CIM Ireland – Responsible Marketing event at Invest NI offices.
Wednesday 5th February 2025
‘Responsible Marketing – driving success through integrity, trust and impact’
Post Event Summary
This was the first CIM Ireland event of the year, and what a success it was! The theme of ‘Responsible Marketing’ was carefully selected by CIM Ireland Chair Marion Norwood, with a keynote address by Alexis Eyre, a strategic communications leader and expert in responsible marketing, known for helping brands to authentically communicate their sustainability and social impact. Alexis’ keynote then set the stage for the lively panel discussion with the five expert panelists who shared their thoughts, experience, and insights around this topic. The room was buzzing with marketers from a range of different industries and roles, also making it the perfect networking opportunity over a sumptuous breakfast catered by Invest NI.
Marion Norwood, CIM Ireland Chair, opened the event with a motivating welcome speech and updated the room on the resources available via CIM, and the online networking platforms available to use. Refer to our CIM Ireland website (details at the end of this summary) for an insightful paper that Marion wrote on Responsible Marketing.
There was so much to take away from Alexis and each of the panelists, it’s hard to summarise, however below are some of the key points mentioned.
Alexis Eyre – Strategic Communications Leader and expert in Responsible Marketing
Alexis started the main event by video link and talked about the positive and negative impacts of marketing using the 4Ps. Alexis created a sustainable marketing compass, which is basically a strategic planning tool for marketers to use. Whilst it doesn’t give all the answers, it gives the parameters within what you should work with. The day this model was launched on LinkedIn it had 750,000 hits in the first 24hrs, which was something Alexis wasn’t prepared for. However, this model is now embedded in loads of education programs and used by loads of brands. On the back of this Alexis was encouraged to write her book ‘Sustainable Marketing: The Industry’s Role in a Sustainable Future’ – a necessary purchase for any modern-day marketer!
Marketing since the 1950s has been the sole pursuit of commercial growth, with little to no regard for its environmental societal impact. Check out ‘The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals’ one of the most famous sustainability frameworks in the world.
Product through a Sustainability Lens
- Manufacturers need to start having responsibility for ‘end of life’.
- Product lines being launched every day are getting out of control, with so much ending in waste. Even charity shops are overflowing.
- The obsession to get people to buy more and more has created over 53.6 million tons of E-waste to be thrown away.
- Frightening Fact – we have more precious metals in landfill than we do in our mines at the moment!
Price through a Sustainability Lens
- The pressure of aspirational buying (for example, Christmas messaging encouraging you to buy more and more – feeling you are not as good as everyone else if you don’t) meant that 54% of individuals during Christmas 2022 spent more than they could afford. There was a 29% increase in suicide in the two weeks following this, from people suffering from severe debt.
- Black Friday and Cyber Monday are other examples of the above, where people are constantly pressured to buy more and more, much of which they do not need.
- Marketers tend to love dynamic pricing, but what it often means is that people who are the most affluent get the cheapest price.
Place through a sustainability lens
- Same day delivery deals, and the power to drive convenience can actually cost the equivalent of 3000 trees being cut down. Encouraging people to wait/be patient would mean fewer deliveries, and more being delivered at the same time.
- Throughout the Covid pandemic, a lot of brands went online because they thought it was the way forward. But actually, the people that needed to shelter most were not digitally literate and thus completely ignored (mainly the over 65s).
- Around 29% of individuals in the UK actually don’t transact online.
Promotion through a sustainability lens
- 72% of advertising is based on inadequacy messaging, and around co-creating products that people desire and don’t actually need.
- Alexis recommended looking up the Geena Davis Institute, as they really focus on gender equality, racial equality, minority parties, and how everything is depicted in culture.
- Females are a third less likely to speak in marketing, and more likely to be shown in domestic roles than professional roles.
- Ad tech companies hold on average 72 million data points on a child by the time they turn 13. Data being used to sell products to children, but are we focusing on their needs or their desires??
Alexis talked about efficiency in marketing and sustainability, and gave the car industry as an example, which for an industry that has a net worth of $740 billion its efficiency is monumentally low. She also highlighted that one image in an average email is about 50 grams of carbon. If the average email open rate is about 20% then think of all that carbon you’re emitting. Marketers really need to think about wastage from a marketing perspective.
We also have ‘brain prints’ which Alexis thinks is the second biggest impact of marketing, behind behaviour change and behaviours that we drive. Brain print is a term that’s just starting to become known, although it was first floated in 1993 by the WWF. In essence it’s a subconscious impact of marketing and everything a company says and does in society. Gillette got absolutely hammered a few years ago because it was uncovered that they were charging females three times the amount for a razor that was pink. The razor was effectively exactly the same as the male razor, but because it was visually different, they could charge more. The brain print of marketing is monumental, but the subconscious impact it is having on our culture is horrendous.
Alexis mentioned the ‘Purpose Disruptors’ – an organization who are really driving change in the advertising agency world. They did this huge report that found that advertising has 32% to every single person’s annual carbon footprint in the UK, just by the very nature of how it operates.
Alexis’s final note:
Marketing needs to effectively become the orchestrator of performance against environment, commercial and societal targets, and always making sure that it is delivering on all three.
The Panelist Discussion
Following on from our keynote speaker we had the ‘fantastic five’! Our five panelists consisted of; Kerry Boyd from Autism NI, Tim Monroe from Smiley Monroe, Angeline Murphy from SSE Airtricity, Lana Templeton from Murdoch Group, and Michelle Board from Ulster Orchestra – all leaders in their field of expertise. It was an insightful discussion, with interesting questions from the audience….a few key takeaways from the panel were:
- A data driven approach to sustainability is essential.
- Sustainability Storytelling – every marketer needs to be able to do this.
- Implement a reporting mechanism and integrate with your business strategy.
- If you don’t have a written sustainability policy then you need to create one.
- ChatGPT can be a useful tool for templates and stimulating ideas.
If you haven’t embarked on your sustainability journey and need some inspiration to get yourself started then get yourself a copy of Alexis’s book! Please also reach out to us here at CIM Ireland (details below) for any advice and support….or maybe you have a sustainability story to share with us? We would love to share on our channels if you have!
We hope to see you at a future CIM event! #CIMevents
For information about CIM, please contact
CIM Marketing Community Manager, Pippa.White@cim.co.uk
For more information about CIM Ireland, please click
https://regions.cim.co.uk/ireland
Or join our LinkedIn group:
CIM Ireland LinkedIn Group https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8203641/