An interview with:
Lara Koritzke, UEBT Communications and Marketing Director
1. How long have you been working at UEBT, what is your role and who is part of your team?
Field trip in Italy (Alba) where the white truffle is wild collected
Wow, I guess I have now been here almost five years, but for the first three of those years I was a part-time advisor in communications and marketing. My role now is as the full-time director of the communications area at UEBT. I work most closely with my longtime Amsterdam-based colleague Nelly Debril who has been with us for six years. Nelly leads our claims work and polishes up most of our communications products. Oriane Brunet, based in France is the latest addition to our Communications team, she is our Conference Organiser & Claims Officer. Finally, I also work with Gabriela Salinas who is our knowledge sharing advisor, based in Lima, Peru. We also work with a freelance designer based in rural Scotland
2. How did your previous experiences at Rainforest Alliance and ISEAL help you in your current position at UEBT?
At Rainforest Alliance I began my career and I would travel a lot and write about sustainable development and certification, mostly in Latin America. ISEAL was my first time as a communications director, and I didn’t know anything about how to do that kind of work. I was a writer and I knew nothing about things like communications strategy, web sites, media relations, and a vast array of other topics. But I had a great team and I learned by doing. It was also a small non profit with a global focus, similar to UEBT now. I was able to learn about many other areas of non profit leadership including governance, finance, human resources, internal communications and more. And because both organisations were about the interface between industry and sustainability efforts, I had a lot of knowledge ready to share and test with UEBT when I joined.
3. You have a long-term experience in communicating around sustainable and ethical sourcing issues. What did you witness has changed over the years in the way companies communicate about those and what do you think drove that change?
I think the main change I have seen is that companies have to communicate about their sustainability in general and you see most mainstream companies having to say something about their commitments and actions on social and environmental issues. This used to be the exception, and most companies were just silent about this. You had some niche companies doing a lot, and the rest were just quiet about it, and likely because it was not on their radar. Now you have significant disclosure around their commitments, policies, projects and more. However, this means there is also this incredible rise of greenwashing, which is really a problem. Companies are still not able to communicate their challenges in a very honest way, and there is always a great deal of ‘spin’ to how they talk about their sourcing.
4. How do you help UEBT members and certificate holders in communicating around their commitments and actions?
I am not a marketing genius with all the creative ideas for them, but what I do provide is a deep expertise on sustainability communications, especially in terms of sourcing. I also have a lot of experience on what makes these kinds of communications credible, in terms of protecting the brand or the company and in building trust with clients and consumers (and avoiding greenwashing). So I try to bring that to my discussions with companies, and not say that I can help them come up with the best social media campaign or the best way to market a product. Another thing I try to advocate for is that companies share more stories of the biodiversity rich places and the local people whose livelihoods depend on these natural raw materials, and that they consider doing this in their product marketing. I think especially for the beauty industry, in particular, companies are not yet really marketing the local people and the inspirational botanicals that make these products unique.
5. UEBT offers several ethical sourcing programmes for companies that wish to improve their practices (verification, certification). All those programmes allow the companies to make claims on the work they are doing with UEBT. Can you tell companies that are reading this interview what a credible claim looks like?
Oh no, that might take too many pages! But it really can be summarized by a few things. First, ensuring that the claim itself is clear and not misleading. For example, if the claim is about one ingredient in the product, then that needs to be clear. Also, the type of claim needs to be clear. If the claim is about membership, a commitment or a donation to a charity, then it should not look like a product certification nor have a consumer-facing label on a product because these types of claims don’t actually say anything about the sustainability of the ingredients inside the product. And finally, a claim should be relevant. This could mean that the if the claim is about an environmental issue but the ingredient is well known to have significant social challenges in the supply chain, that might not be a good claim to make. But it could also mean that the claim should not be promoted for an ingredient that is not relevant to the product at all, such as not iconic or named or important for the formulation, and ignoring more relevant ingredients as a kind of distraction.
6. UEBT will launch in March a new corporate and member logo. Without spoiling how it will look like can you explain why this change?
Ah yes, we decided late last year to create a unified brand look and feel with our logo including our membership logo. We have a beautiful certification label that had been designed by an award winning agency in Brazil back in 2018. The image on this label has a really strong appeal to our stakeholders – our members and our Board and staff. So we decided to refresh the corporate UEBT logo to use the same image, but ensuring that it does not look like a certification label. We should see this being rolled out in March of 2023.