Sustainability is a bittersweet term in that it embodies one of the most transformative forces in business today and yet at the same time its very familiarity has led to some world-weariness with the topic. Some say that is because so much has been written about sustainability in the last few years that it has suffered the same fate as the word, ‘green’. Others suggest that the persistent tension between marketing and sustainability has led to insufficient alignment between the two, inadequate impact as a result, and disillusionment as a symptom. Finally, some have suggested that as sustainability becomes mired in tools, metrics, and data, this transformational topic has lost some "sex appeal" to keep it top of mind. In truth, if sustainability has lost any urgency as a topic or initiative inside a company the fault lies with ourselves as we have failed to invest our efforts with the fresh energy and ideas that critical, long-term change demands.
There are three key ways to ensure that your sustainability efforts maintain the necessary engagement and impact that your brand, business, and our planet needs. The first area is integrated brand storytelling. Inside many companies an invisible barrier persists between marketing and sustainability, especially in terms of budgetary support and the priority given to sustainability by leadership and marketing. Instead, marketing departments need to open their aperture on how they view brand storytelling to capitalize on how critical sustainability is to consumers, and especially, Millennials and Gen Z. Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson in their new book Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter, go so far as to argue that business leaders need to engage all four ways of knowing - thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition - to truly understand the nature of a brand in today’s fractured media landscape, and to unlock the power of sustainability efforts to galvanize leadership, employees, customers, and consumers to rally around those efforts.
Second, is employee engagement. Sustainability has real bottom-line benefit through employee attraction, retention, productivity, and satisfaction. Yet too little effort is being made to socialize sustainability efforts throughout organizations to give employees ways to participate and to reward them for doing so. Notable exceptions include Barclays who, in order to shore up their reputation, linked the compensation of 150 senior management to its 5 C’s – customers, colleagues, citizenship, conduct, and company. Or HP, that partnered with the micro-lending platform Kiva, to launch a five-year global partnership called a ‘Matter to a Million’ that enabled over 100 HP employees to lend over 4.2 million dollars in twenty-five dollar increments to support entrepreneurs from a variety of backgrounds around the world. Such employee engagement efforts sit at the heart of integrated storytelling that breathes new life and relevance into sustainability.
Third, many sustainability efforts fail to earn the traction they deserve because companies are not investing enough in the feedback loop between their efforts and the people positively affected by them. Sometimes this is due to strategic competition between internal and external stakeholders (for example, local communities are often far removed from a corporate HQ), or sometimes it is due to brands failing to reach out to the communities they impact for insights into what more those communities would like them to do. Alternatively, well-intended efforts often fall in the gap between theory and practice as brands intellectually embrace compelling models such as the Circular Economy or Net Positive, and fail to take actions specific to execute off those frameworks to ensure they have a real impact on their company and the communities they serve.
The cost of such complacency is far higher than fatigue with the term, ‘sustainability.’ It robs each company of a first mover or competitive advantage that is being exercised by a variety of inspiring brands using it to their advantage. For example, B&Q, a sub-brand of Kingfisher, has embedded sustainability directly into an above-the-line marketing campaign. Intermarche, the third largest grocery supermarket chain in France, has turned undesirable products on their head by re-characterizing misshapen produce as “Inglorious fruits and vegetables” luring grocery shoppers towards the novelty of buying awkward looking items. Or Hana, a natural cosmetics sub-product from Japanese company Lion, has launched a campaign around healthy beauty brought to you by the power of nature by literally cleaning a polluted river with an 88-foot floating organic billboard that treats the wastewater by absorbing deadly toxins.
The challenge for all brands committed to sustainability lay is to maintain their capacity to breath fresh life into their efforts. As tiring as the process may be in terms of personal energy, internal politics, and creative activation, sustainability is a conversation whose work has only just begun. There is perhaps no more powerful way to jump start fresh interest and energy into those efforts than by joining sustainability leaders at Sustainable Brands ‘14 in London on November 3-5, 2014. This community represents the forefront of brand innovation with companies such as Unilever, BASF, Coca-Cola, Marks & Spencer, and Heineken revealing their latest and most compelling sustainability strategies and activations. This community of business leaders will show your company how to build a shared vision and to leverage new technologies to implement ideas that contribute to the collective health of individuals, organizations, economies, and the planet. Don’t miss your chance to reignite your sustainability efforts at Sustainable Brands ’14. They are only going to become more important to leadership, employees, customers, and consumers over the short and long-term as they become more critical to the planet every day.
