Thomas Kolster
Marketing activist, founder and director of The Goodvertising Agency and is an internationally recognised keynote speaker
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Winning in the sustainability discipline is like trying to catch a pigeon when you were a child. When you think you’ve almost got it, the pigeon casually jumps a foot forward and looks back at you, dumbfounded. A decade ago, sustainability was a clear differentiator and the business case was clear-cut. This was back when Unilever launched their Sustainable Living Plan, an organization-wide transformation blueprint including marketing and innovation. The brands within their portfolio with sustainable attributes and a purpose, such as Ben & Jerry’s and Lifebuoy, simply performed better. Today, sustainability is a hygiene factor and the whole company is scrutinized, from governance to when the product or service is in the hands of its customers.
Translate sustainability into a value proposition for your customer
You can hardly watch a commercial break or browse the supermarket aisles without seeing ‘sustainability’, ‘green’ or ‘fair’ splashed across it all. When topics such as diversity and climate have become the tried-and-tested talking points for brands, it’s no wonder people are growing tired of (and increasingly skeptical towards) efforts that they suspect could be cheap marketing tactics.
There’s a genuine lack of education and understanding of these complex sustainability issues and most communication seems like an introduction to climate change for a kindergartener rather than the truly eye-opening and engaging stories they could be. What does sustainability really mean? How does your sustainability attribute add value to your customers? I might not care enough about recycling my laptop to act, but what if a company instead offered the laptop as a subscription service? Then I’ll always get the latest, and the old laptop is the service provider’s headache. Good for me – and good for the planet.
From navel-gazing preacher to life coach
Values or actions are not enough. It’s increasingly about a continuous push to help people live better lives. Think about it: with all these good-intended promises from brands, what brand has in fact succeeded in creating positive change in your life? If brands want to play a meaningful role in our lives, it begins with a stringent focus on positive transformation by seeking to answer the question: who can you help us become?
There are brands that, rather than putting on the hero’s cape, have turned people into the heroes of the narrative by helping us to discover a better version of ourselves.
There are brands that, rather than putting on the hero’s cape, have turned people into the heroes of the narrative by helping us to discover a better version of ourselves. Purpose vanguard brands like Corona and Dove have stayed relevant through two decades by helping us discover the value of our oceans and beaches, or by constantly challenging our beauty ideals. As a leader or organization you have to find your WHY in people’s WHO.
Three key takeaways if you want to stay relevant in the sustainability space:
- Sustainability should be integrated across the whole company, not simply a green storefront.
- Purpose is not a destination. Look to people’s dreams, fears and aspirations.
- Don’t focus on your why and values, but WHO you can help people become.
More bang for your buck with a customer hero narrative
A recent study I’ve launched together with GfK shows that transformational ads – those that focus on consumer achievements and empowerment, rather than the brand’s own heroism – have a stronger emotional impact across a number of key questions.
A recent study I’ve launched together with GfK shows that transformational ads – those that focus on consumer achievements and empowerment, rather than the brand’s own heroism – have a stronger emotional impact across a number of key questions.
We found significant differences on statements such as “makes me feel empowered by the message” and “message sets it apart from others in the same category.” One important contrast can be illustrated by the two ads I just mentioned. Dove scored significantly higher (+10%) on the action part such as “inspires me to be part of the change”, or triggers such as “I want to learn more about the brand or the product” (+5%). When you as a brand are on a mission to transform people’s lives at every step, your resources and activities bring you closer to enabling people in changing their behaviors, driving sales and ultimately playing a truly meaningful role.
Time to evolve
When you, as a leader or a brand, focus on people’s challenges, aspirations, or dreams, you ensure that you stay relevant rather than being stuck with values that at one time seemed progressive (but may eventually make you appear more like a dinosaur trying to learn new ways).
No doubt about it, over the next year we’ll witness a more challenging economic environment – but this is a real moment to showcase your leadership and move from playing a transactional role to one that’s truly transformational.
No doubt about it, over the next year we’ll witness a more challenging economic environment – but this is a real moment to showcase your leadership and move from playing a transactional role to one that’s truly transformational. It’s the last purpose frontier – how can your brand realize the inner betterment of people?
If you don’t succeed in improving people’s behaviors, you won’t succeed with the greater challenge of creating better ways of living in our communities, in society at large or in the challenged ecosystems we’re dependent on. This is a time to put yourself in people’s shoes.
During the last financial crisis, Hyundai observed that people were nervous to buy a car because they feared losing their job. Hyundai wanted to do their part and launched an insurance program, Hyundai Assurance, which would take care of the payments towards the car for up to six months in the event of loss of employment; the program was later successfully reprised during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Since some societies have reached a more than sufficient level of material wealth, it’s time for us to start focusing on inner human wealth: happiness, better connections with the community, less stress, and fulfilled citizens. Materialism is a losing strategy. The happiness of buying new shoes is a short-lived dopamine kick, whereas finding better ways of living in balance with yourself adds lifelong value. It’s time to create the right human and planetary balance. It’s time to create a new leadership that enables people to move towards change.
