London Calling

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.

While the week may be coming to a close, the office is still very much a-buzz as we look ahead to July and start thinking about our favourite kinds of Pulling Power

That’s the headline theme for this year’s Arts Marketing Association conference, by the way, which aims to explore the ongoing revolution in social marketing and promises to be all kinds of awesome.

In fact we’re looking forward to it so much we decided not to wait and this week went to see Mark Earls, author of Herd (one of my favourite reads of the year) and keynote presenter at the conference talking about social learning and the latest trends in understanding human nature.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re going to the conference this keynote is likely to unpick many of your closest held assumptions about the value we often place on influencers, early adopters and the individual when planning our marketing strategies and tactics.

On the plus side you’ll also likely walk away with some new ideas on how our jobs as marketers are changing towards a model that helps audiences to grow themselves, if that makes sense. And if it doesn’t make sense, then I guarantee you’ll still have lots to talk about. After all,  conversation is one of the key ingredients of any social campaign, right?

In other news, we’ve been very busy indeed on the home front too, with new Account Manager Nina joining the team in the last few weeks, and even newer Account Manager Jason and Digital Account Manager Katie poised to join us shortly.

So, lots of new faces, lots to learn and lots and lots of Social with a capital ‘S’ to look forward to in the weeks to come.

Audience segmentation for the next decade is the theme of the latest issue of the Journal of Arts Marketing, the quarterly publication from the Arts Marketing Association.

My latest piece argues for an approach to sustainability that moves past the simple eco-checklist approach to putting your house in order, and rather returns to the core brand values of an organisation. In this way sustainability becomes a strand of programming in its own right and another way to think about and  talk to our audiences.

The implications for understanding how an audience’s attitudes to green issues and sustainability might integrate with our more traditional segmentation strategies are still being uncovered, but it’s clear to me that failing to include this line of thinking in our planning is a failure to grasp new opportunities for building relations with our target markets in the decade to come.

Here’s the article in full:

Like a latter day Johnson and Boswell, Dr Ben Todd of Arcola Theatre and I have been out on the road performing a green marketing double act at AMA Networking events and other choice locations across London and the South East.

The idea has been to inspire discussion on the different ways a green marketing mix can benefit broader audience engagement and, as Ben pointed out, take advantage of the biggest and best networked marketing team we possibly can to help test out our theories.

One of the main questions we’ve been posing is whether a venue’s marketing team should be the ones taking the lead on green initiatives.

Unfortunately there is no one size fits all simple solution to the problem of sustainability.

Rather there’s a need to navigate any number of different positions. You’ll want to encourage investment in meaningful change, avoid the slippery greenwashed slopes of a quick carbon neutral cop-out, seek out new lines of communication and explain what you’ve learnt so that others can follow in your footsteps.

During our mini-tour one theme has become increasingly apparent – if you really want to position sustainability as a central part of your venue, it needs to be embedded right through the corporate identity. In other words we’re back to brand – the natural home of the modern marketing team.

Talking about the Arcola’s own experience, Ben outlined how evolving their own sustainable strategy has been a long, slow burn in direct contrast to the quicker promotional ‘splash and dab’ of selling theatre tickets.

The first lesson they learned after deciding ‘We’re all going to be sustainable – Yeah cool!’ was to start asking what that really meant to them as an organisation.

The answer was to go right back to Arcola’s corporate branding and mission statement, so the place where long term work on building company identity and relationships with stake holders, funders and audiences becomes the home for sustainability as well.

As Ben explains it, there are two divergent approaches to adoption. Treat sustainability in the same way you would Health & Safety (forms and tick boxes basically) or position it directly as a strand of your core programming. For Arcola their three main strands of programming – Professional Productions, Youth & Community Work and Sustainability – are now all intrinsically linked, cross-pollinating creative ideas and creating new and exciting ways to engage with Arcola’s audiences.

As Ben explains it ‘we’re identifying a whole new way of engaging audiences, building loyalty and accessing new markets.’

We think you’ll agree that rather than just viewing this as adding another task to the teetering pile of to-dos, the opportunity to engage with new ideas and talk to our audiences in new ways is precisely why we became marketers in the first place.

At it’s best arts marketing is about capturing people’s imagination and inspiring them to try new experiences. It’s exactly this kind of engagement we need to encourage a cultural shift towards more sustainable practises, and this is precisely where the arts are in a prime position to reach people and help create real change for the better.

Full Disclosure:

London Calling is the current sponsor of JAM, supporting the Arts Marketing Association and working in partnership with our recommended printer, Greenhouse Print, to ensure each issue is printed to the highest possible standards of environmental management.

We’ve chosen to use the promotional space that comes in kind as part of our supporting package to create a series of advertorial articles highlighting issues of sustainability within the arts and cultural sector.

We rather like writing these, and all comment and feedback is always greatly appreciated.

Whatever happened to the good old text message, huh?

That’s the question Sarah O’Hanlon and I were challenged to answer in the latest issue of JAM, the quarterly Journal of Arts Marketing from the Arts Marketing Association.

We were especially drawn to the reasons why mobile has yet to reach a critical tipping point in the arts marketing mix – an unwillingness to risk an accidental tarring with the scuzzball brush? – and suggested that perhaps one of the main barriers to adoption was a tendency to think in terms of large and relatively consistent mailing lists rather than embracing the niche opportunities that can exist in a faster opt in / opt out conversation.

You can download the whole issue here.

To save you looking we’re near the back on pages 21 & 22.