Our Intersections

Is it less about things and more about their relationships?

Over the years I’ve worked across diverse industries in roles involving marketing, innovation and sustainability. And I’ve slowly come to realise that these three things are interlinked. Indeed, New Age texts, and modern marketing books, say that everything is about relationships. It’s the connections between things that are valuable, more than those intrinsic things.

Sustainability is a hot topic right now. Climate Change, pollution, diet, waste, fair wages, gender and worker’s rights are all vital, of course. But without an integrated approach, ‘doing sustainability’ won’t be effective or, indeed, sustainable. It may lead to superficial results, or possibly none at all. Here’s why:

Sustainability specialists will analyse what needs to be done, and can be done. They are experts in their respective areas and will identify what progress is possible. But unless they engage in some radical thinking, the basic dynamics won’t alter. The end result of their efforts will be compliance (which is good) rather than change (which is better).

For example: it is great for car producers to become carbon neutral by producing electric cars, offsetting their emissions via sustainable energy and planting trees. But wouldn’t it be better for those companies to innovate in public transport and micromobility instead – so those cars are never produced, congestion not created, and parking spaces not required.

Innovation folks can work with sustainability professionals to generate new approaches. Their bread and butter is finding ways of doing things beyond ‘business as usual’. There may be systemic limitations to what is possible initially, but they can begin the journey on new pathways that could one day, with luck, become dominant social paradigms.

And then there’s the marketing people. They understand audiences better than anyone. Okay maybe not as well as Insight departments, but well enough to engage them. Knowing who to communicate with is the final piece of the puzzle. For without persuasive communications that can change the right people’s thoughts and behaviours, any progress will be small and soon sizzle out.

I believe that harnessing the intersection of sustainability (what) x innovation (how) x marketing (who) is the most effective way to drive internal and external change. This is what I am focussing my thinking on these days. There’s other valuable perspectives, of course – creatives, social enterprise, key workers, etc. – but I’ll leave those areas for their practitioners to champion.

What to produce? How to produce? Who to produce for? These are the three essential questions of economics. And similarly, with Sustainability, we may consider: What to do? How to do it? Who for? (I have not included when, because it’s obvious – now!)

The answers to the first two questions will be wide-ranging. What to do? Maybe reduce product packaging, facilitate re-use or implement process electrification. How to do it? You could produce multi-lingual platforms, biodegradable materials or virtual edutainment. But beyond the project’s immediate needs, the response to ‘Who for?’ will always be the same: for ourselves. For we too exist at an intersection, that of producers and consumers. The answer lies within the relationship that we have with our world.