Measuring the environmental impact of marketing, Part 1

This post is a prequel to a series on improving the environmental sustainability of marketing communications.

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Discussions about environmental sustainability in business rarely mention the environmental footprint of marketing communications. Yet marketing successfully consumes too much energy and produces too much stuff to be ignored in considering — and lowering — your company’s environmental impact.

What is the environmental footprint of your company’s marketing? How can you reduce it without negatively impacting your results?

Because you can’t manage what you can’t measure, the first step is to assess the situation and determine the environmental impact of your marketing communications. Two frameworks dominate the landscape of environmental impact assessment: Life Cycle Assessment and carbon footprint (in Part 2 tomorrow).

Life Cycle Assessment

Life Cycle Assessment (or Analysis) quantifies the total environmental impact of a product or service along its entire value chain, including “raw material acquisition, materials manufacture, production, use/reuse/maintenance, and waste management”.

According to Stanford University’s Jeremy Faludi, whose recent Sustainable Brands Boot Camp session* covered the basics of LCAs, the purpose of life cycle analysis is five-fold:

• Tell a product’s back story
• Identify the biggest impact along the value chain
• Establish baselines for improvement
• Guide product or process development
• Support product certification

You can conduct an LCA either by calculating industry averages for particular impact points or calculating impact by product. LCA has been formalized in the ISO standard 14040-14049. Experts or certification bodies can conduct an LCA for you, using any of a number of available measurement methodologies.

Regardless of the desired level of detail, LCA is a comprehensive, time- and resource-intensive process that requires you to determine what to measure, gather product data, compute and compare product impacts, and interpret results. Follow up action to reduce impact and calculate the decrease further complicates things.

To conduct an LCA for your entire marketing program, you’d have to conduct a new and separate LCA for each and every product or service you’re using. Because of this, I don’t foresee its application in assessing the environmental impact of marketing any time soon, if at all.

Up next

This post is the first in a series; tomorrow I will discuss the carbon footprint of marketing communications. In subsequent installments I will outline a 5-step model for reducing the environmental footprint of your marketing communications. In the meantime, please share your thoughts in Comments: Is Life Cycle Assessment of marketing communications worth doing, and why?

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Measuring the environmental impact of marketing, Part 2

Image credit: bufivla

* Disclosure: Sustainable Life Media granted me a free press pass for the Sustainable Brands Boot Camp – regular registration for the online seminar series is $395.

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