Measuring the Environmental Impact 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. By Peter Korchnak


Impact

What is the environmental footprint of your company's marketing? How can you reduce it without negatively affecting 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.

Life Cycle Assessment of marketing communications

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.

If Life Cycle Assessment of marketing communications would be a mean feat, measuring carbon footprint, a subset of LCA, would considerably simplify the evaluation process, while still allowing for identifying greatest impacts and baselines for reduction.

Marcom's carbon footprint

FootprintCarbon footprint is "the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted over the full life cycle of a product or service or in a financial year for a business".

Because carbon dioxide is a major man-made greenhouse gas and because its measurement is more straightforward (and cheaper) than LCA, carbon footprint analysis has gained significant traction in the ecologically-minded business community.

According to Andrew Winston, competition in carbon footprinting software is "fierce". I have found these comprehensive tools on the market for measuring the total carbon footprint of your marcom activities:

Except for Etetra's, these tools reside behind tall pay walls, so it's hard to assess how they work, how accurate they are, what results they deliver, or what clients they serve.

Several free online calculators can help measure the carbon footprint of different parts of your marketing operations. Examples include

Even more so with these narrow calculators, accuracy and customization are an issue. But these tools will allow you to dip your toe in the complex waters of carbon footprint measurement and analysis.

Alternatively, as with LCAs, outsourcing the calculation of your marketing's environmental footprint to a specialized third-party would probably be more efficient. Plenty of carbon footprint consultants operate in the marketplace for any company to make an informed selection.

However, other than the Sustainable Advertising Partnership of the Institute of Sustainable Communication, it's unclear who, if anyone, specializes in the footprinting of marketing efforts. It seems carbon footprinting of marketing communications is a curve that's ahead of the next curve.

No demand, no supply?

The main reason for the scarcity of entities measuring the environmental footprint of marketing communications seems to be weak demand. Few companies seem to be interested in doing this, though as with many other environmental sustainability initiatives, lower environmental footprint can lead to significant financial savings.

For those enlightened corporations that want to reduce their marketing's environmental impact, scale becomes an issue: the carbon footprint of corporate marketing communications must be large enough for any measurement and reduction efforts to yield meaningful and cost-effective results.

Two other reasons may work to prevent companies from accounting for their marcom's eco footprint: the role of marketing and total carbon management. Rather than a strategic business function, marketing remains a utilitarian tool in many business people's minds. And, most companies focus on the footprint of either their entire operations or value chains of individual products.

What's your take? Is Life Cycle Assessment of marketing communications worth doing, and why? Does your company, or a company you know, measure or plan to measure your marcom's carbon footprint?

*** Image credits: bufivla and barockschloss

Peter Korchnak is a sustainable marketer, blogger, and speaker. As the principal of Semiosis Communications, he helps socially responsible businesses empower people, restore the planet, and achieve prosperity. On his Sustainable Marketing Blog and in his trainings and presentations he explores the intersection of marketing and sustainability. A Slovakia native and a Portland, Oregon resident, Peter enjoys guerrilla yardwork, ice hockey, trail running, and studying politics and culture.

Thanks for sharing!

Submitted by peterkorchnak on Tue, 03/02/2010 - 4:16pm.
@Don: I appreciate your taking the time to share the info.

@Richard: Well put. Marcom wastes too much energy and materials to communicate with its audiences without taking those audiences' needs into consideration. Do I really need a fancy binder to get and be sold (or not) on a company's message? No wonder many think marketing equals the production of smoke screens.

The Classic Marketing Faux Pas

Submitted by Richard Noss (not verified) on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 1:25pm.
To Don's point, "It will be interesting to see how the SEC's newly issued Guidance on Climate Change Disclosure Requirements for Public Companies will impact the way in which company's address the undocumented climate risks associated with their advertising and marcom supply chains." Just wait until the ball really gets rolling on product stewardship legislation! But in the near term, I'd like to mention the impact on brand value that is so near and dear to marcom's core responsibility. For companies in earnest pursuit of zero carbon footprint, to those merely beginning to launch sustainability initiatives, it's marketing's job to make sure their efforts are accurately and appropriately communicated to their stakeholders. Marc Stoiber, founder of Change(just acquired by Maddock Douglas), recently released his 2010 A Sustainability Brand Map Study. Very well researched and verified, it lists the 5 C's of Sustainability Branding. Number 2 on the list is Consumer Facing, in which he writes, "There are plenty of ways to improve corporate sustainability, but consumer facing changes will have the most immediate impact on public perception and, potentially, financial performance." Remarkably, marcom regularly overlooks the most basic and blaring vehicles of communication that their companies rely on to secure business, the packaging of proposals, RFQs, RFPs, qualification packages, product manuals, training materials, trade-show materials, etc., etc. Take the simple ring binder as an example. The vinyl binder business alone in the US far exceeds 100 Million units per year. Despite it's exceedingly nasty environmental footprint, it's still one of the most commonly used vehicles to package stakeholder communications targeted to secure business. Add to that PVC clear covers, PVC binding elements, and you have the majority of document packaging. Clearly marketing communications generates and consumes too much stuff...but it's also the type of stuff that creates the biggest faux pas.

A curve that’s ahead of the next curve.

Submitted by Don Carli (not verified) on Thu, 02/04/2010 - 4:05pm.

The lifecycle assessment and/or carbon footprinting of advertising and marcom is not a front burner issue for most brands for several reasons:

1. The spend against advertising and marcom line items is typically less than 10% of corporate revenues so they do not meet typical financial criteria for "materiality."

It will be interesting to see how the SEC's newly issued Guidance on Climate Change Disclosure Requirements for Public Companies will impact the way in which company's address the undocumented climate risks associated with their advertising and marcom supply chains.

http://www.sec.gov/rules/interp/2010/33-9106.pdf

"Companies that may not be directly affected by [capital expenditures to reduce emissions and, for companies subject to “cap and trade” laws,expenses related to purchasing allowances where reduction targets cannot be met] could nonetheless be indirectly affected by changing prices for goods or services provided by companies that are directly affected and that seek to reflect some or all of their changes in costs of goods in the prices they charge.

In addition to legislative, regulatory, business and market impacts related to climate change, there may be significant physical effects of climate change that have the potential to have a material effect on a registrant’s business and operations.

For some registrants, financial risks associated with climate change may arise from physical risks to entities other than the registrant itself.

Companies also may be dependent on suppliers that are impacted by climate change, such as companies that purchase agricultural products from farms adversely affected by droughts or floods.

There have [also] been increasing calls for climate-related disclosures by shareholders of public companies. This is reflected in the several petitions for interpretive advice submitted by large institutional investors and other investor groups

While materiality determinations may limit what is actually disclosed, they should not limit the information that management considers in making its determinations. Improvements in technology and communications in the last two decades have significantly increased the amount of financial and non-financial information that management has and should evaluate, as well as the speed with which management receives and is able to use information.

A registrant should not limit its evaluation of disclosure of a proposed law only to negative consequences. Changes in the law or in the business practices of some registrants in response to the law may provide new opportunities for registrants. For example, if a “cap and trade” type system is put in place, registrants may be able to profit from the sale of allowances if their emissions levels end up being below their emissions allotment. Likewise, those who are not covered by statutory emissions caps may be able to profit by selling offset credits they may qualify for under new legislation.

Legal, technological, political and scientific developments regarding climate change may create new opportunities or risks for registrants. These developments may create demand for new products or services, or decrease demand for existing products or services. For example, possible indirect consequences or opportunities may include:

• Decreased demand for goods that produce significant greenhouse gas emissions;

• Increased demand for goods that result in lower emissions than competing products;74

• Increased competition to develop innovative new products;

• Increased demand for generation and transmission of energy from alternative energy sources; and

• Decreased demand for services related to carbon based energy sources, such as drilling services or equipment maintenance services.

These business trends or risks may be required to be disclosed as risk factors or in MD&A. In some cases, these developments could have a significant enough impact on a registrant’s business that disclosure may be required in its business description."

Don Carli
Senior Research Fellow
The Institute for Sustainable Communication

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