Messaging You Can Stand Behind: Marketing Discipline at Speedy Hire.

A marketer’s seat

Nicola Hayes has spent twenty years at Speedy Hire. She is now senior marketing manager looking after national accounts, sectors and the solutions businesses, and four years ago she took on an addition to her role as ESG business partner. The combination is unusual. It makes her responsible for what Speedy Hire says about its sustainability performance, and for ensuring the evidence behind it.

When Nicola joined, the flagship campaigns were about working at height, dust, and hand-arm vibration. Today the energy in those same teams is directed at Scope 3 emissions, supplier data, and carbon intelligence reporting. The campaigns look different. The discipline behind them does not.

As ESG Business Partner, Nicola led the implementation of Speedy Hire’s Anti-Greenwash Charter commitments, bringing together stakeholders from across the business to strengthen governance, improve evidence requirements and create greater consistency in sustainability communications.

The four-hour promise

Asked what shapes her approach, Nicola reaches for an example from previous operational campaigns.

“We offer guaranteed four-hour delivery to our customers. It’s one of our service promises. There was a lot of planning that went into that prior to launch, where we tested it to make sure it was robust and that we could deliver on it before we put it out there. And it’s exactly the same with this. You don’t want to undersell your services and you definitely don’t want to oversell.”

A service promise that cannot be kept is a liability. For Nicola, sustainability claims should be held to the same standard as any other business promise. If a claim cannot be evidenced, it should not be made. Speedy Hire’s annual sustainability reporting follows the same logic, publishing KPIs against each pillar of its Decade to Deliver strategy, showing progress so far and where work is needed to stay on track.

Getting the house in order

Signing the Anti-Greenwash Charter followed three or four months of process design, audits and governance. Five or six work streams. Sixteen senior stakeholders across sales, bids and tenders, customer services, supply chain and product data, each asked to own a piece of how the company’s sustainability story is told in their part of the business.

“We didn’t want to start the external rollout through all our communication channels until we knew we had everything we needed in place to minimise any additional risk.”

Nicola turned the internal rollout into her endpoint assessment for a leadership apprenticeship. The project included the development of a Green Claims Policy, governance processes, approval workflows, evidence requirements, supplier engagement, product data guidance and audit controls designed to support accurate and transparent sustainability communications across the business.

Nicola delivered awareness sessions to more than 145 colleagues, helping create a shared understanding of how environmental claims should be evidenced, approved and communicated.

The spoken word

Research from Futurebuild found that the biggest source of greenwashing in the built environment is not advertising or social media. It is conversations with sales agents. The finding sharpened her rollout.

“I think that’s really interesting in the Charter, that it is the spoken word as well. It is not just about marketing with what we are producing. In sales you’ve got to make sure you understand what we’re doing and represent it really clearly.”

The sales team took to it quickly. They saw the framework as an asset in competitive tenders, where major clients are now screening suppliers on disclosure quality, not just emissions performance.

On not standing still

Toward the end of the conversation, Nicola returns to a line she has used more than once.

“You’re not going to remain a leader by staying still, are you?”

The discipline she brings to sustainability claims is the same she would bring to a service promise, or a safety campaign. The standards will keep moving. The work of standing behind what the company says will not be finished.

That, in her account, is what serious marketing looks like.