Introduction
In an earlier blog post I highlighted that regenerativity needs to permeate all areas of our life for us to be able to say that we live regeneratively. It’s a work-in-progress for me, as it is probably for most of us. In reality, it is what collectively working toward a regenerative future entails.
Pursuing the same logic, a regenerative business is a business where all aspects of the business are regenerative. Where each defined area of a business adds regenerative value. Thus, in a regenerative business structured around functions, each function would be able to legitimately claim that it adds regenerative value. When I say, ‘adds regenerative value’, I don’t just mean value necessarily as an output alone, rather, also as a process. Hence, what it does and produces would add value to, rather than detract from, the regenerative basis of the business.
Market-oriented regeneration
For a business that we might describe as market-oriented – one where the essence of what they do both internally and externally, how they are organised, and how and what they communicate, is oriented toward meeting customer’s genuine needs1 – marketing would be a core contributory function. Thus, in such a business, to pull its weight, marketing would likewise need to be regenerative. However, for a business to be regenerative, its focus needs to extend beyond the needs of the customer.
Regenerative Marketing
For many, marketing is degenerative, responsible for the rampant development of consumerism and materialism witnessed in much of today’s society. Driving consumers to want products they don’t genuinely need. To fill gaps in their life that don’t exist, that are fictional self-creations, and to impress people they don’t know and/or don’t care about. This is how many see marketing.
Thankfully, this is only one very narrow, albeit troubling take on what marketing is about. However, when we see how some businesses behave today, we must sadly admit that there is more than a grain of truth to this view. One problem, while we may not like it, is that most of us contribute to this model in the way that we participate as consumers, and by implication, fuel this degenerative system.
New understandings
Having taught a very different understanding of marketing for over 35 years in top Universities around the world, I am pleased to say that marketing described in this way isn’t the only option. Indeed, an alternative type of marketing exists, and moreover, can be developed further. Regenerative marketing.
Marketing that is regenerative would drive a regenerative business, guiding what they stand for, their purpose, their interactions and communications with other businesses, customers and society overall. Their activities and behaviours, the products offered to the market, the price charged, the messages developed and media chosen to share them, their distribution systems, literally everything that they do would as a commencing point, not further contribute to the depletion of finite resources, the degeneration of the health of the natural environment and to and within society broadly. Instead, a regenerative business, guided by an underlying regenerative marketing philosophy and associated practices and behaviours, would contribute positively not just to their chosen marketplaces, but rather by implication, to planetary health overall.
Regenerative marketing defined
Tying the threads together for a postgraduate lecture that I gave at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 2023, I defined regenerative marketing in the following way:
“Regenerative marketing occurs when governments, organisations and individuals co-create value propositions that enable all elements within defined ecosystems to flourish”. Dr Dave Webb
While today three years on, I could probably tweak this definition here and there, I don’t feel there is any real necessity to do so for this post. The essence still holds true.
Planetary health and regenerative marketing
Planetary health includes the health status of the natural environment and all living species that interrelate to produce the dynamics of a healthy thriving and flourishing ecosystem. These are some of the defining characteristics and imperatives for regenerative marketing.
As I said previously, rather than simply focussing on meeting customer’s consumption needs in a narrowly centred economic product market space per se, regenerative marketing extends to meeting a broader set of environmental, societal, and by implication, planetary health needs. The ultimate objective being to contribute positively to the health and wellbeing of the entire planetary ecosystem within which businesses operate. This is quite a different role for marketing.
During the same lecture mentioned above, I posed a couple of questions to my students for their reflection and within-group discussion.
I now pose the same questions to you for your reflection.
- What would it mean to think of ourselves as co-creators of planetary health/wealth rather than as consumers of planetary resources?
- Would our preoccupation with consuming change?
We’ll come back to explore these questions further in a later post. For now though, let’s look elsewhere in businesses for regenerative value-adding contribution.
Regenerative Human Resources
Human Resources (HR), as a functional area within businesses, could likewise be regenerative. First, the management of HR would likely not see employees as a ‘resource’ to be managed per se, that is, managed in a utilitarian way, rather employees would be seen and treated as valuable assets, meaningful co-creators of regenerative value for the business and the entire ecosystem within which the business operates. They likewise would have a keen external focus. The value that each employee adds would be enhanced and supported, nurturing the infinite potential of each individual employee, and thus by implication, the business.
The individual, an autonomous intrapreneur within the business, adds in turn regenerative value in a self-determined manner. An energy of thriving and flourishing permeates the culture of a regenerative business radiating through each employee irrespective of level and role. Probably quite an exciting fulfilling environment to work in. Likely very different from some of the toxic workplaces that exist today!
Regenerative Accounting
Accounting represents another example of a regenerative functional area. Regenerative accounting wouldn’t focus exclusively on balance sheets, profit and loss (P&L) statements and budgets, except insofar as they contribute to the regenerative nature of the business. Regenerative accounting would additionally consider the many external costs of a business, incorporating them into their cost accounting structures.
Quantification would not only be in $ terms. It would extend likewise to include other measurable metrics such as those that consider the business in respect to the Environment, Society and the Governance of the business (ESG). Impacts in terms of carbon emissions, labour practices, resource consumption and community well-being would among others be considered relevant contributors to a broader regenerative measurement system.
Conclusion
Regenerative businesses comprise the different areas of a business that form part of an interconnected regenerative value-adding whole. Here I have restricted my attention both to functionally structured businesses, and to just three selected key functional areas within such a business. In reality of course, many other internal and even external structures exist in today’s operational business environment. The ideas that I have presented here apply equally to these too. I certainly don’t mean for my words to be interpreted with any restrictions placed upon them. Indeed, quite to the contrary, regenerative businesses are likely to take on their own identity shaped by the needs of society and the challenges that we will confront in the years to come. As should be the case, my words and the ideas they convey, will undoubtedly need revisiting and updating over time.
- By accentuating customer needs with the word ‘genuine’ as a descriptor, my intention is to semantically differentiate between these needs and customer desire-based wants which may be materialistic in nature. ↩︎