Ep 185: How can marketers turn ideas into impactful action?

[01:00:00.460] - Finn

In many industries over the last 10 years, we've seen pockets of circular innovation reaching the market, but it is not reaching the scale required to transform our economy. This is where marketers come in.

[01:00:12.760] - Finn

For years, marketers have been using their skills and expertise to incentivize consumers towards products that drive the linear economy. However, in our marketing playbook, we've identified four action pathways that marketers can take to use their skills to unlock the benefits of a circular circle economy.

[01:00:31.670] - Finn

Welcome to the Circular Economy Show. I'm your host, Finn, and in this episode, we're going to break down the first one, Create Scalable Solutions. To help me do that, I'm joined in the studio by the global research Director at Diageo, Deb Caldow, and Global Research Lead at Accenture Song, Rachel O'Reilly.

[01:00:52.040] - Finn

Welcome both. Thanks for joining me today. We're going to get straight into it. We know there's real progress being made, but there's much more we can do to ensure that circularity is a core driver of business revenue.

[01:01:07.460] - Finn

I wanted to start at the beginning and find out what role marketing teams can play in identifying the most commercially viable opportunities for their business. We'll start with you, Rachel.

[01:01:16.930] - Rachel O'Reilly

Marketers, if I can be so bold, are one of the, if not the, driving forces behind sustainability. If you think about what marketers have always done, they've always convinced people of something to fall in love with. That's their job.

[01:01:33.450] - Rachel O'Reilly

When it comes to sustainability, suddenly we lose our minds because we stop thinking about that. We start going very technically, we think about risk and how we can suddenly convert people to do something they're not doing. If you ignore all that and go back to the basics, marketers are there to help sell stories, to talk about stories, and that's what sustainability is at its core. I think they're absolutely fundamental.

[01:01:55.140] - Finn

Nice. Deb, anything from you on that?

[01:01:57.160] - Deb Caldow

Yeah. I couldn't agree more that, whilst it might not be obvious to most marketers at the moment that actually there is a real role. It's about what you're talking about there, which is the ability to help consumers take a bit of a leap, and also make things desirable.

[01:02:14.470] - Deb Caldow

When we talk about circular solutions that are good for the planet, we also need for them to be desirable for consumers. That is what marketers should do by their very nature and apply it now to a big question with the world.

[01:02:29.640] - Finn

Inherently, by doing that, you get the benefits of fostering longer term relationships with the brands, more points of sale. We've identified the opportunity. How do we then market those innovations? Rachel, if you could give us a consumer angle to that.

[01:02:44.720] - Rachel O'Reilly

I think what's been really interesting when we've been doing our research, and that's with people who are often left off out of the sustainability conversation. People are innately circular and sustainable in their behaviours. It's very innate to try and circulate crop rotations, for example. It's very innate to look after the things that we care about.

[01:03:03.190] - Rachel O'Reilly

I think it's starting there, not with sustainability or circularity or any of the technical terms, but what do we all care about as humans? We care about supporting the causes that matter. We care about caring for our futures, our children's futures. We care about resourcefulness and looking after what we have. For me, that's where you start, which plays right into a marketer's role.

[01:03:26.380] - Finn

That's really playing into what the consumer wants. Are you seeing a real appetite for circular propositions in the market at the moment?

[01:03:32.710] - Rachel O'Reilly

We often have this chicken and egg conversation around there's not enough appetite, prove the business case. It depends what you talk in terms of appeal or appetite. If you look at what's happening out in the world, people are already doing a lot of it, and there's a lot of success around things. Vinted is a very well-trodden platform, but people aren't talking about that as a circularity or a sustainability initiative at all.

[01:03:58.460] - Rachel O'Reilly

There is appetite there. Where we're getting hung up on is we're trying to understand that it's something different. We're trying to ask ourselves and measure it against something that we call sustainability when that's not how it's showing up in terms of keywords that people are talking about. It might actually look quite different to some of the key metrics we're looking for. I would say, yes, there's appetite.

[01:04:21.620] - Rachel O'Reilly

When you come to looking at traditional metrics for how we look at the business case for it, it looks very different, and therefore the adoption problem comes into play. From a consumer perspective, I'd say, yes, there's a lot of core interest.

[01:04:34.110] - Deb Caldow

What has helped us at Diageo our heads around this, in particular, is to think about to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. That's a good practice with Innovation. If the problem is a huge amount of food goes to waste, how do you redistribute it? The solution might be olio, a crowdsourcing sharing platform.

[01:04:58.800] - Deb Caldow

When we started to think about circularity. Where we started was thinking about circularity. Very soon we thought, actually, this isn't about circularity. This is about, in our case, spirits. Spirits that go in single-use bottles all around the world, and no one's ever challenged that.

[01:05:18.480] - Deb Caldow

If you've ever worked in a bar, you know the hassle of having to go downstairs in the middle of a service and get some new bottles when everything's run out. The problem that we fell in love with was replenishment of spirits in a pub. The solution has happened to be circular. Once we got our head around that, it helped us mobilize better internally, it helped us sell us better to consumers and customers alike.

[01:05:40.230] - Deb Caldow

I would add to the consumer lens, which is there are consumers that want to do it. There are also consumers that just want a better product that's more convenient and easier to use. Often, circularity can be the answer to that.

[01:05:55.650] - Rachel O'Reilly

It's a really important point because we have an obsession with segmenting consumers into those who are and aren't interested. We like to talk about those who we have to either convert or forget about, we don't know what to do with them, or the people who are the early adopters who we have to sell, sell, sell to. Then there's this middle where we go, I don't really know what to do with them.

[01:06:15.400] - Rachel O'Reilly

Actually, by falling in love with the problem, as Deb says, you can take away all those assumptions found who is or isn't in the market for it and just look at what are people doing and loving right now and how do we cater for that in the best possible way. It's a refreshing approach to it, I think.

[01:06:31.860] - Finn

We're saying, forget circularity for a moment, that our innovation is actually solving a real problem, and the circularity aspect is something that hits home after. Yeah, exactly. You talked a little bit about internal buy in there, and we'll get onto that later. We talked a little bit about design there, too. Let's talk about now how important is cross-functional collaboration, bringing supply teams in, and also incorporating marketers early into this process. How important is that?

[01:06:59.390] - Deb Caldow

I'll maybe have a go at that one because I think that I've learned over the last few years of trying to scale circular solutions or even come up with them in the first place and then find a way to build them into our core business, that I have never worked so closely with supply as a marketer as I have these days.

[01:07:19.030] - Deb Caldow

Actually, our supply colleagues have for a while been thinking about how to make and move our products in a more sustainable, circular way. What we have brought, I hope, to the party as marketeers is to think about solutions that aren't just the ones that are behind our operations, but actually a consumer might be interested in buying and selling.

[01:07:39.590] - Deb Caldow

When you have a very efficient, large-scale business like Diageo, the world's leading company, you have spent 200 years developing a supply chain infrastructure that does what it does brilliantly. It sends bottles down a line in a factory that's highly efficient, highly cost-effective. What you're starting to do is you're starting to unravel that. That's where the initial, probably business, rejection can be. It could be seen as we're now having to completely rework how we do everything.

[01:08:12.330] - Deb Caldow

Actually, when you look at other things like costs of goods and glass, and in our case, glass is getting very expensive, you actually make it a much bigger conversation about how we're going to grow in a resilient way. Glass is getting really expensive. We could do with reusing the glass, glass, but that is circulating.

[01:08:29.660] - Deb Caldow

In answer to your question, the supply and demand sides of the businesses have to be inextricably linked. If you're going to start really having new business models internally, you better have your supply people and your procurement people, your marketeers, and your finance, and everybody else all in the same place on it, because otherwise you will hit issues when you come to scale.

[01:08:50.580] - Finn

Again, you're ensuring as well that the technical innovation actually matches the market demand. Ultimately, you're giving marketers a story they can work with. They know the product in and out. I don't know, Rachel, if Is there anything in your work that speaks to that collaboration aspect?

[01:09:04.160] - Rachel O'Reilly

Yeah, it's so true what Deb is saying. I think as being a consultancy, you get that privileged position of watching lots of different firms grapple with this on the inside. Sometimes we're brought in by CMOs or marketing professionals who are struggling with consumer adoption. Sometimes it's from a sustainability perspective, and it's like, why can't we get momentum within the business? Sometimes it's from a design perspective, but rarely actually.

[01:09:29.530] - Rachel O'Reilly

What becomes clear every time is that it's being tackled at an incredibly siloed level, typically. Sustainability teams have historically owned that work, but are now getting into a problem when it's going or attempting to go mass. Marketeers on the other side have an ambition to do it, but there tends to be less confidence or mandate sometimes. Rarely on these projects do you ever get those people coming in together because they're commissioned by a single stakeholder line, if you like.

[01:09:57.660] - Rachel O'Reilly

When we think about good old design and what we would have done when design thinking came into the mix way back when, that was all about bringing people together, cross-collaboration. That was what we heroed and what worked well. For some reason, when it comes to sustainability, we've lost that. It feels scary.

[01:10:14.440] - Deb Caldow

We think it's somebody else's job, don't we? Often, you hear that, well, that's a supply team's job. That's procurement. It's not really a job for enter function name. When you think about the value chain of how you make, move, and distribute products, actually, you start to see that… We talk about widening your aperture, that camera lens zooming out and paying an interest.

[01:10:37.320] - Deb Caldow

Marketeers, in particular, are used to thinking upwards towards the consumer. Rarely do they go down the other end, which is the factory end. I think once you do, though, there's plenty of opportunity to think about growth. The other element of collaboration as well, which I think you might come on to, is around not just internally, but externally with partners.

[01:10:58.340] - Deb Caldow

Think about circularity is you need other players other than yourself working on it. You need the infrastructure, right? The government. You need the things like waste collectors to work with you. It's not very sexy, but it's really important because you can make all that effort as a business to have a circular solution. If the local council doesn't recognize it or anybody else that wants to be involved can't because they can't scale up, then you're going to hit issues.

[01:11:29.220] - Deb Caldow

In our case, we realized we couldn't do it all on our own. Actually, we have a program where we work with startups that have got circular solutions, usually that have come from some data power. Actually, a lot of circularity is actually about data than it is about vessels and moving things around and refill. We're really fortunate to have worked with quite a few startups who we've been able to support to scale.

[01:11:56.860] - Deb Caldow

EcoSPIRITS would be a great example of a business that had a vision five years ago, driven out of an individual who saw spirits bottle waste and decided to get ahead and do it. That's just brilliant because businesses like ours need businesses like that, individuals like that, to come to crack the solution. What we can then do is help scale it.

[01:12:19.520] - Finn

You said it there, you've done a lot of work on the innovation, you've identified a real opportunity. That doesn't always translate to a successful business model. As I said earlier, internal buying is crucial to that. I'm wondering, in the case of the Diageo and ecoSPIRITS example, what were those early internal conversations like?

[01:12:38.720] - Deb Caldow

My opening pitch to the business was, "We've put beer in kegs for 250 years, the ultimate circular model. Yet, why have we not done that for spirits?" We being the industry, we being Diageo. When you describe that, people go, "God, this is mad, actually, isn't it? We've never really thought about what happens to all those bottles once they've gone out of our warehouse."

[01:13:01.710] - Deb Caldow

The first thing, it's the problem. We dramatized the problem and then talked about potential solutions. Of course, those solutions before they scale are probably not commercially viable. They will cost you more. They will be disruptive to your supply chain. There is a bit of a leap of faith there, but that's why it's important to have everybody on board and skin in the game, if you like.

[01:13:26.370] - Finn

With marketers as well, they can, again, use their skills. You always get the advantage. Perhaps economically, it wasn't fruitful to start with, but you get that industry first. You come from that angle, I suppose. We talked a lot in the intro about…

[01:13:42.250] - Finn

We've looked at success stories. We've obviously spoken about Vinted, but ultimately, we're not reaching the scale that we need to transform the economy. Rachel, to bring you in here, what do you think the main barriers are or the blockers as to why we're not reaching the scale we need to for circular propositions?

[01:13:57.200] - Rachel O'Reilly

Big question. We're in pilot purgatory at the moment. We see a lack of investment and support in giving it a go because of all of the risk, adversity around it. For marketers, it's particularly pertinent because of the fears of greenwashing. Sounds old, but it's still true. There's a lack, and this is more broadly than just sustainability in bold leadership at the moment. We are paralysed by uncertainty.

[01:14:23.330] - Rachel O'Reilly

Look at the current world, and that means that you need that CMO, that CEO, that CFO to take a bet. At the moment in the current climate, we're not taking any bets. We're not making any decisions. That's something that's hindering sustainability more broadly as well.

[01:14:39.940] - Rachel O'Reilly

Then in terms of the other point, it's the ability to operationalize, and to Deb's point around supply chain, bringing everyone together. There's a lack of ability or readiness to do that as well in terms of the implementation side of things.

[01:14:53.060] - Rachel O'Reilly

Metrics being a key part to that. We've got to be able to measure something other than immediate ROI because it's not going to happen. We're not set up to that, and it's terrifying for businesses, particularly in a moment when we need to make money. Again, it's all of the old challenges to scale, I think, but a combination of where we are at the moment and the sustainability topic just exasperates it.

[01:15:15.530] - Finn

Amazing. Deb, anything to add on that point?

[01:15:17.470] - Deb Caldow

No, I'm just listening to you thinking, "Yes, that's exactly what's going on inside businesses." Then I suppose the question that leads on from that is what can people from within businesses that are supporting businesses like ours do within that. Storytelling, I'm finding, is really powerful to give those examples of where it's been challenging and how we've overcome it.

[01:15:43.240] - Deb Caldow

A permission to have an experimentation budget and give it a go. In the circularity solutions that we're looking at, we've got different KPIs than we'd normally have with innovation. They are different. Actually, they're timed on a slightly different horizon as well. In the beginning, it's, does it actually work? Can we operationalise it? Later on, we will look at, will it make money? And will a customer want it?

[01:16:11.520] - Deb Caldow

We just think a bit differently about the choreography of what we're trying to prove out, then we would with a normal consumer-focused innovation, because I think it is slightly different. It's all the same discipline, making sure it's feasible, viable, sustainable, and desirable. There are four lenses, but you to choreograph it in a slightly different order because you're not going to get all of that answers at front.

[01:16:35.310] - Finn

Okay, nice. We've had four lenses from Deb. Rachel, I don't know about you, but have you got one action that marketers could take today in their practices to move forward with this?

[01:16:46.580] - Rachel O'Reilly

Maybe controversially, I'd say start with you. Find your route to sustainability, because if you can't connect to that, then we don't stand a chance. I would ask ourselves, why are we doing it? It can be as simple as I want to make a legacy myself within the job. It doesn't have to be eco warrior territory.

[01:17:03.160] - Rachel O'Reilly

If we keep separating sustainability in the workforce and workplace from our own personal lives, we're going to keep coming up to this point where we work in sustainability for years but still have the consumption issues at home. Breaking down those barriers between employer, consumer, CEO, CEO's children would be really helpful. I'd start there.

[01:17:26.030] - Finn

Amazing. That's a perfect place to end on. Thank you both for your time, and thank you to the audience for listening.

[01:17:31.820] - Finn

You can find out more about the marketing playbook, linked in the show notes of this episode. Don't forget to subscribe to the Circular Economy Show to listen to upcoming episodes of the other marketing pathways. See you next time.