Once a decision has been made to get commit an organisation to sustainable marketing there are two main approaches that can can be adopted: I will characterise these as the ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down approaches’.
The bottom-up approach is usually consumer focused or driven and characterised by market research. Customer attitudes and values are researched and the data used to inform and direct the sustainable marketing strategy.
The top-down approach is usually characterised by vision and values of a strong champion or group within the organisation: it is directed by leadership. Rather than being market research driven it is usually led by an internal audit which leads then to a strategic plan and subsequent action.
As a marketer you might expect me to favour the bottom-up, research led, customer focused approach, but I find some flaws that make me uneasy with that direction. Firstly, asking customers to about such a normative proposition as sustainability is likely to result in very misleading data – like asking someone to vote for Mon and apple pie, as the old cliche goes. I remember being involved in the very early days of marketing smoke alarms. All the research suggested they were a wonderful idea and everybody would buy one – sadly it was decades before they reached anything like acceptable penetration. Secondly, I think there is something slightly cynical about a purely market driven approach to sustainability. I still believe that sustainable marketing makes good business sense, but there is also a case for pioneering leadership which means an acceptance of a degree of risk to secure the high-ground.
We are back to that word,’leadership’ again. When we are in a time where standard approaches have not delivered, it is time for visionary, iconoclastic direction. There are plenty of strong business leaders with the right views and values – it is perhaps time to harness those energies. When the issues are urgent it may be that we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of too much concensus management.
“Reasonable men adapt to the world. Unreasonable men adapt the world to themselves. That’s why all progress depends on unreasonable men.”
George Bernard Shaw
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