Your company has been progressing nicely up the sustainability curve from compliance to cost savings. The next logical step is reputation and revenue generation, and it's here that many sustainability pros hit a roadblock.
Without a CEO mandate, business units usually have little incentive to deviate from what's been working in the past. Sustainability and CSR initiatives have safely been tucked away behind the scenes, dealing with internal and supply chain issues that reduce risk and cost to the business. Objections to customer-facing sustainability initiatives range from “Why put our neck out and risk greenwashing charges?” to “It's still a niche market” and “Why would we promote our values for commercial ends? We're doing this because it's right, not to make money from it.”
Perhaps they do see that sustainability is beginning to go mainstream, but it hasn't become a burning platform for action. And this is the big opportunity for sustainability pros. It's time for you to change the conversation.
As pointed out in a recent EthicalCorp article, “Corporate responsibility teams could do more to articulate a clear business strategy for their company that will grow sales…. Social and environmental issues are increasingly seen as new business opportunities, rather than risks to be managed. But translating this knowledge into practical business plans is easier said than done.”
You'll need to craft a compelling story and business case for taking sustainability to the next level within the organization. And that story must to be told using the language of numbers, making a clear connection between sustainability and topline revenue.
How you do that is the subject of a new series of articles that will cover:
Let's tackle the first one now. TAM, or total addressable market, is the sum of all of the potential sales that your company could make if it didn't have any competition. In the sustainability world, we need to identify your TASM, or total addressable sustainability market, to begin building the business case.
TASM is based on an understanding of how many buyers are motivated by sustainability-related attributes when they purchase or recommend a product. It's crucial to your strategy, and yet secondary data on this information is slim. LOHAS is a wellknown segmentation model originally designed for health & wellness, but it may or may not apply to your category. I would question whether the same segmentation model holds true across all categories including food, electronics, personal care and energy.
Without knowing exactly how many buyers in your market care enough to adjust their purchase and loyalty behavior, it will be hard to justify any customerfacing initiatives. Even if the market is small for your category, it may be growing at a rapid enough pace to make a dedicated effort worthwhile. Side note: don't believe what consumers tell you; TASM should be based on behavioral data, not a poll.
Step two is knowing what share of this market you currently own versus your competitors. Are you leading or lagging? If you increased share by one percentage point, what is the resulting revenue that you could use to fund additional projects? If you cede competitive advantage among this group to a competitor, what percent of your customer base is put at risk?
In the next issue, we'll discuss how to protect and grow your sustainability customer base.
To download the entire July Newsletter from Fruitful Strategy, click here
Jennifer is a strategist who's passionate about the role businesses can play in creating a better world. After almost 20 years in brand and customer experience strategy, she started Fruitful to help companies profitably align brand and business strategy with social impact. Jennifer has been recognized as a rapid and intuitive problem solver, a dynamic speaker and a get-it-done professional. She brings a global perspective, having managed strategy projects for businesses in the EU, Dubai and Southeast Asia. Consulting and corporate-side experience ranges from the Fortune 50 to smaller regional players across a range of industries including tech, hospitality and healthcare.
via | Sustainable life media
Fresh from the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, SLM contributor Lucas Daniel offers a firsthand look at how Nokia is telling its sustainability story - via cellphone.
For companies innovating in the new economy of ethics, shifting consumer behavior is one of the more difficult tasks to undertake. Companies have to not only deliver on what people are most concerned with: convenience, beauty, value; but also make a switch to more responsible actions natural and seamless. Reusable grocery bags come to mind as a good recent example of this; at the local Jewel-Osco near my home in Chicago, they are inching closer to the check-out aisle so that it no longer has to be a fully pre-planned activity. For mass adoption, green products and services have to be within arm's reach.
So where better to put the tools for more responsible behavior than in the object within pocket reach: your mobile phone. Nokia is doing just that in an interesting extension of their "power of we" brand story: offering a set of applications and services that bring green tools, community, and information a menu button away.
Nokia is currently offering four of these combo applications and services in their phones.
At Barcelona's massive Mobile World Congress (MWC) exhibition last month, I played with we:offset and Green Explorer at the Nokia booth. They're impressive not simply because they are included on the phone (no extra effort required), but because they don’t feel kitschy or like they were tacked on at the end. There's value in using them beyond just a feeling that you've done your good for the day. Green Explorer gave me some user-generated suggestions on where to grab an all-organic lunch or where the best parks are. Johanna Jokinen, senior manager of Environmental Communications, was at the Nokia booth explaining the apps. "They are examples of services that can help people do their bit for the environment with the help of mobile technology. We are bringing eco services directly to people, where ever they are, creating communities and having a strong social location element included in them."
This level of direct engagement with their customers is what sets Nokia's sustainable efforts apart from those of their competitors. This was even evident in how they engaged with MWC attendees to tell their story. In comparison to Nokia's booth, Samsung and LG's sustainable brand stories were behind glass, unstaffed, and talked exclusively about eco-packaging, bio plastics or energy efficiency. Samsung did have a few bullet points about their "Eco UX," but the applications seemed too passive, like Eco Calendar which marks ecologically significant days, or too kitschy, like Eco Walk which counts and shows trees saved as you walk.
While Nokia was very focused on their green applications and services at the event, they were framing it as part of their larger sustainable brand story known as the power of we. "The power of we is Nokia's attitude to eco business and approach to more sustainable living - a billion people using our devices to connect and work together in different ways to protect the environment," says Jokinen. "The power of we combines both Nokia's own environmental work as well as all the individuals using our devices."
The power of we is an umbrella for the following green initiatives:
The power of we is both changing how Nokia thinks and acts internally as well as engages with worldwide community. And they are getting recognized for their efforts. The power of we won the 2008 Green Awards Grand Prix.
But it seems that Nokia's greatest impact will be with their services and applications, as it has the potential to create a massive behavioral shift with their 1 billion users. It’s the simplicity of it that makes it so innovative. Most people don’t want to put out extra effort to be green. So what if our devices pushed us to? In 2007, Nokia introduced a simple innovation in their phones: when it's done charging, it notifies you to unplug, so you’re not syphoning unnecessary phantom power. It's not that people want to keep it plugged in, they just forget. So Nokia very simply reminds them.
"One of the goals currently is to demonstrate people that there are simple actions they can take and that the information on what to do and how to do it is within easy reach – in their mobile devices. Doing small things individually can have big impact (The power of we)."
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Lucas Daniel is a strategy lead at gravitytank, where he manages the strategic direction of a wide variety of projects, from product innovation to market positioning to future platform strategy for clients ranging from Samsung, OfficeMax, and Unilever.
Lucas sits on the advisory board for SLM's upcoming Sustainable Brands '09 conference in Monterey, Calif.
Incentives programs help too, the survey finds. Among companies that provide rewards to encourage green behaviors, 77% provide special employee recognition, 36% give prize incentives, and 14% offer a monetary reward.
“Many employers now recognize that green programs in the workplace can promote social responsibility among workers and help retain top talent,says Don Sanford, managing director of Buck’s communication practice. “But there is still much more that organizations can do. We expect to see future growth in green training programs, environmentally responsible investment options, and recruiting employees with green skills.
Four out of five companies use web- or videoconferencing to reduce business travel - making remote conferencing the top sustainability strategy cited by survey respondents. Other popular strategies include setting policies to conserve paper (76%) and implementing employee wellness programs (68%).
via | Sustainable Life Media
Dr. Prabhu Kandachar, Professor of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft will be among those speaking at a conference focused on "Sustainable Innovations at the Base of the Pyramid" to be held on Sept 26th and 27th at the Helsinki School of Economics. He heads the BoP Design Lab at Delft and they have a hefty collection of student projects completed over the past couple of years available for download (18MB PDF)
Other speakers include Torben Vestergaard, designer of the award winning Life Straw as well Rama Bijapurkar, India's leading consumer insights researcher and consultant and Dr. Simona Rocchi, Director of Sustainable Design, Philips Design. Simona Rocchi was in charge of the user-centric co-design process for the low-smoke biomass stove Chulha, which just received the IDEA2008 award from IDSA. Yours truly will be reporting on the actual event soon so watch this space if you're into sustainable design for the 'other 90%'.
via | core 77
The MeetingPod, a paperless, electronic meeting system, is designed to help meeting venues lower their carbon footprint and attract an increasing number of environmentally conscious customers, according to the company.
"Venues are starting to look at their corporate social responsibility policies very closely," says Dave Wickett, Synanto's sales director. "By not having a strategy to reduce their carbon footprint, many meeting and conference venues are telling us that they are starting to lose business."
The MeetingPod is a personal electronic tool that stores meeting agendas, minutes, and presentations at a fraction of the energy required to power a laptop computer, according to Synanto. The product also eliminates the need for a projector for presentations, further reducing energy use.
"Each piece of paper used in a meeting has the equivalent carbon emissions of burning a 60-watt light bulb for one hour," says Wickett. "A meeting of ten people will typically have emissions of around 1.6 kilograms of CO2 - equivalent to driving a typical 4x4 for six miles. The same meeting, using the MeetingPod, would have a carbon footprint of only 0.2 kilograms of CO2."
The MeetingPod is up against some stiff competition, as many companies turn to videoconferencing technology to reduce their carbon footprint from business travel. Deloitte, for example, recently contracted with Nortel to equip its 130 offices worldwide with videoconferencing software - no meeting venues required.
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SMEs will see a 17% increase in PC shipments - and a whopping 40% increase in server shipments - over the next four years, according to the report from Access Markets International (AMI), an IT strategy firm. The upshot? Energy efficient IT operations will soon prove much more of a money saver for smaller enterprises.
"SMEs are gradually becoming convinced about the positive outcome of green IT in reducing overall running costs, total cost of ownership, and increasing savings," says AMI research analyst Vittesh Kalambi. "As such, SME bottom lines are being redefined to include sustainability."
In addition, many of SMEs are broadening the definition of green computing - implementing policies that not only improve their triple bottom line, but meet the needs of their size as well, according to the report. Such strategies include recycling e-waste and printing on both sides of a page can also be small steps that reap big cost and energy savings.
Via | Core 77
Before environmental issues became part of the mainstream, the role of a designer was already starting to get much more interesting. Product innovation used to be the exclusive purview of R&D, where scientists and engineers tinkered away on technology-centered, proprietary advancements. Designers were left to style products for consumption and marketers worked further downstream to stimulate demand.
The emergence of more user-centered-thinking has given designers an influence well beyond the old drafting table. Upstream in the product development process, designers can now leverage tools like ethnography and sophisticated needs analysis. When given the opportunity, these methods drive the whole development process towards more meaningful and commercially viable innovation. These user-centered methods are the precursor for solving the green problem.
On the other end of the chain, the consumer has not yet been fully blended into the process, so the benefits and value of these new design approaches are less understood, and even prompt some level of suspicion. The way we go about asking these questions, and translating consumer needs back into business and design requirements, creates a wariness that has been uttered by some of the most optimistic proponents of green business. Do consumers mean what they say? Do they really want a greener future if it means dramatically changing their way of life?
The report, from Business for Social Responsibility, is based on several pilot projects looking at the IT sector and suppliers in China. It outlines several steps companies can take to build capacity in their supply chains:
Support multiple capacity-building strategies. Approaches can include providing generic tools (such as a factory committee or worker hotline to address concerns), conducting trainings, creating supplier-support networks and implementing factory-specific projects.
Focus on the business case. To achieve buy-in from suppliers, identify real incentives and allow suppliers to shape their own approach to CSR improvements within the factory.
Integrate a mentoring system into the monitoring process. Work with the supplier to identify root causes of compliance issues. This strengthens the relationship between the company and the supplier, shifting focus from immediate compliance to continuous improvement.
Foster ongoing dialogue among stakeholders. These include customers, suppliers, NGOs, local government and industry associations. This reinforces each group’s efforts, creating the potential for a much bigger impact on everyone’s CSR efforts.
"The challenges with capability building identified in this report is not unique to the IT sector or to China, and many of the recommendations can be applied to a wide variety of sectors and geographies," says Laura Commike Gitman, BSR's director of advisory services.
To download the report, click here (PDF).
via | Sustainable Media Life
It’s one of the few areas of the economy on its way to robust growth. As we point out here every day, money’s flowing to companies and firms are scaling up new green projects at a pace that’s pretty tough to keep up with.
Well, all those projects and companies mean employment, as the Phoenix Business Journal reports.
“Clearly, a company that does sustainability is in a growth sector,” Dave Thompson, founder and CEO of Gilbert, Ariz., alternative fuels firm Diversified Energy Corp., tells the business journal.
The estimates are pretty impressive. In a report earlier this year, researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst predicted 14.3 million people could see their jobs go green in the next few years. That’s likely to pick up, according to a report last year by American Solar Energy Society. In the November report, the society claims there are already 8 million workers in the renewable energy or energy efficiency industries and that number could climb to 40 million by 2030.
bizjournals: Sustainability trend creates whole new fields within existing industry sectors
greenbizjournal: Washington, D.C. studying green collar jobs
So who are the greenfluencers? Researchers began with a sample of more than 11,000 Americans, narrowing down to a group of 484 who both factor environmental awareness into their purchasing behavior and are highly active in a social networks. Common characteristics of this small but influential group include the following:
Brands should pay very close attention to what greenfluencers are saying because "they have the ability to promote or skewer a company's claim of environmental responsibility," the report concludes.
To learn more about greenfluencers - and how you can reach out to them more effectively - download the full report here (PDF).
via | Sustainable Media Life
Via^ Core 77 Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken
Bill Moggridge (IDEO), John Thackara (Doors of Perception), Josephine Green (Philips Design), Geetha Narayanan (Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore), and Luigi Ferrara (Institute without Boundaries, Toronto) were only some of the speakers and guests at the highly stimulating Changing the Change conference that took place in the impressive Molecular Biotechnology Research Centre of Turin, Italy, July 10-12.
This outstanding conference "on the role and potential of design research in the transition towards sustainability" was the brainchild of Ezio Manzini (professor of industrial design at the Milan Polytechnic). Jointly organised by the Polytechnic universities of Milan and Turin (with extensive support from their masters and doctoral students), Changing the Change was part of the programme of Turin World Design Capital 2008.
In this longer article I have tried to open up this important conference to those who were not there, which is made easier by the fact that all 138 papers are already online.
CherryPal is taking cloud computing mainstream in a big way with a soon to be released green personal computer. This green PC comes in a small, affordable package weighing just 10.5 ounces and consuming no more than two watts of power. The triple-core processor only has one fifth of the components of traditional computers, boots-up in 20 seconds, and promises to be faster than Vista and mac’s OS-X.
CherryPal had us doing our computer research to understand the power behind utilizing cloud computing. The PC contains only 4GB of flash storage, 256MB of memory, and a power architecture-based 400MHz Freescale mobileGT MPC5121e chip on a Linux operating system. To the everyday user, this means that most of the computer resources will be owned and accessed by a third-party provider in a data center – the type of service on demand similar to the way we program a Tivo. It also means that computer viruses will truly be a thing of the past for Cherrypal users.
For those of you who are a little more tech savy, here’s a more complete list of CherryPal’s Hardware:
Skeptics standby, CEO Max Seibold stands firmly behind his product believing it will not only deliver on energy savings and cost, but also on speed, making it “the most affordable, greenest computer on the market.” According to Seibold, CherryPal will be able to appease the music collectors, the gamers, and those looking for a simple to use word processor. While official pricing hasn’t been released yet, sources say to look-out for prices well under $400 sans the monitor, keyboard, and any additional accessories necessary to run the desktop. Look out for an early August release along with a laptop to follow in the near future.
