Sustainly
The Gen Z Breakthrough Brands and Why They Love 'Em
4 years ago - What Gen Z want from brands is the new Holy Grail for marketers — you only have to look at the myriad surveys and reports published recently that seek to analyze their preferences and intentions. This obsession with Gen Z is understandable — after all, this new generation of consumers already are two billion strong and have a combined $44 billion in purchasing power.
Why Should Anyone Trust Your Brand?
4 years ago - Which brands do you really care about? Is there one you simply couldn’t do without? It’s a question that we rarely ask — so prevalent and dominant are companies and brands in our everyday lives. But while we’re dependent on the products and services that enable our modern existence, do we really care who makes them? The history of consumer culture is littered with once-dominant consumer brands that were replaced by newer, more relevant offerings. Today, in the Internet age, the shelf life of major brands is shorter than ever before. Consider powerful brands such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram: None of these existed 15 years ago. Would you like to bet they will be around 10 years from now?
Why You Should Align Your Brand’s Sustainability Efforts with the SDGs
5 years ago - The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (aka Global Goals) are viewed by most in the sustainability community as the biggest opportunity yet for the world to shape a new and better way of doing business while shaping a new and better world.
Communication Chasm: Brand Wins, Missed Opportunities in Engaging Consumers on Purpose
6 years ago - If ever there was a time for the world’s leading brands to show leadership in sustainability, that time is now. Globally, the political resolve to combat climate change is being challenged by the arrival of a new US president who considers global warming a “hoax.” Resource scarcity and shrinking biodiversity are a growing concern for more and more areas of the planet. Immigration fears are being stoked by nationalist politicians throughout the world; and attaining racial and gender diversity continues to be an unattained goal in many parts of global society.
Forget Video Snacking: Longer Brand Stories Are Hitting Home
6 years ago - How can a brand or a company cut through the noise of our modern media landscape and truly connect with a short-attention span public about the social and environmental issues it really cares about? Documentary film might not seem the obvious solution, given that the medium demands an audience’s full attention for a good chunk of time. Increasingly though, marketers are turning to documentary storytelling to cut through all that social media noise and tap into a growing consumer demand for content that isn’t simply a throwaway video snack.
Food and Drink, Inc: How Big Food Is Aiming to Connect with Conscious Consumers
6 years ago - Food dominates our lives; it influences our health and has becomes a defining theme of 21st-century popular culture. No wonder then that the sustainability issues that influence the things we eat and drink have taken on such importance with the public worldwide.
How the World's Best Companies Demonstrate Their Sense of Purpose
7 years ago - How do you communicate your company's sense of purpose — what you stand for in simple terms — in a way that is authentic, transparent and honest? Increasingly, the answer for many of the world's biggest companies is to highlight their sustainability work. Why sustainability? Well, sustainability, after all, is rooted in doing business in a transparent and authentic way. And, in today’s always-on, smarter-than-before society, pledging to be a better company just won’t cut it. You have to demonstrate how your company’s purpose is creating a tangibly better experience.
Report: How 15 Major Consumer Brands Are (or Aren't) Effectively Leveraging Sustainability Communication
7 years ago - It’s commonly assumed that mainstream Main Street isn’t interested in sustainability. Shoppers will buy on price, performance and reliability. They’re swayed by celebrity endorsements and some of them want to be associated with stuff that’s cool. But being sustainable? Not a chance.
Why Your Company Needs a Magazine Mentality
7 years ago - There was a time when the only way a company could hope to talk directly with real people was through the medium of advertising or public relations. Companies felt distanced from consumers and they worried that people wouldn't take them seriously unless they could broadcast a big campaign or get their PR agency to persuade a journalist to write about them.
3D Printing: How the Personalized Power of Production Could Lead Us to a More Sustainable World
7 years ago - We live in an era of such dramatic, technology-enabled change that it’s hard, sometimes, to get a real handle on just how important the latest new platform or digital business trend will be.When it comes to 3D printing there is no longer any doubt. After all this is a technology that has been employed, on a specialist scale, within industry for decades. But, much like the way the modern personal computer grew out of, and disrupted, the mainframe computing industry, the advent of personal and portable 3D printers is set to radically change the world of manufacturing, fashion and even medicine.
Would You Want to Read Your Company’s Sustainability Report?
7 years ago - "It's all in our Sustainability Report."That's a phrase guaranteed to strike fear in the hearts of even the hardiest sustainability wonks.
How to Avoid the Social Media *Fails* That Hit at the Heart of Sustainability
7 years ago - Reputation, in a world where social media is the mainstream, can no longer be seen as just a “hygiene” issue where corporate comms and PR agencies handle a few annoying but easily identifiable stakeholders. Instead, when the whole online world can see and comment on your dirty laundry, reputation actually becomes a fundamental part of sustainability. Not least because, all too often, a corporate transgression has a direct effect on the wellbeing of customers, greater society or the planet.
Trend Briefing: Sustainability Implications of the Sharing Economy
7 years ago - When Airbnb and Uber burst on the scene a few years ago the business world was abuzz with the potential for a new “sharing economy.”Advocates explained how these services would provide people with new ways of making money by utilizing their homes and vehicles to their full potential, while offering a service that could save energy, reduce waste and bring communities together by sharing their resources and time.
#SB14London: Why Brands Should Be Talking Sustainability
8 years ago - What if 15 of the biggest Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies decided they really wanted to change the world? How would they go about communicating their sustainability commitments to the millions of consumers they need to persuade to live more sustainably?At present, even though FMCG companies are starting to understand the need to explain sustainability directly to consumers, they continue to put most of their communication efforts into their Sustainability and CSR corporate sites — an obvious destination for NGOs, shareholders and academics but not the first place the general public go to get information.
BBVA, AT&T, GE, Unilever Among Brands Best at Making Sustainability Viral in 2013
9 years ago - Is 2014 the year that sustainability marketing and communication become a big deal for companies? That’s certainly the impression you could draw judging by Unilever’s recent launch of its Project Sunlight campaign, not to mention Chipotle’s "Scarecrow" film and interactive game along with IKEA’s new sustainability awareness-raising "Wonderful Everyday" campaign.
Failure to Communicate: Dry Sustainability Reports a Missed Opportunity
9 years ago - Does your heart sink at the thought of reading yet another sustainability report?Over the last three years I’ve been documenting the ways companies are communicating sustainability online and using social media in particular. Time and time again, even those companies that demonstrate real panache in their sustainability communications fail to make the best use of the research, data and information that goes into their sustainability report. Often, as a result, a company’s most interesting sustainability work is left buried in these dull but worthy publications that no one really reads.
Hyundai's Controversial Ad: Communicating Sustainability the Wrong Way?
9 years ago - Suicide may be painless in the song but it's a theme that's causing all sorts of grief for automaker Hyundai.