Marketers Unleashed

Sustainable Marketing: Powering Change

• Kathryn • Season 1 • Episode 11

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Join us on Marketers Unleashed as host Kathryn Strachan speaks with Gihan Hyde, founder, and CEO of Communique, about integrating sustainability and ESG into marketing strategies. They discuss the importance of diversity in the sustainability conversation, changes in the ESG landscape, and overcoming barriers like resource constraints and finding skilled talent. Gihan shares insights on tackling supply chain engagement, the role of internal communications, and utilizing social media effectively. Hear how marketing can support sustainability initiatives and why genuine passion is crucial in this field.


Social Media Links:

Kathryn Strachan - linkedin.com/in/kathryn-strachan

Gihan Hyde - linkedin.com/in/gihanam

Website: communique.global

Welcome to Marketers Unleashed, the podcast where marketers break free from the noise and dive deep into the raw truths of the marketing world. We're here to go beyond best practices and uncover the bold ideas, untold stories, and hard lessons that shape real marketing success. From dissecting daring campaigns to confronting the challenges keeping us awake at night. We're unleashing honest, unfiltered conversations to inspire, educate, and challenge you to think differently. Get ready to conquer the untamed side of marketing. I'm your host, Kathryn Strachan, and this is Marketers Unleashed, where we're not just talking marketing, we're redefining it. For anyone who doesn't know me yet, I'm Kathryn Strachan,

author of Scaling Success:

Building Brands That Break Barriers, international keynote speaker, and fractional CMO for cutting edge brands. I've spent years navigating the ever changing world of marketing, and I've seen it all. As your podcast host, I bring my expertise and curiosity to the table, diving deep into honest conversations with industry leaders to uncover the insights, challenges, and bold ideas shaping our industry. Let's get started. Hi everybody and welcome to Marketers Unleashed. So today I'm here speaking with Gihan and we're going to be talking all about sustainability and ESG and how we can make sure that we're creating marketing strategies that take these things into account because it's really important. Thank you for being here with me today, it's great to see you. Thank you for having me. Do you want to get us started by telling us a little bit about what you do and who you are? I am the founder and CEO of a consultancy called Communique. And what we do is we specialize in helping organizations. To have better conversations with their stakeholders, including their suppliers, their community and their employees. And we also help organizations to train their board members and senior leadership teams on what is ESG and how does it differ from sustainability and what are the trends that are coming towards them. Or the regulations that are coming towards them that will have an impact on their operations. So these are the two services that we offer. We're a B Corp certified organization, meaning that we do meet the highest standards in environmental and social impact. We're based in the UK. We are currently a team of 29 consultants who are all freelancers, but 40 percent of our consultants are from developing countries and underrepresented communities. Parallel to that, what I also do, because I believe strongly in giving back, is I teach. I teach at Oxford University, so I teach a course called Sustainable Cooperation. I also teach at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations on how to develop effective, sustainability communication strategies, and I teach at the Chartered Institute of Marketing on circular economy and ESG regulations. So thats me in a nutshell. That's awesome. What Made you want to start the consultancy? There were two reasons why I was keen to start Communique. One of them was that I spotted a gap in the market. And that gap is the training and stakeholder engagement. Sustainability at that time, and you're talking about four years now it was booming and it was being at the forefront of the board and SLT's agenda. And I also realized that there aren't a lot of female founders who founded consultancies like Communique and definitely from underrepresented communities or diverse background like I am. So I'm originally from Sudan, but I reside in the U. K. And I'm a British citizen. So that was one of the reasons. I spotted a gap and I wanted to fill it. The second reason is because I was angry, to be fair. I was extremely, extremely disappointed at the fact that the sustainability ecosystem lacks diversity, and it lacks voices from diverse backgrounds. And if anything, we do need to be diverse in sustainability. As a result, I created Communique and I made it a mandate that at least 40 percent of our employees and freelancers have to be from developing countries and underrepresented communities, because I wanted Communique to act as a bridge between these countries who are heavily impacted by climate change to have a, voice in the developed countries. And this is why I created Communique. Why is diversity important in the conversation? It's important because otherwise it's going to be a very boring conversation to be fair. For you to really have an impact and make a change and lead the way, you have to listen to different opinions and you have to listen to different views, and different mentalities as well. And if you don't do that, you won't have a full picture of how the impact should be measured. And unfortunately right now, if you look at all the consultants that are out there offering sustainability and ESG help, very rare you will find someone who looks like me. It's absolutely not right because it's if anything, it's us who are from the developing countries who are the mainly impacted by what the Western countries are doing and the actions that they are taking decisions on. So as a result, I said, I need to change that. You mentioned that when you started it four years ago, it was a different sustainability world, than it is today. Can you talk to me a little bit about what you mean by that and what those changes have looked like? Okay, so four years ago the term environmental social and governance ESG really came into play. And the reason why ESG all of a sudden became very evident is because COVID hit and it enabled investors and the financiers to take time off and really reflect on their investment portfolios. And they realized that they're lacking a lot of transparency when it comes to portfolios. They also realized that the portfolios who are focused around social impact and environmental impact are actually making more profit and being more recognized as a brand than the ones who are not. Post COVID, this is where it really erupted. And this is where the pressure from investors, the pressure from regulators came into play and they realized, okay, something needs to change. And as a result, we go from no regulations around 10 years ago, all of a sudden now there is huge regulations. And this is what I mean by it has changed and the landscape has changed. More recently there's been a recession and brands don't have as much money, so I feel like they really wanted to do sustainability, but then budgets started to get cut. Have you seen any impact based on brands not having as much money to, invest in sustainability initiatives? So that's not going to really have an impact on the regulatory aspect of sustainability. It is having an impact on the quality of the commitments and the quality of initiatives. And it's also having an impact on the speed that the corporations are going in. Purely because it's proving to be very expensive. But not only that, it's also proving to be very hard to find the talent to push and bring these initiatives to life. There is a recent LinkedIn green skills report that came out. And you could see that there is a massive lack of talent in the market when it comes to environmental and social, but specifically to environmental science. How do you overcome something like that? It depends. What are you overcoming? Are you overcoming the speed that you're going towards achieving your commitment? Are you overcoming finding new talents? With, there not being enough people and skills out there to deliver these initiatives. How do you start to overcome something like that? I would invest heavily in upskilling my current employees and finding these employees who are passionate about the topic. Rather than wasting time and finding new talent. Because you could easily partner with a university and upskill your talents. You could easily invest in programs with these universities to encourage external talent to enroll into these sessions or into these degrees. You could create incubation programs for founders who will help you find the technology that would increase the speed of your commitment. There's always a solution. Whether or not people want to take it, that's different. When it comes to your clients and the work that you do, what sort of challenges do you help your clients overcome? The number one challenge is engaging their supply chain. For a company to report on their sustainability and ESG commitments, they need to report on the amount of carbon that is being caused by this organization. Ninety percent of the carbon is actually coming from the suppliers who are supplying the goods and services to the organization. So if a company then commits to reducing its carbon, let's say, by 70%, okay, 90 percent of this 70 percent is actually coming from the supply chain, not from them personally. How do you convince your suppliers to invest hundreds of thousands of pounds and dollars. To redesign their business model. Then have the technology to even capture the amount of carbon that each supplier is emitting. Then reporting on it effectively. So it's a big ask from the suppliers. So our job is to come and sit with the suppliers, sit with the employees of the organization who's going to work with the suppliers to get this data and simplify the strategy for them, and explain to them what is the role that they play in the journey, but also explain to them that without them, there will not be a journey. There won't be a company because they'll be fined hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars if they don't adhere to their regulations. So this is what we do. We create a dialogue with the different stakeholders, and then after that, we train the suppliers. We train the employees on the sustainability agenda and the sustainability skill sets that they need to have in place so that they're ready after a year for the reporting cycle. It's uh, it's really interesting because this ability to take complex information and distill it into dialogue that the audience understands is something that like I've spent my entire career as a marketer, and a content marketer especially, doing because content marketing, whether you're doing that with internal stakeholders like in the supply chain or whether you're doing that with external stakeholders. Basically boils down to that. It's taking, a company's vision and mission and, especially in the tech world is often more complex, and boiling it down into these insights that not only helps them to understand what they need to do, but gets them on board with it, gets them to believe in it. In your role, do you rely on or include or work with marketers in this process? We do. We do. We have to work very closely with the communications team. They're not our clients, they are our key stakeholders. Because as an ex-marketer myself, I completely believe in the power of marketing. And I absolutely believe in the power of storytelling. And no one does it better than the communication teams. The first thing we do is we actually sit with the communication team, and say, listen, this is the mandate that we've got from your sustainability teams. This is the reality of what needs to be done. Now we need to understand what is the problems that you will be facing in this, so that we can help you achieve it. So we do work very closely with the communications team to distill that into actions and into steps that needs to be taken. But we also use the power of behavioral science and anthropology in that. So as a, a rule of thumb any client that we embark with, we have to have an anthropologist and a behavioral scientist in the team yes, it's sometimes people consider it as a change management exercise because you're completely changing a company, how it works and operates, But you're also asking people to change their lifestyle. you're asking people to change their mindset. And you can't really do that if you don't speak their language. If you don't relate to their values. If you don't talk about the emotions associated with them living a more sustainable life. I know it's one of the key differentiators between us and our competitors. A lot of marketing is like that as well, of understanding the audience, understanding what language they speak, and how you can speak to them in a way that is going to connect and resonate with them. What's the biggest barrier that you come up against when you're working with marketers and communication teams? If anything, we had a lot of encouragement from them. I think it's just that they're under resourced and overworked. And here we are adding more to their work. I think that's the one of the temporary challenges that we face with them. And again, I am an ex marketer. I've seen it, I've witnessed it. All the decisions that are being made are made without us being there. And this causes us a massive confusion because we don't understand why the decisions were made the way they were made. For example, why were the commitments made? Why is it 80 percent reduction and not 40 percent reduction, Why has 2030 been chosen as opposed to 2050? We don't know what we don't know because we were not there. We've always been given the strategy and been told, go ahead, make it happen. And I think, because I understand that, I know how to speak to the marketers and relate to their pain points. I know how to explain to them that we're here to make their life easier. And when they see that they relax more. So luckily, because we get to speak to the board members and the senior leadership teams, we are able to also bring the marketing teams with us when we're having this conversation. Because it's very rare that I'm delivering a training to the board members or the SLTs. and not asking for the head of marketing or head of, or the chief comms officer to be there. When my stakeholders raise an eye and say why? I say Because we need them. And I always lay down why we need them. And I think this is where the marketing and the communication teams appreciate us because we are their advocates. We're not their competitors. I think a lot of marketers understand the value of sustainability as well, and, why it's important, and, regulations that they need to comply with. But, how can they support your work? What do you need from them in order to have a successful project? I need their expertise in, changing mindsets. I need their expertise in which channel will really have more of an impact and reach their consumers better. But just be aware, I don't just work with marketers, so I also work heavily with internal communicators as well. And even between internal communication and marketing, there is a rivalry between them, because marketers always have the biggest budget, for example. At least that's historically how it was. I think what I do need from them is time. I just need more time with them. I need their transparency as well, because if they're transparent with me and telling me exactly what they're facing as challenges, I will be able to help them. And I need their expertise in knowing their consumers. I don't know their consumers. My job is to present to them and de-mystifying the technicality of the ESG commitments. And then I should ideally leave it in their hands, which I do, but to get there, I have to explain to them where this these commitments came from. Why are these commitments important? What is the ramification of these commitments if they're not taken seriously? But most importantly, the importance of language being used and not just take everything for face value. They need to question the data that's given to them. They need to make sure that the audience they're targeting have the right narrative. And I think this is where we thrive a lot by working with the communication teams. I mean, and you mentioned there on internal communication and it makes sense that the employees would need to be on board as well, but can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with the internal communication teams? I'm absolutely convinced that for us, before we talk externally, we have to get our house in order. So if there is anyone who needs to be engaged as soon as possible, it needs to be the internal communicators team. Because it's the employees who actually play the biggest role in making these commitments a reality. So I'll give you an example. We run a lot of hackathons. As part of our way of engaging with employees, supply chain, and communities. So one of our clients asked us to run a series of hackathons. The problem that they were trying to solve is come up with an initiative that will help us reduce our carbon within our workplace. You have four days to come up with an idea and the business plan to present it to a jury. And if you succeed, the idea is approved, then you can run it. One of the ideas that came out of these hackathons was creating an application that employees would download voluntary. The employees would then input information about their own lives. So if I commuted from A to B, I'll put this in the app. The app will then say to me, okay, did you realize that commuting from A to B equated to X amount of carbon, which is also equated to X amount of, swimming pools. And by the way, do you know you can reduce these swimming pools or carbon by X, if you walked from A to B, and then from B to C, you took public transport, and then also again, when I ate, I've eaten, let's say, meat, it will explain to me the impact of meat on the planet, and how I would be able to reduce my carbon if I would eat once a week, for example, vegetables. So it humanized the strategy of the company in behavioral nudges that are simplified enough for everyone to understand it, whether you are a CEO or a non desk based employee. As a result of that, the company was able to reduce. their employee carbon by 20%, but also take the information from that app and put it towards how the company worked to reduce their scope number three, which is the supply chain and then the carbon that's not controlled by the company itself. So it was great. And this is what I mean. You have to bring your employees with you from the beginning, before you go externally. And this is where the diversity comes in, by the way. They were absolutely diverse in roles, ethnicity, gender, background, and departments. And that was the beauty of it. And they believe in the journey, and they want to help the company to achieve these big goals. I mean, As the saying goes it takes a village. Yes, absolutely. It takes a village. It takes a village. So for me, once I get the in house right, once I get the employees mindset in the right place, this is then where the power of marketing Comes in. Because your employees are also your marketing agency. Because they're also your customers. They're your advocates, they're your social media, they're everything. So if you get that it's an easy job then semi easy job for the marketers to take that forward. Yeah. Absolutely. And I know that you've got a really big presence on LinkedIn as well as one of LinkedIn's top voices. What role do you think that social media plays in sustainability and sustainability initiatives? It plays a massive role because it's giving us access to markets, to case studies, to initiatives that normally we would not have known about. It made us all in the same room, But the only problem I'm also facing with social media is that if you stick to the sustainability ecosystem, you're not going to go far because it's an echo chamber. And everyone is saying the exact same thing. For example, There is a suggestion that a new regulation will be scrapped and will be simplified and it's called the Omnibus regulation for CSRD. And if you look at LinkedIn at the moment, every single sustainability professional is talking about this one. But in reality, I don't want to talk about this one. I don't want to just hear all, everything about this one. I want to hear about other things. So this is why I'm very careful with social media. I'm also very careful of what I personally post. I make a point not to post for the sake of posting. As a top voice. You will never find me ever posting about Black History month during the Black History month. You will never find me posting about International Women's Day during International Women's Day. Because frankly speaking, all of this needs to be normalized. It needs to be posted about all through the year, not just a certain time of year. And this is what I'm finding with my fellow sustainability professionals. When there's a hot topic, everyone posts about it. It could be deceiving because it's an echo chamber. So my advice, if you are looking into sustainability or want to embark into sustainability, or you're interested in the topic, surround yourself with the cynic, surround yourself with the passionate, but also surround yourself with the critic as well. Listen to all views and then form your own view on it. How have you found your voice on LinkedIn and, broken out of that echo chamber? That's a very difficult question. Um, How? By not following everyone else. I was never a follower anyways. Me either. Whoever knows me well, they will know I don't follow people just for the sake of following and just for the sake of wanting to belong. Because don't forget, as humans, we want to belong. We want to be part of a herd. We want to be accepted as well by our peers. We want to be liked by our peers and appreciated by them. I'm not that person. if anything, if you come to any of my lectures, or even when I'm speaking to my clients, I always say to them, challenge me. I want you to challenge me. Because if you don't challenge me, then we're never going to go forward. We need to hear each other's opinions. We need to hear the good, the bad, the ugly of the reality of what's happening. So how I do it is, yes, I listen to my peers. Of course, I respect them. Absolutely respect them. I take everything they say on board and then I formulate my own opinion. And that's how I stand out. And that's why, by the way, you'll find I don't have a big following on LinkedIn as much as my other top voices. Because I'm going against the grain. I'm a top voice, yes. I'm respected, yes. But I have a lot of people who are lurkers as opposed to following me, if that makes sense. Yeah. It does make sense. A lot of people on social are lurkers anyways, but I think it takes bravery and courage to stand out and go against the grain, to go against the norm. Because as you say, everybody wants to be liked and everybody wants to, be part of a herd. It makes us feel safe and secure. Was it scary for you at first when you started to go against the grain or was it just always in your nature? I'll be lie to you if, I told you I actually, paid attention. I didn't, to be honest. Didn't notice. I really didn't. I just did what I did. I was actually very surprised as well when LinkedIn, added me as a top voice. And I even went back to LinkedIn and I said to them, but why, what am I doing? And they were like no, we just love how different you are. And I was like, okay, fine, because you're not going to get anything more than that or anything different than that. I'm glad it's working. But what's happening is that it's proving a point, and that is, we need more of me out there. Whether from a, an ethnicity background, from a different thought background and a transparent background approach. That's what we need, and that's what LinkedIn is helping me achieve. It's the fact that anyone can be a top voice if they really became themselves. And not wanting to be part of a herd or wanting to please people. And the lessons I have learned from these people, and the opportunities that these people have given me as well. I'm very grateful for social media, Yeah, it's opened so many doors for myself as well, so I've seen firsthand the power that it can have in opening doors and creating opportunities and bringing people together. Before we wrap up, do you have any final advice for our listeners on, sustainability and how they can help make the world a better place? If you don't believe in it, don't go into it for the sake of it, the best thing about the sustainability and the ESG world is that if you do something wrong, trust me, someone is going to pick it up and someone is going to shout about it. It. So be very careful if you're not truly passionate about the world. and sustainability. I would say just take your time, figure out what you really want to do, and you should not be an expert in all aspects of sustainability. Choose what's really close to your heart, and work on it. For me, when I started my sustainability journey, I went into the G. So I worked as a head of change communications for HSBC asset management, Barclays internal audit. So compliance and risk. So I understood what the G really meant when I was in BP. I was more into the environmental aspect with the workplace modernization and modernizing the workplaces. When I was in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, I worked more on the social aspect. So I worked in all three major umbrellas of sustainability. And then I realized my true passion lies in the S, which is the social impact. And this is where I decided, okay, I want to work on that. So I know on LinkedIn, I'm not known for my environmental thought leadership. I'm more known for my social and my governance because I love governance. I love how a company is governed. I adore and I'm very comfortable creating the mechanics of how you make the business model ethical. And I also love the social impact. So that's what I found my passion in. So I would recommend, try everything first. Then, hone down in what you really want to be. But to be honest, I prefer being a generalist. My superpower is because I'm a generalist. Yes, I have passion for social impact. but that doesn't mean I don't understand how the environmental impact works. Or how the governance is working. And that is my superpower because I can hold my own in a conversation. So far, until today, I worked in 11 different sectors. Very rare you'll find someone saying, I actually worked in 11 different sectors. Very also rare that you say that you worked in different departments within these sectors. Right now I can hold my conversation very easily with a banker, versus a project manager, versus a internal auditor, versus a risk manager. Very easy because I was there, I witnessed it, I lived it, I understood it, and then I move on. That's an excellent final advice. Thank you so much for joining us today. I've certainly learned a heck of a lot about sustainability, and I think for anybody listening, it's some really great insights into how marketing can work with sustainability and the value of diversity and, how you can communicate these initiatives out. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. That's a wrap for this episode of Marketers Unleashed. Thank you for tuning in and diving deep with us into the unleashed world of marketing. We hope you're leaving with fresh insights, new ideas, and maybe even a few ah-hah moments to fuel your next big move. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a new episode. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a review or connect with us on LinkedIn to share your thoughts. And join in the conversation. Until next time, keep thinking bold, challenging the norms, and unleashing your inner marketer. After all, what's the worst that'll happen? I'm your host, Kathryn Strachan, over and out.