In the scope of the second live date of the marke[ding] XPO on June 16, 2021 WA Media, the publisher of eppi magazine, organised an industry talk on the future theme “Sustainability”. Together with Rolf Janka (Hagemann), Roland Liederbach (K+M), Martina Schneider (Schneider Schreibgeräte) and Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar (Halfar), the editors Till Barth and Dr. Mischa Delbrouck discussed the industry’s position with regards to sustainability, which strategies make sense, where greenwashing begins and why the theme can also be fun.
In 2019 sustainability was the talk of the town. Then, Corona arrived on the scene. Did the crisis fuel the sustainable attitude or has the interest faded due to people being more preoccupied with their health and the economy?
Roland Liederbach: Sustainability is a general basic principle that shouldn’t be reduced down to environmental protection. The Corona crisis has led to us rethinking our behaviour in different dimensions. For instance, many people have rediscovered their direct surroundings and nature, industries that were particularly hit hard by the Corona crisis came more under focus so that a greater sensitivity for their problems arose. All of these are basic trends that have been identifiable for some time already, but which have now taken a front seat. We definitely believe that as a crucial aspect of the future sustainability has received a much stronger weighting through Corona.
Martina Schneider: The Corona crisis has revealed several weak points in our system. And we have learnt a great deal through this. For instance, one has noticed that reacting too late to a crisis can cost lives. This applies for Corona, but also – and at some point in time even more evidently – for the climate change. Furthermore, one has experienced that many things don’t have to be implemented as was usually the case in the past: For example, that travelling by air is not always essential. That is why I am very confident that Corona is lending the theme even more impetus.
What do the end customers think about it? Is sustainability still as important for the users as in the Fridays for Future year in 2019?
Rolf Janka: For us the Corona crisis only had a minor impact on the theme sustainability. In fact, the customers enquired about the theme even more intensely last year, on the one hand due to the fact that the Fridays for Future movement had strongly increased sensitivity for the topic and on the other hand because more and more regulations demand that the companies take the theme sustainability into account, particularly regarding the ecological aspects. The legislator is the major driving force at the moment. Furthermore, we also observed that particularly mediumsized companies address the theme sustainability much more intensively than industry companies. Whereas big industry companies often consider sustainability necessary, medium-sized companies are more convinced by the topic, are much more intrinsically motivated.
Mrs. Stühmeyer-Halfar, why is sustainability so important for the industry?
Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar: Sustainability is indispensable in the promotional products industry. Because the times when thoughtless and imprudent promotional products were presented, are long gone. It is no longer irrelevant what product is implemented, one selects something appropriate for the target group, seeks advice from the trade, informs oneself – on an international basis – on the web, compares the items to the retail trade and brand name articles. The “main thing cheap“ mentality hardly exists among the industry players today. The item has to look good, be of good quality, a sustainable approach has to be fulfilled at least to the minimum degree. One doesn’t want to be embarrassed about products one implements. Of course, they should also be favourably-priced, there’s no question about that. And there are end customers, who exclusively look at the price. However, this group is diminishing. And those who don’t occupy themselves with the added demands of the industry, will without doubt in time only address a small niche of customers.
Martina Schneider: I can only endorse that. The group of sustainably-oriented customers – both end customers and from the trade – is on the rise.
Rolf Janka: Companies that operate the business model promotional products, will have to consider whether this business model really is viable if the theme sustainability isn’t integrated into the company and not just in the ecological sense, but also regarding the economic and social aspects. If the lawmaker says we should all become climate-neutral, then the companies have to act in that direction and then those who have already been occupying themselves with the theme sustainability for longer, will also have a sustainable business model.
What are you doing in your company to make your products and supply chains more sustainable?
Martina Schneider: It is difficult for us to explain that in brief. We started occupying ourselves with environment and resource-friendly methods very early on. This is based on my father’s interest in environmental themes. At the time, the theme was more of a niche topic and the customers mocked us a bit following the motto: “Nice, that you are doing it, but I am not paying for it.“ In the meantime, one is sensing a much wider acceptance and greater interest. In the mid-1990s, TÜV Energie und Umwelt called around to the company and took a look at our firm. That triggered off a process: We went through all of the different departments and thought about what we can improve.
Then, the EMAS certification – an environment management system of the EU – came out that supports companies in becoming more sustainable on a voluntary basis. The great thing about it is that it initiates a constant improvement process. As a company one sets oneself different goals to improve the environmental commitment, which are then tested and validated annually or every three years in an audit. The EMAS certification turned a big cog for us. For example, in 2010 we changed over to green energy, put several photo voltaic plants and a cogeneration unit into operation, introduced general measures for saving energy for instance in the IT area or for lighting. In this way, we identified very many weak points at our premises and through solving these we have been able to save a lot long-term, which is now really starting to pay off. That is why sustainability is simply a great thing: Because at first one has to make high investments; however, these simply pay off long-term.
Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar: I can certainly confirm that. After occupying ourselves for many years with environmentally-friendly and resource-saving processes out of personal interest – with subjects like photovoltaics, pellet heating, CO2 neutrality at the location or green energy – we committed to the first ever environmental certification called Öko-Profit, a project carried out by the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. As the name suggests, the aim of Öko-Profit is that the user actually profits economically from acting in an ecologically responsible manner. It is about options for saving money – about avoiding waste, saving energy and water, through to the better separation of waste, in order to perhaps even save the price of raw materials.
Of course, one initially always has to make an investment. But as a family business it is not always that dramatic whether you get a return on the investment within three or nine years. That doesn’t play such a big role. The thought that one can save money or thinking in a different direction achieve added value by changing over to sustainable processes was already there, however it was our personal interest in the matter that was the main driving force for us. Without that it is rather tough, because after all one has to get the employees on board too.
As an importer, Halfar is a global player. What do you do at global level to make the supply chains more sustainable and more ethical?
Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar: First of all, we take a look at every production plant that we collaborate with, also the most important upstream suppliers for main materials, if at all possible. We have a very good personal picture of how things look on-location, which is enhanced by the cognitions of the JCK subsidiary in China. We don’t like working together with factories – unfortunately under the Corona situation it wasn’t avoidable sometimes – that we haven’t visited or seen ourselves. Certificates are the one thing, they are of course necessary, but it is only possible to gain a personal impression of the atmosphere, of the mentality on-site, the communication between the management and the employees in a personal visit.
Furthermore, we also pay attention to the social working conditions of course. And we strictly test the ingredients along the supply chain, pay attention to the chemical compositions or colourings so that we can filter out the upstream suppliers that suit us. However, what one should never forget and this is often pushed into the background: Sustainability depends on the quality of a product. All measures, all certificates and all texts are not worth a penny if the product is in plain terms rubbish, fails on the third day of use and lands in the garbage. In that case, all of the accompanying efforts are in vain. There are products that due to their life cycle and durability are not made from regrowing raw materials, but where this is acceptable considering the overall life cycle assessment. Everyone has to ask himself, what he is offering his customers. And if the product is a high-quality product in its class and specification, which is correspondingly well-accepted by the recipient, then this may be justifiable.
We are constantly occupied with replacing materials with better, i.e. more eco-friendly materials, for example made from regrowing raw materials, but the question is at what price and whether it makes sense. One can’t make a robust, water-repellent, dirt-repellent cotton bag designed for a 30-year service life that isn’t coated. That is simply not possible. That only works using synthetic fibres, perhaps from recycled raw materials. One has to assess the situation separately for each individual product.
Promotional products distributors don’t manufacture the goods themselves: What possibilities do they have of making their company more sustainable and more ecological?
Roland Liederbach: On the one hand, a lot can be gained by reorganising the processes at one’s own location: For example, switching over to green energy and biogas, dispatching goods using a CO2 neutral process, switching the vehicle fleet over to electric and hybrid vehicles, avoiding and reducing waste as well as recycling. And then there is the second dimension, which involves our customers and supplier partners. Of course, here we are extremely interested in working together with partners, who place the corresponding focus on these topics and ideally who beyond the pure certification are actually eager to push the basic principle of sustainability. Our efforts predominantly focus on our customers. This is where we have the biggest backlog, in arousing enthusiasm for sustainability, in addition to a corresponding price differentiation and corresponding quality of the products. It is about having an influence, putting forward ideas and making the corresponding suggestions as early as possible when planning campaigns and selecting the appropriate products.
Mr. Janka, you organise CSR workshops for your customers. Is this more a form of education or an offer that does justice to the increased demand from the market?
Rolf Janka: There is huge interest in these workshops. It is very important for us to demonstrate consulting competence and carry out educational work. And it is useful for the customers to experience company personalities like Mrs. Stühmeyer-Halfar, because on the one hand the enthusiasm and on the other the competence becomes tangible. At the beginning the customers explain what they understand under sustainability in the context of promotional products. Here, we discover a lot of lacking knowledge. The customer wishes to demonstrate a sustainable attitude, but especially in the case of promotional products, this is a wide field. When is an item sustainable? Does it have to be manufactured following a climateneutral process? Or made from regrowing raw materials? Great uncertainty prevails here. We attempt to explain things to the customers in a more concrete form, i.e. only want to offer climate-neutral promotional products in the future or display a transparent supply chain so that the customer has something tangible to get to grasps with.
The problem is we can provide good advice, but ultimately the price is often decisive. Our customers are often not always the last instance when it comes to taking the decisions. It is often down to the procurement department, and for buyers the amount of money they save is more important than acting in a sustainable manner. Luckily, this is gradually changing, but one mustn’t forget: Promotional products are not of high materiality for industry companies. Unfortunately, it will take some time for the theme sustainability to have asserted itself in the promotional products sector and until we are able to exclusively sell products that actually have a good life cycle assessment.
Customers are looking for criteria, which enables them to evaluate sustainability. Is climate-neutrality a good criterion?
Rolf Janka: That really is a complex theme. While visiting a trade show last year, a remarkable number of exhibitors used the term as advertising, but on examining these more closely, we then established the fact that this only referred to climate-neutral dispatch, or climate-neutral packaging – and wasn’t about the most essential level – the article itself. Climate-neutrality is not the pinnacle of sustainability; however it is a step in the right direction. We have premium partners, who really pursue the theme sustainability convincingly and who try to improve their life cycle assessment. But we also have partners who buy their way out with CO2 compensations. That is slightly reprehensible somehow, on the one hand however a good way of doing something. Doing nothing, wouldn’t be right either.
Mrs. Schneider, your company is without doubt one of the environmental pioneers of the industry. How do you find the fact that almost every company is now jumping on the sustainability bandwagon and that some of them seem to be making it easy for themselves? Is that good, because things are starting to move or do you think: “At least do it right”?
Martina Schneider: A little bit of both, but in principle my credo is that we should perceive and recommend sustainability more strongly as something positive. If we always consider sustainability to be a problem theme, nobody will like it, measures will only be undertaken out of a guilty conscious. That is not a good driving force. This is why individual initiatives for climate-neutral products or transport routes are welcome. I am convinced that long-term the customers will notice who is serious about the theme and takes an holistic approach and who only launches initiatives on a one-off basis. Due to the fact that we have been EMAS-certified for many years, we have gained a great deal of credibility in this field, which is facilitating our communications now. We are very grateful that there is an incredible amount of movement in the industry. We didn’t start changing everything over all at once, it can only be done step by step. Small steps then turn into small achievements and one reaps esteem from people who support that and find it good. That is the only way something big can arise from it later. Today, I can say that in retrospect all of the small initiatives were worthwhile. And the most important thing is that it is fun.
There are however also negative examples of players, who look for the simple answers or shy responsibility to a large extent. How can one expose such green washers?
Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar: We will have already achieved a great deal at all levels, if we create awareness for the fact that there is not just one simple answer. There isn’t the most sustainable item, but indeed many dimensions: If I take a look at how materials are produced, at the CO2 balance, their disposal, the durability, the intended purpose? Is the item designed in such a way and so well that it can replace a retail trade item, or will it merely float around in the car boot? When customers ask me to name the most sustainable item in our line-up, I know the person hasn’t really occupied himself with the theme. Then, one has to simply talk about it and address precisely these issues. We have to get used to the fact that in this respect the next few years are not going to be easy. What has characterised decades perhaps – being able to offer a relatively useful quality as cheaply as possible – no longer suffices and that is a good thing too. The theme sustainability will not go away again, it is now here to stay. The trend themes that always crop up again and again – at the moment it is the climate and CO2 balance, two or three years ago it was ocean plastic and recycling – enable us to draw the attention of society to the problems. Once awareness has been created for a theme, I can address the next issue. They follow on from each other.
However, if I home in on the complexity of the overall picture – from social responsibility and working conditions, to ocean plastic, the implementation of biocides on cotton fields and the treatment of jute, through to the CO2 balance, it is too overwhelming for the listener. We have reached the point where the picture is gradually expanding, but we still have to put many pieces of the huge puzzle together yet, before we can perhaps answer the question as to which is the most sustainable promotional product.
How sensitive are the customers concerning the theme transport routes?
Roland Liederbach: We are very pleased that the first customers are basically viewing items from the Far East very critically or are partly ruling them out completely. One of our biggest customers has set himself the goal of ensuring that the implementation of promotional products is completely CO2-neutral by 2025. In this connection, we have incidentally hugely reduced the share of items sourced from the Far East in our overall line-up, so that the share is only half of what it was ten years ago. There are by all means sustainable products that are easy to place, which originate from Europe and Germany, which can be well-implemented. Of course, it is also a cost aspect, but then one can reduce the order quantities: Sometimes less is simply more. It is our task to work towards making sure the customers become more sensitive in this connection. It is extremely satisfying when one arouses this enthusiasm and helps the customers tread a more sustainable path.
But not all products can be produced in Europe anymore, i.e. electronic items or products that involve a great deal of manual labour such as textiles and bags…
Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar: I have the impression that this idea of sourcing as many items as possible from Europe, is actually disappearing, because it is simply no longer feasible in many product areas. For example, this is the case with FFP2 masks. Those that came under criticism originated from Turkey, not from Asia. Not everything that is produced in Europe is good. Above all, we don’t manage the volumes here in this country or in our economic area, and also not in terms of the know-how.
Even if one was to sew T-shirts in this country, the materials implemented would probably still come from the Far East. That is not a problem at all. After all, we do live in a globalised world. The companies that work for us and for many of our colleagues, have long since lived up to the standards we expect. The situation is not the same as in the 1990s, we have long since arrived in the year 2020/21. Many industry customers don’t assess this situation correctly. One should thus convey to them the fact that we monitor everything, carry out audits, have certificates both in terms of the materials used and regarding transparency within the supply chain, as well as at a social level. That is what we are there for and that is the added value that we offer as a promotional products importer and as a promotional products distributor. If we didn’t offer that the end customer could source products from the Far East himself, he wouldn’t need us.
Martina Schneider: We don’t have the problem to the extent of Halfar perhaps, but there are indeed materials that we have to import. But I think one can avoid this problem to an extent if one builds up trust as a brand. Through this image transfer and selection of the right promotional products, one can convey a great deal of trust to the end customer. One certainly can’t make this generalisation “The Far East is bad”.
As a rule, the recipient of promotional products only sees the product and doesn’t know how committed the manufacturer in the background is. How can this be conveyed?
Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar: We rely on the trade here of course to convey knowledge about our brand. We provide material, we provide it online, we train the trade. That is slightly more difficult for us compared to a B2C brand like Schneider and takes certain effort to overcome the “hurdle trade”, so that the message is also conveyed to the end customers. But even if this doesn’t succeed, we don’t abandon our principles.
How can one incite the industry customers to listen more?
Rolf Janka: There are customers who are interested in this theme and there are some customers who are not interested in the theme. As sad as this may be: At some point in time the lawmaker will have to intervene so strongly that the customers have to listen and if it happens to cost more are prepared to pay more too. One can carry out educational work, but the time comes one day when the lawmaker has to help out. We have reached this point at the moment.
When you look at the industry as a whole: Where would you say it currently stands regarding sustainability?
Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar: The entrepreneurs are more and more aware of its relevance, now they have to reach all of the employees, get them on board, but also inform them. That is definitely a task for us to make sure our employees know as much as our customers. And then it is about reaching the end customer, which of course the trade is ultimately responsible for. At this point, the employees of the trade become the key players. In the everyday routine, everything frequently revolves around short deadlines or complaints, because the imprint has perhaps not quite been placed in the right position. Here the question arises as to how to deal with this – with resources, with goods, with market participants both customers and suppliers. Does it really have to be air freight? Do the products seriously have to be disposed of or can they perhaps still be used? Such decisions are ultimately taken by people. And that’s why we have to get the people on board.
Roland Liederbach: I am of the opinion that we still have a relatively long road ahead of us. At the end of the day, a lot is only possible if the legislators enforce measures, as Mr. Janka quite rightly noted. But it is also a question of communications and transparency about a wide range of aspects of sustainability. To cite here a figure: Every year around 3 billion tonnes of really highquality raw materials land on rubbish dumps and incineration plants in the EU. There are only very few people who would endorse this. We have to create awareness for such situations so that the choice and implementation of products doesn’t occur thoughtlessly.
Kathrin Stühmeyer-Halfar: That has already changed to an extent. When I think about the last trade shows, the visitors posed the question much less frequently: “What’s new?” Instead, one sees that their minds are at work which items they could implement for which customers. One does notice the change that it is not just about flooding as many people with as many novelties as possible, but instead showing selected novelties that present a good basis for discussions. I think this will be the case over the next years. This has certainly been further reinforced by the Corona crisis.
Rolf Janka: The problem in our branch is that we have a relatively low standing in the marketing mix and marketing departments who occupy themselves with promotional products tend to focus more on classic forms of communication. In spite of the fact that specifically haptic advertising media has such a high, long-lasting usage. There are also great differences between the customers. Some take a totally sustainable approach, others say: “It is good if the items are sustainable, but the main thing is that they are delivered fast and cheap.” That is a bit sad, but we are all in the same boat. We are taking small steps forward and if I think about where we were three or four years ago when we launched our sustainability strategy, a lot of things have already changed. We had a customer consultant who said he wanted to sell promotional products not sustainability. That has changed in the meantime, because our customer consultants inform themselves. It is down to all of us to inform our customers and where one reaches fertile soil one can bring about a lot of change. And when one then also succeeds in eliminating the price hurdle, then everyone is happy.
Photos: Screenshots, © WA Media
