How to “Reduce” in your marketing communications

This is the fifth post in a series on improving the environmental sustainability of marketing communications. Previously: Measurement; A model; Rethink. Today: Reduce.

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After the difficult initial step of rethinking your marketing, Reduce may seem temptingly simple: Decrease the consumption of energy and materials in what’s left in your marketing communications mix. There’s more to Reduce than meets the eye, however, which is why I will devote more space to conceptual issues here, as these are typically overlooked in the discussions of “greening your business”. A simple internet search should provide you with plenty of concrete examples and ideas for your specific circumstances, from eco-friendly printing solutions to shifting your marketing online.

Better is better

Thinking beyond quantity requires a mind shift, as does thinking about your marketing communications as a system. The two shifts will inform your strategy for reducing the energy and material intensity of your marketing communications.

Conventional wisdom holds that more marketing is better: more advertising equals greater exposure equals more sales; more direct mail sent out means more sales. If this post series has one central argument it is this: we must ditch the “more is better” thinking and adopt the “better is better” mindset.

Rather than advocating for a simple across-the-board reduction, my approach is two-pronged. Your strategies for Reduce in marketing communications must have two goals:

1. Increase eco-efficiency of your marcom (by reducing its energy and material intensity), and
2. Maintain, or even increase, the effectiveness of your marketing communications

In other words, do the same, or more, with less. The beauty of the two-pronged approach is that the reduction in energy and material intensity will most likely lower your cost, which will, in turn, translate into higher ROI even if your results remain the same.

However, you will need to make sacrifices. Take direct mail: I have seen campaigns with an in-house list achieve response rates as high as 11%, and ROI over 1,000%. Sounds great until you consider that 89% of the physical material was wasted. On a mailing of even just a few thousand, it adds up; not to mention that typical response rates for direct mail are typically much lower. The environmental and financial goals must balance.

Go forth, Reduce!

You can take a number of approaches to reducing your marcom’s eco footprint (you can combine these, of course):

• Total approach: Reduce total impact. Take the total footprint as your baseline and work to reduce it in any way possible. It may be as haphazard as it sounds, and it partly goes against the beyond-quantity rule.

• Absolute approach: Reduce in areas with greatest impact. Rank order by size the footprint of each marketing tactic, and reduce first in the area with highest footprint, then the next, and so on. This approach goes beyond pure quantity considerations by offers a structural, in-depth view of your marketing system. Working with absolute numbers will make the environmental and financial impact fast and easily understandable, which can generate good energy for further Reduce efforts.

• Relative approach: Reduce in areas with greatest percentual impact. Rather than focusing on numbers, focus on percentages. Following the above two approaches, you can work to reduce the total footprint of your marcom or the footprint of each tactic by a certain percentage. Or you can rank order your tactics by where you can make the greatest percentual impact (some of these may mirror the absolute list). The relative approach will be most helpful if you’re starting from a significant base. Communicating percentages is also more generally understandable than, say, tons of carbon.

You will likely find that to reduce your marcom’s total footprint while maintaining the same overall effect you will need to follow a decrease in one area with increases in other areas. The structural view will help here.

You may also find that the road will prove more difficult as you go along: once you pick the low-hanging fruit, you will need to get creative in your Reduce efforts.

What’s your experience with reducing the eco footprint of your marketing communications? Please share in Comments.

Next week: Reuse.

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Image credits: RiPO and 200MoreMontrealStencils

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