Sustainability: More than the business buzzword du jour
In a recent survey of 270 marketers, PR professionals, advertisers and others conducted by the American Marketing Association and Fleishman-Hillard, more than half of the respondents said they believe that sustainability involves finding a balance between human, natural and financial resources for long-term benefit. That's a pretty broad definition with regard to how sustainability might fit into your everyday business practices, but it's a good start.
The good news is that some companies are committed to taking the lead on sustainability; others are working hard to incorporate sustainable practices however and wherever they can.
At a breakfast meeting this morning hosted by Fleishman-Hillard in Chicago, FH execs joined Don Bartell, senior director of environmental initiatives at Motorola; Francesca DeBiase, vice president of worldwide supply chain management at McDonald’s; and Jamie Firth, senior vice president of corporate communications at Exelon in a panel discussion of each organizations' goals, hurdles and achievements regarding sustainability.
The discussion unearthed several interesting insights:
McDonald's DeBiase said her company is working hard to clean up its act internally and working with its suppliers to help them do the same. More importantly, though, McDonald's wants to work its way up the supply chain to the growers and ranchers, helping them to reduce their very significant carbon footprints. (Think gassy cattle.)
Meanwhile, Exelon's Firth said "the recession has been an opportunity" for his company to promote energy efficiency. Consumers already are mindful of their energy bills these days, so Exelon has accelerated its advertising and customer outreach to educate consumers about energy usage and conservation.
And Motorola's Bartell said his company is producing more energy-efficient phones made from recycled content; promoting mobile phone recycling by including recycling envelopes with new phone purchases; and even forgoing including paper manuals with some new phones-- "you guys never read the manual anyway," he said to laughs from the audience-- and instead prompting phone buyers to go online for information.
The most interesting insights related to how sustainable efforts can be measured and whether they should be marketed.
Firth said measurement of the impact of sustainable practices remains elusive. And companies should be humble about their sustainability efforts and careful about asserting any direct impacts from those efforts.
Motorola's Bartell, however, said measurement still is necessary to create a baseline. "You don't know if you're getting better if you don't measure. You gotta start," he said. At Motorola, sustainability efforts are less about marketing and more about honest effort, he said. "There hasn't been a whole lot of chest-thumping. We are not screaming from the mountaintops. ... There's not a lot of bravado involved."
Maybe the question is whether you should market your sustainability efforts, or whether you should let those efforts market you. There's much to be said for letting your actions speak for themselves.
Where do you stand on sustainability? Do you market your efforts? Do you consider them a normal order of business?
On a similar note, Marketing News staff writer Piet Levy is working on a story about how you can become credible enough to make green marketing your specialty and whether that's a sustainable pursuit. If you have any thoughts on that topic, please feel free to contact him at plevy@ama.org.
