Quick Wins for Effective Sustainability Communications
Achieving your sustainability goals requires engaging all your stakeholder groups, so effective communications are key. Here, Kirstie Macdonald, Head of Insight & Sustainability at Material, offers some advice from the front line as to some of the practical steps you can take to ensure you’re credible, compelling and compliant with what you mean to say…
TRANSLATION, TRANSLATION, TRANSLATION
Embedding true social and environmental sustainability transformation draws on the skills and knowledge from all teams across a business and brand, including teams who do not regularly communicate with each other, and who tend to communicate in very different ways from each other. This can be a barrier to success.
Bridging the gap in language between those at the sharp edge of operations or production with those on the front lines of brand and marketing communications is imperative. Understanding that the reasons one team wants to talk about a particular development or plan may differ from the reasons another team want to talk about it is important and often results in the same message needing to be crafted in different ways to make it accessible for different audiences. Getting these teams together around the table to discuss their respective understanding and application of language is a fundamental first step.
Eat the Frog
Before you get to the nicer stuff like curating your environmental sustainability credentials or developing product messaging and campaigns, be sure that you have a solid position on any key areas of materiality across your operations. Whether it is specific materials in your supply chain or a reliance on high-impact industries within your wider value chain, you need to ensure you have a robust external and internal/reactive position on these if challenged. Before you do anything else, you need to develop a credible and clear narrative that everyone can understand and support within the business.
Keeping It Real, In Real Time.
The term “progress over perfection” may be overused these days, but it does still stand. As communicators, it is incredibly liberating to be so transparent, something that is essential in the arena of social and environmental sustainability communications. These comms are subject to different ‘rules of engagement’, requiring extremely high thresholds of substantive rigour to be applied when crafting messaging. There’s a necessary balance to be found in communications between promoting as much progress as possible publicly while also preparing internal and reactive positions for potential unknowns or pivots because – let’s face it – the sands of sustainability are constantly shifting under our feet. The basic table stakes are to always commit to having current (and regularly updated) status and progress comms available via your owned channels (primarily website) as a standard hygiene factor and a starting point from which you can build out more substantive and compelling storytelling.
Mind the Gap
There is a demonstrable gap between the values consumers display relating to sustainability and their actual purchase behaviour – a phenomenon that has been labelled variously as the Value Action Gap or Intention Action Gap. In plain terms, this means that whilst 50-70% of customers may poll strongly in favour of sustainable products, this only translates to 5-15% of actual purchase behaviour.
Broadly, there are 6 hurdles consumers have to overcome in order to close this gap: convenience, knowledge, price, responsibility, availability and impact. All have a part to play, and I won’t dive into them here, but in our humble opinion, none is more important than responsibility. 63% of consumers believe sustainability is not their responsibility, it’s the responsibility of business. However, the upside is that 83% would consider the brand or business that had a better record of sustainability. So, a clear commercial opportunity exists for those businesses that can effectively communicate their sustainability solutions and benefits.
Avoid Campaigning Credentials (Please!)
Please, brands, stop campaigning stuff you’ve achieved within your own business, no one cares and your consumers have moved way beyond this form of brand-owned-cheerleading. This is not doing anything to close the value action gap or to provide tangible, lower-impact product and service offerings or solutions. It’s like standing up and applauding yourself for attending a theatre performance. Save your hard-fought marketing spend to invest when you really do have something innovative or new and useful to shout about that delivers a tangibly evident sustainability benefit for consumers. For example, your brand may launch a new circular service for consumers (think repair, resell, upcycle, refill, reclaim) instead of campaigning incomplete ‘advances’ such as partially recycled or recyclable packaging.
Get Real
Be very careful about keeping your language real, for example, don’t talk about ‘saving the planet’, about being the ‘greenest’ or the ‘most sustainable’. These “absolute statements” are a red rag to the ASA (who now use AI to search for nonsense claims just like this) and for your competitors (who can raise complaints against you). These absolute statements require an unattainable threshold of substantiation to ever be able to stand up. They are also very lazy, out of touch and lack credibility.
Instead, get real with your comms. Talk about achievements in context, using facts and substantiation. There are new rules of engagement, and the Green Claims Code is industry agnostic, regularly updated and complaints (either received externally or raised directly by the ASA) are proactively investigated with swift and public penalties imposed that range from advertising bans to fines of up to 10% of global turnover. It’s not easy to develop credible, compelling and COMPLIANT sustainability communications, and it often requires a very close consideration of the right channels to fit the message. ATL might be a quick fix for awareness, but its limited message capacity might not be the right fit for more complex, new or innovative services, benefits or features. It also requires hard work and creativity to be able to reject ‘catchier’ claims that will fall foul of the code while simultaneously suggesting alternative solutions that fit the brief.
Stay in Your Lanes
While it is very important for every brand to have their own credentials updated in a long form and accessible format as a hygiene factor, it’s common to see brands and businesses conflate messaging around their own sustainability achievements and their sustainability product or service offerings. This just serves to confuse consumers (well, everyone really) further. Be sure to keep these comms separate, both physically and tonally. Business and Product each have differing audiences, specific comms channels associated with these audiences and require a variation in language to make your messaging as accessible as possible. Let’s keep these credentials distinct and clear.
Written by Kirstie Macdonald, Head of Insight & Sustainability, Material
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