He painted a convincing picture: ‘Marketers may take the view that they are providing vital information but that is only part of the story because the purpose for providing that information, the reason they get paid, is to influence a consumer’s decision to buy their client’s product or service. Using recycled paper or organic packaging or whatever other greenish tricks in the marketing phase looks to me like trivial window dressing, a diversion from the fundamental issue of unsustainable patterns of consumption. Does anyone else see the irony in marketing depicting Eskimos unpacking their new air-conditioner? We can indeed sell ice to Eskimos – pity we need to!’

It’s true that marketing can fall into the trap of reactive ‘window dressing’ but a less cynical viewpoint perhaps is that used in the right way, marketers can be valuable allies in the push for sustainable development. Marketing is a fact of modern life and, like it or not, has a role to play (however peripheral) in the direction our society takes.

The greater challenge for marketers (and what many marketers struggle with) is the foresight to position sustainability alongside other more traditional brand attributes such as price, quality and performance, thereby enabling it to function as a natural (rather than artificial or contrived) extension of their brand offering. In time, ‘green products’ will no longer be a relevant differentiator. The concept will become redundant because in order to compete in a market, you’re going to have to ‘be green’ – it will be an expected rather than an augmented product feature (just like seatbelts were once an augmented product offering but now are an essential feature of any car). Or so I hope. The marketers worth applauding are those that put sustainability at the core of their brand strategy. That is, it’s a consideration when deciding any and all of the 4Ps – it’s written into the DNA of their product and therefore influences every product decision made, from whether they might use palm oil as an ingredient to how they transport their product to whether they use FSC-accredited paper for direct-mail marketing.

Pleasingly, there is a growing movement of marketers that see it as part of their role in society to help make sustainability desirable. Indeed, if you believe that marketing has a role to play in shaping consumption patterns, there is an argument to be made that marketers can help ‘steer’ society to make better choices. We can do this because marketing isn’t always just about selling a product or service – we’re also in the business of selling ideas. We might even be able to help people realise that Eskimos don’t need ice!

So is my defence of marketing’s role in sustainable development valid, or just a load of greenwash, uh, I mean hogwash?

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a communications agency that believes marketing can play a significant role in generating behaviour change for the good of the greater community.

Not really. If you agree that integrating all the elements of a promotional mix can maximise cost-effectiveness and reinforce a consistent brand message or image, then you’ll also agree that the integration of these elements is wholly dependent on the ability of the brand team to coordinate multiple different communications tools and vehicles – often all at the same time. This, in turn, requires careful planning.

Unfortunately, it’s a rare brand manager who has the necessary foresight and organisational skills to pull off a truly integrated marketing communications campaign. Accordingly, the reputation of marketing is marred by brand managers who simply can’t complete (or think about) more than one element of the promotional mix at once. This means that many brands are missing out on the potential ROI that can be gained from enabling marketing communications to act synergistically.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was to develop marketing strategy with ‘ordinary mortals with average skills’ in mind. I would suggest that keeping in mind a specific brand manager – and the organisation’s internal processes and philosophy – is also useful. This approach will ensure that your recommendations play to the strengths of the product, the individual and the organisation. As Steve Waugh once said: ‘Your strategy revolves around the bowlers you’ve got.’

Or if you prefer the advice of a Prussian soldier and German military theorist to an Aussie cricketer, Carl von Clausewitz once said: ‘Effective strategy derives from tactics that are implementable.’ That doesn’t mean not setting stretch targets or proposing ideal-world, even ‘out of this world’, scenarios. It simply means taking the time to really understand your client, warts and all. After all, personal idiosyncrasies have led to the downfall of more than one great creative concept. So if your client or organisation is procedurally challenged (i.e. disorganised), show them the way by providing detailed timelines, prioritising tasks, and including recommendations such as ‘if you only do three things out of this entire document, do this, this and this’. To steal another line from Carl von Clausewitz: ‘If a strategy only works when it is superbly implemented, it is a flawed strategy.’

Some of the most positive feedback we get from clients is about our ability to ‘hold their hand’ throughout the life of a project and guide them from A to Z. This becomes particularly important with integrated campaigns, when you need to be able to think several steps ahead in order to see how all the pieces of the puzzle will work together. Clients may not always be able to see the bigger picture or be mindful of the need to do so. Some just won’t be capable of seeing it – ever. Others won’t have the time. Whatever the reason, you have a role to play in bringing your big ideas to fruition.

By not setting your clients up to fail, you’re much more likely to move their brand closer to what is really meant by ‘integrated marketing communications’. Do that and you’ll help rid the world of one-off direct-mail pieces that end up in the rubbish bin, advertising that’s off-message, sales aids that can’t be sold from, etc., etc. Do that and you’ll help say goodbye to inefficient and ineffective marketing communications, i.e. you’ll produce less crap and reduce a large part of the world’s waste. Need more convincing? Check out the following video by Melbourne-based agency GreenMonkeyDesign showcasing the very best and very worst of print advertising.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency where integrated means less is more (less waste, more ROI).

– The Royal Society, 350th anniversary celebrations

With the birth of the Royal Society came the birth of modern science – or so many say. As so eloquently put by The Economist earlier this year, ‘the ancient Babylonians had developed complex mathematical techniques to record the stars, the Greeks systemised the organisation of knowledge based on logic, Islamic scholars wrote astronomical and medical texts and Chinese inventors recorded recipes for gunpowder but none of these became self-sustaining in the way that science is today.’

The oldest scientific academy in existence, the Royal Society and the many men and women who have passed through its doors are responsible for what we understand as science today – the process of acquiring knowledge based on applying the scientific method and the body of knowledge gained through such research. Through this, the society and its vocational offspring, science, revolutionised the way people think about – even process – the world.

I had hoped to attend some of the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations in London – and many more things besides – but a little thing called a volcano (we’ll leave the naming at that) got in my way. But let’s not get bogged down by my holiday woes. Why, might you ask, would a tribute to the birth of science lure a marketer to the British Museum in the first place?

Well, as a marketer who once practised medicine, my CV is perhaps one of the best viewing platforms from which to appreciate the achievements of science. As a young medical scientist, I observed the ability of experimental science to make sense of the world’s mysteries, from why hot air rises to why what goes up must come down – albeit at a more sophisticated level than I’ve just articulated. Later, as a clinician, I would observe the life-changing (often life-saving) advancements delivered by scientific research, from new drugs with novel mechanisms of action to new-fangled procedures and devices that would revolutionise the way we treat disease. And now, even later still, as a marketer, I continue to observe how the application of science can satisfy human needs in a wholly different sense, via some of the most marketable products in the world – the Apple Mac (and every i-variant that followed), Windows XP, Intel’s Core Duo Processor and Toyota’s Prius, just to name a few.

From jet airliners to drugs to iPods, science continually endows society with ways to sustain itself (and arguably to consume). Surely, then, science will also endow us with the solutions to the current and emerging global crises brought about by overconsumption?

But what of the Royal Society’s own prediction for the future? According to its President, Lord Rees: ‘The sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more before the fuel runs out. Any creatures witnessing the sun’s demise 6 billion years hence, here on Earth or beyond, won’t be human – they’ll be as different from us as we are from bacteria.’ So if science is our seer, life will go on. We just don’t know yet what form it will take. Anyone else want to make a prediction of royal proportions?

Those interested in reading more about the history of the Royal Society can do so by getting their hands on a copy of Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson, HarperPress.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency specialising in complex brands and their audiences (we’d argue that it’s the perfect mix of science and magic!).

The sustainability challenges facing society today are forcing businesses and marketers to search for more sustainable ways of maintaining relationships with customers and delivering value to them. From this shift has emerged the concept of sustainability marketing.

This new brand of marketing seeks to stop marketing managers from merely reacting to social change in order to further their commercial propositions, and instead proactively lead social change in order to contribute to a more sustainable society. According to the authors of Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective, Frank-Martin Belz and Ken Peattie, sustainability marketing is an evolution of marketing that blends today’s economics and technologies with the emerging concepts of relationship marketing and the social, ethical, environmental and intergenerational perspectives of the sustainable development agenda. It has a consumer focus with an emphasis on integrating sustainability principles into both marketing theory and the practical, everyday decision-making of marketing managers. It is not exactly ‘new’ marketing, they say, so much as ‘improved’ marketing.

The crux of the case for sustainable marketing is that by not engaging in sustainable marketing practices, the discipline of marketing will continue to be complicit in driving global crises through overconsumption. This of course does little to further the reputation of marketing, which has long been branded as a discipline in crisis with few metrics to prove otherwise.

While Belz and Peattie admit that ‘viewing marketing as a force that can shape the world might seem like nothing more than self-aggrandisement on the part of marketers’, they do make the valid point that, in the liberal consumer democracies that make up the majority of the world’s richest societies today, the products we consume are marketed to us. That is, the influence of marketing on the choices consumers make is prolific – even endemic. Some may even go so far as to say that if society is going to change, marketing needs to change first.

Indeed, the first edition of Philip Kotler’s Principles of Marketing to be published in the 21st century described one of the central issues facing marketing today as transforming sustainability issues in mainstream marketing from afterthought to context. The fact is that when Kotler makes a point of something, you know the writing is on the wall – marketing, like the markets it serves, needs to evolve. While Belz and Peattie make a number of valid points about this topic in their own textbook, I can’t help but think that their description of sustainability marketing – as ‘marketing that endures forEVER’ – is one that reeks of self-importance and contradicts, even undermines, Kotler’s and their vision entirely. It’s a clichéd phrase that goes nowhere towards capturing the imperative facing marketing today: to connect with a rapidly changing society of consumers who generate their own content, demand dialogue and expect all business practices – marketing-related or otherwise – to respect the impact they may be having on the environment.

I don’t know about you but I don’t want my marketing efforts to endure forever. I want my marketing efforts to be effective and efficient now. I don’t need my outputs, physical or emotional, to endure for all of eternity like some trophy on a mantelpiece. I want my marketing campaigns to be biodegradable: to break down naturally over time when their job is done, to be absorbed without a trace, to be recycled into something more useful.

It’s perhaps a small point in an otherwise well-rounded argument by Belz and Peattie, but surely marketing that endures is, by definition, passé – and not what is really meant by the term sustainability marketing. Marketing should be practised sustainably, yes, but should not, in and of itself, be sustainable. To ‘endure forever’ defeats the purpose of marketing entirely – to satisfy the current, unknown or emerging needs of a prescribed group of customers (at a profit of course) and thereby remain relevant and meaningful. Brand managers must continually evolve the way they market their brands (journey through the history of Europe’s largest fashion houses if you need proof) or risk irrelevance and, ultimately, extinction.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency that believes in enduring brands, not marketing that endures.

• How customers perceive the authenticity of your sustainability activities can affect your reputation and sales.
• How employees perceive your commitment to sustainability can affect staff morale as well as your ability to attract, engage and retain talent.
• How investors perceive your environmental performance is helping or hurting your competitiveness can affect whether they choose to invest with you and/or keep investing.

If you believe all that, then you’ll agree that it’s vital for companies to create a credible market-facing image around sustainability. In today’s market, sustainability credentials are fast becoming an expected rather than an augmented product feature. If you’re slow to market with these messages, you’ll never catch up.

As such, now is not the time to stop reading this article and tell me that talking about sustainability with your customers is irrelevant in your industry or line of work. It’s not only large mining and petroleum companies that consume the earth’s resources. If your business operates in the real world, it’s a consumer of the earth, so how can sustainability not be a relevant topic – particularly when your customers are growing more environmentally conscious every day?

So, if you’re a marketer, it’s time to get to know your sustainability officer or equivalent – think office manager or managing director if you’re an SME – and start weaving your environmental story into your promotional materials and activities in ways that engage customers and support your corporate image and value proposition.

Rest assured that marketing your sustainability efforts doesn’t require knowledge or skills you don’t already have as a marketer (this is why the term ‘green marketing’ is a myth, since it implies that acting responsibly is optional rather than just a part of good marketing practice). Marketing sustainability follows all the normal rules of marketing, i.e:

• Develop a comprehensive strategy for branding your sustainability initiatives
• Understand what motivates your customers to purchase your offering and what role sustainability plays in current purchase behaviour
• Determine how you want your customers to experience sustainability throughout your product’s lifecycle
• Define how you want to relate sustainability to your core, existing business.

This inside-out approach positions sustainability alongside other more traditional brand attributes such as price, quality and performance, enabling it to function as a natural (rather than artificial or contrived) extension of your brand offering.

Once you have this foundation, you can work on bringing sustainability to life for your customers through sophisticated messaging and innovative executions. The key is not to think of your environmental credentials as something you tag on to a campaign or communications piece at the last minute – they have to be part of your brand plan from the get-go. If you take shortcuts, your sustainability messages will stick out like a sore thumb, rather than a green thumb (pardon the pun).

The brands that market their sustainability initiatives well (think Toyota or GE) put sustainability at the core of their brand strategy – it’s a consideration when deciding any and all of the 4Ps. Any other approach just pays lip service to the green movement. The flow-on effect is marketing communications that are genuine and believable. It’s the old adage – actions speak louder than words.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency that believes in marketing that’s green by nature rather than by name.

As a working woman who wants to remain a working woman and have babies, I find nothing more frustrating than the lack of a national paid maternity leave scheme. Australia is one of a very few countries around the world to have no general provision for this type of leave. Even Ethiopia, an underdeveloped nation, offers new parents 3 months’ leave at 100 per cent pay.

In most countries around the world, leave is funded either by employers directly, through social insurance, or partly funded by employers and employees. In AustraIia, women typically have to work for a large, publicly listed company to get any paid benefits.  Unfortunately, I work for a small, privately funded business with no such scheme in operation (it’s the only time I wished I worked for one of the four big banks) and face returning to a sole income upon the birth of my first child. It’s not something I blame on my employer. It’s simply something a small business cannot fund, for me or anyone else, without the help of the government.

But this really isn’t about money. I’m not worried about ‘doing it hard’ for 6 or more months while I bring up baby. I’m a girl from the ‘burbs who put herself through medical school. I know what it’s like to scrimp and save. The point is that it’s demoralising for an independent woman who has supported herself from the age of 15 to become wholly reliant at the age of 32 on her husband’s income – just because she decided to get preggers. It’s an insult.

More importantly, it’s outrageous for a country – a country that likes to call itself the knowledge nation – not to have paid maternity leave when the benefits to organisations have been proven over and over again:

• Increased retention of female employees and associated reduction in turnover costs;
• Improved staff morale and productivity;
• Cost-effective means of retaining skilled staff; and
• Improved organisational efficiency through the benefits of long service, e.g. institutional memory, industry knowledge, networks and contacts.

I hate to quote old data (although it does show how long we’ve known about the benefits of paid parental leave and done nothing) but a 1994 study from the US found that for every $1 a company spends on flexible work or family benefits, there is a return of $2–6 through reduced absenteeism, increased motivation and higher rates of retention. Indeed, Westpac reported that its retention rate increased from 54 per cent in 1995 to 93 per cent in 2000 as a result of introducing paid maternity leave. BT Australia reported a 100 per cent rate of return, stating that paid maternity leave was seen as intrinsic to returning mothers feeling valued and recognised. John Fairfax Publications reported that 88 per cent of women returned from maternity leave in 2000, compared to only 37 per cent in 1993, the difference being directly attributable to improved practices.

And last but not least, I’m getting old. My eggs are officially running out. I can’t afford to wait any longer for Rudd and Abbott to make it a good time in Australia to have children. I grew up in the days when Natasha Stott-Despoja wore Doc Martens to question time. I was a grown-up by the time she became a mother. I don’t want to be a grandmother before either of us is entitled to paid parental leave.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency where complex messages and specialist audiences meet their match (we wish this included making sense of political mumbo jumbo for mum and dad voters!)

PLEASE HELP!

I’m fed up with these twentysomethings with their tweets and their texts and their three-second attention spans, rocking up late to work every day oblivious to the needs of anyone but themselves. Apparently I’m meant to call these flickr-and-you’ll-miss-it types ‘colleagues’ and interact with them on a professional level. God only knows how. I mean, I turn up to work every day on time and apply myself with the same passion as I did in my first heady days of employment 18 years ago (and for the record, there was a recession on then too). I get paid a decent wage and I go home satisfied (mostly) with a good day’s toil behind me. I am pleased (even lucky) to be employed and I strive in every way possible to make my job a success – for my employer and myself.  So the question I have is: ‘Why is all of that not enough for these so-called millennial babes? What more do they want? What right do they have to complain so much, expect so much, demand so much? And where, oh where, is their loyalty?’

These are just some of the sentiments held by Gen X and baby boomers alike about their fellow cohort, Generation Y (otherwise known as millennials, generation next or the net generation). Indeed, Gen Y is entering the workforce with an entirely different – some might say alien – set of values, attitudes and expectations. As Graham Brown recently wrote for online blog yourLifeWorks, Gen Y ‘are tech-savvy, travel-mad, self-absorbed, peer-pressured, celebrity-obsessed, Facebook-compulsive, iPod-wearing, brand-conscious 20-somethings who live with their parents and show no loyalty to their employer (and that’s the good stuff).’ So how are we expected to work with them? Manage them? Lead them? And when we’ve got over our annoyance and realise that we need them in order to sustain the workforce, how do we attract them? Engage them? Keep them?

Generational differences

An international survey by global workforce solutions leader Kelly Services (the Kelly Global Workforce Index) recently found that communication styles and attitudes toward rewards are key generational differences that affect workplace productivity. Forty per cent of Australian respondents believe that these differences make the workplace more productive; 23 per cent believe they interfere with productivity; and 24 per cent believe they make no difference.

Kelly Services Managing Director, James Bowmer, said that generational differences can sometimes cause friction between employees but, when properly managed, can also be a source of growth. ‘When the differences between the age groups are harnessed effectively, they can provide a powerful stimulus to creativity and productivity. Rather than trying to smother this diversity, good employers are utilising it to generate fresh ideas and new ways of doing business.’

Among the survey’s key findings were:

• Baby boomers believe they understand the generational differences better than Gen Y or Gen X
• Gen Y are the most positive about the productivity benefits flowing from diverse age groups in the workplace
• In communicating with colleagues, all generations prefer face-to-face discussion over written or electronic communication
• Gen Y and Gen X largely opt for traditional cash rewards while many baby boomers lean toward non-cash benefits such as time off and training opportunities
• Almost half (47 per cent) the respondents said they had experienced intergenerational conflicts in their workplace.

It has long been acknowledged that age-related differences do have an impact on the way people go about their work. Indeed, this survey showed that Gen Y and Gen X employees are more likely than baby boomers to adapt their communication style when dealing with colleagues from a different generation.

Mr Bowmer said it is important that employers recognise the key differences between the generations and manage them effectively in order to achieve a harmonious balance and a productive work environment. ‘Juggling these pressures is challenging but by addressing issues such as compensation and internal communications amongst others, it is possible to reap the benefit from a diverse group of people, and generate conditions that can help organisations to flourish.’

Managing Gen Y

So how do we go about managing Gen Y in the workplace? The following tips come courtesy of a number of HR consultants and commentators on the web:

• Provide challenging work that really matters – Gen Y workers need to feel important
• Don’t look for a Gen Y worker to approach work as you did, i.e. eager to please and willing to do ’scut’ work or put in extra hours to get ahead
• Offer increasing responsibility rather than cash bonuses as a reward for achievements
• Provide immediate feedback and acknowledgment where possible – Gen Y workers have been brought up on immediate gratification
• Provide ongoing training and learning opportunities – it’s very often ‘lack of training’ that Gen Y workers give as a reason for leaving
• Act as mentors rather than managers – Gen Y workers want to be treated as colleagues, not as beginners or kids
• Allow some flexibility in day-to-day scheduling
• Act as a sounding board – Gen Y workers are brimming with ideas and want to feel heard
• Use innovative ideas for creating a more comfortable, low-key, low-stress workplace – relaxed workplaces are a priority for Gen Y workers
• Focus on work outcomes, but be personable and have a sense of humour
• Make it clear when Gen Y workers can have more freedom to be creative and when they should follow strict guidelines.

So is it a case of managing the unmanageables? Or just a case of changing our expectations?

About the Kelly Global Workforce Index

The Kelly Global Workforce Index is a survey revealing opinions about work and the workplace from a generational viewpoint. Survey results and comments appear courtesy of Kelly Services.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a marketing communications agency proud to have all generations on its books.