If the sustainability team is not working with the marketing team, then both are missing a trick

Those corporate responsibility teams that understand their remit as seeking to influence across the business sometimes report that where they have the most difficulty is with the marketers.
 

There is certainly a history of mutual misunderstanding. Corporate responsibility teams are historically very focused on internal process – supply chain management, process efficiency, ensuring consistent behaviours across the business, and so on. They produce an annual sustainability report, and it takes quite a long time to get programmes going.
 

Marketers are externally focused. They follow extremely carefully what the customer thinks, and what the competition is doing. They are not overly concerned with the niceties of internal process, and the lead time to a major marketing campaign can be as short as six weeks.
 

It has been a real mars and venus match up. About three years ago, one corporate responsibility manager referred to marketers as “the last bastion of corporate irresponsibility”. Around the same time, one head of marketing at a Business in the Community event labelled his company’s corporate responsibility department as the “sales prevention team”.
 

According to Alex Cole, managing director corporate at Freud Communications, and formerly corporate affairs director at Cadbury, things have changed a lot since then.
 

“We have moved from a push environment to a pull environment,” she says. “It used to be that CR teams were pushing corporate responsibility into marketing.” This meant that CR people were under the impression they had to speak the language of the marketers and adapt elements of responsible business to be relevant to them.
 

“Now, marketers are hearing these messages from consumers in their research, particularly around brand loyalty. That means they are taking an interest in their own right.”
 

Changing role
 

That is probably what corporate responsibility managers have been hoping for. But now it’s arriving there may be a side-effect they hadn’t anticipated. There is a danger that they get cut out of the conversation which becomes one between the marketers and the company’s customers.
 

Cole says: “CR teams may well find there are now activities that they haven’t instigated. They have to ensure that they are seen as having a degree of ownership of the agenda, so that working collaboratively becomes the natural solution.”
 

The make-up of corporate responsibility teams is changing to adapt to the new needs, Cole believes. She argues that there have been three waves of CR professionals.
 

The first, in the early days, “came from all backgrounds such as human resources, legal, community affairs, etc, and they learned CR on the job”. In the second wave there was “an increasing professionalisation with a group that had gained experience in CR, maybe even studied it”. In the third wave, “there is a rebalancing taking place”. The value of general business understanding and insight has gone up and the role of CR is being seen more widely to be to integrate across the business, Cole says.
 

John Luff, the founder of Sustainable Marketing, agrees that marketers are taking greater interest, but still sees a big gap between the two disciplines, with corporate responsibility specialists in many companies still too inclined to think everyone sees the world the same way that they do.
 

Luff argues that marketing managers often assume that the sustainability agenda is only about the environment. “So, we have ‘green marketing’.” On the other hand, “CR folks often still make the mistake of believing that marketing equals advertising.”
 

He says that it’s not enough just to create a corporate responsibility steering committee and to put a marketer onto it. “Just because they are in the same room, they are still speaking different languages. The CR team needs to actively seek an equivalent to Esperanto – a common language that they can use to build understanding.”
 

And corporate responsibility teams should not believe that they have the monopoly on wisdom and that others just need to hear it and learn.
 

One marketer who asked not to be named said marketing teams could provide a clear perspective when sometimes corporate responsibility teams might be driven too much by what they wanted to hear.
 

“We recently ran a successful campaign that built an ethical component on top of our mainstream brand. And it played well with a sizeable segment of our customer base,” he says. But his research also showed that there was another significant group – “call them the ‘white van man’ group” – who hated it. They were, in fact, alienated by it.
 

“The CR teams are quick to dismiss this feedback as irrelevant, or representing views that are not valid. But marketers will want to find messaging that will get the benefits of the move without alienating that group – if it can be done.”
 

It is an example of a delicate question of what common goal should actually bring the corporate responsibility team and marketers together – how much does the company simply follow “what the customer wants” and how much does it go further into how to influence the consumer into new behaviours?
 

Jo Daniels, marketplace director at Business in the Community, says consumer insight alone won’t be the driver of behaviour. Marketers are just as likely to be influenced by seeing what their competitors are doing, and by an intellectual understanding of how changes in society are going to affect the marketplace.
 

Business in the Community recently launched a piece of research on “influencing the customer”, which explored these issues with some of the UK’s top marketers.
 

 “Smart marketers understand that they need to be ahead of where the customer is right now,” says Daniels. “Redefining needs is something that they know how to do. It’s what they’ve always been doing.
 

“If marketers see the task as being to influence customer behaviour, they will be more inclined to try to link sustainability to individual benefits that people care about and not necessarily talk about ‘sustainability’ at all at the start. They will start where the customer is and lead them on a journey.”
 

Spreading the word
 

One challenge identified by several people is that marketers tend to spend a lot more time talking to agencies than they do within their own businesses. And very few of those agencies “get it”. Specialist agencies that focus on sustainability are few and far between.
 

One that does is Futerra. Co-founder Solitaire Townsend says the past few years have seen a big shift in who, within client businesses, is commissioning Futerra’s services. “It used to be that we were working with CR teams,” she says. “Now it’s communications directors. The budgets are bigger, and the agenda has moved up the food chain within the corporations.”
 

Townsend says the gap between the disciplines is still there – and that, more than once, Futerra has introduced marketing teams and CR teams within the same company to each other. The onus is on CR teams to change that.
 

“Any CR team, especially in a consumer-facing company, that is not actively engaged with the marketers is missing around 50% of their job. A large part of the company’s footprint is in partnership with its consumers.”
 

Townsend says that too often the CR team regards their marketing colleagues as “‘end-of-pipe’ – the route by which the world gets to find out about their wonderful CR programmes”.
 

But most consumers don’t care about GRI, or whether a company’s offices are ISO14001. “They want to know how the company’s products are going to help them to be what they want to be, or achieve what they want to achieve.”
 

So, for the new head of corporate responsibility in a company that hasn’t yet bridged the divide, where do you begin?
 

Alex Cole says it’s horses for courses. “Some will want to parachute in a change agent – someone from outside who can help bridge the gap and whose experience will be respected on both sides. Others will seek to grow it from within. I tend to think corporate affairs is the right place for it to start.”
 

As one of those external change agents, John Luff says it is important to get the timing right. “You need to get in early. There’s no point retrofitting CR onto a brand strategy that has already been set.”
 

He also recommends that you actively seek to get cross-over between the teams – internal placements where someone in marketing might be placed in corporate responsibility for a while, or vice versa – so you begin to build understanding where it is most needed.
 

And, if possible, get a process embedded where the brand strategy and specific marketing campaigns have to get corporate responsibility sign-off. But you need to be quite commercially minded in how this is done. You need to avoid being seen as the internal police.
 

Luff says: “You’ve got to be aware that we are all always guilty of talking in shorthand. CR and marketing are both hugely diverse tribes, and how people see the world within each can be very different. You need to understand the people in your own company and not make assumptions based on what you think you know about the other side.”
 

What if the marketers don’t want to engage? Solitaire Townsendthinks this is unlikely – and if it happens it may well be that you went in with the wrong approach. Marketers are not hard to engage, she argues. They are, after all, always happy to look at something that relates to market research – understanding the customer better.
 

Listening is always a good tactic, Townsend suggests. “Ask them to tell you about the brand – what it stands for, how does the customer see the company? Use this to understand what the company is in the public domain, and let this inform your own work.” At this point a good CR team can bring to the table a well-prepared understanding of what competitor brands are doing on sustainability.
 

Top level access
 

The one advantage corporate responsibility teams often have in creating a route for dialogue is their access to the very top.
 

Alex Cole notes: “The CR team can have the CEO’s ear, which brand teams won’t have. You may be able to set expectations through top level support.”
 

Jo Daniels agrees, saying: “If the strategy to embed sustainability thinking into the company is driven by the CEO, this can encourage marketers to look at their work in this respect. And it provides an opportunity for CR teams to present themselves as partners in coming up with solutions.”
 

B&Q is one example of a company that has driven its approach to marketing through the top level commitment of the CEO and the board. And other specific campaigns have come from interaction between CR teams and marketing. For instance, Sainsbury’s drive to get people to eat a wider range of fish as part of the company’s commitment to sustainable fishing.

This was a clear case of needing to use smart marketing to influence the customer in a direction they wouldn’t have gone on their own. And Marshalls’ development of the FairStone brand to guarantee an absence of child labour in its supply chain was driven by the marketing team: an example of “pull marketing” in action.
 

One commentator suggests that there will be a lot more interplay between the teams in the future. The companies that are trusted by their consumers and who are credited with having real social responsibility – these are the ones that have embedded that commitment into what their brand stands for. “Some of these are niche players, but others, like B&Q, with their green apron people in-store, and also Eurostar with their understated approach with the customer, are making the message mainstream.”