“It’s fair and square - every square essentially helps you hit three ESG metrics with a single product.”

In this episode of the Can Marketing Save the Planet podcast, we were joined by Rob Cobbold, founder and CEO, of the brilliant organisation, Native - a platform which allows people, groups, communities and organisations of all sizes to protect the planet – one square at a time!

“AI allows us to do the art of marketing without marketing” …

A slightly longer episode this week, but boy is it an interesting one! In this episode of Can Marketing Save the Planet we bring together two of the biggest conversations in the world today; AI and sustainability to find out if they are friend or foe. Joined by tech futurist Dan Södergren and sustainability guy, Russ Avery, we discuss questions around, is business and society responsible enough to use AI? Why AI policies a must for organisations - and, how can Marketers use AI in an informed and meaningful way?

“90% of Marketers agree that sustainability agendas need to be more ambitious.”

We are back to 2025 with a bang and a full-on schedule of fantastic guests and riveting conversations. In our first episode of the year we’re joined by Ozlem Senturk, Senior Partner at Kantar’s Global Sustainable Transformation Practice. Ozlem shares so many interesting insights from Kantar and the World Federation of Advertisers study ‘Sustainable Marketing 2030’, where they identified what Marketers need to do to transform faster, the structural challenges and lack of internal resources that need to be overcome and the need for a P&L that factors in planet and profit.

“We need to get back to classic marketing – what matters to our audience is a must. Even those people who don’t ‘buy into’ sustainability – up to 70% of them are actually engaged in sustainable behaviours – they just don’t label it as sustainable….”

In this episode were joined by Denise Hicks, Global Climate Lead at strategy and insights consultancy, C Space. We were particularly interested in a very soon to be published piece of research titled, ‘The S Word’.

Denise shares insights from the research findings, highlighting the ‘dysfunctional love triangle’ that exists between brands, their stakeholders and regulations and the tensions and frictions which are causing trust issues.

Businesses need to be asking themselves – “What could this business be, redesigning it from the ground up?” Start with the opportunity as opposed to the challenges.

We know communication and engagement is critical to driving change, a su bject we have explored many times on the podcast, but there’s always something new to learn. Hence why we really enjoyed meeting Laurence and Graeme from Litmus Sustainability to talk more deeply about a subject which is very close to our hearts.

“We don’t ’speak for young people, we let them be the voice and share their perspective.”

We keep coming back to the S – ‘social and societal impact’ in many of our conversations with clients, leaders and marketers, we’re discussing the role of business, both in how they operate and what they are doing for society.

In this episode of the podcast we have a chat with the brilliant Kian Bakhtiari, Founder of The People, a Gen-Z consultancy. We were keen to know more about the work Kian does both with the youth generation and businesses, how he brings those worlds together (which is very much needed).

“When it comes to food systems, Marketers can be the most valuable in providing extraordinary consumer insights so that assumptions are not made in what people want.”

To maintain food security, food systems need to change. They need to be more sustainable, less impactful on the planet, healthier and way less wasteful. But, there is still a huge amount of education and awareness that needs to happen if people are to truly understand why food systems are at risk and, how we choose what we eat really does matter.

It’s the final episode in our mini-series on sustainable leadership and in this episode we’re joined by Professor Chris Marquis. Chris talks to us about his experience studying, writing about and working with organisations on sustainability. Author of, “Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism,” we explore Chris’ first experience of B-Corp, a movement setting new standards for how business should operate. Chris believes we can learn a lot from B-Corps, “we should be studying B corporations, companies that are putting the social at their core.”

As we continue to discuss and explore the role of leadership in our ‘Sustainable Leadership’ mini-series, what better than to gain the viewpoint from someone with sustainability at the core of everything they do. This led us to Kevin Dunckley, Chief Sustainability Officer at HH Global.

Kevin’s passion for what he does is crystal clear and we loved our conversation with him talking about the practicalities of being a hands-on CSO - what’s involved, where the challenges lie and more importantly, unearthing the opportunities.