CIM course director and celebrated author on brand strategy, Paul Hitchens, recently ran a webinar for marketers focussing on sustainability giving some outstanding examples of how sustainable values can become fundamental to a brand – indeed to the business as a whole. The webinar explored the most useful literature available on the subject as well as giving many lively examples of how a sustainable brand strategy can bring real benefit to a business and all its stakeholders.
It’s not just altruistic
The first point Hitchens had to make is that incorporating sustainable values isn’t just a matter of paying altruistic lip service to investors, customers, and employees. Adopting sustainable values helps to align financial and strategic goals. It gives a business a real sense of purpose.
Hitchens began by referring to John Elkington, as the ‘father of sustainability’, explaining that, way back in 1994, he introduced the concept of the Triple Bottom Line, coining the phrase ‘People, Planet, and Profit’.
Elkington states in his latest book, Green Swans, that the original aim of the ‘People, Planet, and Profit ‘concept has largely been lost and his book is a manifesto for a new approach to capitalism. His revised mantra is now ‘People, Planet and Prosperity’.
In his foreword to Green Swans, Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, comments that:
“The UN’s sustainable development goals are quite simply the world’s greatest business plan – the growth story of the century.”
The goals are intended as a guideline for governments, but Polman makes they point that many of them are helpful too for businesses. You can see all seventeen goals here.
Sustainability as ethical behaviour for a measurable approach
Hitchens went on to summarise John Grant’s latest book, Greener Marketing, where the author describes the key values of both Body Shop and IKEA. He considers sustainability as being a kind of ethical behaviour, a manifestation of the ‘do as you would be done by’ philosophy promoted by many of the world’s religions, essentially it’s a code of conduct, a way of behaving.
In Hitchen’s own book, Brand Management Within a Week, he outlines the bones of a strategy which can measure behaviours to see how they match up to the ideal. The brand needs to measure up to the perceptions of others – Hitchens quotes Jeff Bezos as putting it best when he says:
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room”
Another author with a wealth of practical experience is Julian Richer, founder of Richer Sounds, the UK’s largest HiFi retailer. Richer takes the concept of the importance of ethics further in his book, The Ethical Capitalist. The first shop Richer set up in 1978 when he was 19 sells more per sq foot than any other retail outlet and a lot of that is due to the appreciation and care given to employees by their employer. Richer has, for example, set up a trust for employees, and paid bonuses out of his own pocket.
Case study 1 – Tony’s Chocoloney, tackling slavery
Hitchens then described his first case study, Tony’s Chocoloney, which has, at its heart, a commitment to producing chocolate which is 100% made without slavery. The company was founded by a Dutch journalist, Teun van de Keuken, who was shocked to discover that slavery and child labour were still endemic in the cocoa industry.
Chocoloney bars are not divided into even squares, but into pieces of random size, symbolising the inequality in the industry and the exploitation of the cocoa farmers and their workers.
The company works with its suppliers to ensure not just fair wages, but also sustainable farming practices – it’s all detailed in the inside of every wrapper. (I’m not sure how effective this is from a marketing point of view, as it’s not something I’ve ever noticed). The wrappers themselves are made from materials compliant with sustainable forestry practices. And the aim of the company doesn’t stop within its own scope. The idea is that this holistically beneficent approach will influence practices throughout the industry.
Case study 2 – Body Shop, against animal testing
Hitchens comments that van de Keuken’s entrepreneurial approach is similar to that of the Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick. In her case, she was dedicated to obliterating animal testing in the cosmetic industry. But in the same way that van de Keuken, is also concerned with the environment and not just slavery, her scope was also wider – she supported both Greenpeace and The Big Issue. Read Roddick’s business biography, Business As Unusual for more on her experience and approach.
Case study 3 – Mattel’s Barbie, encouraging young girls to reach their potential
Hitchens then went on to outline the development of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in businesses, describing the early half of the 20th century as the ‘philanthropic’ era, when businesses donated to charity or, as Lever Brothers did, building accommodation and amenities for employees.
These days the approach of business is a more responsive one. Mattel wanted to actively counter falling confidence levels in young girls by raising their career aspirations. In 2018 the company launched the Barbie Dream Gap Project. As early as age five, girls begin to question their potential and the Dream Gap Project aims to tackle this. One of Mattel’s dolls, for example, is modelled on Oxford-based Professor Sarah Gilbert, a woman instrumental in developing the Astra Zeneca anti-covid vaccine. The doll is one of a series aimed at encouraging girls to study STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. Also as part of the Dream Gap Project Mattel partners with organisations such as Inspiring Girls International to support female entrepreneurs. The company has set up the Ruth Handler Mentorship Program – named after Barbie’s creator. The programme is designed to help women further their careers throughout the toy industry by way of mentorship, coaching, professional development and learning.
Case study 4 – Unilever’s Marmite, waste not-want not
Marmite is an excellent example of the circular economy in action. The concept of the circular economy is to re-use resources and reduce waste. Marmite is made from surplus yeast from Heineken beer production. The EU defines the circular economy as being:
“ a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. In this way, the life cycle of products is extended.”
The Ellen Macarthur Foundation is a charity committed to developing a circular economy throughout the world. This aim, the charity believes, can be achieved through:
Eliminating waste and pollution
Circulating products and materials (at their highest value)
Regenerating nature
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)
ESG gives businesses standards of evaluation and ways of measuring ESG compliance in the following ways:
Environmental: climate change; waste; deforestation; pollution; resource depletion
Social: communities; conflict; health and safety; working conditions; diversity
Governance: board structure; executive pay; policies regarding taxation and political lobbying; anti-corruption measures
Increasingly, investors are looking for measurable proof ESG strategies. Additionally, often, ESG initiatives can have a significant impact on growth.
Hitchens gives the example of Ben and Jerry’s, a company which has an ESG philosophy running through everything it does. Indeed, its dogged determination to stick to its stated ethics led to tensions with its owner, Unilever, which has announced that it will be spinning off its entire ice cream business over the next couple of years.
Ben & Jerry’s has three core values: human rights and dignity (it is fiercely anti-racist); social and economic justice; and environmental protection, restoration, and regeneration (it’s passionately and actively supportive of dairy and agriculture sustainability). Ben & Jerry sources milk from hormone-free cows, for example.
These strong core values were established by the original founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. You can read more about how the company was set up and began to grow in Ben & Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop, by Fred “Chico” Lager, a former CEO of Ben & Jerry’s, which is subtitled, How Two Real Guys Built a Business With a Social Conscience and a Sense of Humor.
A sustainable brand strategy can help drive innovation – Ecotricity
Concern for sustainability can help drive design thinking, helpfully defined by IDEO founder and Stamford professor, David Kelley, as being,
“the premise of design thinking revolves around empathy, being understanding of what other people want, and how the world is put together from a social and emotional point of view.”
This generates user-focussed solutions.
Dale Vince is a fearless innovator within the fields of renewable energy and environmental sustainability. One of Vince’s first experiments involved setting up a service called Windphones at the Glastonbury Festival in the late ‘80s. He constructed a windmill which could charge mobile phones using an old electricity pylon and train batteries sourced from a scrapyard. The experience jump-started his development into becoming a clean energy industrialist. Among other things, Vince’s company, Ecotricity, has produced one of the UK’s main electric vehicle charging networks as well as developing ways to produce bio-gas from grass using anaerobic digestion. It’s all part of a strategy to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. You can read more about all of this in Vince’s book, Manifesto, The Battle For Green Britain.
A sustainable brand strategy can give purpose – Lush
Hitchens recommends asking the question, “how does your brand make the world a better place?” If you don’t know the answer, consider:
What’s wrong with the world (focus on just one thing!)
What’s special about your brand?
How might the unique nature of your brand solve a world problem?
Providing a solution gives your organisation a sense of purpose, and a sense of purpose attracts both talented employees and engaged customers. Hitchens explains this by saying:
“A brand’s purpose has the power to become its North Star, pointing to service excellence.”
An example of this is Lush, a company which offers sustainable cosmetics whilst championing the environment and animal rights. Lush uses vegetarian ingredients, it avoids preservatives, and, like Body Shop, it does not carry out animal testing. The company structure is not hierarchical, and it’s 10% employee-owned. Co-founder, Mark Constantine, is messianic about these values. He’s an enthusiastic campaigner against waste in the form of packaging – one of the reasons a lot of Lush products take a solid form which doesn’t need packaging.
Like Tony’s Chocoloney, Lush is also passionate about ethical sourcing: pricing needs to be fair for producers; and producers need to care for the environment. Lush, caring also for its customers, uses organic fruits and vegetables.
A sustainable brand strategy can underpin values – IKEA
Values are the guidelines that form a business’s moral compass. Values inform recruitment and the selection of supply chain partners. In order to develop a strong employer brand, marketing and HR need to work together. Engaged employees give a better return on investment. For comprehensive, well-researched advice on how to create a strong employer brand, Hitchens recommends David MacLeod and Nita Clarke’s book, Engaging For Success.
MacLeod and Clarke’s research identified four main themes on which to focus.
Leaders that supply a strong strategic narrative
Engaging, caring and motivating managers
Employees are given a voice. They are not considered the problem, but rather the solution
Integrity – stated values are not just lip service, instead they drive behaviour
Ingvar Kamprad founder IKEA in 1943 aged 17 with a very Swedish, clean, spare, and functional ethos. Kamprad’s vision was to achieve a better everyday life for IKEA customers by offering well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.
Employees are central to the company, but, indeed, the company espouses the other values mentioned throughout the webinar – it’s a good case study to end on (you can read more about this in John Grant’s Greener Marketing).
The importance of extending sustainability to your supply chain
Many of these case studies relate to the focus businesses have given to ensuring an ethical supply chain or even fixing issues in the supply chain more broadly. Consumers recognise that often the biggest impact companies make is through the partners they choose to work with and the produce they choose to buy to make their products. For businesses with complex multi-tier global supply chains, ensuring a responsible supply chain back to source can seem like a daunting prospect. The sheer quantity of data required to ensure you can market claims without greenwashing is overwhelming and really unmanageable without a specialist data platform, like Tried & Supplied. Yet there’s no better way of impressing customers and investors with your commitment to ethical business than demonstrating how it stretches to your whole supply chain.
Conclusion
Overall, there are two aspects in common with all the examples given in the webinar.
The first is that, although important to have a strong vision of what needs to be achieved, whether ending slavery in the cocoa industry, stamping out animal testing, or reducing waste packaging, the adoption of an ethical approach to business tends to result in a much more holistic, all-encompassing way of behaving. Ethical businesses will, indeed, be aiming to support ‘People, Planet, and Prosperity’ in everything they do, and that includes their supply chain.
Secondly, a sustainable brand strategy has a much better chance of being universally and enthusiastically implemented if it has a strong, committed, passionate entrepreneur leading it.
The CIM offers a two-day course in Strategic Brand Management.
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