Oregon-based tea brand Tazo recently made headlines with an innovative marketing campaign on TikTok. It's a super interesting example of how companies can implement regenerative principles into their marketing practices. But before we dive into it, first some background info:
A Regenerative Transformation
In August, Tazo which is part of ekaterra announced that it is embarking on a full transition to a regenerative approach. Tazo's so-called "Regenerative Roadmap" includes a long list of goals, from ensuring fair trade and human rights standards across its supply chain to empowering smallholder farmers, improving diversity, equity and inclusion across its workforce and direct suppliers, switching to and ensuring regenerative agriculture standards, and protecting, enhance and regenerating more land, forests, and oceans than needed for the business - to name just a few. The announcement came with the launch of four regenerative organic versions of its most popular tea blends as well as the already mentioned marketing campaign.
From Sustaining to Regenerating
Now, as a purpose-driven business professional you've probably come across the term regenerative quite a lot already, but what exactly is it and how can marketing be regenerative?
In general, one can define regenerative businesses as businesses that enhance, and thrive through, the health of socio-ecological systems in a co-evolutionary process. While most of our current systems are extractive and linear, regenerative business strives to heal what has been harmed and to restore and revive what has been lost or degraded. Thereby, the concept differentiates from, or expands the idea of, sustainability which often focuses merely on sustaining ecological systems, in the sense of doing no further harm. When it comes to marketing, regeneration is an even newer concept and can therefore mean a lot of things. But the general idea of regenerative marketing practices is that these are actively pursuing and creating healing, both on a social and ecological level, leaving a net-positive impact on the environment and local community. So how exactly could that look like?
