Brand & Marketing: Is Your Sustainability Message…Well…Boring?
By Guy Champniss for CSRwire
I am not sure the dots are being connected. In fact, I think there are more dots being added (rather than lines between them) — and they’re being added farther and farther apart.
I’m talking about the link between sustainability and CSR, and the marketing and brand teams.
At a structural level, new research by GlobeScan and BSR highlights how little contact brand and marketing teams have with the CSR and sustainability folks in large businesses. As obvious as it may sound, if you’re not talking to each other, then you cannot listen to each other, and you certainly cannot spark off each other to create great ideas that lead to engaging experiences farther afield.
Consumers Want the Experience of Sustainability
It’s fair to say that for consumers, it really is all about experiences today. Where once it may have been about ubiquity of product, then about price, and then about service, now it’s about experience. That should be music to most marketers’ ears, as experiences always outrun transactions, and present far better opportunities for consumers to get closer to other consumers, and to get closer to the brand.
They are also driven far more by emotion than rational assessment — which should be another check mark on the right side of the table for what brands want in their relationships, both internal and external.
Report the Drama, Not the Documentary
With that in mind, on the few occasions when brand and marketing do talk to CSR and sustainability, why is the output so typically data-driven? Why do both sides reduce the most important — the most strategic — conversation for businesses today to an almost Morse-code like tap of information for consumers?
Continue reading on CSRwire Talkback.
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