So What's Marketing Got to Do With It?

Recently, when presenting EarthSayers.tv to a prospective sponsor, the person I was talking with seemed surprised that a marketing person would be the builder of EarthSayers.tv. This person comes from the environmental movement and the idea that one would "market" sustainability is, well, counterintuitive. Low awareness is low awareness. And the tools available to increase awareness are communication tools and practices. The Web is driving big changes in marketing and environmentalists need to spread the word. Our President is setting the tone with a strong collaboration and cooperation message.

The same day I was talking with the environmentalist, I ran across the Social Responsibility report of the WPP, one of the world's largest communications services groups, employing 110,000 people working in over 2,000 offices in 106 countries. It contains a letter from the CEO, Sir Martin Sorrell, about the role of marketers in today's world. Here are some highlights from his letter:


“So if the marketing industry has been unwittingly complicit in causing the problem, it’s now confronted with an historic opportunity: to shape and encourage consumer demand for sustainable products and lifestyles; to restore the true value of durability; to reject the superfluous in products and packaging; to make much of what has passed for fashion deeply unfashionable…The internet makes the dissemination of information and the mobilization of protest swift and virtually cost-free…we’re all too conscious that we can be credible as an advisor only if we practice what we preach.”

We are practicing what we preach.

CMO: Chief Marketing Optimist

From time to time I read about an executive who is in the middle of big changes and is able to articulate the role of trust, the importance of being optimistic, and the critical role of innovation. Such a person is Mr. Estenson of CNN.com.

In his case the driver is how information is created and monitized by a media company with an "array of television channels, Web sites, a radio network, airport TV sets and magazines" as is the situation with CNN. It seems to be mostly about money, advertising dollars, but if you look closer it is not a stretch to see that Mr. Estenson could easily be looking at the need to create a sustainability strategy across all the CNN properties and to see it as building a trusted network in a network company.

Our call for leadership from among the CMOs and marketing professionals especially in large Enterprise companies is what Mr. Estenson (he's been at CNN.com since July) exemplifies. Here are some comments from the New York Times article, Can the Go-To Site Get You to Stay? (January 18, 2009).

“It’s a very complicated thing to integrate newsrooms, to change people’s job descriptions, and to establish trust across multiple platforms,” he says. “The challenge is herculean.”

Propelled by what he calls the “constant positive dissatisfaction” of his bosses, Mr. Estenson is acting as CNN.com’s in-house optimist, constantly trying to improve the site’s vision.


To that end, he wants to ensure that CNN.com’s success doesn’t cripple innovation. “Fear of change can send you to a very conservative place,” he says, rolling up his shirt sleeves. “We want to redefine the news experience.”

The above graphic shows how we see the connection between his conversation and our focus on sustainability as a business strategy. This view of change takes Mr. Estenson's language and puts it in the context of a sustainability initiative. We think this puts the emphasis where it should be in this period of a new and invigorating air of change and financial makeovers. In companies with an outdated strategic planning process, we offer "Strategic Doing" as a starting point. It's a discipline and innovation by Ed Morrison of the Institute for Open Economic Networks.