Fear of greenwashing drives marketer to found a sustainability tech start up.
As anyone in marketing knows, there can often be internal challenges between what a company would like to say they do and what they actually do.
“This is not a new problem, but it is new in terms of sustainability’’ says Founder and CEO, Felicity Christie. “As consumers demand goods from businesses with more responsible practices, and as governments increasingly regulate for these improvements, the pressure is on to be seen to be doing the right thing. But we’ve all seen the overstating of doing good and how that can backfire. Now there’s fear about committing to anything which is almost as bad.”
Felicity says that the answer to any of these marketing claims is to simply be able to substantiate and show evidence of what good things your business is doing on your own sustainability journey. Easily said. It was this problem to solve that has created new start up technology business, Sustainability Marketing Group.
It turns out that there are many businesses searching for a solution to get their ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) house in order. Jose Alomajan is the Chief Customer Officer (fractional) for Sustainability Marketing Group and has seen over the last two years in his marketing strategy business, that clients are increasingly having to report to boards and customers on ESG. Presently, it’s the usual, pull some numbers and create a pack approach. It’s that ad hoc reporting which this new tech platform is looking to replace. There has been reasonable progress in basic carbon counting, which all helps, but it isn’t enough to meet most reporting requirements.
Chief Commercial Officer, Stu Christie, has worked for many years in start-up seed funding and venture capital in New Zealand. He says “ESG reporting is now a fundamental item of disclosure treated no differently than reporting financials. Increasingly, to access funding for businesses either through investors or to access any form of impact fund, the reporting must be there. It must be consistent and meet international standards.”
Christie goes on to say that many large corporates are well underway with a sustainability plan. Or they were, until they realized that scope 3 reporting would involve them reporting on suppliers and in some cases customers. This now means that many smaller businesses are having to get their heads around ESG if they want to supply the corporate customer. There is pressure on under-resourced SMEs to come up with a plan and a degree of pressure on bigger organisations to bring their community of suppliers along as one functioning ESG compliant ecosystem.
So, for Sustainability Marketing Group, that is the mission; to solve ESG reporting for small to medium sized businesses by making it accessible and easy on a user-friendly platform, that is realistically priced. In turn, if supported by corporate customers they can solve their scope 3 issues for not just themselves but industry wide.
Are we there yet? Felicity Christie states that the platform development is underway with guidance from our hugely experienced Technology Advisor, Peter Newey (previously of ASB and Xero previously). Sustainability Marketing Group is working at an industry level to ensure requirements are met so the tool works effectively to reduce overhead for SMEs. “The goal is a degree of collaboration so that as a kiwi company we can show the world that we can address ESG and sustainability challenges, no problem at all,” says Felicity.
For updates on the platform, you can join a waitlist at www.sustainabilitymarkting.co.nz
Media Contact:
Felicity Christie – Founder and CEO
+64 27 2775925
The Sustainability Marketing Group is a New Zealand based, independent, sustainability technology company for small to medium businesses and corporate companies looking to embrace sustainability as the future of good business. Sustainability Marketing Group is developing a platform that will make it easy for businesses to demonstrate their environmental, social, and governance commitments.