Making a pitch to your company’s executives about the importance of sustainability? AHA!’s very own Betsy Henning has a few words of advice in her recent column, “Getting sustainability a seat in the C-suite,” on the Sustainable Industries website. Take a sec to check it out.
Photo credit: jeroen_bennik on Flickr
I was just blown away by how honest and principled Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz seems to be, when reading the recent interview with him in Harvard Business Review.
For example, here’s his response to a question about decisions he’s made that have been unpopular with Wall Street:
Within the past year I got a call from one of our institutional shareholders. He said, “You’ve never had more cover to cut [employee] heath care than you do now. No one will criticize you.” And I just said, “I could cut $300 million out of a lot of things, but do you want to kill the company, and kill the trust in what this company stands for? There is no way I will do it, and if that is what you want us to do, you should sell your stock.” What I stand for is not just to make money; it’s to preserve the integrity of what we have built for 39 years …
Especially in light of other recent CEO news, Schultz’s words were a welcome change of pace, and I must say, a brilliant piece of PR. Schultz seemed to be reaching out to all of his audiences—employees, customers, shareholders—and hitting just the right note. If I were a Starbucks employee, reading those words would make me proud to work at Starbucks. It’s motivating to know the company’s top guy cares as much about people as profits. As a socially conscious customer, I can feel great about buying my morning coffee, because my $2.50 happens to be funding the well-being of human beings, not corporate growth at all costs. For me, that’s a better purchase motivator than any sleek new packaging or combination of syrups.
And, shareholders? I’m sure he scared a few of them off. But maybe Schultz’s strategy is to not just have a more sustainable company—and by sustainability here, I mean long lived as well as green. Maybe he’s shaping a more sustainable investment environment, with shareholders who care as much about the complete health of the company as they do their returns.
It’s not often we talk about social issues here at Shiny Green Button. Usually, it’s all green, green, green.
But the needs of people are a big piece of the sustainability puzzle. Even, ehem…their most basic needs.
On a run through the streets of downtown Portland last night, I couldn’t help but notice a big metal box—say, walk-in closet-sized—on the sidewalk. The box was a bathroom; one of the Portland Loos the City of Portland put in place a few years ago to help alleviate one very real problem associated with a large homeless population—the problem of people relieving themselves on the streets.
Portland City Commissioner, Randy Leonard, calls access to toilets a basic human right. The tagline that was painted on the side of the Portland Loo, “A unique solution to a universal problem,” expressed that same sentiment in an upbeat and positive way. The tagline seemed perfect. It instantly helped me understand the use for the box. But it did more than that: It gave me a reason to support its existence, whether I care about the struggles of the homeless or not. It reminded me of the immense power of language—that finding just the right phrase can ease social tensions and connect us all.
Photo credit: ansik on Flickr
The equivalency is a common device used in sustainability communications. You’ve seen it. It usually goes something like: “The emissions we reduce by [insert environmentally responsible action here] are equal to taking 500,000 cars off the road for a year. Or like this: By [insert recycling activity here] we save the equivalent of 20,000 trees.
Many of the equivalencies you see in sustainability communications come from calculations provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s handy greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator, which helps express carbon emissions in terms of passenger vehicles on the road, barrels of oil consumed, railcars of coal or even propane cylinders used for home barbecues.
The EPA’s website says the calculator can help you translate “abstract measurements into concrete terms you can understand.” But does it? Without context, I have no way of understanding what removing 500,000 cars from the road really means. The comparison gives me a concrete image, but the idea is still abstract. Expressing it as a percentage of all the cars on the road might be more meaningful, but we all know that number wouldn’t sound as impressive as 500,000.
So, what’s a writer to do? I want to suggest we find more relatable ways to express these ideas, but maintaining accuracy can be tricky. So, here’s a thought: We could use equivalencies to make a larger point.
For example, as we gathered data for our own sustainability report, we learned that by setting two-sided printing as our default, we saved the equivalent of two trees in one quarter alone. That fact doesn’t mean a lot on its own. But, it helped support a larger idea we wanted to communicate. If every small business our size in the U.S. did the same thing, together we could saved 385,264 trees in a year. The imagery is still abstract, but it gives us a compelling way to encourage other businesses like ours to make small changes that add up to a bigger difference.
What about you? How do you use equivalencies in your sustainability communications?
Photo credit: Yogma on Flickr
In his discussion of the verbal challenges in communicating sustainability and describing people who practice it (are they sustainers? sustainabilitists?) Joel Makower addresses something we’ve discussed before here on Shiny Green Button: You can only use the word sustainability so many times before it starts to feel hollow.
Anyone who writes about corporate sustainability can feel the pain here. There just aren’t a lot of solid synonyms for the word. Sure, you can sprinkle in a few references to corporate responsibility, but that gets tired pretty quickly too, especially when you have to broaden it to corporate social responsibility. If only there were another single word that communicates the broader-than-the-environment spirit of sustainability.
Makower suggests we take another look at green. We’ve all heard warnings to steer clear of the term, for fear it will be met with green fatigue or, even worse, carry the stink of greenwashing.
But, isn’t that the term everyone is using anyway? Makower argues that green is commonplace in the business world and that it’s not much of a stretch to broaden its meaning to include more than environmentalism. That’s already happening in the political arena—the most obvious example being the U.S. Green Party, whose platform includes democracy, social justice and economic sustainability along with ecological sustainability.
So, what say you? Can we embrace green and broaden its scope? Or, are there still valid reasons to resist a meme that seems so firmly established?
About six minutes into his TED talk, Carl Safina takes confusing complexities about the use of dispersants to clean up the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico (Is it toxic? Does it work?)—and makes the whole thing crystal clear.
How? By comparing it to something we can all relate to: a sink full of greasy dishes. We all know that oil and water don’t mix, he says. Until you add a dispersant—a common form of which just happens to be soap. Add the soap, and what happens? The oil breaks up into little drops and mixes with the water, turning it into a cloudy soup.
He uses the simple comparison to wage a pretty serious accusation: that BP is using dispersant to cover up—not clean up—the oil spill. After all, there’s no drain in the bottom of the ocean ready to whisk that mix of oily water away.
It’s so hard for me to know what to believe. BP’s site dedicates an entire page to arguing the use of dispersants is effective in controlling oil spills, and it offers even more detailed FAQ. But—especially after seeing Safina’s example—I can’t help but notice that just a click away, BP also claims skimming is highly effective—a process by which oil floating on the surface of the water is collected. You can’t skim if oil is dispersed, right? So which is it, BP? (Plus, check out the BP’s odd use of a snake analogy to describe how dispersant works. How many times do you have to read the description to understand it?)
In the battle for hearts and minds, it seems simpler is better. Safina’s example is not only relatable, it’s memorable, and more important—it’s something I can see with my own eyes.
That’s how Gil Friend kicked off the first full day of the Sustainable Brands conference yesterday.
It was a powerful and surprising statement. It showed how far sustainability has come from the days when environmentalists were labeled “tree huggers.” Today, it’s become another part of the business landscape. Companies aren’t demonstrating social and environmental responsibility because it’s nice. They’re doing it because it gives them a competitive advantage.
Friend’s statement also emphasized the urgency and complexity of our challenge. You just can’t afford to be nice when climate change threatens to turn our home into a blistering, sooty rock. You can’t afford to be nice when you are reinventing the industrial engine of the economy.
Still, change is hard. Bruce McGregor from IDEO told us yesterday that only 10 percent of people are successful in making a change when faced with a life-or-death situation. There are an awful lot of smokers out there who can’t kick the habit after a diagnosis of cancer, and plenty of people fail to exercise and eat better even after developing type I diabetes. Just telling someone to change because it’s good for them doesn’t mean they will do it.
Now, here we all are—facing a life-or-death situation—and still drinking water out of plastic bottles, flushing bleach down the drain, driving our cars.
As marketers and communicators, the lesson is to stop talking to consumers about how they can feel good about their more eco-friendly purchase or their microloan. Only a handful of consumers buy because they want to do good for the planet, and recent research by Fruitful Strategy shows that 24 percent of people are “rejecters” of green products, purposefully avoiding products with green messages on the label. Most people are not buying or behaving green out of altruism, but because it also makes them feel more secure, comfortable or attractive—or it saves them money.
So it’s time for sustainability to stop being so nice. We have to be sustainable and beautiful. Sustainable and healthy. Sustainable and simple. Sustainable and affordable. Our future depends on it.
In those first few days of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, many in the communications industry criticized BP for its lack of a cohesive crisis communications plan. First they said it wasn’t their fault. Then, they accepted responsibility. And how much oil is gushing out? The numbers have been fuzzy.
But lately, critics have eased up, thanks in part to what many are calling BP’s effective use of online tools and social media. The company is getting the word out about cleanup efforts via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and a dedicated website, www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com. It’s also front and center on the main BP website.
Of course, no matter how effective the company is with these venues, the pitfalls of social media still apply. Social media, by its nature, puts a brand in the people’s hands, and that includes disgruntled consumers and activists.
When I did a Google search for “BP Facebook,” the first item was a link to a “Boycott BP” Facebook page. A fake Twitter account mocking the company, @BPGlobalPR, launched May 19 and already has twice as many followers as BP’s official account. Despite some obviously snarky tweets, some readers have confused the fake account for BP’s official voice.
The actual crisis BP is communicating about is obviously much larger and graver than the recent palm-oil problem Nestle faced, or yesterday’s Intel Facebook snafu, both of which have been held up as examples of what not to do with social media. Rather than getting defensive or trying to stop the vitriol, BP seems to be moving forward with its own message while letting the critics move forward with theirs.
This seems like the right approach for now, but unfortunately, the environmental crisis and the communications crisis that goes with it are both far from over.
Photo credit: Daniel*1977 on Flickr
Over at GreenBiz.com, Tim Mohin, director of corporate responsibility at AMD, offers insights from this month’s Ceres conference in Boston and poses an interesting question:
“If so many companies are producing data on environmental, social and governance issues, who is reading all these reports? And, what are the data being used for?”
Mohin describes a scene at the Ceres awards ceremony, when a representative of Seventh Generation accepted the award for best sustainability report in the small and medium business category and asked the audience how many people had actually read the winning report.
The response? Chirping crickets and a few hands.
But, when he asked how many people had read their own company’s report, almost all hands were in the air.
Mohin goes on to say that CSR reporting can offer more than a window into a company’s programs; it can be useful as a mirror, to engage employees and inform improvements in a company’s CSR strategy moving forward. An excellent point, but I can’t get past that first question: why should anyone read a company’s CSR report?
Mohin identifies a gap that we communicators need to fill. The data companies collect for CSR reporting is a goldmine for stories with relevance beyond employees and investors and industry analysts.
For example, we can take the data out of the report and into the real world, putting one company’s accomplishments in the larger context of its industry and global efforts. We can connect the dots between corporate sustainability efforts and the products consumers see on the shelf. We can add texture to data about employee volunteerism by highlighting who benefits from it and how others can pitch in.
When we use corporate responsibility as a frame for a company’s larger brand story, we can encourage external audiences—consumers, suppliers, peers and even competitors— to not only read about its sustainability efforts, but support them and also consider their own.
Here’s an example from our own portfolio. We helped HP develop its comprehensive global citizenship report, but we also used the data to create a business-magazine style companion piece for a consumer audience. Would you read this?
Photo credit: Nick Hobgood on Flickr
Those three words are music to a marketer’s ears. If a client came to me with a project and said they wanted something “swift, radical and creative,” I’d clear my calendar to meet with them that day. I’d drop whatever was on my desk and turn my focus. I’d expect the assignment to be hard, meaningful, high-stakes and worth the effort.
What’s more, every person I know in my circle of creative services agency types would do the same.
Beyond that, most of the smart, creative people I know in whatever field—from engineering to law, from medicine to education—would relish that kind of assignment. It’s the stuff our work stories of triumph and celebration come from.
Well, friends, our assignment may have just been issued. Read this piece from CNN about the U.N.’s third Global Biodiversity Outlook report. Not only does it call for dramatic action, it lays out the cost in oh-so-human terms: $121 trillion of lost economic opportunity if we don’t do something now.
So, how about it? What “swift, radical and creative” idea can we come up with? I’d love nothing more than to cancel this afternoon’s dentist appointment.
