Demonstrate how circular economy efforts help achieve key marketing and business goals. By assessing the impact of circular offerings on brand performance, marketers can build a clearer picture of how CBMs support brand growth, business resilience, climate action, and other organisational objectives.
Inform strategic decisions on how to drive consumer adoption of circular offerings. By understanding how messages, channels, or tactics engage customers across the acquisition, use, and post-use stages, marketers can learn what works, adapt accordingly, and help scale circular initiatives more effectively.
Align teams around a shared direction and recognise marketing’s role in the shift to a circular economy. By embedding circular economycircular economyA systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. It is based on three principles, driven by design: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature. indicators into marketing teams’ strategies and incentive programmes, marketing leaders can guide employee behaviour, unlock internal momentum, and channel resources and skills into circular business transformation.
However, typical marketing dashboards can be unfit for measuring marketing performance in a circular business model. For example, a fashion brand that tracks success by the volume of garments sold may be reinforcing a make-more, sell-more approach, without questioning how value is being created for the customer, the brand, or the wider system. This could make it harder for marketing teams to justify investments to help scale circular business models, like rental or repairrepairOperation by which a faulty or broken product or component is returned back to a usable state to fulfil its intended use., which aim to drive revenue and market growth without increasing the production of new garments.
Traditional performance indicators may not capture the value that circular business models offer to marketing teams and the wider business. For instance, a beverage company measuring success in terms of the volume of single-use bottles sold could miss signals of increased brand loyalty or customer lifetime value associated with refill offerings. Without this broader perspective, marketing teams may be making strategic choices without fully understanding the potential of circular routes to growth.
There are four performance areas where marketers can take a leading role, and four performance areas that they may not be responsible for but they can influence. Our approach builds on familiar categories of marketing performance, evolving them to reflect how circular business models can deliver returns within the constraints of our current linear system as well as how we can measure the unique benefits and value of circular business models in a circular economy.
This is not a one-size-fits-all approach – not every metric will apply to every organisation, business model, market or product. Relevance, reporting periods and data availability will vary by sector, and each brand will need to decide which teams are best placed to track progress, share insights, and drive action towards circular business transformation.
