The latest issue of JAM, the Journal of Arts Marketing, is now available, and includes our regular thoughts on sustainable marketing and business practise along with a range of thought pieces on the idea of leadership.
Great reading and food for thought as always, and here’s our own small contribution in full…
All too often in meetings, conversations and at conferences I’m finding that the idea of sustainability is something that sounds nice to businesses in theory but is doomed to sit forever in that someday/maybe file of things to do once every other pressing box has been ticked off.
Proof read the new brochure, debug the website, figure out that whole social media minefield etc etc.
In other words time is just as precious and finite a commodity as paper stocks or power, so why shouldn’t it be included in any audit of available resources?
Sustainable thinking is all about forward planning, maximising on existing resources as well as conserving them, and taking the long-term view – all safe and commonsense business attitudes when you come right down to it, right?
I’d argue that adopting a sustainable approach doesn’t have to be a choice between whether its better to gain social benefits or save precious financial resources. In fact a sustainable thought process is often the key to unlocking new innovation and creativity within a company.
Let me give you an example from our own business to illustrate.
As a business London Calling offers plenty of different things, but a lot of what we do, day in, day out, is use fossil fuels in one form or another to drive dead tree stock around town.
That’s the majority of our carbon footprint in a nutshell, and considering we recently figured out we’d driven the equivalent of perhaps seven times around the equator in a year, you can surmise both that:
A – We’re pretty good at what we do because we’ve gone a long, long way for a lot of different people over the years.
B – That whole mileage thing would probably be a good place to start if we were serious about addressing our business from a ‘how do we lessen our environmental impact?’ point of view.
As you probably guessed, that’s exactly what we did, reducing our real-world mileage and fuel consumption by 15% in the last year with no drop in volumes of print delivery and in fact increasing the overall geographic area we cover.
The trick, such as it is, is all in investing staff time and resources in desk research and figuring out how, for instance, to best combine our delivery routes to minimise the distances one of our vans will need to travel in any given day.
This real-world mileage reduction also means an equally real-world reduction in our fuel expenditure, so if we’re delivering the same volume of work with a 15% reduction in associated costs that’s obviously a great saving and one we can use to help keep our prices steady during this belt-tightening budget year.
That’s just one example from a long list of business-benefitting initiatives we’ve been inspired to take thanks to that first step of thinking green.The real point here though is that if we can do it, so can you. Or, to put it another way, maybe there’s more mileage in embracing a sustainable business stance than you might think.
