Wal-Mart wants to help the planet?
The retail giant may not have seemed like the likeliest corporation to make a push for sustainability, but Marriott School alum Greg Chandler is working to help customers and suppliers see the short- and long-term benefits of going green.
As Wal-Mart’s director of marketing, wellness, and sustainability, Chandler works with vendors to reduce waste, while fostering a vision to penetrate the company’s culture. Wal-Mart’s size and scope have put it in a unique position to make sustainability both enormously impactful on the environment and cost-efficient.
“This is one of the coolest things anyone can do in marketing,” Chandler says with a smile. The sustainability initiative, officially launched in April 2008, is a broad approach to overall health—for the planet and the consumer—which includes programs such as Wal-Mart’s inexpensive prescription drugs.
“To be sustainable means to drive out waste and costs to save people money,” says Chandler, who has been thinking outside the box, finding ways to reduce unnecessary product packaging and to save costs in the process. Stripping the cardboard box of one brand of baby seats meant that more could be shipped in the same space, and it was easier to sell—the consumer could get a better sense of how the product really looks.
Presenting to a marketing class of Marriott School MBA students in October 2008, Chandler, who was the director of marketing at Frito-Lay before coming to Wal-Mart, explained that people are seeing themselves as an integral part of the green movement.
“People were telling us they wanted to peacefully coexist,” he says. This influenced their marketing strategy, which consistently places the Wal-Mart customer in the environment—not detached from it.
Chandler earned his BA in public relations from BYU in 1994 and an MBA from the Marriott School in 1996. He says his BYU education has been essential to this latest opportunity.
“It was invaluable,” he says. “The values taught here are that business can be used for a higher purpose—BYU was central to my preparation for this.”
