Some of the latest news from the Clarity Sustainability camp and other thinking that we hope you’ll find useful.
Posted 11 December 2012 as Clarity News by Leigh
Things are going well at Clarity HQ and we’re looking to appoint key roles.
Account Manager
Delivering great service to our clients, across a number of accounts. You’ll have experience as a marketer, managing project work, a passion for sustainability and ideally some agency experience.
Designer
We need a versatile designer who we can work with on everything from web artwork, to print and interiors. If you’ve got a great eye for design and obvious creativity, then you have the opportunity to work across numerous exciting accounts and projects.
Think you’ve got what it takes? Get in touch by emailing hello@think-sustainability.co.uk and we can provide you with a full role profile and talk you through any questions you may have.
We’ve spent the last few months working with Cranfield University Centre for Design, the Sustainable Design experts, working out how to build the exhibition stand of the future – a more sustainable ‘greener’ exhibition stand.
Exhibitions generate a huge quantity of waste – the stands themselves are often a key element of this. The larger exhibition stands may feature stock walls but are often largely un-reusable and often destined for landfill.
We conducted some primary research to explore people’s perceptions to this challenge. Our finding were that the venues, exhibitors and exhibition delegates, even at sustainability focused exhibitions are little awareness of the challenge, and everybody thinking another party had taken such considerations.
We don’t want to limit creativity or the impact our clients can make at exhibitions by moving from dynamic bespoke built stands to an (often quite dull) system. Far from it – as well as achieving great returns for clients, exciting stands are were we get put forward for awards.
So what’s the answer to minimising environmental impact whilst maximising exhibition impact? There might not be a silver bullet but our work with Cranfield did help us build and bolster capabilities in the area required to make the more sustainable exhibition stand a reality:
Careful selection of materials
Choosing the materials that have lower embodied carbon, lower toxicity and recyclability whilst maintaining the characteristics of the traditional materials which make them so successful to work with.
Supply chain, travel & waste management
Having the processes and supply chain management to ensure we reduce travel and waste where possible.
Reusable elements
Having said that ‘stand systems’ are not always the way to go for some organisations, reusability is a concept that even the most bespoke built exhibition stand can embrace. Alongside Cranfield, we have developed a way to deliver re-usable plinths and walling that do not meet standard stock wall sizes but does not limit the creativity of the stand.
Hiring equipment
Much equipment can be hired to save you money as well as reducing environmental impact. From furniture to AV equipment, we treat this the same as sourcing any material – looking at the environmental credentials of the item, including energy saving opportunies.
Carbon calculation & offsetting
When you’ve reduced the environmental impact of the exhibition stand as much as is feasible, there is still going to be a remaining impact. We offer clients the option of calculating the remaining carbon emissions of the stand and offsetting these.
Find out more about our more sustainable exhibition stands and see some examples by following this link.
We will be publishing a full report of our findings and recipe for the greener exhibition stand in due course. Can’t wait that long? Then get in touch and we’ll happily talk you through the summary and how you can embrace a stand that not only has carefully considered sustainability credentials, but is proven to deliver commercial results, just call 01525 292 005.
Posted 11 November 2012 as Clarity News,CSR by Leigh
We’ve been busy over the last few months helping Macmillan Cancer support with their communications. Dedicating a few hours of our skills per month pro-bono is part of our own CSR efforts.
The projects have included:
- Designing clothes recycling bags and carpark recycling banks as a new source of income, optimising the message to maximise response
- Producing a fundraising guide full of ideas to generate more funds
- Bringing the segments to life with pen portraits for workshops
It’s a pleasure to be able to aid such a good cause. Keep up all the good work Macmillan.
If you want to know more how you can help, visit www.macmillan.org.uk/Fundraising/Fundraising.aspx
We recently had the pleasure of speaking alongside our client E.ON at the CIM East of England Marketing conference.
Billed as covering ‘the next stage of CSR, public/private sector partnerships’ a diverse group of speakers discussed the principles of social marketing, largely focusing on techniques to change behavior.
We spoke about the E.ON sustainable city partnerships and how through collaborating with local authorities and councils, it is possible to help people get the most free low carbon technologies and help people become energy savers.
Much of the talks yesterday centered on the concept of behavior change being like a set of scales, with people rationally balancing the benefits and drawbacks of a particular behavior. Inertia is when the scales are equally balanced but there are ways to influence people towards a positive behavior:
- Increasing the benefit, reasons to take positive action
e.g. (carrying on the renewables example) the savings on energy bills of installing a renewable technology
- Decreasing the barriers to change that may otherwise cause obstacles to adopting behavior
e.g. offering ways to finance renewables to reduce the the upfront investment requirement
We saw this model being used again and again by the speakers in situation like stopping smoking, increasing exercise, health screening and much more. Each time it was apparent that some key concepts underpin each:
- Understanding the audience – perception is the individuals reality, putting ourselves in the customers shoes and effectively segmenting the marketing is crucial
- Creativity – that message carries more weight, whether selling benefits or overcoming objections, if delivered creatively, intelligently and concisely. A bit of ‘wow’ always helps
- Appeal – making a behavior fun and easy to adopt increases the chance of sustained success
- Continual improvement – measurement and monitoring are the marketers bread and butter
If you’d like to talk further about good practice for social marketing or maybe you’ve got some examples of your own to share, please get in touch.
