The Matcha Initiative
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Mary has over 17 years of experience in marketing strategy, transformation, customer and employee experience, strategic partnerships, and business development. She has successfully structured and led marketing teams within the hospitality and B2B sectors (office supply distribution), consistently delivering impactful strategies and campaigns.
In her recent professional journey, Mary explored entrepreneurship by running her own consulting practice, where she helped companies develop comprehensive strategies for marketing, customer and employee experience, through the lens of sustainability and change management. Her focus was on bringing methodology to sustainability roadmaps with SMART objectives and effective reporting, creating strong green teams with diverse profiles committed to driving internal change, and ensuring strong buy-in from management by linking sustainability objectives closely to business goals in the context of office sustainability and regional strategy.
Mary has now decided to blend her business acumen with the change management skills acquired through her Executive Master in Change at INSEAD, leading a marketing team in the hotel industry. Outside of work, she remains committed to raising awareness on sustainability challenges and actively participates in a community focused on this cause.
Here are a few ways I am happy to help:
In my previous role, I was actively involved in sustainability at the regional level. My financial director had a good grasp on sustainability and wanted to make change, but she could not do it alone. Along the journey of helping my director with sustainability transformation, I gained exposure to The Matcha Initiative, Climate Fresk worskhops, and many other sustainability resources. Being involved in many sustainability efforts and discussions enlightened me on the importance of corporate involvement in the sustainability movement. This inspired me to learn more about change management, as well as write my Executive Masters thesis on sustainability.
I am also part of The Matcha Initiative's Responsible Marketing online solutions working group.
Despite having a clear sustainability strategy, alignment of stakeholder interests was the first hurdle, especially when stakeholders prioritised business objectives over sustainability ones. I realised that our control is limited. For example, although we are heavily reliant on our suppliers and are therefore partially responsible for their environmental and social impacts, it is hard to impose our own views on them because they have their own.
In such cases, what we can do is to continue raising awareness among stakeholders, and doing whatever is possible with the given resources and support to drive sustainability transformation.
I am very proud of the Sustainable community we created in Asia with my colleague, Karine. This is a very unique set-up in a company as we had one or two ambassadors to lead the sustainability topics locally. They were fully empowered and involved many different roles into their initiatives, creating the right internal emulation.
To me, the most important is to create those regular catchups during which you can share not only the status on projects but also ideas. Even what can be seen as small actions are source of inspiration for the whole community.