Marketing: The Bastard Child of Sustainability

An Open Letter to The Marketing Community:

It’s funny how the ways we choose to promote sustainability are often the furthest things from sustainable.  Marketing – as a business practice – is not sustainability.  Sure, marketers, designers, ad agencies and pr firms can specify chlorine free, FSC-certified papers and soy-inks, offset their direct mail’s carbon footprint, run greener servers, and video conference with clients.  Minimizing impact is important, but it’s just the sound of slowing down the inevitable.  As a seasoned marketing professional and environmentalist, I have struggled with this.  

Today’s marketing professionals (and departments) find themselves charged with communicating the social and environmental values of an organization in order increase its financial return.  But they are mostly left out of participating in and implementing most triple bottom line initiatives.  They are not contributors of  sustainability; they are communicators of sustainability values and practices (in some cases).

Interestingly, it’s the promotion itself that get corporations in trouble with public cries of deceptive uses of green marketing, greenwashing.  I’m not sure what “green marketing” is anyway, if not just another finish-layer on top of pre-existing marketing veneers.  It certainly doesn’t sound anything like something that may be sustainable.  Green marketing sounds exactly like something that might have been a fad once upon a time.

Honestly though, most current advertising and branding is merely phatic anyway– its only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to actually conveying importance.  Like green marketing is to sustainability, most promotion is content-light (this is not to say that phatic communication is meritless.) But, the argument goes, that we (as marketers) don’t have a choice.  There’s a school of thought around this falsehood that consumers don’t have the attention space for complex messages.  And even if they did, they don’t want it.  And even if they wanted it, marketing is built on spectacle and metaphor.  It’s representations of the things, not the things.  Saturation is the goal.  Not depth.

But language doesn’t have to be the barrier to sustainability. I argue that we (marketers, strategists, designers, writers, etc.) need to move into a post-phatic era of marketing and promotion. A move towards promotion, that does more than simply promote.  

Here’s how:

Imagine a campaign that does more than promote a company, product or service.   Imagine a promotion that has intrinsic social value. What happens when context and content collide?  How much good could the marketing community do if we architected programs with corporate, civic and cultural value as the goal?

I’m not talking about corporate philanthropy, clever (and important) NPO partnerships, cause marketing, crowd-sourcing, long-tails or affinity programs.  I’m talking about promotion that serves, simultaneously, the civic, the cultural and the corporate body.

If we do it right, a few things happen:

1.    Greenwashing becomes nearly impossible because the act of the promotion is the thing itself.

2.    The marketing department finally gets to eat at the sustainability table, rather than a feed on table scraps from corporate intent or actions.

This concept even raises an interesting opportunity to re-evaluate how we measure marketing.  Return on Investment becomes Return on Intention becomes Return on Impact.  Nothing less than all three should be our goal.  

When successful, we can look our CMOs, clients and our children straight in the eyes and point to financial return, social impact and environmental progress for the best of the best of these promotions.

If careful and successful, these campaigns will create greater loyalty with the conscious consumer, elevate authentic brands to heroic status, build organizational reputation and provide financial return on the fiscal investment.  But, perhaps more importantly, finally, our marketing programs will Do Something.

A few words of warning:

1.    This type of promotion is not for the inauthentic.
2.    It’s also not for the uncreative.  It is hard work.  

Marshall McLuhan pointed out that, “societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate, than by the content of the communication.”  I argue that if we put as much creative thought into the nature of our promotion, as we do to the content of the promotion, we can develop an irrefutably positive change in the marketing industry for good.


John Rooks, President and Founder
The SOAP Group
jrooks [at] thesoapgroup.com