On Brand, Transformation and Sustainability

13 May 2011 – Mark Lee

I’m heading to Sustainable Brands ’11 (SB11) in Monterey, CA, in few weeks, where I will deliver the opening keynote the morning of June 08, then MC the rest of that morning. As I prepare to make the journey with colleagues Patrin Watanatada and Chris Guenther, I have been reviewing some related thinking SustainAbility has done these last few years, in particular the principles for sustainable branding I tested in my keynote at SB09, which Patrin and I revised and captured in this article last year.

Firm Footing

The assumptions which formed the foundation for our thinking still seem sound – that brand is the embodiment of an organization, that it has power to do good from a sustainability perspective, that sustainability is good for brands and vice versa, and that when sustainability is made part of a brand promise, it’s less likely to be compromised – but what of the principles themselves? We suggested that the five essentials for sustainable brands are that they be: relevant, responsive, reliable, resilient and transformative. If these hold today, where especially might we look for transformation?

If you are interested in how we defined the five principles, please visit the article referenced and hyperlinked above. We’d be eager to hear whether you think the definitions we crafted stand the test of time and, more to the point, whether they matter. And we have particular interest in the question of where and what kind of transformation we might find brands helping engender in terms of pushing creation of a sustainable society and economy.

Beyond Deep Green

Inside SustainAbility, our conversation is trending away from the deep green consumer – as much as we admire those people and the brands that serve them, it feels the last thing needed now is more brands committing to pursue that same (still small) segment. Instead, we wonder if the greatest near term leaps won’t be made when both new and mainstream organizations figure out effective means to move the mass consumer to sustainable products and services almost without them noticing. In this category might be a product like Valvoline’s NextGen motor oil, which contains 50% recycled oil.

It does not escape me that this is fossil fuel, and that it goes into the gas-burning internal combustion engines (including those in hybrids) that concern us but which remain the cornerstone of the automotive fleet, but 50% materials re-use is a huge shift in any product’s composition. Is it possible that key aspects of transformation might look this, well, bland? But that a multiplicity of such efforts – the kind of rapid prototyping that I referred to in my autumn 2010 blog on sustainable innovation, Bit by Bit – is the way forward?

Join the Debate

We’ll be exploring this thinking over the next few weeks, and it will influence what I have to say June 08 in Monterey. If you have views on our five principles, and/or a reaction to my pondering around ‘incremental transformation’, please be in touch! And whether you comment or not, do follow our views on @SustainBrands from the conference in June via @markpeterlee, @patrin and @reallychrisg.