Every professional, consultant, or business person with interest in sustainability I’ve talked to concurs that sustainability means more than “green”. Yet green is what the Prosperity-People-Planet concept of sustainability gets reduced to in most sustainability narratives and discourses. Sustainability is misbranded.
The word itself is so overused and overhyped, many people have begun blocking it out, like an annoying commercial or unpopular president. Substitutes are emerging, the catchiest and most telling one of which may be “S-word”.
The word green naturally comes with the actual color. Most businesses or products calling themselves green bear the color, which makes sense from the psychological standpoint (and not so much from the standpoint of differentiation). Some have tried to inject blue – as in, water – into the mix, though keeping the focus square on the environment.
As Joel Makower points out in his recent book, lack of standards in the green economy means anyone can say or do just about whatever they want and call themselves green. So if the green economy is a mess of (mis)information, you can only imagine what the wider sustainability industry looks like.
What does this mean for brand sustainability?
Every brand needs a champion. There is no shortage of sustainability advocates, spreading the triple-bottom line word to whomever will listen. I meet them every day, I’m one of them – we’re all champions of the sustainability brand.
But just as people with no government are left with no authority to protect or guarantee their rights, any brand without an ultimate backer is prone to being overrun by dominant misinterpretation. It’s not to say government needs to be the sustainability brand’s ultimate backer. In fact, it may actually not be possible for such a champion to emerge – sustainability appears to be a grassroots, bottom-up brand. Embracing that reality will prevent a great deal of frustration.
Every brand needs a strategy. Here’s where brand sustainability is lacking most. What are its goals and objectives? Its target audiences? Its value proposition? Marketing tactics? Without a major champion to determine these elements, the brand will flounder. But if sustainability is a bottom-up brand, perhaps its strategy will be developed wiki-style.
Every brand needs a simple, consistent message. Simplicity is the first rule of message stickiness. Cue “sustainability = green”. Audiences may change our messages, adapting them to their thinking and preconceived ideas. Brands are not what companies say they are, it’s what the audiences say they are.
In the “sustainability = green” equation, the message is no longer core, however: it’s reduced to a third of its original meaning and takes focus off the holistic goals of sustainability. Skeptics would opine that humans have a tendency to remember one piece of information about something. Trinity is a single, simple, and comprehensible idea that has been spread and adopted with tremendous success.
It may just take a while. Which is where consistent delivery of sustainability’s trinity message comes in (think Barack Obama’s “Change”: so many things to so many people, but a single, unwavering message carried through the entire campaign, from the left field to the White House).
We all, as one, are champions of brand sustainability. We all are the message, we all must speak with the same voice, and we all must create both.
