Archive for the ‘Sustainability’ Category
5 ways brands can engage on climate change
2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year on record, according to reports last week. The news came as flood waters overwhelmed Queensland, Australia and mudslides killed hundreds in southeast Brazil. The natural disasters were made worse by global warming, scientists told ABC News.
Brazil mudslide January 2011. (Source: www.wn.com)
Meanwhile, a new poll shows only 40% of Americans believe global warming is caused by human activity. And New York Times environmental blogger Andy Revkin said in 2010 “global warming, the greatest story rarely told, had reverted to its near perpetual position on the far back shelf of the public consciousness — if not back in the freezer.”
Is that how it is for you? Is climate change even on your radar screen as a business? And if it is, are you doing something about it? Or are you treating it like some harmless object along the distant horizon?
What your brand can do
I won’t make an argument for why you or your business should care about climate change. I’ll leave that to authors like Bill McKibben, whose 2010 book “Eaarth” is an unsparing description of a world already scarred by global warming and a guide to how we must now live in it.
What I would offer are five ways your business brand can engage stakeholders on climate change. After all, a large minority of Americans believes humans are causing global warming and increasing numbers of customers are holding business accountable. On the opportunity side, brand differentiation around climate change is there for the taking in many markets.
- Brand as promise: You can’t waffle on climate change. Choose to believe the scientific evidence and climate scientists like this one who states unequivocally, ”We’re observing the climate changing – it’s happening, it’s real, it’s a fact.” Take a stand. Let your stakeholders know your business cares deeply about the trajectory of the world’s climate. Then show them what you’re doing about it through your products, services, operations and culture.
- Brand as meaning: Customers, employees and, indeed, all stakeholders are in constant search for meaning. That’s life. Connect what you’re doing on climate change to what matters to your stakeholders. And what matters to most of us is that we and those we care about achieve happiness and avoid suffering. The climate is now on a very unhappy path. Be an example for a different way forward.
- Brand as emotion: We all experience basic emotions such as joy, love, anger, sadness, surprise and fear. For many of us, the thought of climate change overwhelms us and triggers undesirable emotions. How much more desirable is a brand that taps into the joy and satisfaction in caring for our planet and its current and future inhabitants?
- Brand as story: Humans connect through stories. It’s how we entertain, educate, preserve our cultures and instill values. Your brand is a story. Place it within the Mother of All 21st Century Stories — climate change — and watch as new, meaningful and emotional connections get made.
- Brand as experience: No matter what we tell others about our brands, what determines their fates are the experiences others have of them. When someone interacts with your business or product, they experience your brand as a promise kept or a promise broken. Promise to be on the right side of climate change and then give others the experience of standing with you — and you with them — in creating a world hospitable to all.
Tags: Andy Revkin, Bill McKibben, brand, brand emotion, brand experience, brand meaning, brand promise, brand story, Branding, Climate Change, Eaarth, global warming, Sustainability
Posted in Branding, Climate Change, Current Affairs, Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Taking the road less traveled on consumption
This article first appeared in Sustainable Industries, September 28, 2010.
The latest drop in consumer confidence will no doubt discourage many businesses. After all, consumer spending comprises 70 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
If individuals have greater confidence in the future, they buy more stuff. Businesses make more money and hire more employees. That increases consumers’ ability to purchase more things, their confidence rises and the virtuous cycle continues.
Until it stops.
And stop it did two years ago this month after Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy and sent stock markets and the economy into a tailspin.
With today’s overall economy only modestly improved, we in business today find ourselves at a crossroads. Do we continue down the rutted but familiar road of a materialistic marketplace, hoping the road will soon smooth out? Or do we choose an alternate route to prosperity this time?
The dead end of material consumption
It didn’t take the Great Recession to teach many of us the path of consumption we’ve traveled for more than a century is ultimately a dead end. That’s been apparent for some time; we have only one planet to sustain our pace of natural resource consumption, and we need two or three at the rate we’re going.
Source: Global Footprint Network
What isn’t apparent is whether our experience of the Great Recession will fundamentally change the way we do business. Ask yourself:
- Is your business hunkering down, waiting for the return of the free-wheeling, free-spending consumer?
- Or are you using this period to rethink your business model, what you produce and sell and how you measure success—consistent with a resource- and financially constrained age?
Confronting ‘the materiality paradox’
The last time we suffered a downturn like this was the early 1980s. When we emerged from that recession, Americans went on an unprecedented spending and consumption binge that continued largely unabated until two years ago.
The era gave rise to what sociologist Juliet Schor describes in her excellent new book, “Plenitude,” as “the materiality paradox.” That is, as products became more valued as “symbolic communicators,” they grew more reliant on fashion and novelty, speeding the cycle of consumption.
“People buy more products and turn them over more quickly,” she writes. The paradox is we value goods less today, but we consume more of them to satisfy our natural desire for social meaning and individual expression.
The non-material consumer economy
If past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, then it’s likely Americans will return to what we do better than anyone: consume. But nowhere is it written that what or how much we consume has to be identical to the last 25 to 30 years. A consumer economy doesn’t have to mean “a-consumer-of-materials economy.”
Much of what individuals and businesses “consume” is far more about experiences than stuff, such as:
- education and training, of all types
- fine arts, crafts
- music, theater, dance and other performing arts
- movies, reading, sports and other entertainment
- travel
- hiking, bicycling, skiing and other recreational activities
- digital gaming and other virtual products
That isn’t to say these and other experiences don’t have associated sustainability issues. The business challenge is to dematerialize the production, promotion and delivery of these experiences as much as possible. But businesses enjoy a head start on sustainability when their core products are experiences instead of goods.
Makers of goods can gain a similar advantage through “cradle-to-cradle” techniques such as upcycling (turning waste material or other used or useless products into new, higher-value goods).
Design for environment and sustainable design practices minimize raw material use and waste. But the jury is still out on whether better, smarter design is the “silver bullet” solution to over-consumption. At some point the prevailing materialistic mindset also has to change.
The road less traveled
The point is: A consumer economy isn’t unsustainable by definition. It depends on what and how much gets consumed. Americans are deeply conditioned to satisfy their desire for happiness and meaning by accumulating possessions. This reflects the persuasive power of professions like mine — branding and marketing — more than some genetic predisposition to shop.
Dislodging materialism as the economic status quo won’t be easy. But if enough businesses choose the road less traveled, the next three decades will look far different from the last three.
Many sustainability leaders in business are already re-conditioning customers to consume less and differently. They respect the material limits of our planet. And they recognize what customers ultimately desire — happiness, security, belonging — isn’t found on store shelves and never goes out of fashion.
Tags: consumer confidence, consumer economy, Juliet Schor, materialism, materiality paradox, Plenitude, Sustainability, sustainable consumption
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Lesson from Katrina: Social sustainability matters
Five years ago this week, I sat glued to the TV watching the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Four years ago this week, I left the business I co-founded and headed down the path of sustainability. The first didn’t cause the second, but it certainly played a role.
Within five months of leaving my business, I visited New Orleans twice. The first time to see for myself what Katrina had wrought and the second to help gut flooded homes with a work crew from here in Portland, Ore.
Today, the images of Katrina and the outrage I felt at our country’s shameful response to the suffering in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are never far away.
Lower Ninth Ward resident outside her newly gutted home (January 2007)
For me, Katrina presented the human face of an unsustainable future and put the social in sustainability.
Less than a year after the storm, Al Gore raised my consciousness of climate change with his “An Inconvenient Truth.” As powerful as his message was, I knew when I moved my work into sustainability, Katrina wouldn’t let me forget the inconvenient truth of social inequity.
Climate change threatens to make matters worse by hitting those least able to deal with its consequences. But human-caused global warming wasn’t the issue in New Orleans. It was human-enabled neglect, whether it was the levee system, the evacuation plans, the people left behind as the storm struck or the needs of those trying to reclaim their homes and lives months and years later.
Inextricably linked
Environmental and social responsibility are inextricably linked. We can’t be satisfied with an ecologically pristine world where human inequality and injustice are allowed to flourish. Nor a world where justice applies to humans alone.
This is why the triple bottom line in business is so important. Business is a balancing act among financial, social and environmental responsibilities. Even if I believed the purpose of business is to create profits, which I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to ignore “how” those profits were made. Profits are essential to any business, sustainable or not. But if they’re consistently made while harming the environment or stakeholders (such as employees, customers, local residents, suppliers), then the business deserves any public wrath that comes it way.
Social sustainability lags environmental sustainability in business practice. Deloitte says this is due primarily to the absence of “a highly visible, well-established set of metrics for social sustainability” compared to environmental sustainability.
I also frequently hear comments from businesspeople about their struggles to define what social sustainability means for their organizations. And my non-exhaustive web search for a definition turned up little. Lacking a concrete, generally accepted definition, businesses are apt to give social sustainability more lip service than serious attention.
Beyond lip service
Yes, metrics are useful for holding your business accountable and for gauging and celebrating progress. And it helps to align your social responsibility initiatives with your core business objectives, as Harvard’s Michael Porter and others argue, “to produce profits and social benefits rather than profits or social benefits.”
I also think it’s possible to over-think things. More important is to take action now, even if just small steps, to create positive social impact. Because the opportunities for businesses to make a difference mount by the day. The Great Recession has taken a hurricane-like toll across much of the country. As I write this, fears of a double-dip recession are widespread.
Creating jobs sounds like the best social sustainability strategy for any business today. But ultimately that’s not enough. The US economy was humming when Katrina hit. The storm showed that at its heart social sustainability must be about fairness and compassion, hope and optimism, concern and resolve. In good times or bad, those are qualities that can always be in abundant supply.
Tags: Hurricane Katrina, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, social responsibility, social sustainability, triple bottom line
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Like sustainability, branding needs image change
A new study indicating the recession has crowded out concern for the environment prompted the New York Times to ask: “Is ‘thinking green’ an economic luxury?”
Uh, yeah. Not that it should be. If ever there was an economic necessity it would be to think green and adopt sustainable practices. But that’s just me speaking. My professional niche is sustainable branding, so I see business through the lens of sustainability. Plenty of recent studies show the continued gap between intention and action on sustainability among individuals and businesses. 
Neither thinking nor acting green is considered essential.
Like sustainability, branding is viewed as a luxury by most in business. Ironically, that’s farthest from the truth in lean times like these. When acquiring and keeping customers is hardest, a business can least afford to ignore what creates competitive distinction and customer relevance — namely, its brand.
Branding’s image problem
Branding suffers from an enduring image problem. Mention branding, and dollar signs come to the minds of most executives. In a recession, that’s a show-stopper. The problem is branding is equated with design, advertising, marketing communications — all of which cost money. But brand promotion is only part of the branding equation — the most expensive part.
Yes, at some point, you have to build brand awareness, preference and loyalty. And that requires a financial investment in marketing. But the most essential components of building your brand — defining what it is and baking it into your culture, operations and products — are really just best management practices.
Branding is little different from other standard best practices, such as developing financial budgets, employment policies or product development plans. Sure they take some time and money to produce, but that’s simply the requirement of being in business, no matter the economic climate. So it is with branding.
When businesses declare branding a luxury they can’t afford, they are unwittingly saying, “We aren’t going to take the time to decide who we are as a business, what we stand for, what makes us distinct and why we matter as a company. And we’re not going to worry about whether we as managers and employees are keeping our promise as a business to customers and all our other stakeholders.”
Consequences of brand neglect
I used the word “unwittingly” because I don’t believe most business executives understand the consequences of neglecting their corporate brand until more prosperous times return.
It’s one thing to slash advertising budgets or postpone the redesign of the firm’s visual identity. It’s quite another to lose sight of what makes your business distinct and relevant now, today, in an economy fundamentally different from just two years ago. Or to postpone accountability for whether your business is consistently delivering the customer experience you promise.
From the inside looking out, your brand is your over-arching promise to stakeholders. From the outside looking in, your brand is the image stakeholders have of your business, based on direct experience or word-of-mouth. Any business with customers or employees has a brand image. The question is whether the business understands and cultivates that image or leaves the task to others, such as competitors who are only too willing to tell your story for you.
At its most basic, branding means ensuring the experience aligns with the promise. That’s not accomplished by simply spending more money on clever advertising or glitzy marketing events. Much more important is being clear about what your promise is as a company and how your employees, products and practices deliver on it day after day, regardless of the economy.
Branding as necessity
Seen from this perspective, branding is no luxury. And it doesn’t have to be about spending big bucks. What it does require is time and commitment from senior leadership to ensure the brand:
- firmly establishes competitive distinction and customer relevance
- is understood and fulfilled across the company
- is positively perceived by customers, employees and other key stakeholders
Branding is an all-company, everyday exercise in earning and keeping customers and creating competitive advantage. When times are toughest, attention to your brand becomes more crucial than ever.
Does branding need to be on your list of business necessities? If so, I invite you to get in touch and explore how to make that happen.
Tags: brand image, brand promise, Branding, business luxury, customer experience, economic luxury, Freakonomics, Sustainability
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Does happiness have anything to do with business?
Described elsewhere as the “happiest man in the world,” Tibetan Buddhist master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche reminds his audience what we inherently know and usually forget: Happiness lies within.
I heard Yongey Mingyur speak at a recent Portland State University event on “sustainable happiness.” As a sustainability advocate and a sometimes meditator, I couldn’t resist attending.
We in the US might want to listen to what Yongey Mingyur has to say. Despite being a country that enshrined the pursuit of happiness in its Declaration of Independence, the US ranks down most lists of the happiest countries. Probably not surprising given how we’ve managed to conflate happiness with having or buying more things.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
A 2,500-year-old practice mastered by the likes of Yongey Mingyur suggests the cultivation of mindfulness as an alternative path to happiness. And what happens to be on my mind as I blog today is this: Does happiness have anything to do with business?
Fair question, it seems, given the ongoing economic upheaval. These are hard times in many workplaces. Employees who withstood layoffs now asked to do more. Wage rollbacks or miniscule raises. Desperate competitors slashing prices and everyone’s profit margins. And now, worry about a double-dip recession. What’s there to be happy about — other than still being in business or having a job?
In my experience as a business owner, consultant and employee, happiness eludes most businesses even in the best of times. Best, in this case, means periods of rapid revenue and profit growth. It’s the rare company in the midst of a boom cycle that declares, “Enough. We’re happy with what have.” Most cling to the notion that if your business isn’t growing, it’s dying.
Survival of the paranoid
In good times and bad, business is a practice in survival. And as Andy Grove, founder of one of the world’s most successful companies, Intel, famously asserts, “Only the paranoid survive.” He may have a point. Intel CEO Paul Otellini last month declared Q2 2010 “the best quarter in the company’s 42-year history.” And that’s in the midst of the Great Recession!
So should we be nurturing “Intel Inside” all of our businesses, rather than happiness? If we did, we might find the company voice within sounding something like Andy Grove when he writes:
Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left. I believe that the prime responsibility of a manager is to guard constantly against other people’s attacks and to inculcate this guardian attitude in the people under his or her management.
Not exactly a happy-sounding voice. But maybe happiness is something we pursue only in our off hours. And maybe Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain was speaking for business when he sang: “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”
FUD instead of happiness?
Or maybe we should be listening to Yongey Mingyur whose tradition maintains: “The basic concern shared by all beings—humans, animals, and insects alike—is the desire to be happy and to avoid suffering.”
We don’t avoid suffering by inviting fear and paranoia to rule our lives. Why would it be any different in business?
Truth is, we’re not very practiced at cultivating happiness, at work or outside of work. In fact, we’re much more skilled at sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt. In business parlance, it’s simply called FUD. Surround your competitors with FUD so your customers are more apt to choose you. Contrary to human nature, business doesn’t avoid FUD; it rewards it!
So back to my question: Does happiness have anything to do with business? Sure. We all want delighted customers. Even Andy Grove. And yet how many of us believe the purpose of business is to help others—customers, employees, partners, neighbors—be happy? I’m guessing, not many. In other words, happiness doesn’t have that much to do with business.
What if…
What if business was all about happiness? What if we were to follow the lead of the happy country of Bhutan, as hotelier and author Chip Conley recommended in his recent TED talk, and create “a habitat for happiness” in our businesses?
For starters, we might catch up with our customers, more of whom are realizing the futile chase for happiness through more stuff. As the New York Times reported this month, more Americans are responding to today’s economic realities by simplifying their lives, spending more on experiences than possessions and generally getting in touch with what really matters, like relationships with family and friends.
So what do you think? Does business have any business cultivating happiness? Or is it true, only the paranoid survive?
Tags: FUD, Happiness, mindfulness, paranoid, purpose of business, pursuit of happiness, Tongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Posted in Branding, Business & Economics, Communications, Marketing, Sustainability, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
10 steps to employee engagement in sustainability
Today’s guest post is by Eric Brody, a member of the R.Bruer Sustainable Branding Collaborative. Eric is founder and principal of Shift Advantage, a sustainability consultancy in Portland, Ore. He was previously the sustainability business integration manager for Nike and sustainability manager for Nau, a technical outdoor and urban clothing company recognized for its innovative sustainability practices.
Much has been written about how to involve employees in more environmentally friendly office practices, such as reducing paper consumption, carpooling, turning off computers at night, recycling, and composting food scraps. As important as these and many other behaviors are to greening an office, they only take a business so far down the sustainability path.
If your vision is to build a sustainable business operating from a triple-bottom-line (people, planet, profit) philosophy, then sustainability is core to your business strategy. Your challenge involves more than green office practices. It means creating a business whose success is measured by its social, environmental and financial contributions.
Executives can only achieve their vision of a sustainable business by engaging and involving their work force. They need everyone in their companies on board. The question is how to engage all employees in the practice of strategic sustainability.
Fully engaging employees in strategic sustainability
At the risk of over-simplifying what can be a complex undertaking, I’ll offer a 10-step approach to employee engagement:
- Develop a strategic business plan that clearly articulates your social, environmental and financial objectives and strategies over a period of up to five years. I’ve worked with companies that set very aggressive stretch goals such as zero waste or zero carbon footprint by a certain date to ones that set more pragmatic goals such as reducing waste or the carbon footprint by a certain percentage.
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Share your business plan with each group or department. Ask each group to review their individual plan and goals with the intention of incorporating or expanding the practice of sustainability into their metrics of success. Each unit may be different: Purchasing may adopt social and environmental performance requirements in their procurement contracts with suppliers. Product development and design may adopt design for environment (DfE) techniques into their processes.
This type of thinking leads to innovations such as creating products that are lighter, repairable, utilize rechargeable energy sources, use energy more efficiently, or require low impact cleaning by the user. Accounting may investigate new models for measuring and tracking social and environmental impact, in addition to financial performance such as the greenhouse gases associated with business travel.
- Set department goals, both short term and long term (quarter, annual, three-to-five year). Companies may choose to make their environmental and social goals based on company totals or on a per unit or per dollar basis.
- For each job function and individual, determine responsibilities and expectations related to achieving the department’s and the overall business’ sustainability goals. As much as possible, make this an exercise of co-creation between a manager and an employee. You want every employee feeling enthused and empowered to make a difference. You also want to let employees know their contributions to sustainability will be a factor in their annual performance reviews (see Step 7). Set goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely.
- Provide training for each employee to grow competency and skills related to improving their individual contributions to your triple bottom line. Where possible, develop or seek sustainability training that is domain-specific, e.g., marketing, product development, manufacturing, customer service, human resources. This can include sending your employees to conferences or workshops or participating in industry or cross-industry collaborative working groups that are addressing specific issues such as water, logistics, fair labor and energy efficiency.
- Check-in regularly (weekly, monthly, quarterly) to monitor progress on the sustainability front, such as in manager/employee one-on-ones or staff meetings. This enables mid-course corrections and prevents year-end disappointments in group or individual performance.
- During annual reviews, evaluate each employee’s performance related to his or her individual and group sustainability goals. This reinforces the importance of achieving these to the company.
- After their performance reviews, ask employees to produce new or revised 12-month SMART goals to help their departments and the company achieve sustainability objectives. Be sure to share with employees any changes to business or department plans so they can align their individual efforts accordingly.
- Throughout the year, acknowledge and celebrate individual and group sustainability achievements across the company. Consider contests that motivate individuals and groups to out-perform each other and help make the sustainability journey about having fun and making a difference.
- Work with each department to engage their stakeholders and report publicly the achievements and challenges. This may include summits with your supply chain, reporting achievements and challenges to the public through corporate responsibility reports or websites or engaging customers through customer surveys and communications. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) provides a thorough framework for corporate responsibility reporting.
We have seen great success with companies that take these steps to fully engage their employees. This strategic approach moves sustainability from theory to practice within a company. The more engaged employees are, the more they will help your business innovate, achieve industry leadership, reduce costs and increase market share.
Tags: employee engagement, Eric Brody, Global Reporting Initiative, Shift Advantage, strategic sustainability, Sustainability, sustainable business, triple bottom line
Posted in Business & Economics, Sustainability | 4 Comments »