual role of sustainability in the buying decision
Understanding the buying journey and personas involved in the decision-making process is essential to any marketer. Even more so in the impact space, because whether you like it or not, sustainability is not always the primary driver of purchase decisions. You need to dig deeper and understand what truly motivates customers.
Are buyers really driven by sustainability motivations or are they just pretending? What are their other needs / buying criteria and how sustainability rank on this list?
Structuring campaigns around the buying journey
The buying journey is like an iceberg, as a company you only see the tip of it if you don’t look below the surface. Most buyers are already well into their journey before they even reach your website or speak to sales. The other challenge is that buying journeys span across several touchpoints and are almost always interrupted at some stage.
Marketers’ job is to research and document existing buying journeys - before their new solution existed, find problems and opportunities and then strategise how they can market their product in this context, all along the buying journey.
Marketing campaigns should be structured as a sequence of actions along the customer's buying journey.
Customer journey mapping acts as the foundation to inspire and structure marketing campaigns.
Imagine you’re selling heat pumps to SMEs. Research might indicate that first time buyers have very different needs and buying journeys from buyers who already bought heat pumps. With that insight, you may decide this market requires two different campaigns, one for each buyer profile. Chances are they will require different pieces of content and channels - the first campaign may require more educational content and longer sales cycles. Therefore, if your resources are scarce, you can decide which campaign to prioritise based on volume of potential buyers, sales cycle duration, effort to build the campaign, solution / market fit.
Supporting a systemic movement through collaboration
As marketers of net positive innovation, you still have a competitive landscape to navigate. However, the most important competition to beat is the status quo, the non-sustainable solutions.
You’re on a mission to scale new solutions that will contribute to changing the system for good. You are part of a larger movement of pioneers aiming to drive behavioural and systemic change.
This means your thought leadership strategy needs to be systemic, i.e. reflect the people and planet dimensions - again think about social needs and planetary boundaries – and integrate your own ecosystem of partners, suppliers and clients.
This means your direct competitors should also be your allies in crafting and promoting thought-provoking manifestos that can move your industry forward.
People and planet centric marketers should be open to “coopetition”. They should be ready to create or leverage coalitions of change makers to help accelerate change.
In conclusion, people and planet-centered marketing is about deeply understanding our users, delivering exceptional experiences, to scale solutions that help us stay within the safe space of the doughnut.
We could even go as far as branding it Doughnut marketing ;).
Get in touch to discuss how People & Planet centered marketing can benefit your business.
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