Sustainability: Marketing sustainability

Suppliers should market sustainability as forcefully as price, convenience and the product themselves, writes Roger Gardner

Are we reaching the tipping point at which travellers genuinely make choices based upon comfort and sustainability rather than just cost? There are a number of indicators to suggest this is happening. If so, how should that feed through to service offerings and the marketing and management of business travel?

‘Habituation’ is both a blessing and a curse. We get used to a product or service, value its certainty and, hopefully, its reliability too. But that can mask a bunch of negatives such as decreasing economic or sustainability value.

Habituation can also make people put up with something that should be intolerable in terms of comfort, service level or ‘feel good’ value. The last of these is a perennial personal KPI and it may be a factor of rising importance as business travel becomes more difficult. We all want to enjoy our experiences and there is a growing tide of opinion of wanting to ‘do the right thing’ by the planet and humanity.

Change starts as a slow burn, as we have witnessed with electric car technology. When it starts to really take hold, change can be dramatic. For that sector, we can now see the end of manufacture of traditional combustion engines in favour of hybrid or full electric vehicles within a couple of decades.

The shift to rail and the rise of carbon performance improvement in the hotel sector are still at the earlier stages of that same journey but the message is getting clearer – sustainability and better carbon performance is now mainstream not peripheral. So, we should aim to break the ‘habit’ and instead adopt a disruptive and proactive approach.

In the same way that ‘legacy’ automotive firms have looked over their shoulders to see the disruptive ambitions of Tesla, a wave of new providers can now change attitudes in the business travel sector. Cost will doubtless continue to be the dominant driver for TMCS and their clients, but in the same way that electric cars started off with a heavy premium, so too the cost base of sustainability is dropping. For example, the solar industry is now growing without subsidy.

There are lessons here. Business travel is dependent upon the perceptions of the traveller and it might not take that much to make choice based upon secondary – i.e non-cost – factors a great deal more important. If cause-based marketing is also growing in its effectiveness, not least through the ubiquity of social media, why not apply the marketing of sustainability more strongly? A triple whammy benefit awaits as this would catch a rising tide, play to fatigueladen travellers who want a more positive experience and, importantly, deliver sustainability benefits. Most providers in the sector are not in the position of business dinosaurs such as Kodak: there is a lot of good behaviour, initiatives and reinvention to be found. In order to be seen to be a sustainability leader it is necessary to put a lot of effort in and living by an environmental narrative that it is easy to spin. Traveller expectations are rising all the time and, as the evidence of the harm we collectively do to our environment becomes clearer, the case for strong sustainability action makes increasingly good business and CSR sense.

Business travel is dependent upon the perceptions. It might not take that much to make choices based on non-cost factors a great deal more important”