Can marketing keep Australia fair?

As sustainability builds a more significant presence in the boardroom, marketers need to seize the moment to change the brief and adopt more responsible practices.

James Greet is the co-founder of The Payback Project Australia.

Marketers are the architects of demand. We shape culture. Influence behaviour. Drive consumption. Yet the consumption models we’ve helped build are contributing to a climate crisis that’s directly hurting the customers and communities we serve.

No business is immune to climate risks and impacts. The direct consequences of physical climate risks are becoming increasingly apparent to businesses. They will damage assets and value chains through increasing material costs, supply chain disruptions, declining labour productivity, and more. They are already affecting the communities and ecosystems that businesses are embedded in and depend upon.

In Australia, our natural beauty and wonder is so inspiring we sing about it in our national jingle. As home to the world’s oldest continuous civilisation, we are the original home of sustainable living.

Yet our unsustainable consumption behaviours are causing and worsening the climate crisis that is threatening the very environment we rely on to survive and thrive. According to official Bureau of Meteorology data, last spring was our warmest on record at +2C above average. Our record land and ocean temperatures bring with them the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events that we’ve seen this last quarter.

Furthermore, BOM figures released last week predict that this winter the average temperature will also be a full 2C higher, making it our third-warmest winter on record.

The upside is that we are in the midst of a major global industrial and economic transition to make the changes needed. The downside is we are moving too slow. The challenge is one of pace.

Thankfully there is a growing surround sound of pressure to act that is beginning to grab the attention of business and force the action needed.

This ranges from growing investor pressure to understand the risks and opportunities posed to a business by a warming planet, and what the business is doing (or not) to prepare and evolve. Investor pressure is the force behind increasing regulation and the mandatory reporting introduced here in Australia this year. It’s meant that sustainability is firmly out of the department and into the boardroom – a place many CMOs aspire to be, and if you are there, then as ASIC Chair Joe Longi says, “the expectation is that everyone in that boardroom should have a clear understanding of their role in addressing the risks and opportunities”.

On top of this is growing consumer sentiment to choose from companies and brands that are doing the right thing, as well as employees increasingly anxious that their companies are not doing enough and voting with their feet. In research by the independent Practitioner of Advertisers in the UK last year, 70 per cent of employees felt the industry wasn’t doing enough.

But beyond this growing surround sound of pressure on businesses, there’s a special role the marketing and advertising industry can play.

The simple facts are that while operational emissions related to marketing, advertising and media buying equate to about 4 per cent of total C02e (roughly the equivalent of aviation), something like 60 per cent of greenhouse gases come from household consumption. As the architects of demand, driving consumption is what marketers do.

Today we are at a sliding doors moment. Avoiding the worst-case scenarios of climate change requires the rapid transformation of societies. Shaping and embedding consumption narratives that help define social and cultural values in society is what marketing and advertising does, so we can play a massive role in not just shaping but accelerating the changes required to shift our consumption behaviours to more sustainable lifestyles.

But short-term pressures of business today are hindering the ability to properly understand, let alone prepare and react to, the long-term threats to society. So, what can marketers do right here, right now?

First, understand where your board and C-suite see your risk and opportunities – especially across the portfolio – based upon their climate planning, and identify your unique contribution to addressing these.

Second, connect with your environmental, social and governance lead to understand how you can engage your skills together. How might marketing be re-imagined through a sustainability lens?

Third, understand what your supply chain (your media and creative agencies, media owner partners) are doing to minimise their emissions impact while changing audience behaviours. Many agencies tell me that their clients don’t care. Make it clear that you do.

Finally, and most powerfully, as the architects of demand, you can play a decisive role in accelerating society’s shift away from our current high-carbon lifestyles, towards low-carbon alternatives by changing the brief. Every campaign – not just the eco product launch – is an opportunity to normalise the lifestyles, the products, the services and the attitudes we all know we will need to adopt to achieve sustainable living.

The bottom line is marketing can help keep Australia fair. We just need to accelerate the advance part.

James Greet is co-founder of the The Payback Project Australia, an advisory that works with marketers, agencies and media owners to help plan a path toward net- zero.