That elusive slice of pie: BFG, NRS, Petco, Sustana on satisfying consumer appetites
More than ever, consumers can envision themselves taking social and
environmental action. The challenge is moving them from envisioning to actual
action, and brands are poised to help push them over the threshold.
A Monday morning panel at SB’21 San Diego discussed new ways that companies are
leveraging consumer insights for good. Rachel Whitacre, Manager of SB’s
Brands for Good (BFG) collaborative, opened
the discussion with several insights.
Recent BFG
research
found that 96 percent of consumers are trying to make sustainable decisions at
least some of the time. Heeding this data can be lucrative: 85 percent of
consumers are loyal to brands that help them achieve better, more balanced
lives.
“Brands have the opportunity to lead the way by both showing and actively
creating options for consumers that make sustainable behaviors accessible and
aspirational as part of the mainstream,” Whitacre said.
Trashy behavior: Engaging consumers in waste sorting and diversion at scale
Join us as leaders from Cradle to Cradle Product Innovation Institute, Sustana and Intuitive AI share insights on how brands, event producers and venues can reduce waste using technology, education and even fun to drive behavior change and divert waste from landfill — Wednesday, Oct. 16, at SB'24 San Diego.
Consumers are mired in a polarized world, said Susannah Enkema, VP of
Research & Insights at Shelton Group. The same values
that can get you seen as a “good” company can also get you labeled as a “bad”
company.
What do all “good” brands have in common? Criteria include treating employees
fairly, excellent customer service, and providing a quality product. Aside from
these, 23 percent of survey respondents said ESG-related criteria informed their
choices to purchase from a particular brand.
The key is identifying values and holding true.
“We are no longer living in a world where everybody is going to appeal to
everyone,” Enkema said. “It is increasingly important to know what your mission
is, who you are appealing to, and how you reach them.”
Enkema shared five practical steps in becoming a “good” company and winning in
the court of public opinion:
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Decide what you’re trying to accomplish
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Determine what goals fit your brand
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Treat employees well
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Stay committed to goals for the long haul
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Tell your story, build trust, and leverage resources
NRS: The value of values
Case in point: Idaho-based Northwest River Supplies
(NRS) provides river-ready kayaking, paddleboarding and
angling equipment to outdoor enthusiasts and outfitters across the nation. It
needed hard, actionable numbers to quantify its secret sauce and bottle it for
sale.
Through a recent
analysis,
NRS discovered it’s on par with its competitors in terms of quality and price —
so, it doubled down on marketing its values as a
differentiator.
The study found that sustainable products enjoy a 10-30 percent increase in
consumer preference. What’s more, there’s a 10 percent uptick in preference even
after a 10 percent increase in price for a sustainable product, translating into
a 6-7 percent boost in revenue for companies that bake value into products.
Buying decisions are sliced up like a pie, explained Mark Deming, NRS’
Director of Marketing. After standard value factors, there’s a sliver left for
social and environmental values. NRS has found it’s usually that last slice that
convinces consumers to make a purchase.
For Petco, sustainability isn’t a whole other animal
For Petco, sustainability means looking at what humans
are doing and extrapolating the trends for pets. The drive to reduce human
footprint mirrors reducing pawprints.
Eleni Kardaras, Petco’s Customer & Market Insights Manager, found that pet
parents value
sustainability
in high-use pet items, a trend mirrored in the human consumption world. Cory
Skuldt of Corporate Citizenship helped
Petco crunch its sustainability numbers, and highlighted the power of small
decisions to leverage massive change in value chains.
“[Sustainability commitment] enables Petco to be a catalyst for change for the
entire pet industry,” she said. “We’re planning on bringing the entire industry
along with us on this journey.”
Regeneration: 'The essence of expression'
Regeneration is the theme of SB ‘21, and Emily Olson of Sustana
Group and
ReGenFriends quickly laid out a definition (a
definition, she admits, was stolen from Carol
Sanford): “Evolving capacity
for essence expression.”
Through her work at Sustana and ReGenFriends, Olson is exploring how to deepen
capacity for the fullest expression of people and systems. She’s seeing
Sanford’s definition of regeneration coming to fruition in surveys, expressed by
respondents’ descriptions of “regeneration” and how they think brands should
express it:
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76 percent valued reducing carbon footprint
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70 percent valued social impact transparency
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87 percent valued innovative products and services
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77 percent valued transparency about environmental impact
Sustana also polled consumers about definitions of regenerative business.
Responses evoked aspirations of going beyond neutral, safeguarding future
generations, and creating a business model for the future. If product prices
stayed the same, over three-quarters of those surveyed said they’d buy the
product. If the prices were higher, 46 percent said they’d still buy.
A regenerative mindset, carried with innovative thinking, is key to bridging the
gap between customer aspiration and brands with a purpose.
Key stakeholders as agents of regeneration
Philip McKenzie
Later in the week, an energizing cluster of keynotes on day three at SB’21 San
Diego provided glimpses into a wide variety of inspiring
stakeholder-engagement initiatives.
Cultural anthropologist Philip McKenzie opened the plenary by calling on
brands to enter a new type of social contract, one based on stewardship values
and regenerative principles. This would help power a framework that centers both
people and planet, altering the way humans think, see, act and exist in the
world.
“The current social contract isn’t broken; but none of us signed up for it,”
McKenzie said. “It needs to work – not for the owners, but for the rest of us.”
Continuing this theme, Simon Mainwaring, founder and CEO of We
First, stressed that businesses were not
moving fast enough – or far enough – to address the world’s most pertinent
issues. He said many companies put self-limiting parameters on their ambitions
such as working with familiar suppliers or customers, potentially restricting
the scale of achievable impact: “This results in isolated pockets of good
intentions.”
Mooting the idea of collaborative leadership and collective purpose, Mainwaring
talked of a virtuous spiral, or hierarchy, that brands could aspire to. This
starts on an individual level, adopting a “lead with we” mindset (the subject of
his new
book);
before moving up onto other levels that center around leadership, company,
community, society and ultimately transcendence — which is about restoring
harmony between humanity and the natural world.
Cyrus Wadia
Cyrus Wadia, head of product sustainability at Amazon, then spoke of the
importance of mobilizing customers to drive positive change. Amazon’s Climate
Pledge
Friendly
shopping program, which launched a year ago, is designed to help customers
discover and shop for more sustainable products; it has since grown to encompass
over 200,000 products and 37 certifications.
“We are realizing that customers are ready and signaling with their purchases
what they want to see,” Wadia said. “Give citizens and customers alike something
they can believe in, and they can move this system. I’m optimistic about our
future ability to make that change because of the customer.”
Brand firepower comes in many different forms, as illustrated by
Deluxe Chief Brand Officer Amanda Brinkman’s
talk. As a provider of marketing services for small businesses, Deluxe wanted to
raise its profile by using its ‘do well by doing good’ motto as a springboard
for action.
“Our way of doing well would be to do good for small businesses, to inspire more
people to support them. On our 100-year anniversary, we wanted to tell the
stories of 100 small businesses across America,” she said.
The result was Deluxe’s Emmy-nominated series, “Small Business
Revolution,”
which showcases inspiring stories of small businesses helping to revitalize the
towns and communities they operate in. “When you invest in a small business, and
take brand action to go out and help them, you can see a ripple effect through
the entire community,” Brinkman said.
Ensuring that your brand remains relevant is an ongoing challenge for many
sustainability leaders, especially if the brand in question has been around for
a long time.
L-R: Nancy Mahon, Katie Decker and Angelica Beard (moderator)
Speaking from experience, Katie Decker, global president for essential
health and sustainability at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health, said, “When
you think of Johnson & Johnson, you don’t think about sustainability or
sustainable products. We took a hard look at ourselves and asked, ‘what do we
need to do to remain relevant?’”
The answer lay in understanding what united the company and its people – this
led to the company’s Healthy Lives
Mission,
which launched last year. “It’s our health, trying to make people’s lives
healthier. But you can’t have healthy people without a healthy planet – that was
our rallying cry,” Decker told attendees.
Such initiatives often rely on an ability to drive organizational change. Nancy
Mahon, SVP for global corporate citizenship and sustainability
at The Estée Lauder Companies, emphasized the importance of empathy here.
“Where are you driving value, and how do you show up? That is going to be very
different for the HR department versus the R&D department. Then you need
understand what are the levers of change for your organization. Lastly, you need
to focus and prioritize,” she said.
Jonathan Webb
The latter half of the plenary had a strong focus on sustainable consumption.
Looking to the future of our country’s food system, AppHarvest CEO Jonathan Webb
asserted the importance of controlled-environment agriculture, which he
predicted would come to the fore ten years from now.
“Farming is broken. Climate disruption has already hit us in the face on
agriculture … our food supply is dangerously unstable,” he warned.
According to Webb, the solution lies in combining innovative technology with
natural resources and farming know-how to produce more with less. AppHarvest’s
indoor farms in Kentucky, for instance, use up to 90 percent less water than
open-field agriculture and run on recycled rainwater.
Heidi Hackemer
With food being a great connector for people, Heidi Hackemer, executive
creative director at Oatly, advised brands to take advantage of that and
open some emotional doors.
“Oatmilk is great compared to dairy, but sustainability is boring — it’s not
exactly the stuff that consumers are super excited to engage with,” she said.
Oatly’s ‘emotional door’ approach involves creating interesting gateways that
get people intrigued or psyched about something, thus helping to bring them into
more complicated conversations. An emotional door can come from great user
design or user experience, for example.
“It’s not about how your company talks about sustainability, it’s about how
people want to hear about sustainability,” Hackemer told delegates.
According to Mathias Wikström, CEO of Doconomy, consumers are key to
solutions as they can drive more conscious consumption. “We need to connect
consumption to its impact on the planet … it’s all about making those mindful
decisions,” he said.
Doconomy’s partnership with
Mastercard offers a new
approach to environmentally informed
spending
by helping users estimate the carbon footprint of their purchases. Speaking
about the rationale behind the carbon calculator, Kristina Kloberdanz, chief
sustainability officer at Mastercard, said that while her company’s carbon
footprint wasn’t that significant, the reach and scale of its influence is huge.
“Individuals are looking to see how they can make a difference — we did some
research and found that 85 percent of adults are willing to take climate
action,” she told delegates.
Nick O'Flaherty
Taking a stand on social issues is just as critical. Nick O'Flaherty,
director of UNSTUCK at the Tent
Partnership for Refugees (TPR), spoke of his organization’s work in
bringing brands, consumers and suppliers together to create jobs for refugees.
With many refugees now in a state of limbo or displacement for longer periods of
time, the case to economically integrate them has grown stronger, O'Flaherty
said. TPR developed UNSTUCK to scale up its job creation work, partnering with
brands to create products sourced from suppliers who hire refugees.
“We are harnessing the power of the market to create the change and impact that
we seek,” O'Flaherty said, adding that by buying UNSTUCK products, consumers can
help support this job creation.
He also highlighted the business benefits of recruiting people who are fleeing
or have been displaced, such as increasing workforce diversity and employee
engagement: “It also helps builds brand integrity, which is what young consumers
are looking for — brands who take a stand on social issues.”
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Maxine Perella is an environmental journalist working in the field of corporate sustainability, circular economy and resource risk.
Christian is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and outdoor junkie obsessed with the intersectionality between people and planet. He partners with brands and organizations with social and environmental impact at their core, assisting them in telling stories that change the world.
Published Nov 4, 2021 11am EDT / 8am PDT / 3pm GMT / 4pm CET