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Episode hosted by: Paul Frampton, Global President at CvE.
Paul – 00:00:01: Welcome back to another episode of Time for a Reset. This morning I’m delighted to be joined by Gavin Sheppard. Gavin is the CEO of the sustainability platform Pinwheel, which he founded with former UK home secretary Amber Rudd and ad entrepreneur Rupert Howell. Pinwheel is all about enabling business to fund high-impact carbon and biodiversity projects around the world. But I’m going to let Gavin kind of update and unpack that for you. Gav also has a couple of decades of experience in the marketing industry. Most latterly, he was the marketing Director CMO for Smart Energy and he’s had several other kinds of senior marketing roles. So Gav has a perspective on kind of marketing both from being in a marketing department within a big brand, but also now thinking about the role that sustainability plays in marketing and running an organization where obviously marketing and storytelling is part of his day-to-day life. So Gav. Welcome.
Gavin – 00:00:58: Good morning. Nice to see you.
Paul – 00:01:00: Yeah, nice to see you too. So you know where we start, we start with asking people if they had a big red button in front of them what their reset would be.
Gavin – 00:01:08: Yeah. So I’m going to slam my hand down on that red button on the assumption that a business can magic away its carbon emissions by offsetting and that you can do that for as little as £5 a ton. I think that’s crap. We’re going to be said it good.
Paul – 00:01:25: Well, a provocative start is always a good one. Tell us a little bit more about why you think businesses need to do something in this area. There’s lots of different terms thrown around sustainability, greenwashing, climate change. Where is the real core focus that you want to make a change in? Why did you found Pinwheel, I guess?
Gavin – 00:01:53: So let’s look at why businesses feel the need to intervene in sustainability, full stop. There’s a growing, I think, becoming overwhelming pressure from key stakeholders for businesses to do something. Now that might be policy-makers and a lot of businesses there and regulated markets in sustainability, but it’s certainly from staff, it’s from customers, it’s from investors. The number of brands that come certainly to Pinwheel and say, every pitch that I’m going for is a B2B brand or in every focus group as a BTC. Sustainability is high up there on the agenda, and we see this. Forgive me for reading you these stats, but 98% of consumers believe brands have responsibility. Rate world better. 84% say sustainable is important to them when making purchases. 64% of millennials won’t take the job if the employer doesn’t have strong sustainability policies. 83% are more loyal to companies who do. In B2B, 73% of large businesses say sustainability is becoming more important than they’re making purchase decisions. So you’ve got this huge pressure sort of from all sides to do something and I think that’s leading to CMOs in particular, I think, and CEOs to say, we need to do something here. We need to make a claim. We need to put our flag in the sand. And I think the issue where I want to press that reset, I think, is that there’s a pursuit of a claim rather than pursuit of making a difference. And I’ll give it I saw a fascinating brief from it. I won’t tell you who from, but a household brand that we will all know. And it said the top line was this we want to be perceived as the most sustainable brand in our category. Be perceived. And I said, be perceived versus B. No, it all can’t be, but we want to be perceived. And you go, okay, so you’re starting off with an objective to greenwash, right? And I think that’s where businesses and brands are getting into trouble.
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Paul – 00:04:07: Right. I mean, the statistics you shared, they demonstrate that the vast majority of people want to see this. And as you say, ultimately brands talk all day long about being customer-centric and it should be authentic rather than, as you say, just greenwashing. So maybe could you just help define what you would define by sustainability? Because I think that might help. I think some listeners like kind of they know what it means, but equally, they hear different definitions from different people.
Gavin – 00:04:40: So what we’re interested in, my particular interest in Pima’s particular interest is in environmental and ecological sustainability. So that starts within your own supply chain. Things like plastics, carbon emissions, about travel and flights and all of those things. We all have an impact on the environment. I had an impact this morning. I came to work, I drove to the station and got on a train and bought a coffee on the way. All of these have an environmental impact, right, as uncle. So that is something that we can’t, in many cases, avoid, but we can control by the decisions we take in our own supply chains. So number one, how is their brand treading lightly on the planet and other things that live here on this planet with us? Secondly, what is a brand doing to repair the damage that it’s doing and it has historically done and businesses like it have historically done? This is then about intervening outside of your supply chain and saying, we have made a bit of a mess undeniably so, how do we go about cleaning up some of that mess? And what this isn’t about is going back and living in caves and saying, actually we can’t trade as a business anymore. It’s about saying we have a responsibility to trade in a way that treads lightly on the planet. Otherwise we are taking enormous risks with our future, actually, frankly, as businesses and brands, but with our customers and with their children and with their children and with us investors and employees and so on, with how they live on this planet. And that, for me, is the top priority, really, of any businesses. And I love that long term future.
Paul – 00:06:32:That phrase tread lightly on the planet, has really stuck with me. And there’s a couple of things I’d love to kind of dig a little bit more into. The first is like, your your articulation of the impact this can have. I remember when we chatted when we were preparing for this a few weeks ago, you talked about how Europe could look dramatically different in just a few decades if things continue. Could you maybe just spend some of that? And then I’d love to talk about your bit around, actually. Sustainability has got to be top to bottom, right? It can’t just be an advertising campaign going, we are perceived to your point, but maybe let’s just start with the first Bit point . Like, what, in your words, what kind of impact could we be looking at?
Gavin – 00:07:15: I think we can see the impact now, can’t we? I mean, you can see the impact on our we can argue about whether it’s made worse by brexit, but you can see the impact now of changing weather patterns and the food shortages that we’re seeing now. Clearly, if bees die out, we use a pesticide. We’re licensing pesticides in this country which kill bees. Now, if the bees die out, we’ve all got a big problem, right? What’s happening, tragically, in Ukraine will be nothing compared to what will happen to gobs globally if we have an issue with bees. And so you can start to understand how changes in our environment and disappear in biodiversity has an enormous impact on the way in which we live our lives and the ability to live our lives, and the stress and the costs that that puts on us as individuals, let alone the broader ecosystem around us. So the idea that this is something that we’re dealing with decades or hundreds of years in the future is a madness. It becomes worse and worse over time. Carbon that we emit today is going to stay in the atmosphere for a long period of time. And so, really, there is what was that quote about the best time to plant a tree 100 years ago and the second best time is today? We should have been making these changes before. We haven’t. Let’s make them now.
Paul – 00:08:53: Great. And I guess that takes us quite neatly onto why you founded Pinwheel and what your mission and your kind of passion is to try and change how brands get involved. Not just in this conversation, because that’s obviously kind. Of just the kind of almost advocate about how brands get involved in authentically making a difference in their supply chain and how they tread lightly on the planet. So tell us a bit more about that.
Gavin – 00:09:21: Yeah, so, as you said, I set up and ran a CMO Smart Energy GB for a number of years and fascinated, I think, in the change in that period of time of consumer attitude to sustainability. So when we started that campaign, we sat down in focus groups, consumers, we almost didn’t want to make it anything about green. The whole Smart meter rollout is fundamentally about a sort of a green and more sustainable grid. But we didn’t want to make it about that because there was a sense of consumers were a bit sort of tired of this green messaging over that five years. That totally transformed. And by the time I left Smart in the Energy GB, you can see it now. Smart Energy GB is advertising the sustainability and the green credentials are right up there at the top. That was a change in consumer attitudes. So I was interested in I think when I left Smart in the Energy GB, I was interested in that shift and what brands, therefore, were being compelled to do to respond to it. And the more we looked at it, I started talking to Group at Howell HHCL, actually ran McCann Worldgroup and ITV and so on, Amber Rudd, who said was climate change, Robert Cheesewright, who is my Policy Director at Smart Energy GB. And we sort of started to look at what are the issues in this for businesses, not just in how they show up to the market in this, but what they’re actually doing. We thought there were two issues, mainly around carbon offset and voluntary carbon offset markets. One is, and they’re both a return on investment, right? So one is return on investment for the planet. $2 billion a year is being spent in carbon offset in the voluntary carbon offset markets. It’s an enormous global market and it will become much bigger. So is that question one, is that $2 billion having an impact on the planet or the biggest impact that it can on the planet? We don’t think so. Question two, and actually, it seems like the Guardian investigation a couple of weeks ago would say that almost all of this money is not having an impact. Question two, then is, are the brands themselves driving a return on investment for that cash? And almost certainly not. So when we speak to brands about this, they say, I’m doing it with the stuff and I believe it’s the right thing to do. Actually, I’m worried that it’s not having the effect that I thought it would have on the planet, but it’s certainly not cutting through to my consumers in the way that I thought it would. Right. And the reason for that, I think, is because it generally lives in the pages of the annual report. It lives in super on an ad, and it’s not something that consumers live and breathe. And I feel like every founder has one of these moments, but this one is true. So in my moment, I’ve just heard this brief from quite a big brand, or this issue from quite a big brand. And I went to get some food on the way home from waitress, and they gave me a little green coin. You put it in the box and the charity you want to donate to and I thought, this is fascinating because I know that waitress donate to charity. Every UK supermarket does, but I know that waitress do it because they give me some agency in the decision. I put my little coin in the box. And that really that very simple human insights that if we want to be asked our opinion and by doing so, it helps us recall and it helps to notice if I said to you Paul, what do you think of this yellow sweatshirt I’m wearing? You go, I think it’s a bit bright for Thursday Gap. And somebody says to you later, what color sweatshirt is wearing when you go, Yellow? . We talked about it. If I had said that right, and somebody says later, what kind of what directions? When you’d go, I have absolutely no idea. You don’t need to know, don’t need to notice. And that really is at the heart of Pinwheel, which is saying, let’s take a brand’s money and make sure that it’s working as hard as possible here and now for the planet. And then let’s make sure that the way in which that intervention shows up in the minds of consumers or staff is part of a conversation and the collaboration is meaningful. And we build a platform that effectively allows that to happen. And we did it for the Jubilee and we’ve done some bit for big brands. We’ve done it freeze art fairs around the world at the moment, and then it gets some fantastic results from it. So it’s about providing that return on investment, both for the planet and for the brand that’s making the investment.
Paul – 00:13:48: Brilliant. Brilliant. Thank you for that. That’s really helpful to understand. And you obviously talked in that about the disconnect between, I guess, what brands are really doing and how they’re communicating and how they’re engaging consumers by the agency that you touched on with waitrose, so what do you think brands, what’s best in class? Like, what should brands really be doing to actually bring this through the line from it starts at the board table with shareholders that I always look at Unilever and Paul Polman as kind of a fantastic, kind of top down kind of example of we do tread very heavily on the planet as Unilever, therefore we need to take some responsibility. And even since he’s left, I feel like that’s carried on. That legacy is carried on, but there aren’t probably quite as many examples as we’d want. So what does Good look like?
Gavin – 00:14:39: Look Unilever. A fantastic example. And Paul Polman’s leadership in this area, if you haven’t read his book Net Positive, read it because it’s a fantastic manifesto for what we believe should happen, which is about sorting the issues in your supply chain, but then intervening outside of your supply chain as well. So if we think about and really what Pinwhell is about is intervening outside the supply chain. So I’m going to talk about that most. So this is about if we look at carbon as an example, this is about taking best practice in this. And people like Microsoft and Planner have led the way in their investments. Here is about setting a suitably high internal cost of carbon. So I talked at the beginning about if you look at voluntary carbon markets, they will tell you that you can offset your carbon for $5 per ton. You can’t. In our view, people like Microsoft and Canonical have set out $100 per ton and they’re investing. Absolutely. Even though it knows the UK government would say that the actual cost to society of a ton of carbon is £250 per ton. Right.
Paul – 00:15:53: Difference from $5
Gavin – 00:15:55: Disconnect. You disconnect. So best practice looks like setting a credible carbon price and then invest in that by taking carbon out of the short-term carbon cycle and put it into the long-term carbon cycle, where that carbon can be locked away for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We think there are some very interesting nature based ways to do this. You can do it by bearing biomass. You do it by enhanced weather in a block. Seagrass is a very good example of this. But this is effectively about long-term carbon removal storage. It’s not about shorts and things like fossil protection. As important as that is, it’s cheap to do and there’s a little additionality, in our view. So most of the money goes there. The money needs to be shifted to long term carbon. But then aside carbon, it’s about this. We see an interesting interplay between carbon and biodiversity and waste. So if I’ll give you the best example of this, which is or my favorite example of this, which is the see how seagrass, sea turtles and plastics work together, either positively or negatively. So the negative cycle in that ecosystem is that sea turtles are in decline. Green turtles are in decline because of plastics and destruction of nesting sites. Decline in sea turtles means a decline in the health of sawgrass because sea turtles, green turtles are effectively farm seagrass. Seagrass requests carbon many, many times more than 28 times faster than trees. Wow. So so you have a, you know, destruction of se grass, therefore less carbon being removed from the atmosphere. Now, if you intervene in that ecosystem in a positive way, you get the opposite effect. So you protect sea turtle nesting site, for example, and you remove plastics from the ocean, which means you get more sea turtles, which means you get more seagrass. Seagrass filters plastics from the ocean in a phenomenon known as Neptune balls cause microplastic to clump up so they can wash up on beaches and not stay in the oceans, which means more sea turtles, which means more seagrass, which means less carbon. Right. Infinity loop. So in our view, there’s an opportunity for a brand to intervene in these ecosystems in a way that has sort of an exponential benefit. Now it has a second benefit, which is the magic of that storytelling. So if I tell that story to a customer or an employee about, this is how my brand is showing up here, this is what we’re doing and this is the magic of that intervention, it’s inspiring, right? You’re nodding and smiling at this. If I said to you, I know I’ve just removed ten tons of carbon, reaction to your face is just that blank, right? And this is what’s happened. This is how businesses can get it right, both for their brand and for the planet, by doing stuff which it actually works and is magical. The answers are at our fingertips. We have to invest in them or we have to show up to customers in a way that inspires them.
Paul – 00:19:04: Well, I was kind of smiling because I think two things. One, as you say, storytelling connects with us emotionally. And I think what you just demonstrated is you have the brilliance of storytelling from your marketing career, but you’ve obviously also had to get on board a lot of technical understanding of exactly how this stuff works. You just explained it in a very accessible way. I think quite often, as you say, when it comes to our carbon footprint, the language is quite inaccessible for a consumer, or that it’s like, put me or my family in a position where I feel like I can do something that has a real impact. And I guess that’s very much what you’ve created Pinwheel for. Have you got some good examples of brands that are doing good storytelling around some of the stuff they’re doing?
Gavin – 00:20:04: No, because I think the brands shortcut to a very short claim on this. We’re carbon neutral. Let’s just say we’re carbon neutral. We can’t explain how or why. Nobody will care too long. So we’ll just shortcut to a very pithy claim. I think this is where the huge opportunity lies, frankly. We have brands that are starting to do this with Pinwhell, McCann, World Group, Freeze, Art Fairs, Jubilee, Matt Did and a light media that we both know and love have all adopted this and are on that journey. And I think we’ll make it work and work really well. But I think this is where the huge opportunity lies, that it’s a we’re familiar with the sort of concept of hero hub and hygiene. I think, at best, people see sustainability with hygiene. We just have to say that we’re sustainable, we need to be able to make sustainability claim that misses the opportunity to hero it. And I think that’s where there is a real you can look at brands like Innocent, I suppose, who make a real play of their sustainability, but even then, I don’t think they tap into the magic of that sort of outside of value chain interventions and the difference that can make. Mars actually did a great Hope brief. Hashiba was a really good, I thought, quite inspiring intervention. So perhaps I’m unfair to say that there are none, but I certainly think.
Paul – 00:21:48: It’s, let’s be honest.
Gavin – 00:21:53: Yeah, look, neither of us can sort of recall our top ten favorite interventions in this space, and that’s probably quite telling,
Paul – 00:22:03: Right. But I’m guessing on the counter of that, you can probably reel off quite a few brands that are greenwashing and claiming something in order to look good and hope to connect with their consumers. So, yeah. Is that happening more? Is that is that being picked up more?
Gavin – 00:22:23: Yeah. I mean, in 2022, the number of ads banned for greenwash and tripled. And we know that it’s top of the list for, for the ASA, more worryingly for brands, it’s top of the list for the CMA. More sort of consequences, I suppose, of trouble in the CMA than even the ASA. There’s a lot of times that Ad banned. Yesterday, I think I saw in the news this morning by the ASA for using the hashtag Make Change fly, traveling around our planet and protecting it. And our Lufthansa said, oh, well, we didn’t mean to claim that flying didn’t destroy the planet or anything, but I think that whether it’s banned or not, I think what’s much more worrying to or should be much more worrying to CMOs is not necessarily what the ASA thinks, but what a whole generation of influencers in this area think. Because there are lot, and I follow lots of them on Instagram who are dedicated to exposing these sort of greenwashing. Greta Thuneberg herself is a pretty sort of outspoken, critical bit. So I think Branch in a really difficult position, right, because you have to do something. The pressure to act is overwhelming and quite rightly in my view, but the risks of just intervening in a very sort of claim driven, detail, light way, I think, are immense and growing.
Paul – 00:24:01: For sure. You’ve been a CMO in big businesses and, you know, often, I guess, the reach that the CMO has into the organ, quite often, let’s be honest, the CMO isn’t always in all of the conversations that they probably need to be about the supply chain or about parts of it. So it sounds to me like this puts some responsibility on the CMO to go and really find out what is happening in their business rather than just receive an internal brief and go, okay? advertising or marketing has to play a role to get this message out. Just assuming that that works is a bit like a customer experience claim. You would go and check it on the product, whether the product does what it says. You wouldn’t just go and put that out there. What does this change in? What does a CMO or a head of marketing need to do differently, in your opinion?
Gavin – 00:24:57: I think you need to get comfortable with the detail. Right? And you need to ask the questions of what exactly are we doing? How are we substantiating this claim? And to interrogate one step further, how are we substantiating this all with carbon offsetting? By doing what? What are we spending? How are we calculating our carbon? And what projects are we investing in? Give me the detail or make sure there’s somebody in your team who has that detail or there’s somebody in your organization has that detail. Because unless you can get comfortable with that detail, you shouldn’t be making the claim. I think it’s the top three brand reputation risk, right? And it’s going to become worse and worse and worse. I don’t know a single CMO who isn’t being told by key stakeholders that sustainable is important. I also know very few CMOs who really understand the sustainability credentials within their business and by their own mission. So get comfortable with the detail. Do something because consumers are expecting it, but get comfortable with the detail. Make sure that you can stand behind that claim and make sure that you’re intervening both within your own supply chain, but outside it as well.
Paul – 00:26:13: Yeah, good. Okay. Yeah. That’s great advice. And you touched on it a little bit earlier. Some of the examples of how Pinwheel is kind of enabling brands to actually kind of do this. Could you maybe give a couple of really your favorite use cases so far?
Gavin – 00:26:31: Yes, Freeze. Is my favorite one at the moment because we live with them. We did London. We’ve done LA. We’ve just got to take it to New York. So Freeze is the world’s leading art fair, brilliant focus on sustainability. A genuine, I think, focused on sustainability and wanting to do the right thing. They worked with Pinwheel to support some fantastic carbon and biodiversity projects around the world, some truly wonderful projects. But they’re doing it in a way that gives their customers, via Pinwheel, some say in how those decisions are made. So when you book your tickets for Freeze outfit, you get to choose where you want your fair, that investment to be made amongst those projects. Now, you and I know if I was to put out an ad and get 1.5, 2% engagement, I would be pretty thrilled. You could get a 15% customer engagement. 15% customer engagement. 20% of those people are taking two or more actions on the platform. They’re voting and they’re finding out more about the projects and so on. And then they’re going on and putting on social media to put my tickets for Freeze. They’re supporting these fantastic sustainability projects. This is, in my mind, how where the opportunity lies. And clearly, well, I think Pinwell rises to meet that opportunity, which is doing the right thing. Undoubtedly, Freezes money is making an impact now on the planet, clearly in wonderful ways. But the impact on their brand and on their consumer experience is also transformed from where it would be otherwise. So it’s a really good example. As I said, Jubilee did the same thing, the late Queens Jubilee a year ago, who our very first customer. So, yeah, we’re inspired by these projects every day, right? And what our job really is, is to get those in front of consumers and to leverage those to create some brand love.
Paul – 00:28:32: And that example, those two examples are great. I can’t imagine they were particularly heavy lifting and it’s been integrated quite neatly to give the consumer agency and the decision, in part of the customer experience that has enriched that customer experience and to your point, made that touch point more kind of memorable with a consumer. I mean, what brand wouldn’t want to do that? And whilst you’re doing it, you’re also having a positive impact. So, yeah, it’s a great example.
Gavin – 00:28:59: Yeah. And what it does for is it puts you in a position of having a genuine conversation and collaboration with the consumer. To me, as a former CMO, that’s where magic lies, right? That’s gold. Because this isn’t about spend more money with us. This isn’t about, look how cool our product is, or anything like that. It’s just about going, hey, you and I, one to one, are going to collaborate to do something quite good. You don’t have to spend any money, you just have to spend a little bit of time. And we’re going to have a conversation about this, the brand and the consumer, the brand and the employer are going to talk about this. We’re going to collaborate, we’re going to do something good together. As a result of the relationship that we have now, that builds relationships, it builds trust, it builds recall of the activity, and it’s a gift to the consumer. I’m not asking you to do anything different. I’m just like that little green token in waitress is a gift to me as a consumer, right? Because I’ve done my shopping. Don’t get too green tokens for every pound I spend or anything like that. I just get a little green token and if I’ve got a kid with me, they’ll give one to them as well and I put it in the box and I’ve done something good and I walk out of that shop with a little feel good on my phone. Pinwheel basically, is just that made digital focused on sustainability and delivered with a ton of really brilliant content that stays in the mind and projects that actually make a massive difference.
Paul – 00:30:25: No, I love the way you articulate that. And as you’re talking, I’m thinking, of course, as we’ve discussed, this needs to happen for the reason it needs to happen. There’s an urgency to do it. But also, brands are often trying to find these affinity areas or passion areas about what do people care about and how do we, how do we engage with them? Like, oh, we’ll have music as a territory and then we’ll get people engaged. But, if 98% of people to your stat area earlier care about this, you’ve got something that connects with pretty much everybody in some way. What you just got to think about is for your particular brand and products and lines of businesses, what are the types of projects that would actually really resonate with people.
Gavin – 00:31:10: Yeah, and the good thing about, I think our model on this is that one, we’ve got an increasing amount of data that tells us what different consumers are interested in in different markets. So we can give some of that insight up front. And as we develop, we’ll have more and more of it. We’ll take a lot of the guesswork away, but it’s also about because the choice what you’re not having to do is sit in a boardroom and go to, I think, A or B. You’re going to consumers. Well, look, here’s a little portfolio that we think is cool. We can see what consumers choose and we can optimize it over time. So you’re not even having to make, in a sense, do that guesswork because you’re giving consumers the opportunity to take. Now you can derive from that lots of insight as to where else you might want to intervene because clearly you can’t do everything all the time. You’ve made priorities and choices and if I know what drives my consumer’s passion, I know where I can intervene for most, frankly, return for my investment.
Paul – 00:32:09: Yeah, no, great. So just going to change tack as we come towards the end of the chat, Gav, I mean, people listening to you are going to think, well, Gav’s got it all together. He’s smart, he’s been to London Business School, he’s done two decades of marketing, he’s now a CEO, he’s raised money to be able to set something up. But of course, everybody’s always a work in progress. You’ve gone from being a CMO inside a business with some stability because a business is there to actually founding something because you care about making a difference. So what have you learned personally and what are the things that you’re having to think about as you kind of build a business? I guess?
Gavin – 00:32:51: Well, yeah, good question. When we first started this, Rupert, who clearly has been through this several times before, said to me, gab, when it’s your own thing, the highs are higher, the lows are lower. And that is absolutely true. When we win, we’re euphoric. There are moments of uncertainty that you have to get used to as a startup business and that’s a challenge. I think I’m now clearer than I ever have been that business is a team sport and I’m clear than I ever have been at the extent of that team. And so, Pinwheel , I hate to found a thing, really, because I’ve played a role in this, but there are fantastic investors who put their own hard-earned money on the line as individuals to get this across the line and to get this up and running. There are people almost older, there’s a room of people outside this room who almost without exception, have taken massive PayPal from big, secure corporate jobs to come and do this and to work on this and to work with a small startup. There are brands who have adopted a different we’re putting forward a different strategy to brands, and there were some very brave brands who have adopted that as a strategy. All of this is the team around it, and I know it’s a cliche or something I can put on my own, but actually all of these things are required. And I think now, from my experience as a CEO, but also in a startup, have a much more sense of how that team works together and needs to work together and how we are mutually interdependent. And certainly I am enormously dependent. I always have felt I’m enormously dependent on the people around me, but I can see that much more clearly elusively now.
Paul – 00:34:58: Yeah, nice and final question for you. As an ex CMO, or probably, I’m guessing, as a CEO and CMO kind of merged together in your business, what’s the last bit of advice or the one thing you would ask a marketeer to take away from this conversation?
Gavin – 00:35:18: I’ve always said to marketeers that I’ve worked with, when you become responsible for marketing a brand, you lose the ability to see that brand as anybody else sees it, as anybody external sees it. You have to work hard to understand how your brand is perceived in the eyes of your consumers, in the eyes in the eyes of colleagues, in the eyes of the investors and stakeholders. Because you can’t see it, you are unable to see it. And the brand doesn’t live your brand doesn’t live in the brand book. Your brand isn’t what you said is it is what lives in the minds of consumers. It doesn’t matter what you say, well, this is our brand purpose. What your consumers believe is your brand purpose is your brand purpose. Right? So you’ve got to work very hard to understand understand that, to dig into it, to get beneath the surface of it, and and to remind yourself day in, day out, because as soon as you go, well, actually, I know my brand better than anybody, and that’s it. That’s a that’s a phrase I’ve heard a million times in 20 years after, well, I know the brand better than anybody. No, you don’t. You know it worse than anybody, and you’ve got to remind yourself of that.
Paul – 00:36:32: I love that. Well, look, I think you’ve given a great rally cry to marketers to really rethink or reset what they actually are doing in the sustainability space, to rethink what actually offsetting carbon means and actually given some really exciting kind of examples of how brands could be doing magical kind of storytelling around this and doing what’s right for the planet and improving customer experience. When you think about it like that, it’s kind of like it’s mean no brainer, really, isn’t it? Which I know you know, but hopefully, for those listening to this, it will create some trigger for people to go and kind of have some different conversations in their business. So look, Gav, I really appreciate the time. Thanks for your time.
Gavin – 00:37:18: Thanks for having me, Thank you. Take care.
