The results of the study showed that, across every sector (i.e. 10 of the largest consumer-facing sectors in North America), a brand’s actual sustainability record does not correlate with consumers’ perceptions and awareness. This means that, down the road, all of a company’s investments in sustainability may not pay off in terms consumer behavior or even brand equity/corporate reputation, which is directly undermining the ROI of sustainability itself.

This disconnect, or perceptions gap, often results from the brand’s failure to “talk to walk” in a credible and meaningful way. Therefore, Change developed what it calls the 5C’s of sustainability branding – a series of principles to follow when creating sustainability branding strategies:

• Consumer Facing: Looking at what the consumer is looking at.
• Competitive: To compete, brands must innovate.
• Core: Tying sustainability to a brand’s core business
• Conversational: Leveraging two-way conversations, rather than one-way announcements
• Credible: Sequence and objective credibility are key to sustainable brand success.

I would also add a sixth “C”: CONSISTENCY.

Consistency means a brand, a company undertakes sustainability initiatives that match the reality of its business and the image it conveys. This is critical for building trust, and durably affecting consumer’s perceptions and awareness. And ultimately consumer behavior. How?

• First, sustainability has to be more than just an one-off campaign. Sustainability must be incorporated into the brand’s DNA. It must reflect the core values of the brand and contribute to delivering the brand promise over the long-term. This means that a brand cannot change its sustainability focus or ‘cause’ too often, or engage in too many non-related areas. Every brand effort has to be mutually supportive in order to achieve the broader sustainability brand promise.

• Second, consistency is important in the sense that messages must resonate with the brand’s existing voice in the market place. More importantly, sustainability branding must be communicated at every possible customer touchpoint in a consistent way. The 2009 edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer indeed reported that people need to hear a message 3-5 times, from different channels or voices, in order to believe in it.

• Finally, as brand and corporate reputation are increasingly converging, with consumers not only looking at a product’s sustainability impact but also the overall environmental and social performance of the operating companies behind the brands (see the GoodGuide for instance), sustainability branding needs to be aligned with corporate communications.  Such communications efforts have to be mutually reinforcing, not only with consumers, but also with a broader range of stakeholders such as employees, the media, etc.

And you, what do you think? Do you see any seventh ‘C’?

This is the question Nathan Schock of the Greenway Communiqué tried to answer in an article published in the first PRSA Tactics issue of 2010: Communicate your environmental achievements in the New Year, by reaching out to the most prominent sustainability commentators, journalists and bloggers in the US.

All these interesting inputs and answers revolve around five key principles that I attempt to summarize below:

• Be transparent. This is THE golden in sustainability communications. Greenwashing has resulted in increased skepticism and green fatigue. So, be honest. “Tell us the progress, but tell us the trade-offs, too. The cliché about this being a journey, not a destination, is true here,” says Martin LaMonica, senior writer at CNET News and CBS Interactive, blogger at Green Tech. This will help make your story human…and much more credible.

• Think about the audience. “It’s a truism, but you have to craft your pitch to the journalist and his or her publication,” explains Todd Woody, contributing editor at Fortune and blogger at Green Wombat. Understand what matters to your audience, what are the top of mind issues, what the audience wants to know and read about. This often means focusing less on green features and more on benefits such as cost savings from energy efficiency, etc. depending on what means the most to your target audience, be it customer or investor. Marc Gunter, contributing editor at Fortune and blogger at Marc Gunther adds, “I’m looking for stories and blog posts that will not only attract readers but leave them feeling that they learned something new, different or provocative, maybe even something they would pass along to a colleague or friend.”

• Prove what you say with data but still keep it clear. Facts and figures are indispensible key proof points. But don’t overwhelme the audience with it. As William Brent, senior vice president at Weber Shandwick, blogger at The Search for Cleantech advises, stay specific (don’t speak in often meaningless ‘green’ generalities) while making sure you speak in simple terms (frame your story in terms that people understand).

• Provide a bigger picture as well. It is critical to put your client’s story into context, i.e. the bigger sustainability issues around it, how this fits into your client’s overall business strategy and sustainability goals, etc. “Too many PR folks spew facts without context, leaving their audience with more questions than answers and setting themselves up for charges of greenwash, or worse,” says Joel Makower, blogger at Two Steps Forward.

• Don’t “pitch” bloggers—participate! As traditional media models are struggling with fewer reporters covering sustainability and green stories (and not only) and readers are getting most of their news via online channels, it is critical to determine how social media can best meet your needs. However, be reminded about the specificities of blogger outreach! Build relationships with individuals and communicate with one-on-one, personal messages. As Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, founder and editor of Sustainablog insists, “Don’t play the numbers game with green bloggers — blasting out press releases just doesn’t work very well in this space. Find a few you’d really like to connect with, and then do just that: try to build a relationship. Offer opportunities to talk with clients and have your client prepare for a genuine conversation, rather than a presentation of a scripted message.” This is also true for traditional media relations. Be a helpful resource to reporters or bloggers.

• If you do participate, be ready to go a step further. Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation says it all: ‘The leaders will be companies willing to talk about the things their competitors are afraid to talk about.” This is probably the only way to truly cut through the clutter, isn’t it?

Image Credit: Getty Images

Grail Research

Probably as a result of a ‘sustainability noise overload’, greenwashing-induced skepticism, eco-fatigue … or simply ineffective communications, it appears that the great majority of consumers (in this case 85%) have no idea about what pioneering companies such as Estee Lauder, Hewlett Packard, Unilever, Nestle and Intel  are doing in terms of sustainability and CSR.

Surprising? Not really. While corporate reputation and brand image are converging, the gap between a company’s responsible initiatives and consumers’ perceptions and … ultimately decisions still remains important. And not properly addressed.

While companies have been pressured to practice what they preach, i.e. ‘walking the talk’, it is also critical to be effectively able to ‘talk the walk’ as well:

• By being transparent and authentic: 63% of consumers rely on product labels as their primary sources of information about green companies and their products, only if product labeling does not lead to confusion.

• By leveraging the right communications channels (as well as the right messages), that engage consumers, leverage their experiences and interactions with brands and encourage peer-to-peer evangelism, through word of mouth conversations (both online and offline), which are considered as more trusted sources of information (45%)  than advertising (38%) or company websites (18%).

So in the end, isn’t it more a question of ‘are we allocating marketing & communications budgets properly?‘ What are you thoughts?

I found this report highly informative and well-written, as it defines greenwashing in very simple terms (i.e. 10 signs of greenwash), explains why greenwashing is still growing (i.e. consumer demand for green, general absence of industry-wide standards for communicating environmental messages, etc.), and finally offers a pretty comprehensive greenwashing checklist.

The best of it though is that the report provides greenwash perspectives for each stakeholder, i.e.  customers; regulatory, enforcing, and mediating bodies; NGOs; Media: journalists, bloggers, and media sellers.

In the end, “it all adds up” as shown in the graphic representation below. In determining whether a particular claim is greenwash or not, an individual may consider a wide range of factors, at the crossroads of brand reputation and corporate reputation, thus showing that both are more and more interlinked today:

]]> http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/09/21/understanding-how-stakeholders-perceptions-of-greenwash-are-formed/feed/ 3 http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/09/01/dan-pink-at-ted-global-proving-again-that-csrsustainability-is-key-to-motivating-employees/ http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/09/01/dan-pink-at-ted-global-proving-again-that-csrsustainability-is-key-to-motivating-employees/#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:20:12 +0000 admin http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/?p=408 Last month at TEDGlobal 2009, Dan Pink, who is Al Gore’s former speech writer and now ‘career analyst’, made a pretty interesting presentation on the science of motivation by showing that traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think.

(Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:36)

• Money cannot buy performance
  

Rewards or incentives by their very nature narrow our focus, dull our thinking and creativity…and therefore restrict our capabilities and performance. Incentives actually create totally the opposite of what they are supposed to do! Higher incentives = worse performance.

I like Dan’s point here especially in the light of what has happened with the financial crisis…it seems like it is time to review biased assumptions on which the most basic business & HR management principles are based.

• What the real incentives are: autonomy, mastery and… purpose!

Motivation is rather based on more intrinsic factors: the desire to do things because they matter, because they are part of something important and because we like them.  It is very simple and revolves around three elements:

Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives

Mastery: The desire to get better and better at what we do and something that matters

and…Purpose: Doing what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves!

The latter is what interests us the most here. Few employees come to work each morning excited solely by the prospect of making money and increasing shareholder value. They want to be a part of something meaningful, something that contributes positively to society. Effective CSR or Sustainability initiatives can provide a larger context/ a greater purpose for employees to view their jobs and the mission of their organizations!

Beyond increasing employee loyalty, retention and attraction, CSR also enhances employee morale, motivation…and therefore performance!

CSR initiatives are something all employees can take pride in, and don’t forget that your employees can then be your best AMBASSADORS, especially to friends and family when they demonstrate that their organization is a trusted corporate citizen from the inside-out.

This is especially true for newest entrants to the workplace, i.e. the Millenials / Generation Y who increasingly a) want to live for more than work and b) like to feel that they are living for more than just themselves