Strengthen the Brand

Collaborate with your marketing team to support sustainability claims

Procurement can play a vital role in supporting the marketing and communications teams by substantiating sustainability claims and helping to avoid greenwashing.^{1, 2} Your team can gather and share detailed information on supply chain sustainability practices, achievements, and success stories.^{3, 4, 5} Working with marketing can also help you stay abreast of shifting customer interests in sustainability and better inform the data you focus on collecting.

EXAMPLE: Sourcing data is needed to advertise ocean plastic

A computer retailer integrated recycled “ocean-bound plastic” into some of its products but could not advertise the specific product models this applied to due to a lack of upstream data. The result was an inability to gauge customers' preferences for sustainability attributes.⁶

EXAMPLE: Consumer brands adopting carbon labelling

Companies such as Unilever, Just Salad, and Logitech are adopting carbon labelling, a concept modelled after nutrition labels to represent the emissions embodied in the making of a product. Collecting accurate data to calculate product-specific carbon labels requires working closely with partners across the value chain.^{7, 8, 9}

Work with marketing to promote sustainable behaviour

Marketing is a key link between you and the end users in your value chain. Their activities affect the rest of the supply chain. For this reason, it is important to provide feedback to your marketing team on any activities that may undermine value chain sustainability, such as promoting unnecessary consumption. There is also an opportunity to work with marketing to inspire sustainable behaviours among customers, like normalising product stewardship¹⁰ and increasing demand for sustainably sourced products.¹¹ Consider co-creating guidelines with your marketing team to encourage positive marketing practices. These can be further formalised as a ‘responsible marketing code’.¹²

EXAMPLE: IKEA promotes customer behaviour change

IKEA promotes customer behavioural change around sustainability through its “Live Lagom” online community platform. The platform provides a space to share stories, tips, and examples around sustainable living with customers.^{13, 14} In addition, on Black Friday, IKEA Canada chose to forego offering customer discounts. Instead, they invited customers to sell back used IKEA products at double the usual rate to signal their support for creating a circular business model.¹⁵