🌍🔜 The future is impact marketing
How will sustainable impact on planet, profit & people shape companies in the future and what is impact marketing?
Hello 👋 My name is Florian Schleicher and this is the FutureStrategies newsletter from FutureS. I'm glad you're reading along 💚 If you want to learn strategic marketing, my Simple & Sustainable Marketing Academy is just right for you.
Now that we are approaching the end of the year with giant strides, trend reports, predictions about the future and forecasts are also on everyone's marketing lips.
I want to join in on that. But only with one forecast.
A vision.
I truly believe that the future is sustainable impact.
What does that mean?
“The polycrisis of today (economic, environmental, geopolitical) will continue to drastically impact consumer mindsets. In times of chronic uncertainty, it seems the two constant sentiments are the need for trust and stability.”
The question is not whether we all like change, but how we deal with it.
That's why I'm writing about it today,
what I mean by impact,
what impact marketing is,
how impact can be created for companies,
what happens when companies don't create a holistic impact,
and how I myself would like to help shape the future.
Let's go!
🦚 What is Impact?
Impact
/ˈɪmpækt/ - noun
Changes, influences, and results brought about through targeted force
What do we want to have marketing impact on in companies?
From my perspective, we need to work on three interwoven areas:
🌏 Planet: Ecological integrity
🧍 People: Added value for people
💰 Profit: Shared prosperity.
Why?
💰 We live in a world where money still plays an important role - so impact marketing also has to help companies make a profit - i.e. sell products and services.
🧍 Marketing also plays a role in creating a better life for target groups, i.e. people. This goes from the real added value to shaping a diverse, inclusive, and culturally responsive society.
🌏 And last but not least, impact marketing - through green marketing - also has the task of taking responsibility for our planet and thus the future of humanity.
Many people are already aware that the third point - Impact on our planet, is indispensable in the marketing mix, for those who want to know more about it - here are five observations.
In them we see an urge and a need for target groups to have an impact and bring about change:
5 Observations
1️⃣ We see it in the climate activism of young people, which has been much discussed lately:
The majority of Gen Z say they plan to fight both offline and online for issues they believe in over the next 10 years. 80% say they plan to directly support organizations that do.
79% want to go to protests and events.
70% want to use social media to bring about change.
57% want to get involved in politics.
“Every year that we head closer to catastrophe […] the old narrative loses its hold on the collective consciousness. Waves of young people are looking for a new worldview—one that makes sense of the current unraveling, one that offers them a future they can believe in.”
Jeremy Lent
2️⃣ We see it in surveys by IPSOS, where 64% of nearly 20,000 respondents from 27 countries say they have no confidence in their own country to deal with the challenges of the polycrisis.
3️⃣ We also see it in hundreds of data points that show how consumer buying behavior, as I described here in the post on Green Marketing, is changing.
“58% of consumers across 28 countries choose a brand based on its values and beliefs.”
4️⃣ What is one of the fastest-growing job sectors? Sustainability. Linkedin states in a report that more and more companies are also posting "green" jobs and thus the demand on the candidate market is also increasing. From climate science to biodiversity, carbon footprinting, recycling, circular economy, social impact, energy management, air quality, land management, resource extraction, diversity, inclusion, and SDG implementation.
5️⃣ And more and more companies are also setting themselves SMART goals, often reaching further than legal requirements, as far as sustainability is concerned, and taking far-reaching steps for a better future.
And the list goes on forever.
So we see in various data points that our world is changing.
What does this have to do with marketing?
What is "Impact Marketing"?
🎯 Impact marketing
Impact marketing has the task of helping companies to scale good ideas sustainably.
“Yes, there are great challenges and risks ahead in the next decade. But you have something important to contribute to how we meet them. You have agency and the ability, using your unique talents and skills and life experiences, to create a world you want to live in.”
Jane McGonigal
When impact marketing is done right and strategically sound, marketing has the ability to make a real impact - for the planet, people, and profit.
The true impact is based on the premise that a sustainable future is influenced by all three. This is because they are interdependent systems, and our actions impact current and future generations.
For this to happen, change will be needed.
“If we are really going to change, sooner or later we will have to actually make a change.”
Bill McKibben, environmentalist
And that starts with a clear strategy (consisting of diagnosis, directional cornerstones, and coherent measures).
Because if we don't understand people and therefore our target groups through insights, marketing resources can be wasted and useless strategies developed.
♻️ 3 Ways for Impact
Futurist Jane McGonigal describes in her great book Imaginable (reading tip) three ways to exert influence and impact that are also perfectly transferable to impact marketing:
We can work against a future force to try to minimize it, slow it down, or prevent future damage. This is what many climate crisis activists are doing as they work to mitigate the risks of climate change.
We can work with a future force to help speed up diffusion - just as Universal Basic Income advocates fund their own pilot programs and studies to try to prove to governments how much the policy could help.
Or we can unbiasedly explore a future force and try to find new opportunities in it - just as virtually every fast-food chain in the U.S. will have introduced at least one new plant-based version of the popular dairy or meat product by 2021.
The solution for impact marketing is to have a positive contribution.
And that's why, as a curious person, I'm a fan of the third approach: the joint search for new forces and trends that can be used to create impact.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Buckminster Fuller, Architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher and futurist
♻️ Win with impact marketing - or disappear in the long term.
Sustainable impact happens when benefits are created for our planet, people like target groups & for the long term growth of companies.
Change is the only constant in our world. We are facing big ones.
“You can’t control the wind, but you can adjust your sail.”
Jane McGonigal
Companies will have two choices in the coming years:
1) They are the driving force and take the necessary steps. In this way, they can reach young people as target groups and also open up new sales channels. Green marketing is a solution that some companies, as described here, are already taking.
2) Or they are road blockers who rely on old models that may bring in sales for a few more years, but will then face massive headwinds and lose target groups.
Many are afraid of the changes that will (have to) happen.
But staying at one point out of fear, with no future prospects, does no good:
“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you don’t belong.”
Mandy Hale, author
🐄 A sleeping example
A good example of an organization that has slept through movements and missed the train of time is currently NÖM. The Lower Austrian Dairy.
For decades, it was impossible to imagine households without milk. But for some time now, there has been movement in the market and more and more consumers are switching to plant-based milk substitutes.
The market is expected to be around $43 billion by 2029, with a growth rate of over 11% per year.
The reason for this growth is not only the sustainable pursuit of many people but also a simple food intolerance to milk, which has about 65% of adults.
From an outside perspective, this trend has been evident for over 10 years.
So what does the Lower Austrian Milk Board do in the fall of 2022? It posters milk with the slogan "Milk stays fresh - the main thing milk wants to stay".
🙈 As a forward-looking brander, this head-in-the-sand strategy hurts. But at least it's stringent - in 2014, the company made a big announcement to cut online almost completely out of the marketing mix.
If anyone from the NÖM marketing team is reading this - my door is open to you if you want to take a step toward strategic impact marketing.
Here it seems that no attention was paid to the planet or people, but merely tried to milk the actual cow as long as possible.
And good ideas from companies like Oatly have jumped right into this gap. They are actively shaping the market of the future.
Sustainable impact occurs when benefits are created for our planet, people like target groups AND for the long-term growth of companies.
🔮 Be the change
What will the future bring us?
I don't know exactly either.
But I do know that I want to help shape it.
And imagine a better future for myself and others.
“You don't predict the future, you imagine the future.”
With impact marketing, companies can benefit from the changes and help create a positive scenario.
Next year, I will focus even more on developing scaling models for sustainable impact marketing.
And with that, I want to help marketing departments move boldly into the future with the right steps.
A future that has a positive impact on profit, the planet, and people.
💰🌏🧍
In this spirit, see you soon 👋🙂
“I go to scale the Future’s possibilities! Farewell!”
Henrik Ibsen, screenwriter
PS: My contribution in 2022 was, by the way, in addition to several impact marketing projects, that I donated 1% of my annual sales to the Coral Reef Alliance. That means 1,260€ for the protection of coral reefs 🪸🐢🐠
Looking for more reading material?
✅ Green marketing with strategy - What does it take for strategic green marketing and which companies are doing a good job?
🤑 Greenwashing in marketing - What it is, why it's bad, and which brands are "greenwashing."
♻️ Green Marketing - About the responsibility that marketing has for our future
PS: You can also read this posting in German.