2024 sustainable beauty communication trends with fractional CSO Maggie Spicer

Quick Connects are brief but beneficial conversations Mike Hower conducts with leaders in sustainability and ESG about a variety of sustainability communication topics. Watch the conversation or read the transcript below.

The beauty industry has long faced scrutiny for its sustainability practices. With large, complex value chains spanning the globe, beauty brands face serious environmental, social and governance challenges. With most being consumer facing, they are particularly prone to accusations of greenwashing with their sustainability communication. As new regulations come out of Europe and California, it’s more important than ever for beauty companies to communicate with care when it comes to sustainability.

In this Quick Connect, I spoke with Maggie Spicer, a fractional CSO who specializes in helping beauty companies address their social and environmental impacts.

Mike Hower: Hey everybody. I'm here with Maggie Spicer, a fractional CSO who specializes in the beauty industry. Thanks for being here, Maggie. 

Maggie Spicer: Thanks so much for having me.   

Mike: The first question I want to ask you today: what are some of the biggest sustainability communications challenges you've been seeing in the beauty industry? 

Maggie: Yeah. So, beauty is facing a lot of the same challenges that other consumer verticals like food and fashion are facing when it comes to things like green claims — which is that you see this huge consumer demand for sustainably-produced products or sustainable brands, but then you also see a trend of consumer distrust over brand claims. 

In beauty, this gets layered onto kind of a really interesting history over this conversation around ingredients. So, this is the whole green versus clean conversation. And so for a while, there were companies who were creating brands and products that were excluding certain ingredients. And now we're seeing the conversation get elevated to not only ingredient exclusions, but we want sustainable impact. 

What brands are now challenged with is how to identify what their sustainability priorities should be. So, going from clean into the green arena, how to actually implement them because this is a totally new space for a lot of companies. And then how to translate this into storytelling — which I know you are very aware is sometimes the most difficult piece because brands, especially bigger brands need to figure out their storytelling in a way that captures value, but avoids getting accused of greenwashing or at worst getting a potential class action lawsuit over misrepresentation or misleading claims. 

Mike: That's a great segue to my next question. Everybody in sustainability communications like me is starting to freak out about all the regulations — lots of legalese appearing. I was talking to our mutual connection, Christine Uri the other day about if we  all need to go back to law school — which I really would not want to do if I can avoid it. 

How are the regulations in Europe and California impacting how the beauty industry is approaching sustainability communication? 

Maggie: It's a really interesting time — especially being a lawyer — because I remember being in legislation and regulation in law school and it just didn't translate to me. And now going back to everything I learned and realizing that the big impetus for a lot of  the improvements in the industry and how we're seeing ESG actually get translated into all these different verticals we work in is because of regulation.

And for beauty, it's a good thing. Brands were asking for defined standards for a long time. We used to be in the Wild West of sustainability claims where brands could put a little green leaf on their packaging and put a recycling logo on and call it a day. And now there is this complex ecosystem of regulations — not just in the U S.

So, you've got the green guides in the US and the new version is coming out. Hopefully, soon you've got the UK Green Claims Code, and then you've got the EU Green Claims Directive. You've got all these different high level standards and there's a lot of overlap, but they also have a lot of nuance.

And so, brands and retailers that are selling across these different jurisdictions are having to take a much higher level. Look at how they develop their green claims, and it means that having somebody with a regulatory background or at least an eye to assessing what these standards are and how to actually implement them in your marketing is really important because brands need to be consistent in how they build these claims. You don't want to have to build your claims differently across different markets, and then you almost have to forecast a little bit because I think you mentioned California. Like, we're not even talking about what the states are doing. California does its own thing. New York sometimes has its own standards.

As the states get involved it becomes even harder for brands to develop a cohesive approach to sustainability claims, unless they're really taking a 30,000 foot view and thinking about it  across their entire portfolio. So, I think the real kind of change in the approach is that brands are having to really widen the scope of the data that they're ingesting and how they build their approach to marketing. 

Mike: What are some beauty companies that you think are doing a good job right now communicating sustainability? 

Maggie: I'll give you a couple examples across the value chain because beauty captures so many different pieces. On the raw material side, there's two companies called Archaea and Mothership Materials. They're actually using biotech and nanotechnology to develop sustainable alternatives to natural materials. These are essentially lab created much more environmentally friendly alternatives to what we could be sourcing from nature, and that means we get a lot more data. We get a lot more transparency.

From a sustainability perspective, it's a really exciting new frontier on the consumer communication side. I feel like you'll enjoy this piece. There are a bunch of technology platforms that are focusing on empowering consumer comms. On ESG. So two companies I really like, and I've worked with both of them: Bluebird Climate and Provence. 

They are using tools like AI and blockchain to make ESG data more accessible. And they're focused on beauty, but I'm sure, they'll expand into other verticals as well. And then on the brand side, the piece we all know and love there's a really great brand called Cocokind. It's super accessible. Walgreens I think even carries it, but they have on their packaging an impact claims section. So, you'll see the ingredients and then you'll actually see CO2 emissions and how do you recycle? And they're a very accessible brand, but they're making sustainability accessible as well, which I think is really cool to see. 

Mike: So it's almost 2024. Can't believe that.  What are some sustainability communications trends that you see playing out next year?

Maggie: I think we're starting to see it now and 2024 I feel like it's just going to be fuel on the fire — more sophisticated sustainability messaging. And that leads to my number two, which is technology to empower brands to make more sophisticated sustainability messaging. Beauty consumers will often look to  the product itself or product packaging to understand anything about a brand — whether it's what's in the bottle, what is their environmental credential — you only have a couple of seconds to convey ESG information. And so packaging is a great opportunity and a great challenge for beauty because it's very small, like you don't get a lot of space. Even with really simple technology tools like QR codes, brands are trying to use QR codes to redirect consumers to a website and on that website, they're giving much more detailed sustainability information about what they're doing.

And so from a regulatory perspective, that's also great because if you're going to be making green claims, you can't just say “better for the planet.” Like that's not going to fly anymore. So making information easily and accessibly available to consumers is really, really important. And finding low cost, easily accessible technology to get that information across, I think is going to be a huge trend next year. Hopefully going beyond.  

Mike: Yeah. I remember being on a call a few months back with a client and their lawyers — we were working on a big campaign — and the lawyer said that the difference between. Uh, let's say a company says “we're working to make a difference” or “we're making a difference” could be the difference between getting sued or fined — which is insane, which is crazy to me.

Maggie: Yeah, and it's tough because there are a lot of brands who are trying to do the right thing, and you never want to see brands get accused of greenwashing because they made a jargon decision in the marketing department and it didn't translate well.

But unfortunately I think they're being penalized because there are some companies who have been skating the line for a long time. And what's great is we're now seeing regulators develop standards around things like net zero or carbon neutral claims where we didn't have the metrics to back up those types of claims before.

So now we're focused on what is the science behind the claim that you're making. And I think that level of sophistication is forcing companies to put the appropriate level of resources into their sustainability operations that then flows to the calm side. I don't think it should start at the marketing and then trickle down like it has to be at what the core of the company is doing and then, go out.

And to me, it's such an exciting time to be supporting this kind of work and to be interfacing with people like you who have the ability to create an audience for more sophisticated ESG messaging. It's my ideal that in 20 years, this isn't a nice to have — it's just the baseline for being a good business is you've taken all this into account, and you know how to market it. So it's why I'm so excited to see this series from you because I'm constantly learning from other people, and I'm just inspired by the way that we're all trying to tackle the same issue, but from very different perspectives, very different backgrounds. And just trying to make the world a better place sounds a little cliche, but I feel like we're all in it. So, we'll just go with it. 

Mike: All right. Thanks, Maggie. This was a great conversation.