Beyond greenwash to greatness: big brands are turning into society’s problem-solvers

Words: Gemma Adams ( / Source: Forum For The Future

The Economist Intelligence Unit says social marketing is a top five trend for 2014 and new research says that purpose-driven messages live longest in consumers’ minds. If your brand wants to stand-up and stand-out with purpose it’s time to re-set your ‘guff’ detector. An era of brand trouble-shooters is here and they’re putting greenwash to shame.

Big global brands like Nike and Unilever are creating rather than waiting for a better world, and are stepping outside their traditional territories to do it. They are embracing the future with imaginative, relevant and (only time will tell) powerful results, and their consumers and competitors are responding. Can established brands be both successful and revolutionary? They are showing us how it can be done, and are redefining greenwash as they go.

The social marketing trend is upon us. Les Binet and Peter Field’s Marketing in the era of Accountability recommends brands move away from one-message-marketing and instead try to connect with consumers on a more emotional level. They say “emotionally based campaigns… outperform rational campaigns on every single business measure,” which opens the door for communicating the environmental and social messages that might previously have been considered ‘too much’: cue Innocent’s Chain of Good TV advert, Kenco’s Collect-to-Give scheme and Rainforest Alliance’s The Man Behind your Chocolate

Now add into that picture that Apple and Chipotle are talking to investors about long-term risks they haven’t recognised before; creating ‘safe ground’ for others to follow. Chipotle named climate change as a material risk in its SEC filing, explaining: “Increasing weather volatility or other long-term changes in global weather patterns, including any changes associated with global climate change, could have a significant impact on the price or availability of some of our ingredients.” Apple chief executive Tim Cook told investors who don’t agree with the company’s commitments to renewable energy among other sustainability issues they should divest.

Unilever and Nike put this together and, as a result, are making strong, direct links between their long-term business strategy and their brand strategies. For the first time, they are using consumer-facing communications to drive their future as well as their immediate success. They are serious about changing their business models to adjust to long-term trends, and their brand-led initiatives reflect it.

Behind the flourishing innovation in sports apparel – Puma’s InCycle cradle-to-cradle footwear andClever Little Bag, Nike’s Flyknit, Puma’s Bring me Back and Nike’s Reuse a Shoe – I’m fascinated by Nike’s trouble-shooting tactics to scale-up the market for sustainable materials. Why take this on? Nike has a business strategy that wants to ward off the rising cost of commodities like cotton and rubber by adopting closed-loop manufacturing (creating new Nike products from materials reclaimed from old Nike products). For a first-mover, the innovation costs are high so Nike is using brand-led initiatives like the Making App and Nike Makers to encourage designers to choose sustainable materials to increase demand for by them, and Launch 2020 to accelerate new material technologies to market. Nike is bringing a circular economy closer and is building brand difference along the way.

Sustainable living is another trouble-shooting hotspot for brands. Unilever’s biggest environmental impacts are generated when their products are used, and its sees that consumers will also increasingly be hit by the higher prices of goods and utilities. Arguably uncool, Unilever, B&Q and Coca Cola are using personality, open innovation and a sense of community to encourage us to adopt energy, water and waste-saving habits. Project Sunlight is a portal that shows how different Unilever product brands want to help us live more sustainable life-styles. Just as Coca Cola is researching how to nudge people into recycling through Recycle for the Future, Unilever’sSustainAbility Challenge has shed light on how it can help households to compost more and use less hot water. Unilever is helping us to change our life-styles for the better, and believes consumers will reward them with long-term loyalty.

In 2014, we’ll see teams of brand problem-solvers working together to create a new conversation about energy to help boost home energy efficiency, and to brew a tasty future for tea.

These first-mover brands are lifting the bar for greenwashing or ethics-washing which are as much about framing as they are about specific claims: a point brilliantly made by Dissolve’s Generic Brand Video. According to Greenpeace, as long as half-measures are sold as full solutions, corporate actions, no matter how sincere, are nothing more than sophisticated greenwashing. While there’s still a way to go to meet this, in 2014 brands making environmental and social claims without an ambitious vision to back them up are on shaky ground. They risk being seen as weak, or worse, as pacifying consumers by offering platitudes instead of innovation.