Clients often tell us their communications, marketing, or brand teams are disinterested in integrating sustainability into their plans. We hear how, aside from an Earth Day social media post, a report launch, or an employee volunteer day, sustainability doesn’t feature prominently in the annual content calendar.
But here’s the thing: sustainability teams need these communicators working as their partners. Brand teams are key to elevating sustainability as core to the brand’s identity. Internal comms teams can rally employees to drive performance on goals. Sales and marketing teams have the power to make sustainability part of a commercial value proposition, ensuring this work continues.
Read more: Good intentions don't make a green claim defensible
The problem is not buy-in. It’s that sustainability teams are speaking sustainability.
The information fed to communications and marketing teams are things like progress on far-off goals, seven-digit CO2e data points that are hard to contextualize, incremental percent improvements on metrics that are disconnected from the product itself, and highlight stories from the report that are a year old at the time of publishing. This information is essential for annual sustainability reporting, but it lacks relevance and resonance beyond it.
If we want all this impact to have a life beyond the report, we must speak in the language of the business and the customer. We must translate data and achievements into brand proof points and customer value propositions.
Communications, brand, and marketing teams exist to build and protect reputation, drive change, and ultimately help make the business more profitable. And that’s sustainability’s job too — while making a positive impact along the way.
If sustainability teams want their hard work to have legs beyond the PDF, and excitement beyond the eight people who read it cover to cover, they must translate their efforts into a language and narrative that communicators can leverage.
For some businesses, this might mean going so far as to not use the word “sustainability” at all. It likely means getting clear on the value and impact this work is creating and for whom, and being able to articulate that in the language of brand and business.
Read more: The sustainability retreat is over
Sustainability folks may arbitrarily group this swath of environmental, social, and governance topics under one header called “sustainability,” but we’re actually talking about wildly disparate topics, only some of which are relevant broadly beyond the report.
For example, a company may be focused on water, energy, and waste to reduce cost; labor practices, air emissions, and product labeling to reduce risk; employee engagement and learning and development to improve performance; and community giving to improve reputation (and because, well, the CEO is excited about it). Sure, all these efforts positively impact people and the planet but how we should communicate about them varies.
Here are some examples:
A private equity client recognized that their primary why for this work was the resilience of their portfolio amid rapidly evolving regulatory, economic, and political conditions. They shifted from talking about this work as their “ESG Strategy” to their “Resilience Strategy.” This helped them focus their communications on topics that would position them best in the eyes of investors. They were able to craft a story that aligned with their business objectives, and that their leaders and communicators readily wove into their communications, because they were proof points for the message they were already conveying.
A pharmaceutical client recognized that their “sustainability” program was actually a regulatory and reputational risk reduction program. They called their work Corporate Responsibility and worked with the communications team to build storylines around their industry-leading quality and safety program, customer-focused product labeling, and best-in-class ingredient innovation — off which demonstrated their ability to exceed customer expectations and regulatory requirements, with the aim of ultimately becoming the most trusted brand in their space.
For a CPG product company reliant on agricultural crops, the focus was on leveraging their growing practices for differentiation and sales. In their report, they detailed how they reduced their footprint, engaged employees, and gave back to their communities, but they recognized their farmer impact stories were most relevant to their marketing objectives. They provided the marketing team with data, proof points, case studies, and stats around the sustainability and social impact of their farms, which the storytellers turned into engaging content.
For each of these companies, the key was to remember that in an age of content overload, the sustainability teams whose stories we will hear about most are the ones who understand the goals of the business and brand and connect the dots to sustainability — clearly, simply, and in messages that will resonate.