Capital One marketer tells DM industry to reduce environmental impact

by Kim Benjamin, Marketing Direct 09-Nov-07, 12:55

MARKETING DIRECT GREEN DM CONFERENCE - The top marketer at Capital One, the UK's second largest user of direct mail, today urged the DM industry to clean up its act and improve its impact on the environment, or risk being legislated against and facing a heightened consumer backlash.

The call was made by Justin Basini, vice-president and head of brand marketing at Capital One Europe, speaking at Marketing Direct's Profiting from Green Policies conference.

At the same time, Basini unveiled the steps Capital One is taking to develop a sustainable business model. This includes cutting its volumes of direct mail and investing heavily in internet communications for its acquisition and retention programmes.

Basini said the risk of inaction on environmental issues was "bigger than the risk of change" and that the industry would suffer through a loss of confidence and creativity.

Basini said: "We are a vibrant part of the marketing industry but we need to consider how we will secure our future. We need to reorient ourselves away from threat and fear and move on to sustainability. Taking action against junk mail is clearly a vote winner."

The financial services provider will also be including recycle logos on all its printed materials by March 2008, which will enable it to monitor the recycling habits among its consumer base. It is also aiming to use 100% recycled paper on its internal and external communications in the same time frame. According to Basini, Capital One mailed 103 million items last year.

Basini said: "We will use electronic channels to reduce our impact on the environment. We have used the internet previously for acquisition, but we will extend this channel to customer service. Direct mail still has an important role to play but we are exploring new pull models for the medium."

Basini urged the industry to adopt leadership values based on responsibility, accountability and excellence, in order to develop an environmentally-friendly approach to DM: "Our efforts so far and our new marketing policy have been uniformly well-received -- and we have seen an increase in response rates."

Comments

Bill Britt - 09/11/2007

Can someone explain to me how Capital One can monitor the recycling habits of its consumer base by putting a recycling logo on the 100m pieces of mail it blasts out annually?

Chris Arnold - 28/11/2007

The word 'hypocrasy' come sto mind. This is one of several financial institutes that through excessive carpet bombing has helped to make 'junk mail' such an issue that the Government is looking at is a problem. And now they are moving to digital to save money (and no doubt will send out millions of spam emails to people who don't want them) they are trying to look holy than thou. This is green wash.