Sustainability isn’t just a buzzword these days — it’s insurance against reputational risk, the key to new market opportunities, a safeguard against climate change and a critical element for staying competitive. And companies that are resistant to adopting a defined sustainability standards will feel the effects. “Mind the Gap: How Marketers Feel About Sustainability,” a new report by marketing website The Drum and marketing agency gyro, finds that while the majority of marketers feel a moral imperative to incorporate sustainability practices into business, only 38 percent of the companies they work for have defined strategies.
Over two hundred brands and agencies were surveyed for the report to understand how marketers perceive their organization’s impact on the environment, the barriers they encounter and how they view their roles alongside the C-suite in driving the sustainability agenda. An absence of management urgency, a lack of buy-in from management and cost of initial investments were identified as the three principle barriers faced by forward-thinking marketers. What’s more, 52 percent of marketers that participated in the survey said their companies did not have sustainability strategies.