By Amy J. Belanger, CEO of Idealist Marketing & PR
Nearly 800 business leaders from 19 countries convened at the Monterey Conference Center in central Calif., on June 7-10, 2011 for the 5th annual Sustainable Brands Conference by Sustainable Life Media (SLM). This event is a relatively new forum to share best practices, challenges and thoughts on the shifting landscape of corporate sustainability.
Sustainable Brands takes a different approach than other conferences that have been growing mission-based green businesses for a decade or more, such as Natural Products Expo by New Hope Natural Media (http://www.expowest.com ), LOHAS Forum (http://www.lohas.com), and Social Venture Network\’s annual conference (http://www.svn.org ).
In a sustainable business arena where the mission-driven “Born Greens” and the profit-driven “Big Brands” are often still on different playing fields, this conference is openly served up for the latter. The majority of participants were sustainability and marketing executives from multinational corporations, like Wal-mart, Coca-Cola, Clorox, Ford, Disney, and HP.
Founder and CEO, KoAnn Skrzyniarz, makes no bones about focusing her event on opportunity for business. She believes it\’s the best way to capture the creativity and power of the big brands to solve social and environmental problems on the large scale that\’s urgently needed.
However, the program included quite a few leaders from the mission-driven companies and nonprofits, old and new, who have built the green economy that the big brands now seek to engage. Speeches and panels included sustainability executives and thought leaders from Seventh Generation (http://www.seventhgeneration.com ), Interface (http://www.interfaceglobal.com ), CSR Wire (http://www.csrwire.com ), Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (http://www.greenmountaincoffee.com ), Natural Logic (http://www.natlogic.com ), Eco-Products (http://www.ecoproducts.com ), and dozens more.
Through the theme of this year\’s conference, “Play On,” organizers sought to score a collective “aha” about the power of play to overcome the “ho hum” in sustainability education and engage people in the same powerful ways that online gaming and social media do. “Gamification” applies game mechanics and engagement science to businesses; this event applied it to sustainability and branding. Presenters said fear is an ineffective way to motivate change, but the human spirit is built for creativity and problem solving, and the colossal rise of social media, mobile devices, wi-fi, and video games proves gamification is the way to unleash it.
The gamification strategy was elaborated by marketing pros, scientists, and game theory experts, including Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist at NRDC; Robin Raj, founder and executive creative director at Citizen Group; Rajat Paharia, Founder & Chief Product Officer of Bunchball; and Michael Kim, Founder of Kairos Labs. All addressed the finer points of game-like feedback systems as a powerful new frontier in teaching and marketing sustainability in the “engagement economy.”
Toyota Prius believed in the concept enough to gamify driving in an environmentally friendly manner with its on-board software that delivers feedback on fuel conservation. Similar examples are surfacing throughout the business world. Energy executives from Ascentium, Green Energy Agents, Efficiency 2.0, and Silver Spring Network Utilities reported significant energy reduction when consumers use their game-based platform and compete to improve.
Applied to branding, Gabe Zichermann, author of “Game-Based Marketing” (Wiley, 2010), said gamification is rewriting the rules of brand marketing, product design, and customer experience. Zicherman explained how gamification strategies can help companies increase customer activity, loyalty, retention, and viral growth.
The program was replete with valuable presentations on green marketing by brand leaders such as Cone, Inc., Saatchi & Saatchi, BBMG, Shelton Group, and BrandLogic, to name a few. Of course, it\’s difficult, if not impossible, to hold a sustainability branding conversation with big business without the stain of greenwash.
Brand protection strategist and trademark counsel, Lara Pearson, confronted greenwashing head-on in her panel, “The ABC\’s of Staying Clean on Greenwash,” with Jonathan Yohannan, of Cone, Inc, and David Mallen, of Better Business Bureau. Panelists urged companies to avoid inadvertently creating a false impression about their environmental claims which could undermine their well-intended steps forward. Yohannan referenced a Cone Study that backs up their precaution, saying nearly three-quarters of consumers (71%) will stop buying a product if they feel misled by environmental claims.
But it was quickly clear that (at least in the vision of the organizers and thought leaders behind it) this event is neither “green” nor “wash.”
Organizers said the future depends on a sustainable business movement that propels itself beyond the green framework entirely, beyond isolated CSR programs which generate incremental change, and beyond the marketing of good works, to one in which brands are built with sustainability and social responsibility integrated into every function and decision. In other words, companies must “embed sustainability,” making it systemic to everything they do.
Gil Friend, panelist, author and CEO of Natural Logic said, “What we\’re trying to achieve is the creation of a systemic business context in which the full impact (social and environmental) of the manufacture, sale and end of life of a product becomes part of the core business strategy.”
In his talk, “Your Next Move: From Bolt on to Embedding Sustainability,” author and Case Western Associate Professor Chris Laszlo described concepts and frameworks that mainstream companies are using to embed sustainability into their core business strategy – and create competitive advantage. He argued that the solutions they\’re producing are unique and authentic to the business, and require no tradeoffs in profitability, or for the customer, in price or quality.
This is the branding philosophy advocated by Skrzyniarz, and it\’s a whole different game than flying your green. “We like to say that sustainable brand builders need to see brand as first who you are, what you do and how you do it — THEN how you talk about it,” she said, advising brand leaders to be transparent and authentic.
That\’s not an easy challenge to meet, because it involves risk, said Charlie Brown of Nike, Jess Krauss of Source44, and Jason Saul of Mission Measurement. For example, manufacturers are “tightfisted” about sourcing because they don\’t want to interrupt their supply. What they need to realize is that transparency also brings gains. Krauss discussed Source44\’s analysis of its clients\’ supply chain, saying many don\’t even know about unfair labor practices, product recalls, and other problems in their supply chain before the analysis. After, they\’re able to better manage the risks and often find unexpected gains including cost and labor savings, branding advantages, and more.
Transparency relies on measurement: you can\’t report what you don\’t know. In a panel on standards, tools and dashboards, Jason Saul from Mission Measurement discussed the challenges – and opportunities – in measuring sustainability initiatives. With Wal-Mart seeking to make its Sustainability Index the retail industry standard; the Outdoor Industry Association unveiling its assessment tool which measuring the environmental footprint of apparel, footwear, and gear; and dozens if not hundreds more industry-specific tools under development and in use; presenters said measurement and reporting is costly and complicated.
It\’s also fraught with controversy, said Gregory Unruh, of Thunderbird School of Management, in his panel on the “green standards frenzy.” In the design of standards, who decides what measures constitute “green” and “socially responsible”? Steve Arbaugh, of Interface, Jennifer Schwab, of Sierra Club Green Home, Ben Packard, of Starbucks and Bonnie Nixon, of The Sustainability Consortium discussed how standards are evolving and who is taking the lead.
If big business wins the standards scramble, some sustainability leaders doubt whether society will change at the speed required to buffer the worst outcomes of climate change and other looming environmental and social disasters.
In “The Power of & in a World of Either/Or,” Gil Friend said the challenge before us “is nothing less than reinventing the industrial economy of the planet,” to build industries that are in harmony with the planet that sustains them. He said the 2% or 10% reduction goals we commonly see in industry are “woefully inadequate.”
A great many of the participants in the event shared this sense of urgency. In his Sustainable Brand Leadership panel, with Gil Friend, Chip Conley, and former Seventh Generation CEO, Jeffrey Hollender said we need revolutionary change – not incremental change. Companies must become “sustainable in a systemic effect that leaves the world better off than if they had never existed,” he said.
KoAnn Skrzyniarz has said in past interviews, “Leaders set the bar in terms of establishing the pace of change. There is no doubt that the future is in sustainable brands, however whether or not we\’ll be able to create the kind of change we need in the world at the pace we need it will depend to a degree leaders who will continue to step up to keep raising the bar for the rest of us.”
But what happens when visionary leaders – the ones setting the bar – leave the mission-based companies they create?
Hollender is a case in point, which he illustrated in a sobering, cautionary tale about why he was fired from his own company, and where he dropped the ball in protecting his company\’s mission into the future. “I was fired about six months ago after 23 years, and removed from the board of directors, never being allowed to step foot back in the company,” he declared to a riveted audience.
He used his experiences to underscore the imperative to embed sustainability and create cultural, structural, and financial protections around it. He said his decision to accept “too much money from the wrong people,” shifted power into the hands of investors who immediately removed the salary cap he created and started on the path to diluting the company\’s mission.
Hollender believes he could have protected his company\’s mission and employees better had he taken steps to “institutionalize the mission and values in the corporate structure,” and “given more of the company to the employees, who would have acted with greater responsibility and wisdom than the people that owned most of the company.”
Stepping up as such a leader requires courage, as every sustainability entrapreneur and intrapreneur knows. Those who do take risks sometimes suffer big losses, like Hollender did, or receive criticism from all sides of the aisle. Yet Hollender remains optimistic – about financial change engines such as employee ownership, green jobs, cooperatives, and microfinance, for instance.
In his closing statements, Hollender issued the challenge, “Will you put your energy into something that will do more than create incremental change, that you believe will create transformational change? Will you not be afraid to try?”
Hollender is certainly still stepping up. His new project, American Sustainable Business Council, is a coalition-style advocacy network representing 100,000 small and medium sized businesses. He sees the group as “a powerful counterpoint to the US Chamber of Commerce,” and says it will “lobby and fight for closing tax loopholes on the rich, protect the social safety net for the poor, and give responsible businesses a level playing field on which to compete.”
We look forward to seeing the outcome of this, and other projects presented at Sustainable Brands 2011, and who continues to step up in 2012.
Article by Amy J. Belanger, CEO of Idealist Marketing & PR, based in Berkeley, Calif. She is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and fiction writer, and a certified Guerrilla Marketing Coach. Among many successes, her campaigns banned offshore drilling in Florida, raised $1.5 million to protect the wild forests of the Southern Appalachians, and tripled the size of the Arizona Green Building Expo, making it the second largest green building event in the nation.
