The Complete Revision of Sustainability Marketing

Today’s corporate sustainability marketing is unfocused and wide-ranging, a situation that can be traced to the comprehensive format of reporting schemes. They cover nearly every sustainability topic, regardless of industry, greatly reducing each corporation’s focus on the environmental impact of its core product or service. Meeting the current disclosure burden requires most of a sustainability program’s bandwidth, ensnares multiple teams in the disclosure cycle, and produces homogeneity among companies in the same industry, who all provide shallow broad coverage of sustainability issues.

Consumers correctly perceive that different industries have different environmental impacts, and that companies in the same industry don’t vary much. This situation is an opportunity for risk-takers looking to gain marketing leverage by differentiating themselves from competitors.

The best opportunity in sustainability marketing today is to abandon glossy annual PDFs and voluntary disclosure frameworks, and bring the consumer’s focus to a single point. Only address the primary environmental impact of the core products or services. Get away from the items that are off the main business lines. For example, why would consumer health products companies discuss renewable energy systems when they can only purchase the product, and have limited capacity to innovate on that front. The exclusive focus should be a product’s harmlessness to human health, ecosystems, and the environment.

Oil and natural gas companies should only address the combined emissions of their operations and products, and its investment and rollout of programs to reduce that figure. Why would this industry discuss its employee volunteer hours?

Make a showcase of both success and setbacks. Pull back the curtain for consumers who’ve never been able to experience the real drama and cinema of this dynamic industry. The first marketing department to launch honest documentary sustainability content, wins. The first mover advantage will be massive.

The current system reduces risk, however, business owners are not getting upside. The uniformity of sustainability marketing doesn’t reflect poorly on the pure economic elements of the projects, or the skill of the marketing departments. It’s the natural outcome of the regulatory environment and broad-spectrum disclosures that mostly address non-core sustainability issues. The loss of federal incentives in the US is degrading project ROIs, however, that value can be replaced and exceeded by completely rethinking how sustainability programs are marketed.