Why Collective Matter Is Helping Build the First Montreal Climate Week
Author: Anne-Marie Brouillette
There’s a tempting narrative that marketing is the problem: that it exists to manufacture desire, drive overconsumption, and dress up extraction as progress. I don’t fully buy that framing.
Early in my career, I realized design is a powerful tool, capable of doing as much good as harm. I now see life as one big design system, with its interconnected layers and relationships.
Since then, I’ve developed a habit: looking at problems through a systems lens, always digging to uncover the complex connections between issues. And once I identify a problem, I want to fix it. I’ve stopped fighting that.
Marketing is one of the most powerful tools we have for shaping culture, and culture is exactly what needs to shift if the economy is going to change.
That’s what I call Conscious Marketing.
For businesses to see profit differently, they need to see their relationship with the world around them differently, and understand how interconnected our successes are. That requires a cultural shift, and that is where Collective Matter is working to make change.
That is what brought us to Montreal Climate Week: to connect the different parts of the climate movement around shared goals, and to build this festival as a launchpad for fruitful, lasting collaboration.
A Movement, Not a Week-Long Campaign
Movements last when people believe in them enough to keep showing up. That is why we are creating something with Montréal. Everyone can take part in the movement during the first edition of Montreal Climate Week.
Real mobilization means involving every layer of society: brands willing to be measured, marketing professionals ready to reassess their craft, researchers willing to explore difficult questions, and communities ready to engage and hold everyone, including us, accountable.
Climate change is not only an environmental crisis. It is also a crisis of imagination, governance, and relationships. Montréal stands out for its open-mindedness, cultural plurality, and creativity: it is a city that knows how to bring different voices, imaginaries, and ways of working together.
The brand was designed to reflect Montréal. It is shaped by the Collective and evolves alongside our teams at SCMTL.
Measuring What's Hard to Measure
Capturing the impact of this mobilization is not easy. Simply counting how many people showed up to another climate talk won’t cut it for us. That is exactly the kind of metric that can feed greenwashing rather than fight it. If we want people to feel real optimism, we have to earn it with honest data and results.
This is a Conscious Marketing principle guiding the work: say only what you can prove, name what you do not know yet, and never dress up a good-looking number as evidence of change it has not yet earned.
Our theory maps this out as three layers moving outward: a shift in perception and education first, then a shift in behaviours and culture, and eventually systemic change and mobilization.
We use that same logic to guide what we measure. For this first edition, we are watching the early layer closely:
Did people learn something new?
Were they genuinely engaged, rather than simply present?
How many new collaborations were created?
Was this their first time intentionally attending a climate event?
Did they leave feeling more hopeful than when they arrived?
These are early signals. Culture and systemic change take longer to emerge and are harder to measure. But this is the honest starting point for something bigger: over time, we want to trace the whole chain, from sparks of engagement to concrete commitments, changed behaviours, and policies adopted.
We are not measuring everything yet because we do not have all the answers yet. What we do have is a first edition we can learn from, and a plan to turn those lessons into a long-term evaluation framework, built with our partners and designed to track change from perception through to systemic impact.
And this is exactly where Conscious Marketing can best support the movement.
The Community I've Been Meaning to Build
For some time, I have wanted to build a community of practice with Collective Matter: a space where marketing professionals, industrial designers, and sustainability experts can rethink their work together, rather than doing so separately inside their respective organizations.
Montréal already has many people and organizations bringing the sustainability community together, each in their own way. Montreal Climate Week is an opportunity to bring them together and go much further, creating a real snowball effect.
That is exactly what Montreal Climate Week enables. It gives us both the urgency and the audience to strengthen this community. It also gives Montrealers a reason for radical hope and the energy to act collectively.
I’ll know we’ve succeeded when I hear real optimism again in the sustainability industry, as much as at a dinner with friends.
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For Collective Matter’s consulting, brand, and movement-building work, contact me.
Discover and register for events: SCMTL.ca
We are seeking financial support. If this mission speaks to you, write to us at info@scmtl.ca.
SOURCES
Schneider et al., ScienceDirect, 2021
Spence et al., Phys.org, 2026
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494426001763