April’s Creative Review is a special issue devoted to sustainability. For it, the publisher asked Sara Rich, editor of worldchanging.com, to explain how their readers can help genuinely green businesses to thrive. Here’s a (rather long) extract here:
Conscious consumers in the modern marketplace rarely face an either/or proposition. Gone are the days of choosing between pleasure and principle. Gone is the sacrifice of flavour, colour and style in the name of environmental responsibility. With the likely exception of toilet paper (which it seems still cannot be made both recycled and soft), many of our everyday items can now be found in a luxurious shade of green. Savvy advocates of sustainability know that business is not the enemy of the good…
In fact, business can be a vehicle for doing better in the world, and making a comfortable living with a guilt-free conscience as well. But in an increasingly crowded green business sphere, knowing who’s authentic presents a challenge. The responsibility for giving not-so-sustainable products a green face – as well as for making truly green products as desirable as their counterparts – lies entirely in the hands of designers, as the make-up artists and storytellers for brands. In a consumer culture teeming with excess and endlessly driving our desire for more stuff, designers become responsible, too, for reconsidering how we engage with products, and how we might transform the consumers’ motivation from quantity to quality, and from singular to whole systems thinking.
There are three primary categories into which green-oriented brands fall. The best of them don’t craft their identity around sustainability. Their social and environmental characteristics tend to show up as if they are a given in the bigger picture of a current, cutting-edge brand; because the reality is that a lack of awareness around these issues equates to a lack of viability in the twenty-first century. A second category comprises campaigns that do direct their messaging squarely on green, but intentionally incorporate an urban edge and a modern aesthetic in order to combat the stereotype of something four decades too tired. Finally, there are those brands that aggressively present an “eco” image as a way to capitalise on the green consumer movement without matching their practices to their pretence. This “greenwashing” trend has fairly well permeated the industry and it’s now up to consumers to develop a radar for spotting duplicitous brands. As a New York Times article on greenwashing put it, “When a trend starts to show success, it’s a design pile-up…[But] merely dressing up the package is not enough. There is value in telling a story, but it must be true.” Companies whose story is real, compelling, and smartly designed are the ones who are starting to shine.
Then there is another category, which transcends or stands peripheral to the others, and may represent the direction green consumption is headed. It’s design for the elimination of excess – dematerialisation – in which user experience takes precedence over acquiring more things. Product service systems, or service designs, reconceive goods as functions and permit users to obtain access to the outcome yielded by a product without actually owning it, meaning each of us needs to consume less in order to get the same result. The concept has taken hold well in the UK – perhaps better than anywhere else in the world – where sharing of commodities such as cars, office space and power tools has become relatively commonplace.
…Brands can design all manner of slick packaging and alluring ads, but in order to achieve credibility, they have to deliver transparency with every product and interaction. The conscious consumer wants to know what’s in her cake before she eats it. Creatives and designers face the challenge of telling the true story behind a brand in a way that’s sincere, engaging and reassuring so that green business can thrive and the bar can keep rising on what sustainability means in the market.
Read. Buy. Learn. Change: Creative Activism
Also, while we’re on the subject, check out Russell Davies compelling thoughts on whether we can “create a minimal-impact version of consumer society that’s attractive enough that the developing world will want to adopt it as a vision for their future (assuming they don’t come up with something better)?”
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March 27th, 2007 at 10:24 am
I started out with some confusion over your use of the term “designer”, in stating who is responsible for the greening of a company’s brand. There are product designers, systems designers, web designers, graphic designers, organizational designers, and of course, logo designers. But the responsibility for determining the face of the brand does not lie solely with any of these designers.
The brand always lives with the customer and the stakeholders with whom the brand interacts. This is probably the most important thing to understand. The keepers of the brand are not the company’s marketing directors, nor the ad agencies, brand design firms, or individual designers. These people are merely brand stewards, who are ultimately beholden to the stakeholders of the brand—internally, these are the employees, owners, management, etc, and externally this is everything from customers to contract labor, NGO’s, opinion leaders, and communities that are impacted by the companies practices (think of the influence on the brand Teflon by its impact on communities effected by the high levels of PCB’s in their water supply.) It is the job of a good brand steward with a diligent and comprehensive process to consider all of these stakeholders in “designing” the brand. This requires much insight gathering and strategic formulation before the most accurate representation of the brand can then be communicated through words (e.g., messaging), pictures (e.g., ads), and design (e.g. identity, logo).
I wasn’t clear over how you complied your list of the three categories where green-oriented brands fail, and I wanted examples. In your first example, there is good reason for a brand to be careful in “crafting their identity around sustainability”. Many of their current customers may react negatively to a move towards green. Nike is a good example of this. They have to be very careful about how they approach green, as their customer base is mainly unaware, unconcerned, or even actively in opposition to green. It’s one thing to incorporate green components into an existing brand—and this requires careful consideration of their existing brand attributes, whether or not the green ones will coalesce, and then how they might be communicated. It’s another thing entirely to launch a green brand. This is easy by comparison.
Your second category makes a little more sense, but I was wondering again who you might be thinking of. Again, there is good reason to be careful about how one presents the “green” in a brand. A national research study that we did recently at egg indicates that up to thirty percent of the population are actively somewhat in opposition to green in the marketplace due to all the hype and spin. Then, there is a further 30-40% who are inclined to go green, but really need their self interest to be well-accommodated—things like the style (urban edge) you speak of, as well as performance, cost, convenience, taste, etc.
I do agree with you on the third category—the green washers. There are many that do this, and they will ultimately fail (relative, mind you) as you say, due to the transparency allowed by today’s media and information systems. Examples here? Pick any petroleum company, as they are all on the green brand wagon now, including recently Exxon.
As far as NAU goes, one note here. They are extremely impressive, but I question their fashion forward approach. Ultimately the companies that create products that last a long, long time are the most sustainable, or least unsustainable, unless they are a closed loop, or cradle to cradle product. Patagonia proves that durability is a sustainable attribute perhaps at the expense of fashion, although interestingly, their price points and environmental stands have eclipsed the idea of style and almost become the fashionable aspect of the brand—Patagucci anyone? I wonder how long until that Helmut Lang style jacket from NAU ends up in the back of the closet. A year or two perhaps? And then there is the question of instant gratification for consumers who are buying the product but cannot leave the store with anything. I deeply respect the move towards this kind of consumption re-education, and the example of service systems is a good one, which I learned about in McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle back in 2003.
In these early stages of the “staging of green”, brands will not succeed in the mainstream if they lead with the green message unless their product performs well on various aspects of self-interest mentioned above. More likely, brands that deliver primarily on these attributes of self-interest (think taste and health for organics), will need to lead with this, and weigh the advantages of the green components in a secondary fashion (environmental for organics.)
April 28th, 2007 at 11:21 pm