Sustainability should never be used as a marketing tool. Sustainability has to be your product.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Back in 2015, Sophie was working in Lausanne, CH as the Global Content and Social Media Lead at Nestlé Nespresso.
Sophie saw an opportunity to tell the stories of Nespresso’s Sustainability team to the consumer. After starting small by integrating some messages on social media, individual stories soon grew into large-scale global campaigns. In 2018, Sophie joined Dyson as their Director of Customer Experience and Corporate Sustainability Champion.
We asked Sophie Dufouleur for her advice on how marketers can drive change across the value chain. And in doing so, we discovered another connection…
Strained supply chains, climate change and rising inflation rates are all part of one system, just as our people, product, and environment. Nurture one and you nurture them all.
Here’s how Sophie, who’s also part of the board of trustees at Greater Change, a non-profit tackling homelessness, and Mentor for Sustainable Startups at Allia Future Business Centre, uses her career in Marketing to support people and the planet.
Running order:
- Where to start. So you’ve decided you want to champion sustainability. Here’s how to find proof points and gain traction fast.
- The meeting. How to get internal buy-in when pitching to senior management.
- What next? How to build a Career in Sustainability & Marketing.
Interview edited for brevity.
Emma: Sophie, we can’t start this interview without first talking about your roots in winemaking! Growing up in Beaune, the city of wine in Burgundy, how did this shape your relationship with the environment?
Sophie: One of my biggest role models was my grandmother. Born in 1911, she lived through two World Wars and knew what it was to walk miles for water or live without electricity. She kept a no-waste philosophy. When we’d visit at the weekends, we’d sometimes sit in darkness because she refused to turn the lights on. She would say ‘this is not Versailles!’ She was a millennial before her time.
My mother continued her philosophy of nurturing the earth. As a winemaker, you have to look after your resources, and this year, we had a third of our usual crop because of unseasonal frost, rainfall, and hail. We can’t ignore the signals anymore. It’s easy for me to challenge unsustainable practices because I see their impact on an industry that I care deeply about.
We all have a responsibility to make a difference. We all have a responsibility to try.
Emma: Was it always your intention to make Sustainability a part of your career?
Sophie: Nespresso was sustainable by design. I could see that the sustainability team were working on so many projects behind the scenes and I saw an opportunity to tell their stories to the consumer. I started small, integrating some messages on social media, before creating a global campaign. Everything grew organically from there.
At Dyson, when Tom Crawford was named the Global Director of Sustainability, the first thing I did was reach out to arrange a coffee and throw up my hand to help.
Where to begin.
Emma: What’s your advice for marketers looking to champion sustainability at a brand that isn’t sustainable by design?
Sophie: When you consider sustainability across the value chain, it’s in everything you do: it touches every department. That’s also why it’s so difficult to change.
I’ll give just one example. The other day, I was looking at media plans. And so you think of a media plan as something that needs to be efficient and drive revenue – right?
But what if we recognised that each impression equals a carbon footprint? We think that just because something lives in the cloud means that it doesn’t exist. Digital doesn’t change the problem because of all the resources that AI requires.
If the data tells you that you can’t keep chasing impressions because the carbon footprint will increase and that’s unsustainable, the reverse is: How do you make your creative more efficient? Can you resize your assets to reduce the load time on the server? Evaluate where you’ll make the biggest impact.
Some media directors are already championing sustainability in their media, such as Steve Pollack, the Head of Media Comms at Nestlé. Steve’s leading the way for advertisers to calculate at every touchpoint and begin identifying where they need to make improvements.
But what if we recognised that each impression equals a carbon footprint? We think that just because something lives in the cloud means that it doesn’t exist. Digital doesn’t change the problem because of all the resources that AI requires.
Emma: How do you recommend starting these conversations?
Sophie: As with any project, start with something that works to your strengths. For me, that was communication – it’s what I like to do and what I studied.
If I look back at Nespresso, I was managing the social media and doing a lot of social listening. A trend that I’d see over and over again was recycling; I knew that if we didn’t say that our products were recyclable in our messaging, we’d hit a wall and people would stop buying Nespresso coffee.
That’s the thing. Your sales might be ticking along but all of a sudden, customers will switch to a more sustainable option. The more proactive you are, the less you’ll have to react to it; you’ll already be doing it.
At Nespresso, we had to first persuade internally that we needed to communicate more about our recycling scheme ( the awareness phase). The consideration phase was much more difficult because we were asking customers to bring back the capsules; it was on them to take action.
At Nespresso, Christophe Boussemart was the expert on recycling. One day, he showed me the end-to-end recycling operation. At the time, I wanted to do a team offsite and had no budget. I actually took the team to the tip! We also went to the biomass plant where you could see how much energy and biomass the coffee grounds were producing. It was fascinating. People who had no idea about recycling suddenly wanted to help out.
Your sales might be ticking along but all of a sudden, customers will switch to a more sustainable option. The more proactive you are, the less you’ll have to react to it; you’ll already be doing it.
Find some quick wins or promising results to show to the business that what you’re doing is working. When you’re doing great things, shout about them. You don’t have to be perfect.
If there’s one sustainability report to read, it’s Oatly’s. They’re very forward in not knowing it all or figuring it all out yet. If you start communicating about the things that you’re doing right, you’ll get a lot of credit for at least trying. Plus, you’ll be able to listen to where your customers are on that journey.
Once you have some early success, you can find other passionate individuals to join you. These people could come from anywhere. I have a network of champions made of a Creative Director, someone from the retail department, a graduate and an intern. A new member on my team has also been fantastic. Early on, he volunteered to scrape data with a focus on sustainability at scale.
The meeting.
Emma: Against all of the macro changes – strained supply chains and rising inflation rates being just two examples – how do you pitch the importance of sustainability (beyond being a tick-box exercise) and agree on the next steps?
Sophie: First, never underestimate how many opinions people will have on the topic. When you talk about sustainability, everyone has a different view. Everyone. While this can unleash a lot of creativity, it makes it very difficult to decide on what action to take.
Secondly, use as much data as possible to ground people on the right thing to do. If you can’t bring data to the meeting, the conversation will be great but you risk getting nothing done.
Thirdly, consider how and where you’ll present from. I’ve analysed the meetings where we couldn’t reach an agreement and many of them came down to the room setting. You need to take a leadership position rather than let the leaders be in the driving seats. If you’re bringing the direction and the data, you need to put yourself and your team in the middle of the room.
Then, include a key call to action. What do you want people to do? Make it very, very simple. My old boss used to say, “If there’s one thing, what’s the one thing you can do?” If you say that to every employee – let’s say you have quite a lot of them, then you’ve got 2000 employees. That’s already 2000 things they can do. Make it simple but make it urgent. Change will be slow but it’s urgent that we act now.
What next…
Sophie: Network brings network. People will always need help in this space, they’ll never say no. Sometimes it clicks, sometimes it doesn’t; eventually, you’ll find the space that you feel the most comfortable in.
At the start of your career, there’s always going to be someone at the beginning who gave you a chance. The more you go up the ladder, the more you need to become that person. When the industry has given you so much, you have to do the same. Otherwise, who’s going to give back? You’re the people you’ve been waiting for.
At the start of your career, there’s always going to be someone at the beginning who gave you a chance. The more you go up the ladder, the more you need to become that person.
Emma: Where do you see the future of sustainability and the role marketers can play?
Sophie: We need to bring specialists onboard to set the scene, direction and key initiatives. Eventually, I think that sustainability needs to be a part of everyone’s job with sustainability strategy KPIs to hit on a daily basis. It should be an objective on its own and embedded within the business.
When it comes to marketing, hopefully we’re selling products that people want. When you consider your brand, you just have to be honest – sustainability cannot be an afterthought. If it is, your customers will see straight through it. Sustainability should never be used as a marketing tool, it has to be your product.
Wherever you are on the journey – even if you’re a sustainable business by design, even if you’re not – sustainability will always keep you on your toes. And no matter where you are or what you do, you can always do something.
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