In 2025 I put myself through a short course in Sustainable Marketing at the Cambridge Institute of Sustainable Leadership (more on that here). It was interesting. And although I didn’t come away with loads of new marketing techniques, it did give me a solid understanding of the role marketing has played driving economic growth since World War Two. Creating demand, persuading people to buy stuff they may not need, driving endless growth on a finite planet and making lots of money for some people.
The course also challenged us to come up with a ‘strategy for action’ – what we were going to do, as marketers, to drive ‘long-term wellbeing for all’. My response was to come up with the idea of The Impact Files podcast. I’m fascinated by the tensions between needing money to live in a capitalist economy, and achieving it without trashing the environment, or society. The Impact Files podcast explores these tensions through conversations with business leaders at the coal-face – people who’re striving to achieve positive financial outcomes for their businesses in ways that are environmentally and socially responsible in the long term.
What I didn’t plan for is how the podcast is giving me something quite rare: a way to sit with business leaders I admire, people who are building genuinely purposeful organisations, without the conversation tipping into a sales pitch. As a curious, commercially- and solutions-focused marketing leader working with businesses on a purposeful journey, the folks I want to meet can feel awkward if they don’t have a current marketing need and a budget. But The Impact Files has a different agenda. We genuinely want to explore our guests’ personal and business journeys. We do, towards the end of each episode, and with a nod to the CISL course, ask about the big strategic role of marketing in driving longer-term sustainability as well as nearer-term commercial objectives.
I’ve varied the question over the 30-odd episodes recorded so far. At its cleanest it goes something like this: “What big strategic role could media, comms and marketing play in your sector to drive purpose and profit?“
It’s surprised me how consistently people’s answers have been about tactics: social media, newsletters, networking and so forth. To be fair, guests with comms backgrounds have gone a level deeper. But genuine strategic thinking about marketing’s role – the kind that connects audience need to near-term commercial outcomes and longer-range sustainability? Very rare.
These are smart people running successful organisations, often in quite tough trading climates. I’d assumed you’d have to understand marketing strategically to build something like that. What I found was that they’d got where they are despite not understanding it in this way.
That did something quite unexpected for me. I’ve spent 25-odd years at the sharp end of digital marketing – technical, commercial, process. But it took the conversations that the podcast unlocked, and some coaching from my business mentor, for me to see that I can offer genuine marketing leadership to serious businesses. Not just execute. Lead.
And it also left me asking myself if they’ve built this much without a strategic marketing perspective, how much further could they go with it?
That question doesn’t have a single answer. But in my experience it starts in the same place every time – with a marketing function that has a real commercial brief, documented processes, a genuine connection to revenue and purpose, and some sensible metrics. The tactical marketing work, and the business growth, starts from there.