MarPro - The Marketing Procurement Podcast

Celia Landesberg | EcoVadis

November 10, 2021 Rusty Pepper & Dana Small & Celia Landesberg Episode 12
MarPro - The Marketing Procurement Podcast
Celia Landesberg | EcoVadis
Show Notes Transcript

This week on MarPro we talk with Celia Landesberg from EcoVadis, the universal sustainability ratings platform for public and private organizations. that allows companies to assess their suppliers' environmental and social performance.

Listen now... you'll be glad you did!





Dana:

Hey everybody. This is Dana small, and

Rusty:

this is rusty pepper.

Dana:

Welcome to another edition of Maher pro

Rusty:

the marketing procurement podcast. Nailed it. Yes, we did. So what are you doing after this podcast?

Dana:

I am driving to the airport and I'm headed to the Las Vegas. Got to get some peace and quiet, which sounds. But if there are no children in my hotel room, I shall get my peace and quiet and be able to actually read a book for the

Rusty:

first time. Well, let's just hope that there's no children in your hotel room. Yes. That would be, I think at this point, is this your first trip to Vegas since the pandemic?

Dana:

Yeah, I used to go when I lived in LA once a month. So big, big fan. I used to get him all the time. He had a great time kinda message. Perhaps

Celia:

craps

Rusty:

craps. Yeah. We'll be interested to see how gets changed in this past year and a half and kind of the feel and the mood. Cause you know where I'm in Austin, everything's back to normal. Everything's proud. Everything's full it's restaurants are brick and packed. It's just trying to get workers in is difficult, but it'd be interesting to hear how it goes in Vegas. So have a good trip and be safe.

Dana:

What's I know. Right. Seriously. So, but on that note, we really should get to introducing, um, one of my favorite people that I met actually at a women's conference, um, her name is Sealy Landsberg. She is one of those great people who I think has had known what she's wanted to do since she was young. I think she's lucky in that perspective. I wish I had known when I was young, what I wanted to do. I think. Originally me and my cousin were going to live on top of the seven 11 and become lawyers and judges. So I ain't even Thai when I was little. Um, but CLE Celia is a very smart girl and she's even higher. And so Celia, I will let you introduce yourself, give a little people a little bit background about yourself and

Celia:

maybe. Perfect. Well, thank you for the introduction and thank you for having me today. If you aim high and you ended up on a roof, I think that's pretty good. Um, so exactly, even if it's a seven 11, we don't judge, you know, but from a background perspective, you know, you did highlight it correctly. It's really, I feel fortunate that I had some sort of vision as a young baby, basically, tweenager of what I wanted to do. And, you know, I sort of worked towards that and maintained my professional pillars of what I wanted to do. And here I am today. So from a background perspective, I was raised on the east coast and I was taught from day one that it wasn't good to waste things. Um, so that kind of fed my curiosity about waste and sustainability, which then grew into me becoming a vegetarian, starting when I was 10. And I learned all about sort of the supply chain of animals, which we don't need to get into. Um, and that kind of just set me on this journey where I started in every different arena that I was in with. Educational or internships, or then from a professional perspective, this trajectory of making sure that sustainability was always close to business decisions. Um, I spent a little time in the public sector wasn't for me, but I really, really aligned to the fact that. Sustainability made business sense. And if I could just help people making business decisions to get the right information at the time of the decision, I would be able to positively impact change beyond just my own action. So that kind of became a mission statement. And, you know, I worked through college and. Our office versus datability. I went to the university of Richmond. And the result of that was that I saw basically how cross stakeholder decisions got made as a college student, um, over four years. And so moving into the professional life, I ended up taking an interest in supply chain through some of my capstone research and. Channeled that into a sustainability startup that I worked at before. EcoVadis and, um, I've been at EcoVadis now for four years. So that brings me to EcoVadis and I'll give a quick overview of, of the company, but I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more, but what we do is really, you know, we're the leader in business sustainability readings. So we give companies of all sizes, industries, countries, et cetera. A verified credible performance rating on how they do across all sustainability topics. So environmental labor, and social business ethics and supply chain. Um, and we do that is key, right?

Dana:

I mean, because mainly people think, I think when I think sustainability using environmental, but there are so many more different areas. Right. And you guys actually cover all those

Celia:

different areas. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, I'll put you guys on the spot in a minute, but I think it's so important to understand the word sustainable in context of what we're talking about or who we're talking about. Um, so, you know, that's kind of one of my first questions back to you guys before we dig into this today is, you know, when you think of sustainability, what does it mean? What comes to mind? What topics, what things don't fit into it. Anything you want to kind of kick us off with? I've got a question though.

Dana:

Do you consider yourself a better looking and smarter Gretta? Thornburg?

Celia:

I think I'm just older than her

Dana:

and you can see yourself, like I am her, but I'm so much better

Rusty:

angry.

Dana:

Well, yeah, exactly. She doesn't have that smug look on her face, like all the time.

Celia:

Yeah, it's not kind of like a gen Z thing. I mean, you know, I'm a millennial, so.

Dana:

Thorough a quick joke in there. Yeah.

Celia:

I can't pick on another female. It's you know, keep doing great work.

Dana:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if anybody

Celia:

it's not a bad cop, 26 right now on stage doing something and I'm sitting in my apartment on a podcast. So who's talking about. Yeah.

Dana:

Talking to us. I mean, yeah, it couldn't get any worse.

Celia:

Yeah. Next year or in the night at the next cop summit, we'll have to do it there. Okay. Let's

Dana:

roll it back to the question that you talked about, which is sustainability rate. You know, from my perspective is procurement and supply chain and just a person in general to me, sustainability really is ethical and environmental. But I think for the most part, when I think sustainability, I think like everybody else thinks right, Hey, uh, you know, sample packaging and does it, you know, can we recycle it? And things of that sort are really the first thing that come to mind. But knowing the space and that there is so much more, it's sometimes hard to like, oh yeah, there's, you know, all these other facets that you really need to pay attention to like labor and things of that sort. So, yeah. I don't know. What about you rusty

Rusty:

from a marketing standpoint? I think when I think of sustainability, I think of opportunity. How do you help. Better position your brand. But the biggest problem, I think for a lot of markers is the fact that unless your culture is really embracing sustainability, it's really hard to put up that messaging behind it. And there's a, there's very few companies. If you really look at brands that embrace. Sustainable culture through and through from beginning to end their inception. I always question a lot of brands when I hear them talking and preaching about, but then you really look back at their history and they had never once on anything that was really effective, except from. Points within their advertising. And to me, that's, that could be really disruptive for a brand. And, but anyways, so is it from a marketer's mind, I look at it as opportunities, but you also have to position the right way where it's good for your brand. I also think of challenges. I mean, we do printing, we're a very large printer and we've been working on a big initiative as far as recyclable compostable. Water-based inks, all these different elements that are really important, the environment. And we've got some clients that are a hundred percent. If it doesn't have certifications, a certain amount of recyclable, it's not compostable. It's not, it's a non-starter for it. And they're moving millions and millions of units. So I look at that as opportunities, but at the same time, it's challenging. And today supply chain, paper alone is difficult. Trying to find a cycle. Paper is even harder. And so it does, it puts more pressure on the supply chain, the costs go up, you can't lean on your natural supply chain because they're out of it. And so anyways, that's what I, to answer your question, to go back to it, I think of opportunity, but also think of a lot of challenges just because not everybody, is there a lot of people preach, oh yeah, Gabby's stable. Great. It's going to be 30% more and let's go back to the other stuff and you hear, you see that a lot. And so as an organization, how do you get behind something when, you know, Your market's not going to always embrace that anyway. That's the way I see it.

Celia:

Yeah, no, I think it's all helpful context to have, and I'm sure everyone listening to this kind of thinks about sustainability slightly differently when it comes up. For me, when I think about just the definition of sustainability, of trying to use the same amount of resources to do more, to conserve for future use or future generation, whether or not that has anything to do with the environment isn't really relevant from purely a definition standpoint. So taking that kind of mindset with every problem we tackle, and if it's updating specs to make them more sustainable from a materials perspective. Surely specs have been updated before with material changes that maybe weren't sustainability-related but caused a strain. And how did you get through that, right? Or how did you sort of account for that change or that requirement for the business and move forward? So, um, I put you guys on the spot just to sort of highlight that it means something a little bit different to everybody, but in the context of procurement and trying to make it so that across all different categories, Even within marketing procurement, there's such a range of types of things that you're buying depending on the service or the swag or the paper or whatever it is that it needs to really be looked at. Even more specifically from kind of a category strategy perspective, but also from a organizational priority perspective of what does the organization value? Is it something local? Is it something that's a better material as it's something that's a smaller business? You know, there's all these things. Factors are trade-offs that accompany gets to kind of decide what they want to place value on from.

Rusty:

But when you break down the different elements of what you can define that fits into sustainability, you have the localization, your carbon footprint. How do you minimize how much your carbon footprint is as an organization? And so if somebody is buying something over in China, but they're selling it north America, they've got to buy it. There's less regulations. Typically on how that's being produced. And then they're having to either transport by ocean or by plane over here, then you got to truck it to wherever the facilities are versus localization of that end market sourcing and production. So even if they're not using as say, like FSC certified papers or something like that, but they're localizing and they're printing it local. How would a company measure. The sustainability of those efforts.

Celia:

I think there's always a way to measure it. I think again, back to how we define sustainability, I mean, a company's emissions are broken down into multiple scopes. So typically most of a company's emissions are present in their supply chain. Right? Who are they buying from? Where are they sourcing as well as other things like employee travel commute, et cetera, but just thinking about purchase goods and services. I mean, for a company they're always able to. Breakdown which category the admissions are in and make a determination of what they're able to reduce. And if perhaps they don't have the control of the operations or the control of the manufacturing to decrease that footprint, that's where the pressure or, um, sort of expectation gets pushed out to the supplier. That's doing the work, right. It's really a matter of where our mission's being created and who has control over. Essentially decreasing them. Right. So I think number one is figuring out as a company, where are your emissions coming from? And then figuring out strategies to reduce them. I also think beyond environmental, it's important to consider what types of practices and policies and actions that a company is taking to. Treat, um, kind of the environment, well, aside from just a carbon footprint perspective, but like you said, certifications of where something came from making sure that the product is safe for use end of life, if and how can it be recycled taking all of that into account holistically and then taking into account social and social and labor practices as well. Right. Is the employee paying a fair wage to either their workers or the supplier? In trying to doing the work, right. If it's a quote, sustainable environmentally friendly product, but it was made in a factory with forced labor, would you still want to buy that? Traceability is certainly a challenge, but I think. You know, as corporate buyers, it's the procurement professionals rule to be informed about whatever service or good or, or item that they're working on and being aware of what are the sustainability factors that are material for this event or this category, and being able to address those right, ask the right questions, evaluate the right documentation, and then make that decision. Which is

Dana:

basically where EcoVadis comes in, right where they do the ratings. And for like me as a procurement person, or even rusty, I guess, as a marketer, we could reach out to your company and, you know, sign up, sign in and basically see how sustainable a company is, whether it's approved or not, where it's at along the supply chain.

Celia:

Right. Yeah. And I think, you know, people want it to be like, as simple, I was news kind of like a light switch of like, oh, you want a sustainable supply chain? Just turn on the lights. Like doesn't exactly quite work like that. Um, but I think conceptually, yes, we, you know, we have this network of 80,000 companies or closer to 85,000, I think today that we redid where we're providing back. Overall score and a breakdown of what the supplier has done very well. And then it's up to you as the procurement professional to decide, is this enough for me? Right? Maybe they did really well in environment, but very poorly in labor. And you say, well, you know, they're not quite perfect on labor, but we really need a product with better materials. So we have to go this way and we'll work with them to improve. Right. It's um, We don't encourage or sort of promote a cut and run strategy. This isn't designed to be like a pass fail exercise that says you suck you're bad. You got no business, have a nice life because nobody really wins in that situation. So the output or, or sort of what you work towards is more continuous improvement, right? You as the procurement professional, make the decision of who you want to work with with all the information that. And then, you know, what direction they'll tend to then

Dana:

to me EcoVadis is pretty cool. Right? And now you guys have this partnership with teal book, or even though if you're not an EcoVadis customer, like I'm not, I'm a deal book customer. Now I can go in and quickly search for suppliers and can find out not only are they doing. Are they sustainable and have that reading there, which I think is super cool. And only a

Celia:

yes, partnerships are a big part of our model. I mean, we want this information to be able to be used where decisions are made, and if people are making decisions in tool book, let's get the ratings there. If people are making decisions in another P2P platform, let's push the data there. Um, we really want this to become. Business as usual. And, you know, I think we're pretty well-recognized as kind of a global standard as a sustainability score. So wherever companies are scorecarding suppliers, our rating should be there in a sort of future vision.

Rusty:

I think what's challenging is there's so many different certifications. How is a consumer and a business owner or executive can I know the difference between. Like, what is the best way? What's the gold standard. And cause everybody says, this is the gold standard. Well, who, who says that? And then also what are the benchmarks for that? And that's, that to me is just kind of curious because there's so many of them.

Celia:

Yeah, no, there is like sometimes call it the alphabet soup. Um, sir, all acronyms, but, um, it's a group wine just as a clarification. We are not a certification. We are a rating, right? So it's a benchmark and we look at the credible certifications from. All of the industries. So essentially our database of credible certifications, it's about 3000, 4,000 something crazy. Um, but each of those, you know, all certifications are not created equal to your point. So. Our team of experts. Does the work of a basically evaluating those industry standards and saying, does this meet the credible, um, expectations of being verified, having sort of an accepted standard in place versus, you know, Hey, we checked a few boxes and paid a hundred dollars and got a sticker, right? So, um, we're pretty discerning when it comes to what we treat as credible certification versus. I'll call it marketing, speak, or bandwagon hers, you know, insert your word. And so that's one way. Um, and I think when people look at the EcoVadis rating and methodology, it's, it's basically an umbrella rating, right? So we're taking into account all of the relevant material aspects for a certain category or for a certain geography and turning that into. Uh, questionnaire and then a scorecard. So, you know, to answer your question, the easiest way in a perfect world, there would be. Sort of standard rating that everyone uses. I would say we're not quite there, but you know, if you go Google EcoVadis ratings, you'll see lots of metals come up of how suppliers communicate that.

Dana:

So what would you say, like when you think of strategy as a whole, as a procurement person, you think, okay. We typically start with a low. What would you suggest to somebody, whether it's in marketing procurement? I mean, maybe specifically since that's our target audience and then you can make it a little bit bigger, but what would you suggest to somebody in marketing procurement as the low hanging fruit to take that first step, right. To moving their companies. So even if the company culture is doesn't have a big push, they can still at least start taking little steps to bring them.

Celia:

I think a really sort of easy, low, low effort, high reward thing to start doing is in your, whether it's RFX events or outreach to suppliers, or even existing partners that you have ask the open-ended question. Hi, I'm interested to know what additional value you can provide to us on sustainability and see what they come back with. Um, and kind of put the ball in the, in their court. I think that's a really easy way to open the conversation to say that your organization is interested or not necessarily making commitment. And you're not necessarily saying it will or will not impact. Their ability to do business, but you should, um, you know, for companies that are serious and have either initiatives in place that they want to promote or potentially sustainable offerings that they want to provide, that's a great opportunity for them to showcase.

Dana:

Yeah, that's a great one. It's just easy to write just an additional question and give me your guys's plan or what do you have? What do you not have? I think definitely can provide information and then maybe give them a little bit of a nudge.

Rusty:

I like that, but here's the thing. If the person that is asking that question, doesn't have the juice or ability to inflect change. If ball's short. And so as an organization, what are some of the key challenges facing organizations, whether it's writing from marketing or marketing procurement, or just the organization to start standing up and to become more sustainable, to be more aware of it and to actually drive change versus just talking about. Cause I think most companies talk a lot about it. Probably

Celia:

do anything about it. Yeah, absolutely. And you bring up kind of, I'll say an evolving trend or sort of a hot topic, if you will, to use Dana's words. I think corporate accountability has really been under new light and new scrutiny. Um, as far as, you know, kind of public markets and what investors are looking for, even into, you know, private companies as well. And what that means is that for companies that have. Been saying things or we're making statements that are now being asked to prove what the impact has been or what the results have been they're grappling. Right? They're like, Ooh, we just had that statement, but we haven't really done much. Um, and so that's where this push is coming from. That. The people at the top, you know, sees me is being held more accountable now from a metrics perspective on sustainability targets and ESG commitments. So you've seen this from apple, you've seen it from Starbucks. There's a handful of other companies that have done it as well. And there was actually just a study from PWC that came out that shows. Investors are more likely to support a company that has sort of KPIs at the C-suite to hold accountability. But to address your question more specifically of what do those companies typically need to do, or what's their challenge? A lot of times it comes back to some of what may seem like fundamentals of what is the organizational policy, you know, like a supplier code of conduct, and what's the sort of operational. Aspect or the execution of set policy. Right. If it's. Uh, document a link somewhere that nobody ever really reads and everybody signs off on, but it's just a piece of a contract that nobody pays attention to. That rhetoric, that culture is passed down to the suppliers, right of, oh, we just have to sign off on this to get the deal done, but we don't really need to do anything, uh, where organizations are making the change is with the chief procurement officer with the head of sourcing to say, sustainability is part of our ongoing relationship and we're interested in what you're doing. Uh, and we're going to follow up on that basically, and then, you know, choose your degree of encouragement all the way through to mandate, um, depending on the organizational maturity, but yeah, I think it starts with policy and then it comes through into how do you work with those supplier relationships and how did the targets connect back to that? So

Rusty:

what's the value that does with organizations. So if you were to come in during any organism, What's that value. And what do you help them with? How do you help move the needle for them?

Celia:

Yeah, I mean, we're giving them essentially verified data and results on supplier performance to help impact their KPIs, whether that's risk mitigation, KPI, whether that's a carbon reduction, target, supplier engagement, um, cost reduction. It's obviously a little bit unique to each organization as far as what their key priorities are, but most commonly. Risk mitigation, cost reduction and additional revenue or additional value creation. But

Rusty:

within that, how do you work with them to extract that data? Those measurements,

Celia:

we typically will take a list of the suppliers and work with the company on their supplier selection strategy to decide. Which companies should get rated and why, which ones do we need to go verify performance on? Um, and then he go out, his actually goes out and onboards those companies. They go through our assessment process, which is specific to that organization based on their industry, based on their size, based on the location we produce the scorecard and that scorecard becomes a piece of their overall relationship with the buyer and the supplier.

Rusty:

So before our conversation, we were just talking about different organizations and some of the challenges. And there was one organization who their marketing procurement folks really want to push for it. And their procurement team is pushing for it. They don't have the budget, the executives aren't quite there yet to be able to focus on moving this way. Is that a pretty common challenge that you see out there? Or what are some of the different reasons why companies aren't making that big step to convert?

Celia:

Yeah, I think some of it, um, is perception oriented, right? Different leadership may see this as a big step versus not a big step. I think what we're seeing as really a change over the last 18 months is that this went from something that was. Information that people saw as kind of tangential. Maybe we would add this in later, too. This has become just part of the tech stack. As far as cybersecurity information, financial information companies do not want to be caught off guard about who they're working with. And, you know, a number of suppliers already have relationships, right? The third parties. So I think the CPO's that get this, the procurement organizations that. Find find the budget, right? Create the budget advocate for this, really understand that not having access to this information is a risk to them and being able to position their management system, their program, their approach, um, and how they're executing. That is a competitive advantage for them. And it's something they can tell to their CFO, something they can tell to their board and something they can measure year over year.

Rusty:

So what companies out there really deliver on sustainability better than

Celia:

so looking at sustainable procurement. I think somebody like Salesforce has taken an amazing step in the past month where they have actually published a sustainability exhibit to their contracts, where if you're doing business with Salesforce, they have pushed their sustainability commitments down, cascaded those expectations into their suppliers. And there's a consequence if you don't meet those expectations by. You know, the outlined date, they have essentially a fee or a subsidy that they charged back, and that will fuel further sustainability initiatives. So they've created almost this revolving fund where suppliers are held accountable, right. It's a contract clause that has consequences. Um, and they're able to. Go back and use, you know, they're not trying to make money off that clause they're using, you know, those finances that they might potentially earn to feed back into their sustainability initiatives. So I think that's a pretty mature example of what a company is doing to measure and drive accountability through the supply chain. Um, so that's, that's kind of one exam. Uh, I think as far as another other examples go in different categories, you know, you go out, it says a lot in the cosmetics and beauty space, right. Which is totally, totally a different world, tons of marketing associated with beauty and cosmetics. Right. And I can tell you personally, I get marketed to you all day long through every channel from every brand. We run the responsible beauty initiative and there are quite a few. Leading brands there, but I think, you know, loss attain and Estee Lauder have taken quite advanced approaches to sustainable procurement across all categories, going all the way into traceability and being able to get all the way to the source of a product. Right. Palm oil is a big topic within makeup and procurement Micah. Uh, another one, if you've heard of a company beauty counter, they do a ton of work on promoting actually. Legislation of how to get some of these more dangerous ingredients banned. So, you know, sustainable procurement looks different for different industries like I've touched on, but I think those are some of the examples that I think of our health power companies thinking about this progressively as well as how are companies effectively cascading expectations into their, uh, into their supply chain, into their third parties. You guys see

Dana:

any industry, one in front of the other or one that's just way far ahead of all others, um, in that kind of arena. Yeah.

Rusty:

Tell us about the loser industries.

Celia:

I

Rusty:

feel like everybody wants to see a train wreck, right? Nobody cares about.

Dana:

What's the worst of the worst. What have you seen

Celia:

that? Why everybody, you know, all the news is so negative. It's just, people love train racks. That's what sells guess. So, but, uh, but it's hard. I mean, without putting any company on the spot, because they think that's, that's not fair either. I think. I'm a very informed consumer because of, of how I was raised and what I do for a living now. And I will dig in and ask companies about their claims on their website. If I'm thinking about buying something and the responses are very telling, right. Even if I don't message the company directly, what's communicated within a sustainability report or an ESG report. Is very telling of what a company is or is not doing. And when I look at a report, I want to see the data. I want to see what types of certifications they use. I want to see how many different suppliers they have. I want to see the geography. Um, I expect a certain level of transparency. And when I don't see that, um, to me, it's an indicator that they're not doing. So since

Dana:

we want to be fair and we're not calling out companies, can we call it industries as a whole? Do you see one industry that's maybe farthest behind everybody else that really needs to pick up the pace?

Celia:

Yeah, I mean, I think the industries that are by and large known for contributing to some of the problems. Uh, tend to be the farthest behind, right? The leadership of those companies have been successful through not addressing sustainability. So to have the mindset shift of this business needs to continue to exist in order for us to get paid and our shareholders get paid and everybody to keep on that. However, what we do for a living is putting everything else in jeopardy. So how do we future-proof this business while knowing that this kind of goes against what we were founded to do. So I think some of those industries, again, without putting people on the spot, um, some of those companies are struggling to make the switch and make really a progressive program or a leading program.

Rusty:

And we say, what industries? I just don't know what industry we're talking to.

Celia:

Yeah, I think oil and gas, fossil fuels.

Rusty:

If you said that I didn't hear it. No,

Celia:

I did not. I just think that extractive industries that, um, you know, you look at fast fashion, their whole ethos is more and more and more all the time, you know, creating. Um, that would be like a

Dana:

serious, have you not heard of like H and M or these

Celia:

Zahra

Rusty:

that sells super cheap, fast fashion?

Dana:

Like they sell clothes at like five, 10 bucks super cheap, but they are super cheap, but they constantly turn in whatever is like out. The Louis Vuittons or the really high end products they'll copy, but at a super cheap level. And so they constantly are churning and getting new stuff, but it's like, to me is a huge way is you go in there and you can see like everything's on sale. Everything's on clearance, which is droves and droves of all. Um, you know, clothing and extras and things that they can't sell, but yet they're continually churning, which to me, that's one of the war to me. I feel like retail is one of the industries that really needs to take a hard look at what they're doing, right. With the fast fashion, just in general, I feel like, you know, there's so many things that they could be doing and. When they finally do, like, who was it? Maybe Nike, who did something really cool with the shoes

Celia:

he does just to give Adidas the credit? Um, I think it was Adidas, but, um, but yeah, I think generally like blanket kind of statement here. Like if you're buying something retail-wise, that feels like it's too cheap to make sense. There is a hidden cost to that, right? Somebody wasn't paid fairly in that chain.

Rusty:

Uh, I think we've got a, an addiction as consumers aware how many duplicate items do we need in our house and it doesn't ever get used, but we don't throw it away. That I think is the biggest disease we've got in there as a culture is the fact that we can't stop buying and Amazon has made it so much easier for people to purchase. Enter.

Celia:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think, you know, there's a lot of responsibility on the businesses. There's also a lot of responsibility on consumers

Rusty:

because the movie consumer stopped buying your fast fashion. Isn't going to be around. You're not gonna be able to stay in business, but the problem is.

Celia:

We keep consuming. We need to move away from the more is more phenomenon and the sort of pressure to always have. What's new, always have the latest iPhone or the latest fashion trend or whatever it is. And I think, you know, as business purchasing professionals, right, as procurement professionals purchasing on behalf of a corporation, you know, understanding. This money is going to be spent. Let's make sure it's spent in a responsible way, right? With a company that's helping us sort of carry out the corporate values, or maybe it's even some of your own personal values. Right? Your as a professional, you're putting your name on a purchase or on an event and, you know, making sure that the trade-off for that agreement isn't. Somebody else's livelihood is, is an important thing to take into account. So I think it's a cultural shift as an individual consumer, but I also think it's something that can be brought to businesses as far as businesses are largely responsible for the carbon footprint and also a lot of the other, um, sort of difficult trends that we, that we see up.

Dana:

I think when a low-hanging fruit in marketing procurement, which I'm actually doing right now is I'm creating a catalog of promotional items. And with that, we always have a sustainable company alongside with it. So if it's like you buy a mug, you plant a tree, right. So it's always having that offering of like a eco-friendly or a sustainable company alongside, um, just the regular super-cheap company. What do you think. Sound good.

Celia:

I think that's an easy one. The rest of you, anything

Rusty:

I'm just laughing by a bug planetary

Dana:

there. Some, you know, you're like, oh, these promotional items. Ken and Africa or whatever it is, but they do, they really have like missions on there. And I think some people really gravitate towards that. So this is just going to make it like foolproof or super easy, right? Like there are talks about, oh, you got to look at the different numbers on the bottom of the bag. See if it's recyclable, this is idiot proof. This is like, you just go in and you're like, oh, it's sustainable. I'm going to get the tree planted. Good for me. That's my type.

Celia:

And I'll tell you, I'll tell you this story anecdotally, about another company that has done a really good job when they launched their program, they have a internal internet. That's like the homepage for everyone's computer. When you log in and procurement put a little widget that said, Hey, we started responsible sourcing. If you want to get involved or bring us your category or. Come talk to us about what we're doing and how we can help. And they got so many inbounds from different people across businesses. One of them was the chief marketing officer who said. I want to have a sustainable swag program and I want to make sure we're working with the right people. And I think, you know, swag is a relatively easy category, um, or, or sort of easy one for people to latch onto, I should say, as far as it's very tangible. But when you think about other types of categories that might not be as easy, something like hiring an agency or hiring a marketing service or a research firm, understanding. Their business, not necessarily just from a sustainable operations perspective, but also the expertise they can bring to you as far as how to create your marketing strategy, that's aligned to any potential service that you want to offer and promote sustainability on it. You know, to Rusty's earlier point that helps move away from some of the band wagoners that are just posting statements, or don't have a lot of backup, but it'll help you choose a team that's really aligned and able to help you create a sustainable offering that has, um, sort of all the components to make it a very real.

Rusty:

Now, how can people learn more about you and eco betas? Is it EcoVadis EcoVadis

Celia:

ego.

Rusty:

Okay.

Celia:

People can learn more about EcoVadis on our website, which is just www dot. You go about us.com as well as our LinkedIn page. Um, everyone is welcome to get in touch with me directly on LinkedIn as well. Uh, we can drop a link in the, in the comments or in the podcast chat, but, um, yeah, I would say email, my LinkedIn will get to my email, so you're good.

Rusty:

Perfect. Well, I think it's been a really good conversation. I appreciate the time, uh, all the insight data, anything else?

Dana:

Oh, just thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. The updated, smarter, better looking version of

Celia:

Thornburg.