Creating your brand sustainability strategy can be overwhelming. With so many priorities, environmental considerations and opportunities to choose from, putting it all together into one cohesive plan can feel a little bit like trying to figure out a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Let’s keep it nice and simple. Your brand sustainability strategy should be intrinsically linked with your purpose (what are you about?), your business goals (what are you trying to achieve?) and your overall branding and marketing plans. Everything needs to fit together.
In this article, we’ve covered some of the key considerations you should think about when creating your brand sustainability strategy, from telling your story to driving engagement from your customers and creating a sense of community.
Define your goals
The first and most important step in creating your brand sustainability strategy is to understand what your sustainability goals are. For example, if your business operations require a lot of energy usage, how can you make your operations more efficient? If you notice a lot of inventory wastage, how can you streamline your production processes to prevent that?
Once you understand what you’re actually trying to achieve, you’ll have a more coherent list of where you can improve, and maybe even where you’re already doing well! Then it’s about translating those words into actions, setting timeframes, and most importantly, communicating your hard work with all the relevant stakeholders to improve your brand image and provide transparency.
Consider opportunities and threats
A SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) is a pretty standard business tool used across many functions. Marketers use it quite often in planning campaigns, as it can help you clearly lay out areas of influence you have and where the threats might lie.
Getting a good grasp of opportunities and threats can help stimulate ideas for new products or campaigns, identify areas where you should do better, and get a clearer understanding of what’s going on in your market – including what your competitors are working on. All of this inside information will help you create a sustainability strategy better suited to your needs.
Develop a community
Building strong relationships with your stakeholders and potential customers is one of the most valuable things you can do for your business and often, this is about showing, not telling. People that believe in brands and identify with their values are likely to be more loyal and promote what you do, spreading positive word-of-mouth about your brand.
Encouraging your customers to take action that align with your shared values and sustainability goals is a really effective way of building a community around your brand. For example, Lush are committed to being environmentally responsible and championing sustainable initiatives. They bring customers along on the journey by incentivising them to bring their old black plastic pots back in-store to be recycled with free face masks or money off their order. This is a really simple way of showing appreciation, building community spirit and closing the loop in their supply chain.
Measure your success
As with any business activity, you need to make sure that you’re checking in on your progress regularly. This is a useful way of quickly identifying any potential issues and keep your brand sustainability strategy on track. Customers are particularly keen on authenticity from brands, backing up your sustainable claims is an important part of this.
Share your learnings, your failings, and your plans to keep getting better widely – making this information available on your digital channels is an effective way of holding yourself accountable and building trust with your customers. There are also different certifications and programmes you can be a part of, the UN Global Compact scheme is a great way of demonstrating your commitment in a public forum and increasing your brand integrity.
Invest in green branding
A vital part of your sustainability strategy should be taking the time to communicate your good work, through your branding and marketing. Sustainability is not a flash in the pan, it’s a long-term strategic effort and it should feed through every element of your business.
Make sure your sustainability goals and messaging are fully integrated with your brand, even internally. Defining a clear mission statement and being consistent with your branding around your strategy is key if you want to bring your employees and customers on-board.
Interested in finding out more about how we can help you with your green branding and marketing? Let’s chat.