If there’s one thing marketers are often skilled at, it’s latching on to updated consumer needs and trying to appeal to them. After all, marketers are hardly artificial people who spend all day following trends, they’re consumers with tastes and interests as we all are, to various degrees.
As such, it’s easy to see when companies take up new narratives and try to appeal to a growing and developing customer base. Right now, climate interest is at an all-time high and for obvious reasons.
For this reason, it’s not hard to see why many companies are trying to push themselves as the best, most sustainable, most eco-conscious force in the market. However, it’s also true that many consumers have become aware of how companies push this line, and the more proactive customers will be more than happy to vet those claims and cut through the marketing noise going forward.
As such, cutting through the marketing noise around sustainability and focusing on substance first and foremost is key. In this post, we’ll take the perspective of both the consumers and business owners, offering advice for both parties on how they can more easily sustain better eco-solutions, be that through the companies they buy from or the operational systems they nurture.
Without further ado, let’s get started:
Table of Contents
The Consumer View
Understanding The Core Principles Of Sustainability
It’s true to say that sustainability has been used as an umbrella term, and it’s not necessarily perfectly aligned with “environmental good” as an end-all focus. Sustainability simply means a product can be produced using material that can be sustainably kept or reproduced over time. So for example, eating a certain type of fish from sustainable farms that can replace and rear the fish they sell, and you won’t be contributing to the depopulation of that given fish by purchasing it there.
In general, this is valuable for the environment. But it’s important not to mistake sustainability for all manner of environmental action. For that reason, it’s important to be very clear about what you’re looking for in the sustainability you look for in the businesses you patronize. That might include caring about how they plant trees, offset their carbon footprint, or replace the natural resources they use as discussed above. This way, you can be direct in the improvements you hope a company makes, instead of assuming each one is going to be perfectly environmentally friendly at all times, no questions asked.
Analyzing Greenwashing & Misleading Claims
Now, it’s the easiest thing in the world for a company to suggest they’re taking a green-focused view and that they care about their environmental impact. It’s a great start, even. But the truth is that without regular reports and statistics about what processes they’re changing, the effects they’ve noticed, and the differences they hope to achieve, all of this is just words, and it’s important to be very realistic about that.
In some cases, greenwashing can involve simply using environmental speak as a marketing tactic and then never going into the details. In other ways, real issues with a product or service might be covered by the idea that environmental action is enough to subsume that problem and make it no longer appeal to consumers. If your skin cream causes you a nasty rash, it doesn’t particularly matter how organic and vegan-friendly it is. For this reason, it’s important to have an open mind mediated by a skeptical eye when you see such claims – unless given cause to think differently.
Researching Certifications & Labels
As a consumer, it’s important to be aware of the kind of sustainability certifications to look out for. These certifications act as badges of honor, signifying that your packaging materials and practices meet certain environmental standards. Consumers, now more than ever, are looking for these markers to make informed and ethical purchasing decisions no matter the product they’re choosing. They speak to a standard that should communicate more to you than any marketing copy.
One of the most recognizable certifications is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which absolutely verifies that your packaging materials come from responsibly managed forests. Even services like pharmaceutical packaging suppliers are attempting to curate these options for better longevity. Likewise, the Cradle to Cradle certification assesses products and packaging for their environmental and social impact, encouraging a holistic approach to design as well. It means that from top to bottom, environmental processes have been met. The USDA Organic label indicates just that, that the sustainability of said product has been curated within organic guidelines.
While this may not necessarily speak to full-scale sustainability, it certainly speaks to a growing and verified environmentally-conscious business looking to improve itself.
The Business View
Examining the Company’s Overall Environmental Track Record
Most businesses would accept that the future of their firm includes sustaining some kind of environmental drive. Deciding how and where that might be executed though, is another question entirely. After all, it’s not entirely clear how some businesses can make the adjustment to sustainable metrics when they might not offer products, or they may work in a unique environment. If you’re a multinational oil firm, odds are any sustainable drives you try to put in place, outside of heavy investment in renewable energy, is going to fall on deaf ears.
For this reason, it’s important to be careful about the track record of current sustainable and environmental efforts and to see where adjustments could be made. This could be as simple as properly vetting your suppliers to make sure everything is above board, or considering how to reduce wastage in every operational process you have. Environmental measures can also be a sideline benefit, for example, if you run a cycle-to-work program or a work-from-home schedule for some staff, then you’re reducing the amount of emissions you’re expecting each day.
Prioritizing Transparency Via Brand Communications
Some companies believe that in order to benefit from messaging around sustainability, they have to center it at the core of everything they do. That’s not necessarily the case, in fact, a three-month report that details the measures you’ve taken to improve your environmental standing, how those decisions have played out, and what you’ve learned can be much more informative than any other option that feels necessary to you as of the moment.
To put it plainly – quality over quantity is essential when it comes to messaging about sustainable efforts. This could sound somewhat dismissive to marketers who are often incentivized to keep producing content, update social media channels, develop new campaigns, and be as communicative as possible, but in matters like this, it’s important to be highly precise and intentional as opposed to churning out content for the feed.
Looking To Other Businesses For Inspiration
Put simply, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time you hope to improve your environmental approach. After all, your company is not necessarily in the business of solely improving your environmental management, you have other goals and environmental care is how you prioritize processes, but now why they’re developed in the first place.
Looking to other businesses for inspiration, then, is a wise step, as you might when planning any other business process. How are your competitors organizing their environmental pursuits? If you’re running a restaurant, for example, could it be that your local competitors have started to take items about to be thrown out in wastage, and donate them to homeless shelters in the local area? This reduces food waste and makes sure products you weren’t going to sell anyway are able to feed people in need.
This is just one example. Depending on the sort of business you run and the priorities you have, your approach could be vastly different. At the very least, you may realize that few businesses in your commercial peer group have advanced any sustainability measures, meaning you could be the first one to identify a gap in the market and open yourself up to more conscious consumers.
Working With Customers & Clients For A Healthier Outcome
So far we’ve segmented the two perspectives of consumers and businesses into two categories. But that doesn’t have to be how you run your firm. In fact, working with your customers or clients, especially those who are most loyal, can help you understand what your audience is looking for and the sustainable drives they hope you pursue.
You could hold focus groups, for example, to see if your organic sourcing is an expense that they’d be happy to pay for. In some cases, that answer may be yes. In some cases, it might not be. Then you have to weigh up if eating the cost for such a virtue could pay further dividends in the long run.
Perhaps your customers love your products, but they just wish for less plastic waste, which you can then develop a healthier relationship with your packaging supplier to curate. This is a developmental process making systemic, architectural changes in the future, and so taking it slowly and with a great deal of healthy consultation is always going to be better than throwing initiatives at the wall to see what sticks.
With this advice, you’re sure to cut through the marketing noise around sustainability, and become more focused in what you’re looking for – no matter if you’re a business lead or regular consumer.
