My consulting practice centers on progressive businesses and nonprofits that are trying to change the world, their organization or their stakeholders in ways large and small. We all know from experience that personal change can be hard. So it’s no surprise that trying to influence change in others can seem impossible or painstakingly slow. And if we’re not careful as marketers, throwing more content at the problem will only make matters worse.

The world is drowning in content generated by marketers — blog posts, case studies, white papers, ebooks, videos, photos — and the social media meant to publicize and disseminate the content. It’s axiomatic in marketing circles that awareness precedes action. Some content is aimed at creating initial awareness. Other content is produced to generate leads, establish thought leadership or deepen customer loyalty. Too often, however, the marketing objective becomes producing more content instead of the change we seek.

Bridging the say-do gap

Content marketing conforms perfectly to marketing’s traditional role of providing the customer or audience with all the information they need to act. Thanks to digital and social everything, what’s changed is our ability to cost-effectively create, deliver and promote content in multiple forms, across multiple channels and track who and how many access our content. And with news media in decline, marketers can no longer rely on editors and reporters to pick up and run with their stories. Getting the word out depends more than ever on filling the content developer void left by the news media.

So it’s easy to see why content production and distribution is becoming the largest piece of the marketing pie. But is all this informative and entertaining content making a difference?  When it comes to sustainability, for instance, research shows a large say-do gap. Among its results, a 2010 Yale study found:

• 88 percent of Americans say it is important to recycle at home, but only 51 percent “often” or “always” do
• 81 percent say it is important to use re-usable shopping bags, but only 33 percent “often” or “always” do
• 76 percent say it is important to walk or bike instead of driving, but only 15 percent “often” or “always” do

Clearly, most Americans are aware of the importance of certain “green” behaviors. We’re just not doing what we say is important. The Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University offers up the Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change. Number 7? “Believing that information leads to action. We humans aren’t so rational.”

We don’t simply need more information. We need help bridging awareness into action. This strikes me as the new frontier for marketers: creating behavioral change — not just content for content’s sake.

‘Make people feel something’

“Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change,” say Chip and Dan Heath, brothers and authors of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. “Make people feel something.”

People have a rational side and an emotional side, and those wanting to create change have to reach both, the Heaths argue: “But when it comes time to change the behavior of other people, our first instinct is to teach them something.”

In other words, we produce more content and feed it to the rational side. That’s the easy part. The harder part — and the part marketers need to master — is recognizing, finding and connecting to the emotional side of our audience in ways that influence and inspire concrete change. Not just through clever communications but by learning and deploying behavioral change techniques.

In Switch, the Heaths lay out a three-step template for creating change:

1. direct the rational side by cloning what’s working, scripting specific behaviors, pointing to the destination
2. motivate the emotional side by finding the feeling, shrinking the change so it’s less daunting, instilling a growth mindset
3. shape the path by tweaking the environment or changing a situation, building new habits, capitalizing on the tendency for behavior to be contagious

Of course, you’ll need to read the book to fill in the many blanks in this template. But notice the strategies listed here. It’s not simply a process of producing more and better information. It’s understanding how to stimulate and guide change in others. And tapping into the whole person, the rational and the emotional.

For those of us whose measure of success is positive change, being a purveyor of content is not enough. Content untethered from proven strategies for creating change renders marketing ineffective. If you want your marketing to reach greatness, learn how to create change. And let that be the king of your content marketing.

1. Assess organizational brand and sustainability: Develop an accurate baseline appraisal of how customers, employees and other stakeholders perceive your business, how you stack up against your competition and how far you’ve gone in implementing sustainable practices.
2. Review Mission: A great brand takes its cue from an extraordinary mission. Does your mission inspire or gather dust?
3. Identify Sustainable Branding Team: Involve representatives from across your business in defining your brand. Don’t leave it to marketing alone.
4. Define Brand Identity: Get clear on who you are as a business. What do you stand for? And how does that create competitive distinction and customer relevance? Do you want sustainability to lead your brand or live in the background?
5. Engage Employees: Get your employees on board with your new brand. Ask them to identify how they and their groups can deliver the experience your brand promises.
6. Produce Brand Marketing Plan: Determine how you will create and keep customers through the communications and presentation of your brand identity.
7. Produce Sustainability Plan: A sustainable brand is built on sustainable business practices. Determine how far you are willing and able to go with implementing sustainability in the short and long term.
8. Execute Sustainability Strategies: Prevent greenwashing by not letting marketing charge ahead of your sustainability practices. Walk first, then talk.
9. Execute Brand Marketing Strategies: Balance your natural enthusiasm for storytelling with a resolve to portray your business as it is, especially when it comes to sustainability.
10. Measure, Report and Adjust: Sustainable brands celebrate what they do well, hold themselves publicly accountable for their shortcomings and continuously strive to do better.

In branding, the job of connecting emotionally is typically left to marketing and advertising. History suggests that works for many product categories where competitive differentiation is scant and great advertising is their only hope of making consumers care.

Once a company starts hanging its hat on sustainability, however, the rules change. Branding is no longer a game of emotions alone. It becomes a game of facts and emotions. That takes the practice of branding outside the narrow zone of marketing and advertising and into the broad realm of operations and employee engagement to ensure sustainability practices are, in fact, implemented.

My piece also includes the 10 steps to building a sustainable brand. Check it all out and let me know what you think!

My partners and I in the Sustainable Branding Collaborative have released a summary report of the survey, which we conducted in late 2010. I encourage you to download a copy and see what your peers have to say.

When asked which is the “greater sin,” 78 percent of respondents said it’s worse for a business to make an effort to become more sustainable but allow its publicized promises on sustainability to far exceed its actual practices. Only 22 percent said it’s a greater sin for a company to make no claim or effort to become sustainable but otherwise deliver on all of its promises.

What’s clear from the survey is business executives committed to sustainability loathe greenwashing and value integrity. The findings validate the importance our group’s branding approach places on ensuring the sustainability practices of your employees and organization deliver what your brand promises.

Branding advice from sustainability proponents

The survey respondents’ top pieces of advice for companies branding more sustainable products and services include:

• Be honest, be authentic, “walk your talk”
• Build a solid sustainability foundation using methods such as The Natural Step Framework, whole systems thinking and triple-bottom-line accounting
• Measure, verify and certify sustainability claims, preferably using a third party
• Look at branding as a critical foundation for business success, not as a luxury

Does sustainability change branding?

Among other findings, respondents were almost evenly split on the question of whether the practice of branding should be different for an organization that is striving to become sustainable: 53 percent said no, 47 percent said yes.

Branding is branding, say the respondents who believe the practice of branding should be the same — regardless of whether a business is on the sustainability path. Those who believe the practice should be different say sustainable brands need to place a greater emphasis on authenticity, honesty and delivering on the brand promise than traditional brands do. They also believe branding must be approached as part of a comprehensive, company-wide effort to be sustainable.

No matter how you go about branding your business or product, the values of honesty, transparency and keeping your promises are paramount. Whether you believe these values can be instilled through traditional branding methods or require new approaches, the sustainability proponents in this survey strongly advise you to do what you say.

About the survey

The Sustainable Branding Collaborative conducted the Sustainability + Branding Survey November 10-17, 2010. The survey gathered online responses from 291 innovators and early adopters in the sustainable business movement.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?
4. 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.
5. 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.

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.