Marketing with Meaning: A Conversation with Alex Michalko @ HP Inc.

With a diverse background spanning over 20 years of sustainability expertise across the technology, retail, media, and real estate industries, including roles at Amazon, REI, The Walt Disney Company and a research fellowship at Project Drawdown, Alex Michalko is truly a master of all trades in the sustainability field. Currently Director of Climate & Responsible Sourcing at HP Inc., Alex is responsible for driving strategies to reduce carbon emissions, advancing sustainable forestry practices, ensuring alignment with global climate goals and compliance standards, and overseeing HP’s human rights and supplier engagement initiatives. Holding degrees in international relations from Stanford University, and both an MBA and MEM in environmental management from Duke University, Alex is currently focused on helping HP capture accurate and complete data for deeper tiers of the company’s extensive supply chain. 

Alex recently shared her thoughts on the importance of consistency for brands, the need for a third path of sustainability communications, and the challenge of balancing the need for claims to be both defensible and memorable. Read more in our Marketing with Meaning conversation.

1. What’s one shift you’re seeing right now that’s redefining how brands connect with people, for better or worse?

With the emergence of new regulations like EmpCo (the EU’s Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition), companies are being held to a higher standard in their sustainability communications. Environmental claims need to be verifiable, substantiated, and credible. This is a good thing, and it is also redefining what sustainability marketing looks like. Sustainability brand and marketing leaders need to thread the needle more carefully, so that claims are legal but still relevant, pithy, and memorable.

2. Is cultural relevance more about a brand staying true to its own voice and values, or aligning with its audience’s? Where do brands most often get that balance wrong?

Ideally, it’s both, not a trade-off. Finding product-market fit, so that you’re communicating authentically to an audience that holds the same values. That’s the sweet spot.

3. Can you share a campaign or story that’s really stuck with you, something that’s shaped how you lead or think about your work?

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket, and REI’s Opt Outside have all resonated with me for challenging convention and bringing authenticity into marketing. They were each unexpected in their own way, which is part of why I think they stuck with me.

4. How can brands talk about purpose or sustainability in ways that feel real, not performative?

Consistency matters. So does connection to the brand’s core value proposition. And there needs to be action to back up the talk. Jumping on the latest trend if it has never been part of a brand’s identity will feel performative. But highlighting the sustainability benefits of product attributes that have been part of a brand’s ethos since the beginning will feel real. Yet it’s also critical for brands to have the proof points to back it up. 

When Filson talks about creating durable, long-lasting products and minimizing waste, those are characteristics that come to life with their product care, repair services, and their customers’ own lived experience owning Filson products that may have been passed down through generations since their founding in 1897. When Patagonia says don’t buy this jacket, it’s not just an ad. They back it up with Worn Wear used products and repair, and with a company structure that keeps ownership in the hands of The Patagonia Purpose Trust and The Holdfast Collective, which gives them credibility. 

When you get those three elements right – consistency, connection, and action – your messaging is more likely to land.

5. Please share something you learned about your audience in the last year that completely surprised you or caused you to change your strategy?

One thing that’s become extremely clear over the last year in the area of carbon and climate is that our customers want to know what our sustainability work means to them. Many of our large enterprise customers have their own carbon reduction goals, and rather than hearing how we’ve made ambitious decarbonization commitments and are on track to achieve them at a corporate level, what they really want to know is the carbon footprint of their own fleet of HP devices, and they want to see how the decisions they make in procurement (the configurations of the laptops they purchase, for example) and the way they use the devices (both day-to-day decisions like putting a device in sleep mode and longer-term decisions like purchasing refurbished products or extending device life through repair) can help lower their carbon footprint. So my team has been working over the last year on a pilot of a customer climate outcome reporting tool that delivers personalized insights for our customers. We’re excited to take the learnings from the pilot to continue to evolve and scale our sustainability communications and reporting capabilities in the future.

6. What’s one buzzword or trend in marketing you think we should retire? What would you replace it with?

Greenhushing. Over the past 15+ years in corporate sustainability, the pendulum has swung from big, bold marketing claims that bordered on (or sometimes crossed over into) greenwashing. More recently we’ve seen the opposite, with companies afraid of sticking their necks out, opting instead for “greenhushing” – saying very little about their sustainability initiatives. I hope we turn the corner to a third path – celebrating successes, acknowledging challenges, and speaking authentically about both what’s been accomplished and what lies ahead. I don’t have a name for that – greentruthing?

7. How did you end up in your current role? What was the turning point?

I started my career in nonprofit land conservation. Reading Gretchen Daily and Katherine Ellison’s “The New Economy of Nature,” a collection of case studies highlighting examples where conservation was profitable, was a turning point that sparked my interest in corporate sustainability. When you realize that sustainability and business success aren’t a zero-sum game, it opens up a huge range of options to achieve impact at scale. I went back to grad school to get my MBA and Master of Environmental Management degrees with the intention of transitioning to a sustainability role in a large company, and I was lucky enough to land a role on a great team at Disney! The rest, as they say, is history.

8. When you’re not thinking about marketing or communications, what inspires your creativity or keeps you grounded?

Three things: First, spending time outdoors keeps me grounded and inspired. Second, traveling and meeting people from different backgrounds and cultures gives me perspective and keeps me from getting stuck in an echo chamber. And, third, making things by hand reminds me that there’s beauty in slowing down, joy in creative pursuits, and value in knowing when to follow directions and when to go off-piste.