Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, warned today that companies needed to stop encouraging ’super consumption’ in their customers and find more sustainable ways of doing business. Picking up on a trend identified in Brand Strategy magazine last summer, his speech at the Added Value Branding for Good forum told businesses that it was time to stop adding to waste and environmental problems by adding to unnecessary consumption.
Sorrell spoke of how he had initially been a cynic about issues such as climate change and its importance to the business community but is now a real convert. He said:
“Consumers are used to the aspiration that you should consume more, the aspiration that you should have a bigger car, the aspiration that you should have a number of holidays, bigger houses, multiple houses…in other words, it’s a lifestyle we’re encouraging them to make.”
He added that Apple, which is: “one of the most successful, …maybe the most successful….[of] iconic consumer brands, if you think about one of the things Apple is doing, it’s encouraging consumers to buy a music player, an iPod, for about $200 and that is an instrument that the consumer will jettison after a year. It’s encouraging people to buy these things, then trade up and consume more. The environmental issues of getting rid of that stuff are very considerable.”
“All our habits of clients, agencies, media owners is to encourage people to consume more – super consumption. That is still embedded in the consumer’s psyche, so we’re going to have to respond by doing things differently and making sacrifices if we’re going to deal with issues such as climate change.”
Brand Strategy’s editor Ruth Mortimer had a chance to question him more about this topic. She asked him about issues concerning consumption and whether being good was still an idea seen as being a nice-to-have, expensive, luxury proposition rather than something truly mainstream.
Sorrell said:
“We’ve tried to educate consumers to the idea that ‘more is better’. Part of the message here is that ‘more isn’t better’. Take cars for a minute, we have been in the habit of driving bigger and better cars, live in bigger and better houses or consume bigger and better electronic products. What we’re having to do is say: “No, that’s not necessarily right, you’ve got to have more environmentally-friendly products and services. And that is difficult.”
“It is a fundamentally different philosophy, we’re used to ‘more is better’. So when you talk about Apple and the iPod, it’s an incredibly successful company but when you think about the waste and encouraging people to jettison things….20 or 30 years ago we used to joke about those products with built-in obslescence. We don’t joke about it anymore. You can try and build in obslescence but this is countering it. I think it’s about super consumption and people will behave in different ways. Younger people already do; they are doing things in a more responsible way as they build their lives and careers.”
As usual, some fascinating observations from Sorrell and many thanks to Added Value for inviting us along to hear them and ask him about them. What do you think? Is ’super consumption’ an important business issue for you? Any ideas on how brands can curb it?
May 15, 2008 at 11:11 pm |
Interesting yet weirdly ironic. how can Sorrell say such things whilst being at the forefront of the advertising world??
November 5, 2008 at 10:57 am |
[...] We at Brand Strategy are in favour of the idea of what WPP chief Martin Sorrell called “consuming better, not more”. Now, while you may be cynical about the motives of a man running a large agency network – can he [...]