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John Viera who leads Ford Motor Company’s sustainable business strategies, speaks with me at Sustainable Brands 10 about their near, medium, and long term sustainability plans for vehicle engineering & design. Topics include eco-boost technology which use fewer cylinders in the internal combustion engine to achieve similar horsepower while using less gas; alternative fuel engines that accept ethanol, propane, and natural gas; hybrid & electric drivetrains; recycled and biobased soy materials procurement; and lightweighting.

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Timberland’s Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Harrison, speaks in an interview with me on topics including: social media, brand stories and content that resonates with customers, what works and what doesn’t. Additionally, Mike explains how Earthkeepers isn’t just a shoe, but also a brand platform for authentic and credible communications with stakeholders and the public on Timberland’s corporate responsibility commitment and environmental stewardship efforts, and what they care about as a company. A human relationship with the great outdoors based on respect, love, and adventure.

Just finished up a new graphic to shed some light on a perpetual 4 step process of meaningful marketing:

A macro perspective map of four activity sets that should be run concurrently for meaningful social media to gain traction and move forward, for both single and multiple projects. Given that the upperleft quadrant first highlights content production, one can assume this is a content production and interaction model (for which it would be great), but you can perceive it any way you want

Sometimes it’s only necessary to participate in one activity set, based on a project’s short scope. However, most of these four activities need to be undertaken at some point.

Wayne Visser is a longtime consultant in CSR and had made a pretty good, and short 13 slide presentation on how the practice needs to change. He advocates abandoning the old limited scope of CSR, and adopting the modern, holistic, and proactive Corporate Sustainability & Responsibility. Sounds good to me. Since my career wasn’t in the original field, I’m automatically biased to think that bigger systemic thinking & action is the right framework. From a management perspective, it just makes sense to hold a bigger mental model of what sustainability and values branding mean for a company.

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I recently stumbled upon this video produced by BusinessLink.gov.uk as a story about the CSR efforts of an English architecture firm, primarily as it relates to the benefits of having established volunteerism and employee happiness programs (among other areas). So while this wasn’t produced by Bailey Partnership, it serves as an amazing 5min introduction to a humanistic aspect of the company and its employees. Now, if I were in charge of brand identity of a company I’d do a couple things: 1) Keep any brochures very straightforward and concise with a maximum of 5 subjects; 2) Produce videos on the identified subjects along with sustainability/csr, but create each as a collection of clips, from which older clips can reused or discarded, and newer clips can be added. The entire production would be inline with an integrated brand communications platform for identity purposes, which could especially be useful for existing and potential stakeholders (equity holders, partners, and employees).

Okay, on with the show! Could such a 5min video be helpful for your firm?
Another example I provided a while back, has more of a reporting than a journalistic feel.

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From an interview I did a little over a year ago with Mona Amodeo, President and Founder of idgroup Consulting and Creative

You place a high value on branding in corporate sustainability efforts. I believe I know why. We’d like to help people understand why these programs aren’t just altruistic or even just that they make financial sense. If we identify sustainability strategies and tactics with core brand values, we’ll likely to get more people on board, while also strengthening the organizational culture. What do you think?

There are many ways to look at and define sustainability. My research defines sustainability as a core value that defines behavior (profit within the context of social and environmental responsibility). Most people want to be a part of something bigger than them. Big visions engage people and give meaning to work. Sustainability offers that type of opportunity for companies. Connect people with something they believe is making a difference and you will have a committed group of people—customers and employees.

We know that authenticity is a key factor in the ability to position a company as sustainability-focused. Authenticity is created by engaging the whole organization in living the values of sustainability. We learned from Interface that organizations can incorporate these values deep into their cultural assumptions through the incremental process of aligning organization identity (who are we), culture (how do we do things around here) and image (how do others see us).

Our experience shows the intentional alignment of these three spheres— something we now define as Branding from the Core® — creates the greatest potential for creating authentic organizational brands because when organizations “walk the talk” of sustainable values, they create a strong image with the marketplace and employees, this image then reinforces the values and behaviors associated with sustainability.

Tell us about Music as Message. I like the idea of nurturing positive holistic values in children, and progressively instilling a sense of eco-literacy beyond the mere benefits of tree planting and recycling. Rather, it’s a growing understanding of the interdependence of all phenomena and life. What are your thoughts?

Music as Message and specifically our character, Eco the Butterfly, was a direct outgrowth of my research with Interface and other companies who have incorporated sustainability as value into the core of their organizations. Actually, Ray Anderson was the inspiration for Eco.

The idea is simple: Use music and fun entertaining characters to teach children important lessons about the environment and taking care of each other and the world we live in. Music and characters are powerful vehicles to engage children, and maybe indirectly, their parents. Remember how you learned your ABC’s? Our hope is through engaging children early in life, their view of the interdependence between humans and the natural environment will be embedded into their belief systems.

Looking at your bio, I see a big background in Organizational Behavior and Culture Change. The study of motivation and the design of an employee culture that perseveres to succeed (or collectively ‘actualize’) is a massive topic within OD and management circles. Are there certain factors managers need to expand upon in light of the sustainability era upon us?

As you pointed out earlier, embrace sustainability as a value (not a strategy or a tactic) and connect with proven processes that engage employees with that value. Create a powerful vision of what sustainability means to your company. Ask big questions, but start where you are. Give employees room and support to explore what this means to themselves and the organization. Encourage new ideas from all corners of your organization, and don’t give up. This is a paradigm change; it takes time, but yields a return on investment that can be measured in innovation, engagement, pride and marketplace acceptance.

Idgroup is also involved in creative design and advertising campaigns. Push marketing will be with us for a while, although digital PR and word-of-mouth marketing are becoming ever more popular due to the humanistic approach and since personal credibility is on the line. Do you see a shift in how great ad campaigns will adapt to an increasingly value-based society?

Actually idgroup revamped our approach to branding about 5 years ago with this realization in mind. We emerged from our metamorphosis as a bit of a hybrid, combining the best of the worlds of branding, organization development & change (OD) and communications to help organizations create values-based brands. This OD-centric approach to our work is based on the belief that the strongest brands are born from a process of engaging organizational members in creating, living and telling their stories—the struggles and the victories. This is how we build authenticity into our branding campaigns. We have found engaging employees in OD-based dialogue processes helps us unearth meaningful story lines which frame our campaigns while also building high levels of engagement and pride in organizational members. This has a powerful impact on the quality and authenticity of the campaigns as well as a reinforcing effect on the employees belief systems.

What gets you excited about the future trends or direction for sustainability?

I think top-leaders are really grappling with what sustainability means to them, their organizations and their stakeholders. I know this sounds a bit weird, but I get excited because I see them willing to struggle. This means there is potential to help leaders reach beyond eco-efficiency-thinking, to engage with sustainability as a core value. Not just a strategy, or tactic. This is where the real power lies—seeing profitability within the context of social and environmental responsibility requires a real paradigm shift. I believe those willing to ask different questions, big questions will be the real winners. Challenging people to think differently, to view the world from a new window, yields new and innovative answers, high levels of employee engagement and pride and strong connections. Five years ago, no one was really listening. Today, they are asking good questions and searching for meaningful answers. These are exciting times!!

A few months ago, I was sitting in a BJ’s restaurant with my big spiral notebook, a good Hefeweizen, and a swarm of thoughts on branding for good. In the last 3 years, I’d realized through observation, experience, and enough books and articles on the subject, that branding really is what people experience in their interactions with an organization, and their subsequent perceptions. Sometimes actively, sometimes passively, sometimes directly, sometimes by association. In every touchpoint, including media and word of mouth.

Given that reality, what does this entail for values branding? Without going into the specifics of values (as every business’s personality, objectives, value proposition, culture, and industry is different), I started to look at the big picture of which functions branding performs and came up with the following meta model. Since all actions also entail a degree of communication, I then categorized the tactics and tools available for development, interaction options, distribution, and measurement. Hope you enjoy it!

From the Sustainability Consortium comes this animation about their organizational mission in bringing together brands and academics to collectively pursue better product manufacturing through a shared life-cycle assessment and materials database. Creatively speaking, I thought the content style in the beginning was a little trite, though it got better as the story unraveled and must say that animations can really help make complex topics concrete.

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Yes sir, that’s me in the interviewee seat with Kevin Long of JustMeans at Sustainable Brands 10. Kevin had caught me at a tired moment, but there was no way I was going to let him out energize me, out passion”ate” me, or give him the upper hand (wink).

In addition to my staunch and honest advice for organizations to JFDI (just focus/f***in do it) in regards to social media, I added an important point marketers and sustainability practitioners ought to know. While active engagement is sexy (and scary for some), listening and monitoring is very important, and should be the starting point for any greenfield or beginning stages. Just like in life. Lots of insights can be gleaned…

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In 2007, SunChips was successfully repositioned as a snack brand that is better for you and better for the planet. This presentation by Chief Marketing Officer Thomas Oh, will highlight the motivation and strategy surrounding this decision, and the resulting brand innovation and marketing initiatives that were launched to both build and communicate the brand’s authentic steps towards becoming the preeminent sustainable snack. Includes the history of SunChips, various advertising and cause marketing campaign videos and creative print ads, and the story behind the compostable bag. But more than that, it’s about a holistic, integrated brand identity and its communications strategy.