Building sustainable brands takes work, but most experts would agree it’s fundamentally important.
I’m hearing from people that we’re at sort of an inflection point when it comes to making sustainability a centerpiece of corporate branding.
On the one hand, there are these established ESG practices and trends in place, but that still may not give sustainability the focus and attention that it deserves.
In a panel at the beginning of this year, various experts attending Davos this January talked about how to enhance sustainability for company practices, with the tagline ‘sustainability first, marketing second.’
The group talked about how this is implemented in sectors like commercial air, travel, and healthcare.
Consumers (and) employees want the transparency,” said Sarah Chapman, Global Chief Sustainability Officer at Manulife. “They really want to understand what's behind some of what's being said at the brand level.”
“How do you take the organization along with you on the sustainability vision and journey?” asked MIT associate professor Abhinav Kumar. “It's no different from: ‘how do you take the organization along with you on your values,’ or … on a business strategy or anything else. It's the same formula, it’s living and walking what you're talking about as a leadership team.”
And then there’s the people side.
“How do you use that sustainability message as a sword instead of a shield, to get better talent?” asked Forbes Magazine editor Randall Lane.
“There are people who want to engage,” Chapman said in response. “We’ve got to figure out a way to meaningfully engage them. You know, we're seeing certainly a decentralization of sustainability. Sustainability is not the responsibility anymore of a sustainability function. It's being embedded in marketing and risk and finance, and so giving people those opportunities to embed elements of environmental social impact through their jobs is the most meaningful way to do that.”