Hosted by POC Conference 2024 speakers, Michelle Carvill and Gemma Butler (writers and founders of Can Marketing Save the Planet?), Conference of Marketers 2 (COM2) was the follow up to the inaugural conference last year.
The COMs are focused on ‘Rethinking Marketing as a Force for Good – Uniting skills, creativity and influence to drive awareness, collective action and meaningful change’ and the 2025 theme explored ‘How does business and Marketers drive being a force for change from the inside’.
The intention-action gap
After an opening address and introduction by Michelle and Gemma, Ozlem Senturk from Kantar, an online market research platform, took to the stage to discuss ‘How to close marketing’s internal intention-action gap.’
Ozlem explained that Kantar had undertaken a study to address this question with a quantitative study and information from 18 CMOs, leaders and experts. It found that progress is happening, but not nearly fast enough; 90% of marketers agree that sustainability agendas must be more ambitious. While 94% say marketers need to act more bravely and experiment to drive transformative change.
But for many, the value-action gap is something to contend with: 85% of people want to live a sustainable lifestyle, meanwhile only 29% of people are actively changing their behaviour to do so. Put simply, people say they do, or want to do, more than they actually do. This doesn’t mean they are being deceitful; the intention is there, they just need support and motivation from brands to carry out their principles in a way that is accessible and achievable.
Marketers have the responsibility to help consumers live more sustainably, said Ozlem. And there are both opportunities alongside challenges to do so. The opportunities are:
- Innovate for advantage
- Educate people about their choices and actions at a mass scale
- Transformative partnerships to drive bigger impact
- Expand marketing’s role in the value chain
The challenges:
- Redefining success
- Dedicated resource
- Close the (knowledge) gap
- Internal mindset
Ozlem advocated for shifting from a linear to a circular discipline in marketing: from marketing’s scope centred in purchase and use, within a linear value chain, to marketing’s scope beyond purchase and use, in line with circular principles.
Sustainability is nothing else than positioning the company where the world is going and if you want to win you might as well lead, said Ozlem.
The first next steps are:
- Think circular
- Close the corporate value-action gap
- Re-think metrics
- Build out sustainability marketing skills
- Be brave in comms and innovation
Advice from a CMO
Next onto the stage was a panel of CMOs: Gerald Breatnach, Google; Sophie Collins, MPB; Jo McClintock, Trainline; and Sophie Wheater, GiffGaff, discussing their sustainability research findings and learnings.
The panel touched on some of the issues arising out of the US political situation at the moment, and how many businesses are quietly continuing the work they were doing despite it. Sophie Wheater said that “the onus is on us more than ever to hold stability and allow consumers to rely on brands.”
Jo spoke about her role working at a train company, which has a responsibility to communicate and grow itself as a more sustainable form of transportation. Trainline created the ‘I came by train’ brand to bring attention to this and has collaborated with Glastonbury and a number of premier league football clubs to implement this strategy.
It is important to intertwine sustainability into every job description at the company, as part of the company culture.
Diversity, inclusion, and engaging Gen Z
The following session was titled ‘Marketing for Social Change,’ in particular, how to create change from the inside with a focus on Gen Z. The panel consisted of Kian Bakhtiari, The People; Thanh Catachanas, JCDecaux; Sonia Harrach, JCDecaux; Dorothy Oduguwa, Vodaphone; and Ritesh Gohil, Mindshare.
Each of the panellists had a role within their company under diversity and inclusion, or specifically targeted to the Gen Z market.
Sonia and Dorothy discussed the importance of consulting certain groups properly in order to engage them.
Ritesh raised the challenge they face that if inclusion schemes are not driving profit, then they aren’t always seen as valuable; they are emotionally and socially valuable but not financially, which is something that needs to be translated at board level.
To get the message and importance across, said Dorothy, it needs to be broken down in different ways to different stakeholder groups.
However it is hard work always trying to bring people around to your side, said Thanh, the antidote, she said, is finding your allies and coming to events like this [Com2] where everyone is on a similar page.
When it comes to marketing to Gen Z, Sonia explained that they expect companies to align with their values, with Ritesh adding that Gen Z want transparency and authenticity.
“Don’t toe the line!” insisted Thanh, “Gen Z are making the change previous generations wish they could have made.”
However, Gen Z was highlighted as a ‘flip-flop’ generation, trying to balance sustainability and cost of living, for example the seemingly incongruously simultaneous popularity of pre-owned brands like Vinted, and ultra- fast fashion brands like Shein.
Turning internal comms green
Next up was Kevin Duncklet, CSO at HH Global, with ‘Driving Sustainability Internally – Leadership at every Level’.
Kevin explained that measuring your organisation’s sustainability commitment does not come from how big the sustainability team is, but rather how embedded is the mindset into the fabric of the company?
As part of its sustainability journey, HH Global aligned itself with 5 SDGs, and began integrating these into its processes, starting with clients, then its supply chain, then designers, and then 18 months ago it turned its attention towards its colleagues – a company’s secret weapon, Kevin said.
This began with a company-wide Earth Day campaign that was divided up into four different regions, each with four different projects. Each employee had the opportunity to vote what project in their region they would like to support. It was their most successful company campaign ever, with an engagement of 50% of staff globally.
An interesting takeaway from this was that biodiversity related projects had 70% more engagement than carbon-based projects; it is something tangible and emotive – people care about the baby turtles, they don’t care (or more accurately don’t fully understand) about carbon – it can’t be seen or connected with in the same way.
This internal project not only got employees engaged, but allowed the company to make an investment into nature and get a measurable return, not financial, but impact reporting data.
Building on this, HH Global then devised an SDG ‘sorting hat’ quiz, where employees could be ‘sorted’ into whichever SDG best aligned with their values. Board members were installed as ‘house’ heads and Teams backgrounds were created, sporting their SDG house, for meetings.
Kevin said they had a lot of learnings from the project, a lot of success but also improvements, but the impact was palpable.
Marketing therapy
The next session was something of a diversion from the traditional rubric of a conference: it was a rant session. Three panellists proposed an issue which they proceeded to rant about, for the audience to respond and offer therapy to in the form of consolations and solutions.
Adam Bastock from Small99 began, with the rant that, despite there being many fantastic sustainability-focused events out there now, they are still not getting the footfall of, for example, an AI conference. “How do we mobilise our resources to think bigger and access bigger events with our messaging?” asked Adam. There is a social tipping point: you only need to get 30% of people onboard to have a big impact, so push on the open doors.
An audience member responded to say that part of the problem is making the concept of sustainability too big; it needs to be broken down into tangible measures of things people can see and understand.
Someone else added that there needs to be a reframing of the communication around sustainability: an emphasis on ‘better’, as no one can argue with ‘better.’
The next ranter was Denise Hicks from C Space consultancy, who said that the say/do gap is not something unique to sustainability, so it shouldn’t be taken as an issue about consumer’s attitudes to sustainability. Denise used the example of health and wellness industry – consumers are forever saying they want to eat healthier, exercise more, actually use the gym membership they pay for every January, but very often this is not fulfilled. It is human nature and not an issue with sustainability, but with incentive.
Gavin Sheppard from Pinwheel followed with his rant that it must not be forgotten that marketing is about value creation, which needs to be remembered when talking about sustainability. You cannot market sustainability just as the right thing to do, there needs to be some value for consumers from making that choice. Marketers need to ask the question of why sustainability adds value, rather than just mitigating risk.
The day finished off with a couple of group workshops to discuss leadership challenges, and how to take the learnings from the day to drive being a force for hood from the ‘inside.’ With so many thought-provoking discussions and engaged and interesting attendees, COM2 was a valuable lesson in both the challenges and the solutions to generating sustainable momentum in industry.
