Building trust with Charlie Martin

In our October You’re MarketingKind gathering Charlie Martin, CEO and founder of The Anti-Greenwash Charter, led a discussion on how we can build trust through radical transparency.

He said, ‘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 covered 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 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 learned 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 greenwashing
2) A full static content review to create alignment with regulations
3) Co-creation of a Green Claims Policy to act as guardrails for all future communications

And 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 also 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.

You can watch an edit from the live session with Charlie below or listen to it on our podcast here.