How Marketing can help your sustainability journey
Brand led sustainability is the future for marketers and business owners - and here’s why it is so important to focus upon and follow the 3Ps model in balance to make the difference.
The brand building “Triple Bottom Line” approach
Bringing together the ESG - Environmental, Social and Economic - pillars offers the strongest outlook upon which to build a robust sustainable business whatever size and scale - often referred to as the 3 P’s of People, Planet and Profit.
If you are starting your sustainability journey there is no better reference point and common language to get you thinking than familiarising yourself with the 17 global UN SDG’s (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals), and how they might be the solid foundation you need to evolve your own sustainability approach, to ensure you are strategically aligning throughout your business and brand planning process.
Profit is often the word in this combination which is left to one side or forgotten along the way, without it there is not the ability to do the right things for People and our Planet. Any business exists to make money, that is just a fact of life as without it that business would simply not exist; it is how that organisation chooses to invest the money that often interests others, and how it manages its growth trajectory.
Sustainable investment as part of any strategic plan is a hot topic, and something that still needs to offer an ROI ( Return on Investment ) like any other investment a company looks to make across its ways of working. Ideally that return should be both financial and reputational - this becomes the best combination to catapult a business into a strong position of sustainability and able to face into the future - which lets be blunt, it is probably the toughest it’s been in most of our careers.
So, typically the things that need to change centre around prosperity (Profit) and here is where brand sustainability comes to life - ensuring that your business has the best brand offer which is fulfilling a customer need, especially relative to the competitive set.
Having the vision to be different, and bringing it to life
Most (big) businesses have started to make pledges around what they consider to be positive sustainability moves and the impact they aspire to have within the world - from hitting net zero by 2050, to reducing the use of various resources by 30% - and whilst this is good news, they must act on these pledges.
Not many of the pledges are making a company stand out from others, and in some cases they are barely going to ensure that a business is compliant with the pending legal requirements heading towards everyone in the near to mid term. The need to be different and stand out from the crowd around you is critical to ensure your investments do begin to bring back the profitability necessary to build the growth plans in our ever developing sustainable world. Differentiation is the way to put space between you and your competitors, and brand sustainability is the way that many businesses will make that happen.
Relevance and difference have always been at the heart of a strong brand - and consequently if you put the brand at the centre of your sustainability efforts, this will start to move from being seen as a cost and actually an investment that drives a return. Driving positive change needs more exemplors, celebrated for their work which is raising the bar not only for themselves, but also to inspire others around them - adding peer pressure to ensure businesses really do get behind achieving the targets necessary for the planet.
Breaking this down into smaller, easy steps often supports a process that will bring the best teams together into ways of working that will ensure this is part of the brand DNA and bring the right level of interconnectedness. “Good brands” are most certainly desired by the latest generations of consumers, shoppers and even workers and suppliers out there!
Wherever you are right now - if you're an established business who needs to bring sustainability into your strategic thinking, or if you plan to start a new brand which is sustainably native - you can look to manoeuvre through these stages to bring about transformation and embed the changes you need to make to put you on the right tracks.
Assess the WAWN (Where Are We Now)
Essentially a fairly fast phase which needs full team engagement to undertake a robust situational analysis to establish the current place on the sustainability journey. Typically this is laid out in a “map” format to enable the team to know where they are now, what opportunities sit in front of them and how they plan to reach each milestone and by when.
Often a business through its teams have done so much more than they think, and reviewing what has been done against the 17 SDG’s usually shows that each one has been touched in some way. This is a good time to focus on the key areas for your organisation and select the key areas you want to invest resources to have a greater impact.
Alignment on this is critical to success, from C Suite right across any business their needs to be clarity in thinking to decide upon the ambition and direction everyone will follow to make things happen
Focus upon HWGT (How We Get There)
Once the decisions have been taken, the time is right to really put everything behind these objectives and work together to reach the brand goals you desire around the SDG’s that mean most to you and your team as well as your target audience - often this is as much about what you will sacrifice to win, as it is around what needs to be done to push forward.
Putting in place a qualitative and quantitative approach to determining the critical success factors ensures that you are putting the customer-centric “impact back” strategy to your brand lead sustainability planning.
Use this to set your measures, and what you will track against to report back to the key stakeholders on progress. This is where a brand can rightfully deliver upon and “champion”; to really make their mark and bring to bear their own unique way of doing business.
No two sustainability initiatives are the same, and that should be deliberate so as to put clear distance . Some will be sharper and drive greater ROI quickly, others will be graduating and building over time.
Ideate and Build (Make It Happen)
Not only does any brand need solid data and research analytics from which to bring core insights, it also needs extraordinary ideation to make magic happen. Innovation sprints and Hackthons are a great way to bring heads together and use logical and creative thinking to realise strong ideas which will drive ROI. Bringing to life the thinking, creating and realisation that strategic approach to all relevant touchpoints be them digital, social or physical.
Bringing in expertise when you don’t have it is also necessary at times, as you won’t have all the talent and knowledge you need to make some decisions, and ensure that any actions you take are well thought through and have the greatest chance of success.
Why Strategy is the key to success - transforming for competitive advantage
Having a strategic fit and business alignment is undoubtedly the right place to begin, as at some stage you are going to be ready to build your internal and external communications to stakeholders and without this engrainment there is often real danger that “greenwashing” begins.
Posturing has been witnessed in an increasing number of cases, and we are also now seeing the penalisation of businesses who have not gathered the right evidence against their aims and targets to be able to credibly make statements around impact.
Recent Kantar research identified a startling statistic - 76% Marketers believe their organisation has a purpose, but only 10% see it goes beyond their products and services. It is this kind of situation which can so often lead to unnecessary or unintentional “greenwashing”, through naivety or lack of upskilling in new legislation that is now very much in place to prevent this becoming lip service to business.
How collaborative working can sometimes shift the dial
Given the scale of change needed and some of the challenges we are looking at in the world, to move the barometer in many sectors there is also a need for businesses to come together and work with each other to have the right impact - a form of collective intelligence.
Sharing best practise is a good way for competitive organisations to action this - by being competition agnostic to reach common goals (e.g. reducing the carbon footprint, reducing waste, bringing inclusivity). You can stand out at the same time as “raising the bar” for others to follow in their own way - the virtuous effect of being a trailblazer, yet showing the way to bring about change in ways that support the major global goals.
We will need to partner with others, bringing together experts in their fields through natural working teams to explore the innovative ways that involve many stakeholders to tease out the ideas to work through and build the infrastructure to shift the course towards the goals and giving ourselves a chance to hit them.
Bringing together the right stakeholders and citizens - from suppliers, to industry bodies and volunteers - mobilising the various communities which surround our sector or related areas can often pay dividends to the social and environmental targets, as working alone may not compound enough of the necessary components needed to drive momentum
Making it cultural and part of the strategy
It is the formation of the “Good Squad” in many organisations that can culturally change the way that brand and business sustainability embeds and helps drive change. Take away function, seniority, role title and bring together the right mindsets to spend up to 10% of their time to form the arrowhead enabling the sustainability agenda to become part of BAU (Business As Usual) by projecting the first phase of thinking into the ways of working on going.
Insights derived this way are often eye opening and incite a whole new pathway to strategic thinking which involves a broad spectrum of the business. Push the innovation boundaries, and enable the employees and communities around particularly the younger generations who can lean upon the experience that already exists yet bring their new perspectives to the party.
Give the space to people around the business, and find champions in the C Suite to ensure the doors are open, and the oxygen in there to let the people breathe new life into the end to end processes to bring about the change to a more sustainable business. Let global teams work with regional and local teams to capture all the learnings and ideas.
It is worth remembering that great saying “A brand is a promise - and a great brand is a promise kept.” Making a promise and keeping a promise, the gap between these and the tolerance is shortening faster.
The role marketing is playing now and moving forward - every level is custodian of the brand, so brand led sustainability is everyone’s role, to ensure it is across the business to bring success. It is often driven by comms, and too often this is short term and knee jerk. Short term is possible, and also needs a mid term plan. Don’t just offset, but challenge the foundation of the issue.
Stop just complying, start differentiating.