Derbyshire creative agency announces new business direction to focus on the greater good and incite change within our communities
An award-winning Derbyshire creative agency led by two sisters has announced it is pivoting to focus on creating marketing campaigns to encourage people to change their behaviour – for the better.
MacMartin, founded by siblings Claire MacDonald and Anna Hutton, is a creative agency which has been producing highly successful marketing campaigns for clients across the UK since founding six years ago.
The company achieved remarkable growth even during Covid and recently announced doubled turnover.
Now MacMartin has said it is using its reputation, prodigious skills and success to focus on social marketing to incite positive change in society.
The move means that the MacMartin team is working with local authorities, schools, charities and not-for-profit organisations like the YMCA, to create marketing campaigns that are a force for good – and not just about turning a profit.
MacMartin marketing director Anna said: “We want to use our experience and expertise to create work we can be proud of, and to incite positive change within local communities.
“Marketing is a powerful tool in today’s society, perhaps more so than many realise. Everyday, everywhere, marketing campaigns are out in force whether we are aware of them or not. We are being sold to, persuaded and influenced everywhere we go, from waiting at the bus stop to looking at posters on roadsides to scrolling on our phone.
“As marketeers, we know what potential our work has to make a positive impact within the wider world. There’s a lot of research and understanding of human behaviour that goes into creating the campaigns we do. That’s why we are proud to announce that our talented team at MacMartin will be working on creating marketing campaigns that are designed to engender positive changes in society, to influence people to do, for want of a better phrase, ‘the right thing’.”
Anna trained as an occupational therapist before turning to marketing and said that her natural curiosity, and that of her team, had made her fascinated in how and why people act the way they do and how they might be persuaded to behave differently.
She said: “Psychology has always interested me, understanding why people do what they do and say what they say. If you look at positive marketing campaigns that have been very effective in recent times, probably the most famous was launched during Covid when we all needed to receive some very clear, very important messaging. We needed to maintain social distance, wear a mask, and we needed to wash our hands. This was messaging on which, quite literally, hundreds of thousands of lives depended. It’s great example of what powerful social marketing can do.
“I’m so excited that MacMartin is now moving in this direction and I can’t wait to hear from more organisations who we can work with to create influential marketing campaigns.
“The work will involve researching important topics, producing creative campaigns based on behavioural science, as well as evaluating the impact of the campaign to track whether the desired changes in behaviour are being seen. That, for me, is the most compelling part – particularly when you know it is making a positive difference in people’s lives.”
This year Anna has been talking to teenagers in schools about how to take back control of their social media use. Her powerful presentation aims to arm teenagers with knowledge about how social media works, and how they can use social media in a way which doesn’t negatively affect their mental health.
As part of its focus on social marketing, MacMartin has also been championing low carbon websites, pointing out that our digital footprint is actually a huge carbon emissions producer in its own right.
Claire MacDonald has been delivering talks to businesses which aim to provide information on how websites can be created to produce far less CO2, without compromising on performance or design.
For more on MacMartin’s behaviour change marketing, see www.macmartin.co.uk