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Is sustainability as ‘a cause’ deterring business?
An acquaintance from my years in high tech emailed me the other day. I let him know I had left the tech marketing firm I co-founded to move my work into sustainability. I cringed when I read his reply: “That’s a great cause and I wish you well.”
My response surprised me. What’s wrong with being associated with a great cause and someone wishing me well? Nothing, of course. It’s just that sustainability is not a cause for me, at least not any longer. And wishing me well made it sound like, well, I’d need all the help I can get.
Sustainability, for me, has evolved into a mindset, a practice, a method of operating a company, a basis for business purpose and competitive distinction. Defeating poverty is a great cause. Pursuing sustainability is simply smart business.
The work of idealists and activists
I’m guessing many in business still think of sustainability, to the degree they think of it at all, as the work of idealists and ideologues. You know, those people whose ardent support for their cause make them appear a tad unreliable as business executives or consultants.
Sustainability in business is growing in awareness and practice. But the breadth and depth of adoption is not nearly as great as it needs to be. I worry the association of sustainability with environmental or social activism deters many in business from embracing it.
Causes are the perceived stock-in-trade of nonprofits, governments, NGOs and religious institutions. Businesses trade in products and services. Unless business leaders can draw a direct line from sustainability to greater success in selling their goods and services (and, fortunately, growing numbers can and have), they will leave sustainability to the green crusaders.
Causes tend to be long-term, sometimes never-ending, in nature: civil rights, smoking prevention, food safety, pollution control, wetland conservation, climate change. Modern business, perhaps to its detriment, dwells in the short term. For lots of reasons, only about half of businesses are still around five years after their founding.
Obsessing over health of business, not planet
As someone who started an employee-based business and operated it for more than 13 years, I don’t believe most owners or executives lose sleep over the health of the planet. They do, however, obsess over the health of their companies.
And it’s in that obsession where they must discover sustainability as the source for business wellbeing. Not a cause for which they have precious little time or resources to entertain. But rather a method of organizing and operating that improves their chances of keeping the doors open, bills paid, employees, customers and shareholders satisfied, and competitors at bay.
Prominent sustainability consultants Bob Willard and Peter Senge speak of the five stages and drivers of sustainability in business. Starting at a place of non-compliance with environmental standards and regulations, a company moves into the second stage of compliance in response to regulatory demand and public pressure. Stage 3 is moving beyond compliance to seeing the possibilities for ongoing cost reductions and reputation or brand enhancement. The next stage is making sustainability an integrated strategy for creating business opportunity and managing risk. The fifth stage is a mission-driven business that places sustainability at the core of its values.
Except perhaps at Stage 5, the motivation isn’t saving the planet. Businesses are driven by the desire to be in compliance, make or save money and become more competitive. They need to know they can achieve these and other goals by becoming more sustainable. That’s cause enough for them.
The sustainable virtues of slow brand
This may be the first and only time you see the words “cathedral thinking” and “slow brand” used in the same sentence. Allow me to explain.
Last week I heard New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin refer to cathedral thinking as he spoke of his reporting on the daunting ecological challenges that confront us all. The effort needed to prevent the worst from happening will take enormous long-term commitment. The kind that compelled generations of humans past to build great religious monuments over decades, even centuries, knowing they would never experience the full fruits of their labor.
Gaudi Cathedral
I think of the Gaudi Cathedral in Barcelona, whose construction began in 1882 and continues today — 127 years later and 83 years after the death of its famed architect Antoni Gaudi.
I suppose only someone like me would ponder branding as Revkin spoke. I jotted down on my notepad the words slow brand. I had never seen or heard those two words used together, although a subsequent web search shows at least one blog by the name.
There are emerging slow food and slow money movements, but no slow brand movement. That’s understandable. Who in business wants “slow” to describe anything about them?
Painstakingly constructing a cathedral is no metaphor for how most companies and their brands are built. In the hyper-competitive world of business, speed is of the essence. We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re going there fast. We want a brand — stat!
Fast brand, slow brand
Companies that embrace the principles of sustainability will quite naturally take their foot off the accelerator. Sustainability requires a fundamental restructuring in how we conduct business. By holding itself accountable for the environmental and social impacts of its actions, a sustainable business doesn’t take shortcuts to success.
How we build our company brand matters. Weak ones are little more than facades. At best their value is aesthetic. Good ones are strong foundations. They allow businesses to stand the test of time because they’re solid, substantial, dependable, built with a sense of purpose and a whole lot of sweat equity. For me this describes slow brand — not a type of brand, but an approach to building a brand that gains strength over time.
How does slow brand compare with fast brand? Let me take a crack at drawing some distinctions:
- Fast brand is led by marketing. Slow brand is led by mission. Fast brand is isolated to marketing. The rest of the company pays it little or no attention. Slow brand supports the mission of a company, its reason for being. Just as a mission’s accomplishment requires an entire company, so does the building of a brand.
- Fast brand is how we look. Slow brand is who we are. Fast brand is obsessed with appearance: cool, innovative, powerful, smart. Slow brand is committed to substance. Integrity matters above all.
- Fast brand is a promise communicated. Slow brand is a promise fulfilled. Fast brand reduces itself to messages delivered by creative marketers. Slow brand knows a company’s actions speak louder than its words.
- Fast brand is purchased. Slow brand is earned. Fast brand loves media plans: broadcast, social, print. It works inside-out. Slow brand loves satisfied customers, employees and other stakeholders. It works outside-in.
Putting the CEO in charge
The longer I work at the intersection of branding and sustainability, the more convinced I am that brand ownership cannot be left to a marketing team. Ultimate brand responsibility must rest with the CEO. This is especially important for a business that’s making sustainability a brand cornerstone — a so-called sustainable brand. Stating a commitment to sustainability heightens the expectations of a company’s practices. And only the CEO is positioned to ensure every employee fulfills the promise of sustainability inherent in the mission and brand.
If your business is striving for sustainability, you know the transition won’t happen overnight. It will take concentrated effort over a long period of time. You may not be building a cathedral, but it may help to think you are.
Who knew you couldn’t push a tequila around?
Brands are symbols or images of products, companies and people. But people they’re not.
You wouldn’t know it by listening to most consumer marketing types. Here’s a PR executive explaining in PRWeek this month how “brands” can have a “legitimate place” on social networking sites: “Offer things people want or need…Be transparent and reassuring…Listen.”
Hmm, I thought that’s what people were for.
Or how about this marketing executive for a beverage brand whose company just hired an ex-Sopranos star as a commercial spokesman:
“Michael Imperioli represents the 1800 Tequila brand perfectly…Just like 1800 Tequila, he’s not going to be pushed around. He tells it like it is.”
Say what? Your tequila is not going to be pushed around? Sorry to break this to you, but if it tastes good, it will be pushed from one end of the bar to the other.
Still, I get her point. Her tequila symbolizes something: toughness, straight talk. At least that’s the idea. It’s not the tequila that doesn’t get pushed around. It’s you, the drinker. You drink it because you’re a Wise Guy, or so you want others to believe.
The exec should have said something like, “Michael is like my customer; he’s not going to be pushed around.” People who make, represent and consume her product may stand their ground. But her product is alcohol. Its toughness is gauged by its alcohol content or by how hard it is to swallow. Not its ability to stare down a rival.
Brands are images or associations that float about in our brains. The association with a beverage could be “don’t mess with me” or it could be “man, that tastes like @&#!” A brand can apply to a person (e.g., Michael Jordan), but, please, a brand is not a human being. No tequila is going to “tell it like is” — although a person might, after a shot or two.
What does any of this have to do with sustainability? The practice of sustainability asks us (not our brands) to be transparent, authentic, genuine in how we do business. No more hiding behind a carefully cultivated brand image or letting our brands do the talking for us (as if they could).
Branding a sustainable business is about real people and their real stories in making, selling, buying and using products or services. Brand image isn’t manufactured through celebrity cool. It’s earned through real businesspeople taking a stand for a more sustainable world — and then delivering. You want tough? That’s tough.
Starbucks or McCoffee? No thanks
Starbucks is spending big ad bucks to gain the upper hand in its coffee confrontation with McDonald’s McCafe. What’s important to me about this duel is the false — and ultimately unsustainable — choice this campaign sets up. (UPDATE: McDonald’s announces huge promotional blitz for McCafe.)
According to Ad Age:
The high-end coffee retailer is breaking a series of long form, full-page newspaper ads Sunday (May 3), designed to tell the brand’s “story” while warning consumers about the dangers of trading down. It’s all part of its effort to combat consumer perception about its prices and separate itself from McDonald’s expected mass-market assault for its McCafe launch. Starbucks’ print ads, designed on burlap-sack backgrounds, have headlines such as “It’s not what you’re buying, it’s what you’re buying into.” The ads lay out what separates Starbucks from the competition, such as its practice of buying fair-trade beans and providing health care for employees who work more than 20 hours a week.
Living in Portland, Ore., I can tell you that Starbucks doesn’t separate itself from the competition on the basis of fair-trade, health care or other laudatory practices. That is, if you consider Starbucks’ competition to also include the locally owned, independent coffee merchants and cafes, which we in Portland enjoy throughout our great city.
In the battle of national, publicly owned retail chains, mom & pop’s and larger independents are a complete after-thought. And yet they are the ones who suffer most, along with the communities that are so much better off for having them around. Think Wal-Mart and its devastating impact on local economies and small local businesses as it tries to mow down big-box competitors like Target. The loss of the local independents are simply collateral damage in the national and global business wars.
Assuming I had no other options, I would choose Starbucks over McDonald’s because it’s a more socially and environmentally responsible corporation. That’s what Starbucks wants to hear. What they don’t want to hear is that I actually have dozens of great coffee options and none of them involve McDonald’s or Starbucks. My choices are local and they’re sustainable. I don’t care to choose between who’s less bad. I want to support the business owners who genuinely care about my community because this is their community, too. Large publicly traded corporations ruled by the financial bottom line are “dead ends,” as one socially responsible investment advisor I know asserts. Starbucks may be more responsible than McDonald’s, but that doesn’t make them sustainable.
To borrow the Starbucks advertising punch line, what I’m “buying into” is local.
Time to retire ‘green marketing’
With Earth Day 2009 behind us, I have a suggestion: Let’s acknowledge “green marketing” has outlived its usefulness and put our energy into redefining marketing itself.
Green marketing had a good run. It has responded to the rising green demands of customers. And it’s helped raise the environmental conscience of many others. Unfortunately, marketing as it’s most widely practiced remains the fuel for unsustainable consumption. And green marketing doesn’t go nearly far enough to change that.
The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines green marketing three ways:
- (retailing definition) The marketing of products that are presumed to be environmentally safe.
- (social marketing definition) The development and marketing of products designed to minimize negative effects on the physical environment or to improve its quality.
- (environments definition) The efforts by organizations to produce, promote, package, and reclaim products in a manner that is sensitive or responsive to ecological concerns.
I added the emphasis to products to underscore the limitation of green marketing. Absolutely, we must develop and promote products that are ecologically sensitive and safe. And green marketing has encouraged more eco-friendly product consumption. However, it utterly fails to address two unsustainable conditions:
- Too much consumption by rich people and countries: According to the World Wildlife Foundation, the ecological footprint* of the United States in 2005 was 9.4 (global hectares per person); the world average was 2.7. For high-income countries it was 6.4; for low-income countries 1.0.
- Too little consumption by poor people and countries: Although progress has been made on reducing extreme poverty in recent decades, the World Bank estimates that 1.4 billion people still lived on less than US $1.25 a day in 2005.
Over consumption and inequitable consumption explain much of what troubles our world. If marketers really want to make a difference, they’ll look far beyond green products. And focus instead on how to curb the material cravings of the affluent and narrow the rich-poor gap.
We’re seeing signs of green marketing morphing into “sustainable marketing.” That’s an improvement. It situates marketing in a larger triple-bottom-line context: people, planet, profit. Sustainable marketing, however, implies there is something known as “unsustainable marketing” — which of course there is, most anywhere you look.
We need sustainability embedded in marketing. In other words, marketing — by definition — must be sustainable. There is no green marketing or sustainable marketing. There’s only marketing. And it’s sustainable. Or at least that’s the idea.
What does sustainability mean? I rely on the widely used definition from the Brundtland Commission**: “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The AMA, meanwhile, defines marketing (inelegantly) as “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
So marketing newly defined could appear something like this:
Delivering value to customers and managing customer relationships in ways that meet the needs of the organization and its stakeholders without compromising the ability of all humans, present and future, to meet their own needs.
Still doesn’t roll of the tongue, I know. But this alternative concept of marketing is profoundly different. No longer will it be enough to satisfy our customers for their benefit and that of our organization and stakeholders (especially shareholders). This business-as-usual approach to marketing has created too few winners and too many losers.
The world could look very different if marketers accept responsibility for ensuring their organizations (or clients) are not jeopardizing the ability of others to meet their needs. In other words, doing our jobs can’t mean satisfying customers, shareholders or bosses at a cost to the health of individuals, communities and environments now and for generations to come. How we avoid that won’t always be obvious. The point is to acknowledge there can be broad social and ecological consequences to our actions and lines we don’t knowingly cross.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the AMA and academia to get behind a new vision of marketing. They’ll follow the real practices of real marketers. Let’s show them the way.
*According to the World Wildlife Federation, “A country’s footprint is the sum of all the cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fibre and timber it consumes, to absorb the wastes emitted when it uses energy, and to provide space for its infrastructure.” WWF also says, “If our demands on the planet continue at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.”
** Friend Brian Setzler at TriLibrium informs me two key concepts are usually excluded or overlooked when referring to the Brundtland definition: “the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”
In case you’re wondering
I’ll be away from the blog for a couple weeks. See you back here toward the end of the month.