Marketing your sustainability story
Sustainability Marketing focuses on helping businesses clarify and communicate what they are doing in the areas of sustainability and Corporate Responsibility. This post explains how talking about sustainability often needs a coherent narrative and has some tips, and links to an excellent article, on how to communicate that story as clearly and effectively as possible. If you want to read the whole article, go here.
This is how the author of that article describes Sustainability Marketing: “Once you have a moonshot goal that your company can be known for and you’ve begun to tackle it, communicate about it over and over. This starts with what we call a "rallying cry" and a communications platform.
A rallying cry is a short, pithy statement, a little like a tag line, that captures what your company is doing and why. The rallying cry should align with your brand story and make sense to your core audiences. It also should be inspiring and easy to remember.
Undergirding the rallying cry should be clear reasons to believe it. You might think of these as pillars: The rallying cry is the top of a message house and the reasons to believe are the pillars that support it. Together, they form your communications platform.”
The author starts off, in the quote above, with the end-product of what Sustainability Marketing does: it gives you a short, clearly understandable rallying cry that summarizes your corporate approach to sustainability. Before you can do this, the first step you need to take is defining your story. As Shelton goes on to point out, this story is crucial and needs to come from all across your organization.
“Spend time on this, make it a collaborative process and really get it right. If you do that, then everyone in your organization — from brand management to product marketing and sustainability to sales — will be able to use it.
It also can be helpful to create a messaging grid showing how the communications platform gets customized and augmented for specific audiences.
Having been a responsible business for years is not the same thing as having an actual program to reduce impacts and create a sustainable future.”
Notice that in the above quote she focuses on having companies really ensure that they know what their common goals and achievements actually are. Many companies start off wanting to have a story to tell, but aren’t clear about the exact plot yet. Wanting to tell a story about sustainability, because it seems to be expected, is not enough. You need to spend time finding out what your story is, and if it is just beginning, where you want the plot to end up.
Next she points out that this message will need to be adapted and targeted for different audiences. She recommends that instead of sending out specific sustainability messages, you weave them into your other communications. I’ll let her explain it herself:
“If yours is a corporate sustainability story, don’t create a separate communications stream or "sustainability campaign" for it. Instead, create pieces of content that you can "float" into your other communications streams.
In other words, you likely already have an employee communications plan, an investor communications plan, a customer communications plan, etc. Create content about your sustainability story that you can integrate into those existing streams.”
“By content we mean videos, blog posts and articles, infographics, white papers, photos or illustrations with captions. Your company’s sustainability report is a major piece of content that can get promoted to all audiences with content actually pulled from the report itself.
If you have a new product that embodies your sustainability commitment or if your brand promise now is your sustainability story, then, of course, create a separate campaign.”
Ensuring that you are basing your story on facts and then evaluating the success of your story - are you telling people something they understand and is it giving them the information they want - is also crucial.
“Measure awareness and engagement along the way. This can be done via ongoing polling, tracking click-throughs and eyeballs. But it also can be done by creating ways for stakeholders to engage with your moonshot goal via their purchases. Work to demonstrate that consumers are buying Product X from you because they know it supports your moonshot goal.
Bottom line: Sustainability should never be charity; it should be a business lever. Your job is to be able to demonstrate how, by investing in sustainability, your company is building brand preference, attracting new employees, investors and customers, and driving sales. If you can demonstrate some or all of that, then your company will continue to invest and you’ll actually achieve your goal.”
This is how the author of that article describes Sustainability Marketing: “Once you have a moonshot goal that your company can be known for and you’ve begun to tackle it, communicate about it over and over. This starts with what we call a "rallying cry" and a communications platform.
A rallying cry is a short, pithy statement, a little like a tag line, that captures what your company is doing and why. The rallying cry should align with your brand story and make sense to your core audiences. It also should be inspiring and easy to remember.
Undergirding the rallying cry should be clear reasons to believe it. You might think of these as pillars: The rallying cry is the top of a message house and the reasons to believe are the pillars that support it. Together, they form your communications platform.”
"Full Moon - March 27th, 2013" by StephenGA is licensed under CC0 1.0
The author starts off, in the quote above, with the end-product of what Sustainability Marketing does: it gives you a short, clearly understandable rallying cry that summarizes your corporate approach to sustainability. Before you can do this, the first step you need to take is defining your story. As Shelton goes on to point out, this story is crucial and needs to come from all across your organization.
“Spend time on this, make it a collaborative process and really get it right. If you do that, then everyone in your organization — from brand management to product marketing and sustainability to sales — will be able to use it.
It also can be helpful to create a messaging grid showing how the communications platform gets customized and augmented for specific audiences.
Having been a responsible business for years is not the same thing as having an actual program to reduce impacts and create a sustainable future.”
Notice that in the above quote she focuses on having companies really ensure that they know what their common goals and achievements actually are. Many companies start off wanting to have a story to tell, but aren’t clear about the exact plot yet. Wanting to tell a story about sustainability, because it seems to be expected, is not enough. You need to spend time finding out what your story is, and if it is just beginning, where you want the plot to end up.
Next she points out that this message will need to be adapted and targeted for different audiences. She recommends that instead of sending out specific sustainability messages, you weave them into your other communications. I’ll let her explain it herself:
“If yours is a corporate sustainability story, don’t create a separate communications stream or "sustainability campaign" for it. Instead, create pieces of content that you can "float" into your other communications streams.
In other words, you likely already have an employee communications plan, an investor communications plan, a customer communications plan, etc. Create content about your sustainability story that you can integrate into those existing streams.”
"TMitchell_140922_9543" by storiesofchange is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
“By content we mean videos, blog posts and articles, infographics, white papers, photos or illustrations with captions. Your company’s sustainability report is a major piece of content that can get promoted to all audiences with content actually pulled from the report itself.
If you have a new product that embodies your sustainability commitment or if your brand promise now is your sustainability story, then, of course, create a separate campaign.”
Ensuring that you are basing your story on facts and then evaluating the success of your story - are you telling people something they understand and is it giving them the information they want - is also crucial.
“Measure awareness and engagement along the way. This can be done via ongoing polling, tracking click-throughs and eyeballs. But it also can be done by creating ways for stakeholders to engage with your moonshot goal via their purchases. Work to demonstrate that consumers are buying Product X from you because they know it supports your moonshot goal.
Bottom line: Sustainability should never be charity; it should be a business lever. Your job is to be able to demonstrate how, by investing in sustainability, your company is building brand preference, attracting new employees, investors and customers, and driving sales. If you can demonstrate some or all of that, then your company will continue to invest and you’ll actually achieve your goal.”
