Episode 51: Green Claims - The Challenge of Sustainable Consumption with Oliver Bealby-Wright, Consumers International

“Marketers need to get into the nitty gritty and learn about lifecyle assessments and how they are used, their limitations and their advantages, it might seem boring - but it’s really, really important.”

In this episode, we’re joined by Oliver-Bealby-Wright, Lead, Consumers in the Energy System who formerly led Consumers International’s GreenCommerce project in 2022 on improving consumer sustainability information. Consumers International is a membership body with over 200 members across 100 countries, dedicated to defending the rights of consumers.

Oliver shares their whole systems approach, working across critical areas - considering labelling, data, the information lifecyle alongside the product lifecycle, ecommerce and the digital environment, where digital nudging can support, but also considering the risk, greenwashing and misleading claims and the role of retailers and consumers.

We cover A LOT, and Oliver shares a very comprehensive overview of the scale of the challenges, but also the scale of the opportunity.

“Marketing has a big role to play in making information ‘sing’. “

All the time we bring the context back to marketing and communication, and Oliver is clear that marketing has a big part to play - but that there aren’t really any short cuts when it comes to transparency, substantiation and understanding regulation and where principles and policies are justified and where they are not. “it’s about education and upskilling - there are no short cuts.” And we couldn’t agree more.

Oliver shares that sustainable consumption is a basic right of consumers and of course, whilst consumers have an important role to play towards a fair and accountable transition to net zero, so too do retailers and so we discuss their role as gatekeepers, the challenge of compliance by design and the risks and opportunity of ecommerce, micro-targeting and personalised messaging.

When it comes to collaboration, there’s a need for many bodies and actors to be working cohesively to not only create coherent policies - but then to be translated into practice, no simple task given there is just so much room for interpretation. And that leads us to data, innovation and unusual partnerships.

“More transparency alone is not going to get us there – it’s not going to close the intention action gap, which is even more true in online shopping environments than in person. Some folks are doing interesting things, layering information in the online environment, simplifying choices along the consumer journey to avoid information overload - because when things become too complex or there’s just too much to navigate through, people switch off . And if they switch off, they’re never going to reach the important and useful information that matters.”

Trust us… there’s just so much wisdom and so many takeaways in this conversation.

Listen in for yourself, tell us what you think… share your viewpoints. We love to hear what’s landed for you - or what you agree with, disagree with.

Useful links:

If you want to get involved in the UN One Planet Network programme Oliver mentions - see here: https://www.unep.org/explore-topics/resource-efficiency/what-we-do/one-planet-network

For more about Consumers International - visit https://www.consumersinternational.org/

Connect with Oliver Bealby-Wright - https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliver-bealby-wright-56645b15a/

Finally, since recording CI published a few reports during the World Economic Forum - see below

• The State of Sustainability Information which assesses the critical trends and trade-offs in sustainability information provision and emerging policy solutions

• Action Agenda: Informing sustainable consumer choices in e-commerce which provides three strategic, collaborative actions for e-commerce platforms to improve the product sustainability information on their sites

• Policy Action Framework: Improving Product Sustainability Information in E-Commerce which provides a suite of cross-cutting actions for governments

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Our podcasts are recorded purely via online conferencing platforms, we apologise for any minor sound quality issues.