In this episode we explore with Alexis Eyre, co-founder of the Sustainable Marketing Compas and co-author of Sustainable Marketing, whether embedding sustainability at the heart of our strategy be the key to unlocking greater creativity and effectiveness in our marketing.

Alexis shares what drove her to make a change in her career to focus on sustainability and how she is working now to change the industry.

We hear of her frustrations about the lack of creativity and the ineffectiveness and inefficiency that is often taken for granted in marketing.

She invites us to start with the impact that we want to have on the world and use the Sustainable Marketing Compass to ask ourselves the right questions, to challenge assumptions and build the partnerships we need to succeed.

If you have not yet read Sustainable Marketing by Alexis and Paul Randle, I highly recommend picking up a copy.

And their Sustainable Marketing Compass is also available open source (and we've included it on the Resources page of the MarketingKind website).

This episode is hosted by Anna Mullenneaux and Paul Skinner, founders of the MarketingKind community.

In this episode Elaine Roberts, former B2B CMO and MarketingKind member, hosts and interviews:~ Ty Heath – Co-founder of The LinkedIn B2B Institute and former Google and IBM executive on a mission to make marketing science accessible~ Thomas Kolster – author of Goodvertising and The Hero Trap, speaker and marketing activist and one of the founding fathers of the sustainable marketing movement~ Dave Vann – Founder of said & done, brand strategist and advisor to purpose-led B2B businesses and nonprofits

Enjoy this incredibly practical, engaging and important discussion filled with great examples, research and inspiration for how to put purpose to work for your B2B brand.

In this episode we interview Charlie Martin, CEO and founder of The Anti-Greenwash Charter, to explore how we can build trust through radical transparency.He says, ‘we're facing a collective crisis of trust in everything that we engage with...doing something to try and rebuild trust in what we are reading and engaging with is really important because that leads to speed of decision-making, which is what is needed to address some of the fundamental issues at play.'We cover how greenwashing began with marketing, communications and sales professionals freewheeling when it came to making claims that they didn't fully understand and/ or couldn't fully back up. The more recent trends with the tightening of the regulatory landscape in the UK and Europe is leading to an increase in greenhushing with companies scared to get it wrong. And more omission-based greenwashing, where communications may be compliant, but when you dig a little under the surface the bigger story is what was left out. We learn how The Anti-Greenwash Charter is leading the way with radical transparency by supporting signatories with:1) Upskilling all relevant staff members with greenwash awareness training to cut out unintentional greenwashing2) A full static content review to create alignment with regulations3) Co-creation of a Green Claims Policy to act as guardrails for all future communicationsAnd signatories are also subject to periodic campaign reviews from The Anti-Greenwash Charter and their findings are always published.Charlie and his team have also created the new truMRK prototype, an AI-powered editorial assistant that acts like Grammarly for sustainability comms, checking your new communications against your ESG data, regulations, etc. It is a mark of editorial excellence, where readers can click through to a full transparency report.To support the important work of the Charter, please recommend them to businesses that would benefit from joining and encourage every business, no matter how small, to create their own Green Claims Policy. The Charter provides a free template for a Green Claims Policy to download on their website here.And you can also listen to Charlie on The Responsible Edge podcast.This episode is hosted by Anna Mullenneaux and Paul Skinner, founders of the MarketingKind community.

While over 90% of business leaders recognize the importance of sustainability, only 60% have a strategy in place. And many of these strategies are inefficient, ineffective, or simply don't go far enough to address the global challenges we are facing.

In this episode Caroline Taylor, OBE, former CMO of IBM Global Markets and Chair of Oasis Community Learning, hosts and interviews Paolo Taticchi and Melina Corvaglia-Charrey​, co-authors of How to Be Sustainable: Business Strategies for Leading Change.

We start by defining sustainability and talking about the need for long-term shared value. We cover the drivers for sustainable action including the financial risks and the increase in climate litigation. And we explore how to build a strong business case for sustainability.

We also discuss the political influence from the US and Paolo shares that anti-ESG sentiment is more talk than fact.

Paolo is Professor in Strategy and Sustainability and the Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainable Business at University College London, School of Management. He is a prominent sustainability expert, speaker and consultant working with corporates and governments around the world.

Melina is a Researcher at University College London, School of Management. She has over 15 years of experience as a senior marketing leader in the media industry, and also works as a consultant supporting small-to-medium size businesses with their sustainability reporting efforts.

You can check out the Chief Sustainability Heroes podcast here.

And you can learn more about the MarketingKind community here.

The UK advertising industry is the third largest in the world and is known for its creativity. And although many industry leaders are very concerned that their work is fueling the climate crisis, the biggest agencies continue to take on the fossil fuel companies and other major polluters as clients. The UK trade bodies deny that advertising leads to increased consumption and say that only 12% of advertising is effective (so nothing to see here).

Dr Victoria Harvey worked for a decade to try to change the industry from within, but when it showed that it was unwilling to change itself she joined with others to take this issue directly to the people. In May Chris Packham's petition garnered 110,000 signatures and on July 7th parliament debated whether or not the UK should ban fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship. You can read Victoria's parliamentary briefing for MPs here with a forward by Chris Packham.

In this episode Victoria shares with us her PhD research into how the advertising industry could move away from its current destructive model towards more climate-friendly objectives and together we explore why a UK-wide ban on fossil fuel advertising is needed and how we could bring it about.

This issue is often compared to the ban on tobacco advertising, because like the effects of smoking, climate change is a public health crisis. And the number of deaths globally from climate change each year are now similar to the annual global deaths from smoking when tobacco ads were banned in the UK in 2003.

Although there is broad support for the change in parliament, the government has no plans to move forward with regulation at this time. Currently progress is happening most rapidly through councils banning fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship in their cities and regions. Edinburgh is leading the way and many others are joining in. Many art and cultural institutions are also refusing to work with the big polluters and know that change is coming. And there are of course hundreds of smaller agencies that have taken a stand and are unwilling to work with high carbon emitting clients.

The episode is hosted by Anna Mullenneaux, co-founder of the MarketingKind community.

In this episode Dr Mark Fabian, associate professor of Public Policy at Warwick University, associate fellow at the Bennett Institute at Cambridge University, wellbeing expert and author of Beyond Happy: How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfilment, guides us towards how we can increase our wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around us.

Together we explore Mark's latest book Beyond Happy, which challenges superficial ideas of happiness and offers a deeply thoughtful framework for living well, both individually and collectively.

We also discuss his research on the Wellbeing State, which is building an important and much needed case for changes in education, housing, economic policy and healthcare.

Mark shares with us his concept of 'Coalescence of Being', a process by which we gradually integrate our experiences, values, identity, and actions into a coherent, meaningful whole. This could mean setting goals, working towards them, reading social feedback and most importantly learning to introspect on our own motivations and values and using new understandings to course correct along the way.

This episode is hosted by Paul Skinner, founder of The MarketingKind community, director of The Agency of the Future and author of The Purpose Upgrade and Collaborative Advantage.

'It's more money for someone somewhere, but it's not more prosperity.'

In this episode we interview Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity without Growth and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) to explore the ideas in his latest book The Care Economy.

We discuss how the current growth-based economy is often a false economy and how we can instead work towards a Care Economy where "health" is the outcome and "care" is our guiding principle.

Tim powerfully dissects how the UK health burden has changed since the inception of the NHS and how our growth-based economy feeds chronic disease.

Tim says that, 'The food-related costs of chronic disease in the UK are now around £268 billion per year, which is substantially higher than the NHS budget'.

For anyone passionate about tackling the ultra-processed foods crisis Tim mentions the Fight Fake Food March on London 6th.

The book shares a new philosophy for the economy where health is the ultimate prosperity.

Tim believes that creating a Care Economy would mean changing education, regulation and financial systems, but he is not depressed by the road ahead.

He leaves us with a note of respair (recovery from despair) saying, 'The narrative form can hold vision for us. It can hold the vision for how things should be working even when they are fundamentally not doing that. And that vision provides a lens for how we could be doing things better. We can ask ourselves how we can do things differently. What would this look like if it had "health" as its goal and "care" as its organising operational principle?'

This episode is hosted by Paul Skinner, founder of The MarketingKind community, Director of The Agency of the Future and author of The Purpose Upgrade and Collaborative Advantage.

We are all using AI every time we use social media (whether we want to or not), so in this episode Nicole Mezzasalma, Senior Consultant on Innovation at Battenhall, helps us explore the risks and opportunities involved.

Nicole highlights the risks of using AI on social media:1) Consumer backlash - most people don't want to see AI generated photos and videos on social media and they will not be shy in letting you know2) Copyright liability - you are potentially opening up your brand to copyright lawsuits3) Bias - AI tools often confirm and worsen gender and race bias, so you need to actively work to counter this

Nicole shares her concerns about the wild west of AI regulation and the UK government's current attempts to change copyright law so that creators have to opt out to protect their work from being used as AI LLM training data.She also flags concerns about the quality of AI generated content, especially when LLMs like ChatGPT are being trained on AI generated social media content.

Nicole's recommendations for using AI tools to improve your social media engagement include:- Where AI really shines is with data analysis. It can look at large swaths of data and find trends and patterns and classify and categorise things much quicker than humans can.- NotebookLM can act as a self-contained second brain or client brain (and it can transform anything into a podcast or radio show).- AI tools can help to protect vulnerable people by providing effective content moderation for social media.- By making chatbots more realistic and helpful (and knowing when to pass the customer to a human) AI tools can help to increase customer satisfaction and engagement.

We then open up for a group discussion, which covers everything from sustainability and misinformation, to how AI will impact the capitalist model and the role marketing can play in creating a positive vision for change.

At Battenhall Nicole helps clients and internal teams to implement innovation-related work, such as new and niche social media platform campaigns, and experiments that break new ground in the industry.

Nicole has over 20 years of experience in marketing, communications and strategy, with a strong focus on social media. She is a Top Voice on LinkedIn. And she speaks about AI and Social Media at conferences around the world.

This episode is hosted by Anna Mullenneaux, co-founder of the MarketingKind community.