We might have contact with a bank over a loan or an overdraft extension. But when HH Global’s Kevin Dunckley encountered HSBC he came away with a career change.
Banking on a new career
As current Chief Sustainability Officer Kevin explains, the eureka moment happened when he went into a forest and re-emerged as a “changed man”.
He says: “Back in 2013 I was a CIO at HH Global, running tech, and I had senior management responsibility for our relationship with HSBC, one of our big clients.
“They ran a global sustainability leadership and learning programme with their execs in nature-based environments, with NGO partner Earthwatch.”
He adds: “Each time, one of their key supply chain partners got invited. After five days on that programme, working with scientists and NGOs, I came back a changed man.”
Kevin met with HH Global’s then CEO and said: “We’ve always considered sustainability, but our focus on it needs to deepen. This is a really big area and we need to dive head-first into it.”
He adds: “It’s important to our clients, important to me and – luckily for me – also important to our CEO.
“l had a career change from that moment. And our client HSBC played a pivotal role. Since then, we’ve been on a journey of sustainability excellence for our clients, our supply chain partners and the planet we all live on.”
Enthusiasm is sustainable
Sustainability was in the DNA of HH Global long before Kevin’s appointment as CSO in October 2016.
In the succeeding eight years, it has become even more prominent.
This focus on sustainability has fueled Kevin's passion, which began when he joined HH Global in 2007 as Digital Media Director. He later served as CIO and Chief Digital Officer before stepping into his current role.
He says: “I'm hugely privileged to work in an organisation of this size with Fortune 500 clients and an expansive supply chain. I believe we play a crucial role in helping them to decide how to best utilise their budgets for responsible expenditure.”
With “responsible” sometimes used as a proxy for “sustainability”, there is the added dimension of considering both people and the wider planet.
Kevin explains: “We ensure our clients avoid any potentially negative actions, use the best marketing channels and materials, only order what they need to support their marketing campaigns and use the optimal supply chain.”
He says: “We have the most extensive global supply chain, and our work feels truly meaningful. We're helping clients realize they have options and guiding them toward the best choices.
“It feels like what we're doing is important to not only us, but to our clients and our supply chain partners. And there's a groundswell of enthusiasm and energy from colleagues, clients – everyone wants to learn and get better at this and be a responsible organisation.”
Kevin is clearly in it for the long haul, as he explains: “I don't think I could do anything else now having done this role for several years.
“It gives you a spring in your step – there's so much to do.”
The lowdown on HH Global
HH Global is a world-leading global marketing activation partner, with a promise to deliver ‘big impact for big ideas’.
Kevin explains: “When a big life sciences, beverages, technology or financial client has to go to market with their goods and services, delivering a high-quality marketing campaign across multiple geographies is really complex.
“You need a partner like us to activate that effectively and that's what we do. We sit at the intersection of Fortune 500 brands and our global supply chain and we bring their campaigns to life.”
He adds: “We do that across beverages, financial, FMCG, life sciences, luxury, retail, technology, plus non-profit and public sectors, supplying everything from packaging to point of sale materials and more. And we do it at a far larger scale than anybody else.”
Three big achievements
As mentioned, sustainability is embedded in every area of HH Global’s work and has been for many years. And its position at the heart of HH Global is reemphasised year after year by the development of new projects.
Therefore, when it comes to selecting the company’s best recent achievement in sustainability, Kevin sees it and raises it – to three:
1 - Sustainable Procurement Framework
Kevin says: “We launched a global supply chain programme, which is scaling out to 2,000 of our supply chain partners, called the Sustainable Procurement Framework.
“This is going from strength to strength and is moving the needle for understanding sustainability from a supply chain partner point of view.
“We're two years in and it’s something we’re immensely proud of.”
As a services business, 99% of HH Global’s carbon footprint comes from Scope 3 – supply chain – emissions.
Kevin notes that many of HH Global’s clients have the same issue.
He says: “We are the gateway to their supply chain and the accelerator. We focus on the products and services that our clients’ market and try to reduce those emissions.
“As part of our responsible efforts, we also work hand-in-hand with our strategic supplier partners to help them understand sustainability.”
He says: “If we can change the makeup of the products and channels that we operate in for our clients and help our supply chain partners use more renewable energy – for instance, by switching to electric vehicles – we are going to dramatically reduce the CO2 and Scope 3 emissions of our organisation and supply chain.”
2 – Conscious Creative
“We've got 500 creative, design and content production professionals and our clients have their own studios and agencies. Our people are experts in sustainable design and we saw an opportunity to bring that knowledge to clients, so we launched our Conscious Creative programme about 12 months ago. It uses tech and data to help educate and inspire external creative and design communities to think about the long-term impacts of the materials used in their work and how they can design more mindfully with one eye always on environmental impact.”
3 – Earth Day 2024 campaign
Kevin says: “We're really focused now on communication to colleagues and clients. Our Earth Day campaign was actually the most successful internal campaign we've ever run as a business.
“We gave each person in our organisation $10 and asked them to vote on where our sustainability investment went. We included every single one of our 4,500 colleagues across 64 countries, which is hard to do. But the engagement was well worth it – and all adds to our message that protecting people and the planet is incredibly important.”
Innovation with Purpose
These three recent achievements build on a firm foundation of sustainability initiatives introduced over the years at HH Global.
In 2019, the company launched its central programme, Innovation with Purpose, which is a touchstone and guide for everything we do in terms of sustainability.
Kevin says: “Our Innovation with Purpose programme reports diligently on our progress towards a more responsible business.
“We track where we are in relation to five of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the ones that feel the most meaningful to our business. And under each of those we have three business targets, giving us 15 in total to aim for. They’re our sustainability north star.
“As an example, our strategic sourcing team is focused on diversifying spend into our supply chain, which increases competition and innovation. Our human resources team is looking at the diversity of our board structure, because different perspectives allow us to find better solutions. Client engagement teams are also overseeing how we create change for our clients around the use of more sustainable products.”
“Our strategy is to use the UN SDGs to drive meaningful change in our own business first,” says Kevin. “By meeting those targets, we effect change on a greater scale for our clients all across the world.”
HH Global’s Impact Globe
Another way that HH Global has brought sustainability to life is through its Impact Globe.
The company chose 12 projects to invest in – “nature-based investing”, Kevin says.
He adds: “We invest in return for impact, whether water impact, biodiversity impact, soil health impact or carbon sequestration impact.
“We chose the 12 projects with our technology and behaviour change partner Pinwheel.
“Part of the toolkit we have is an impact globe that dynamically moves when you use your mouse, showing the projects and the impact they’ve made.”
He says the globe is “enthusing” colleagues and making a potentially complicated subject easy to understand.
An ecosystem of partners
The Impact Globe shows HH Global’s desire to work with and for others.
As a company with approximately 6,500 strategic supplier partners, there is no possibility of operating in isolation. So which companies are among HH Global’s key partners, helping it to drive sustainability with purpose?
Canopy Planet
Kevin says: “From a forestry perspective, Canopy Planet has given us guidance on responsible sourcing and helped us understand policy.
“You need people to keep you honest when you're trying to be compliant with regulations.”
PlasticFree.com
“We first met PlasticFree five years ago and they gave us quite a sobering perspective when they said ‘marketing is part of the problem’.
“That's quite punchy, but we needed that. It was a wakeup call. So we thought, ‘okay, how do we go from that to being part of the solution?’ Everything we’ve done since around responsible business practice has been designed to make that shift.”
Diageo
The global beverages giant, which produces household names including Guinness, has a strategic partnership with HH Global.
Kevin says: “Our contract with Diageo has levers and KPIs in there which weren't forced on us.
“We completely approve and recommend having a carbon reduction target, for instance.
“If we overachieve or underachieve on that, there are penalties or rewards. We have a nature-based investment clause in the contract. That's a first for us and I believe probably a first in our market. That shows how much we believe in taking this approach.”
Sanofi
The France-based consumer health organisation has a similar arrangement to the one with Diageo. Kevin says: “We've partnered strongly to drive down the CO2 of their marketing activations to the point where we are filming case studies with their CPO that celebrate those successes.”
Kevin says: “Google has been a client of ours for 15 years and we're extremely proud to work with them. We were the company behind their 2023 global environmental report.
“We manage the creative, the peer reviewing and we give them sustainability consultancy. And we've also worked on the 2024 edition.”
Where does HH Global go from here?
One of the greatest challenges in building a sustainable, responsible business is creating a compelling vision for the future and then actively working, day by day, to make it a reality. But for Kevin, the future holds a great deal of promise.
He says: “In the next 12 to 18 months I would expect we’ll make significant strides towards reducing our overall CO2 emissions.
“And that's by the product supply chain, helping clients order more sustainable products and services, maybe fewer products, but better products.”
He also wants to see the Sustainable Procurement Framework reaching 2,500 suppliers across 55 countries and the real-world impact of clients’ design communities becoming vastly more aware of circular design through the Conscious Creative programme.
But the “big one” for Kevin is communication and narrative around net zero.
He says: “There's too much alphabet soup and people are confused. So, I'm making it a bit of a mission for our organisation to be the clearest communicators and storytellers around sustainability.”
He adds: “You're not going to take your audience with you if you speak in jargon and sustainability professionals are guilty of that, just like tech people are.
“I really want to drive clear, authentic storytelling and clear messaging where anybody can understand what you're saying and can get excited to join that journey.”
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