'This is a moment for big ideas. We can see the crumbling of the old order.'

Paul Skinner, founder of MarketingKind, interviews Tony Juniper, CBE, chair of Natural England and author of 12 books including Just Earth: How a Fairer World Will Save our Planet.

In this conversation and in his recent book, Just Earth, Tony makes a very strong case for why power imbalances are becoming more visible in society and why inequality is the main obstacle to climate action and how the system needs to shift to achieve real, lasting change.

We learn about Tony's concept of Thrivalism, how 10 billion people can thrive on a living planet. We hear about his experiences working with everyone from smallholder farmers in Côte d'Ivoire to Vandana Shiva and even The King. And we discuss his campaigning efforts working with the government on the Climate Change Act in 2008.

He encourages us to build collective action and change our consumerism culture.

In the audience Q&A Tony shares what 3 things he would do if he were in charge of the country:

1. Create a new measure for progress, instead of GDP the main metric would be a Genuine Progress Indicator

2. Recognise functioning natural ecosystems as critical national infrastructure and invest in them like we do with the power grid and motorways (see the recent report from the joint intelligence committee on the risks)

3. Legislate for a purpose-driven standard for businesses (PAS808) and find ways to incentivise the city to invest in companies that adopt it.

Tony also encourages us to watch the King's documentary called Finding Harmony, which is out on Amazon Prime on February 6th. And the book Harmony, which Tony co-wrote with The King will be coming out in paperback later this month.

This episode will open your mind to new ways of thinking about futures and how to create them.

Paul Skinner, founder of MarketingKind, interviews Rob Hopkins, author and co-founder of the Transition Network and Transition Town Totnes, to explore the ideas in his latest book How to Fall in Love With the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World.

Rob shares how he is creating memories of the future and giving people something to work towards.

He believes imagination is our greatest strength and we all need to use it to create longing for a fairer future on a large scale.

We explore marketing the future, a national Imagination Act and time travel as a beautiful device.

Rob shares what inspires him from a world of women of colour, particularly in the US, who are writing about radical imagination and time travel such as adrienne maree brown, Ruha Benjamin and Rasheedah Phillips and Black Quantum Futurism.

Sign up for Rob's newsletter The Time Traveler's Gazette here.

Listen to Rob’s podcast here.

Find the essential guide to transition on the Transition Network's website here.

Other inspiring references from the xChange:

Muslim Futures

Town Anywhere

The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson
Paul mentions previous MarketingKind podcast episodes with Manda Scott and Malka Older and our xChanges with Jon Alexander and Andy Burnham.

Join Cass Sunstein, Nudge theory pioneer, to explore his latest thinking on behavioural economics and his latest book, Manipulation: What It Is, Why It's Bad and What to Do About It.Cass tells us what makes great ideas gain traction, about his friendship with Barack Obama and what it's like navigating life from the perspective of a nudge expert.The discussion covers influence vs manipulation in marketing, AI choice engines, the 'joy of missing out' ('the Barbie problem') and our right not to be manipulated. Cass also mentions his involvement in developing a new app that will hopefully be available in the coming months for tracking the dark patterns of online manipulation that are impacting us all.Cass is currently the Robert Walmsley Professor at Harvard. He has previously held senior roles at The World Health Organisation, The Pentagon and The Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration where he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Department’s highest civilian honour, in 2024.He has advised the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations including the British Government.His work in behavioural economics has had a profound impact on the marketing and advertising industries.And if you have not yet read them I particularly recommend: Nudge: The Final Edition, with Richard Thaler; How Change Happens; Noise, with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony; and of course, Manipulation.This episode is hosted by Paul Skinner, founder of MarketingKind and the Agency of the Future and author of The Purpose Upgrade and Collaborative Advantage.

In this episode we explore with Alexis Eyre, co-founder of the Sustainable Marketing Compas and co-author of Sustainable Marketing, whether embedding sustainability at the heart of our strategy be the key to unlocking greater creativity and effectiveness in our marketing.

Alexis shares what drove her to make a change in her career to focus on sustainability and how she is working now to change the industry.

We hear of her frustrations about the lack of creativity and the ineffectiveness and inefficiency that is often taken for granted in marketing.

She invites us to start with the impact that we want to have on the world and use the Sustainable Marketing Compass to ask ourselves the right questions, to challenge assumptions and build the partnerships we need to succeed.

If you have not yet read Sustainable Marketing by Alexis and Paul Randle, I highly recommend picking up a copy.

And their Sustainable Marketing Compass is also available open source (and we've included it on the Resources page of the MarketingKind website).

This episode is hosted by Anna Mullenneaux and Paul Skinner, founders of the MarketingKind community.

In this episode Elaine Roberts, former B2B CMO and MarketingKind member, hosts and interviews:~ Ty Heath – Co-founder of The LinkedIn B2B Institute and former Google and IBM executive on a mission to make marketing science accessible~ Thomas Kolster – author of Goodvertising and The Hero Trap, speaker and marketing activist and one of the founding fathers of the sustainable marketing movement~ Dave Vann – Founder of said & done, brand strategist and advisor to purpose-led B2B businesses and nonprofits

Enjoy this incredibly practical, engaging and important discussion filled with great examples, research and inspiration for how to put purpose to work for your B2B brand.

In this episode we interview Charlie Martin, CEO and founder of The Anti-Greenwash Charter, to explore how we can build trust through radical transparency.He says, ‘we're facing a collective crisis of trust in everything that we engage with...doing something to try and rebuild trust in what we are reading and engaging with is really important because that leads to speed of decision-making, which is what is needed to address some of the fundamental issues at play.'We cover how greenwashing began with marketing, communications and sales professionals freewheeling when it came to making claims that they didn't fully understand and/ or couldn't fully back up. The more recent trends with the tightening of the regulatory landscape in the UK and Europe is leading to an increase in greenhushing with companies scared to get it wrong. And more omission-based greenwashing, where communications may be compliant, but when you dig a little under the surface the bigger story is what was left out. We learn how The Anti-Greenwash Charter is leading the way with radical transparency by supporting signatories with:1) Upskilling all relevant staff members with greenwash awareness training to cut out unintentional greenwashing2) A full static content review to create alignment with regulations3) Co-creation of a Green Claims Policy to act as guardrails for all future communicationsAnd signatories are also subject to periodic campaign reviews from The Anti-Greenwash Charter and their findings are always published.Charlie and his team have also created the new truMRK prototype, an AI-powered editorial assistant that acts like Grammarly for sustainability comms, checking your new communications against your ESG data, regulations, etc. It is a mark of editorial excellence, where readers can click through to a full transparency report.To support the important work of the Charter, please recommend them to businesses that would benefit from joining and encourage every business, no matter how small, to create their own Green Claims Policy. The Charter provides a free template for a Green Claims Policy to download on their website here.And you can also listen to Charlie on The Responsible Edge podcast.This episode is hosted by Anna Mullenneaux and Paul Skinner, founders of the MarketingKind community.

While over 90% of business leaders recognize the importance of sustainability, only 60% have a strategy in place. And many of these strategies are inefficient, ineffective, or simply don't go far enough to address the global challenges we are facing.

In this episode Caroline Taylor, OBE, former CMO of IBM Global Markets and Chair of Oasis Community Learning, hosts and interviews Paolo Taticchi and Melina Corvaglia-Charrey​, co-authors of How to Be Sustainable: Business Strategies for Leading Change.

We start by defining sustainability and talking about the need for long-term shared value. We cover the drivers for sustainable action including the financial risks and the increase in climate litigation. And we explore how to build a strong business case for sustainability.

We also discuss the political influence from the US and Paolo shares that anti-ESG sentiment is more talk than fact.

Paolo is Professor in Strategy and Sustainability and the Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainable Business at University College London, School of Management. He is a prominent sustainability expert, speaker and consultant working with corporates and governments around the world.

Melina is a Researcher at University College London, School of Management. She has over 15 years of experience as a senior marketing leader in the media industry, and also works as a consultant supporting small-to-medium size businesses with their sustainability reporting efforts.

You can check out the Chief Sustainability Heroes podcast here.

And you can learn more about the MarketingKind community here.

The UK advertising industry is the third largest in the world and is known for its creativity. And although many industry leaders are very concerned that their work is fueling the climate crisis, the biggest agencies continue to take on the fossil fuel companies and other major polluters as clients. The UK trade bodies deny that advertising leads to increased consumption and say that only 12% of advertising is effective (so nothing to see here).

Dr Victoria Harvey worked for a decade to try to change the industry from within, but when it showed that it was unwilling to change itself she joined with others to take this issue directly to the people. In May Chris Packham's petition garnered 110,000 signatures and on July 7th parliament debated whether or not the UK should ban fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship. You can read Victoria's parliamentary briefing for MPs here with a forward by Chris Packham.

In this episode Victoria shares with us her PhD research into how the advertising industry could move away from its current destructive model towards more climate-friendly objectives and together we explore why a UK-wide ban on fossil fuel advertising is needed and how we could bring it about.

This issue is often compared to the ban on tobacco advertising, because like the effects of smoking, climate change is a public health crisis. And the number of deaths globally from climate change each year are now similar to the annual global deaths from smoking when tobacco ads were banned in the UK in 2003.

Although there is broad support for the change in parliament, the government has no plans to move forward with regulation at this time. Currently progress is happening most rapidly through councils banning fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship in their cities and regions. Edinburgh is leading the way and many others are joining in. Many art and cultural institutions are also refusing to work with the big polluters and know that change is coming. And there are of course hundreds of smaller agencies that have taken a stand and are unwilling to work with high carbon emitting clients.

The episode is hosted by Anna Mullenneaux, co-founder of the MarketingKind community.

In this episode Dr Mark Fabian, associate professor of Public Policy at Warwick University, associate fellow at the Bennett Institute at Cambridge University, wellbeing expert and author of Beyond Happy: How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfilment, guides us towards how we can increase our wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around us.

Together we explore Mark's latest book Beyond Happy, which challenges superficial ideas of happiness and offers a deeply thoughtful framework for living well, both individually and collectively.

We also discuss his research on the Wellbeing State, which is building an important and much needed case for changes in education, housing, economic policy and healthcare.

Mark shares with us his concept of 'Coalescence of Being', a process by which we gradually integrate our experiences, values, identity, and actions into a coherent, meaningful whole. This could mean setting goals, working towards them, reading social feedback and most importantly learning to introspect on our own motivations and values and using new understandings to course correct along the way.

This episode is hosted by Paul Skinner, founder of The MarketingKind community, director of The Agency of the Future and author of The Purpose Upgrade and Collaborative Advantage.

'It's more money for someone somewhere, but it's not more prosperity.'

In this episode we interview Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity without Growth and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) to explore the ideas in his latest book The Care Economy.

We discuss how the current growth-based economy is often a false economy and how we can instead work towards a Care Economy where "health" is the outcome and "care" is our guiding principle.

Tim powerfully dissects how the UK health burden has changed since the inception of the NHS and how our growth-based economy feeds chronic disease.

Tim says that, 'The food-related costs of chronic disease in the UK are now around £268 billion per year, which is substantially higher than the NHS budget'.

For anyone passionate about tackling the ultra-processed foods crisis Tim mentions the Fight Fake Food March on London 6th.

The book shares a new philosophy for the economy where health is the ultimate prosperity.

Tim believes that creating a Care Economy would mean changing education, regulation and financial systems, but he is not depressed by the road ahead.

He leaves us with a note of respair (recovery from despair) saying, 'The narrative form can hold vision for us. It can hold the vision for how things should be working even when they are fundamentally not doing that. And that vision provides a lens for how we could be doing things better. We can ask ourselves how we can do things differently. What would this look like if it had "health" as its goal and "care" as its organising operational principle?'

This episode is hosted by Paul Skinner, founder of The MarketingKind community, Director of The Agency of the Future and author of The Purpose Upgrade and Collaborative Advantage.