This is part six of an ongoing series of developing thoughts on the intersection of authentic messaging and sustainability. In part one I introduce the concept of greenwash-fighting marketing that follows 5 “PRIME” principles: Participation, Rigor, Intentionality, Mutuality and Exchange. In part two I elaborate on the concept of participation. In part three I gush about rigor and how strong, verifiable sustainability information is one of the surest antidotes to greenwashing. In part four I discuss intentionality in terms of expressing an organization’s true sustainability aims: how to do it well and why it’s sometimes more important to be honest than good. In part five I consider the role of mutuality as a valuable step in moving authentic sustainability messaging externally, into the public realm. Please join me now as I look at exchange as a means of understanding how and why an increasingly empowered (and digitally connected) base of customers and supporters plays to the strengths of authentic brands. As always, comments are appreciated and encouraged.
Exchange
Sustainability claims: Are accompanied with an invitation to talk more about the company’s “walking of their sustainable talk” [Exchange]
Companies with authentic sustainability messaging have a huge advantage over greenwashers: as a customer presses deeper for more information they are presented with an increasingly compelling story. Because they have something to hide, inauthentic marketers will press for the opposite effect: deflect queries and obstruct deeper conversations as much as possible; many people are quite savvy to this behavior and don’t seem to appreciate it very much. To be sure, this is an unenviable position; perhaps this was possible back before consumers possessed the means of horizontal interaction, but those days are gone. Much of the public is quite skeptical about sustainability claims (and for good reason); the better equipped you are to demonstrate your chops, the better (and more differentiated) you are. This is exchange: the last (and perhaps most rewarding) step in the PRIME marketing process. You’ve set the foundation (participation), backed it up with integrity and depth (rigor, intentionality), talked about it accurately (intentionality), supported it with partners (mutuality) and have now successfully piqued the curiosity of the market. Relax and enjoy the ride: you’re doing good work and people want to talk with you about it.
How to go about this? It will, of course, depend upon your brand, goals, customer, etc., but there are some general principles and tools that are useful for most any organization. At its core, exchange is about being willing and able to talk with your customers, but even before that it’s about listening to them. Understanding what your customers want to know is not only invaluable for matters of business intelligence and strategy; it means that, if done properly, your responses will be received as being on-message, appropriate and meaningful.
This exchange between you and your customers (and your customers among themselves) is a great opportunity to share a fuller story of why you do what you do. Indeed, Simon Sinek, suggests you start with “why” because it is in the “why” that we can inspire people. Ever on-message, Start With Why is the title of his book and the theme of his TEDx talk.
Sinek offers a valuable means of connecting these dots with people because you’re making the connection together and in terms that are mutually significant. In his TEDx talk he suggests inverting the process of engaging people. Instead of spending all your time speaking about features and benefits (“what”) or value proposition (“how”), he observes that there is deep value when we talk about why we do what we do (“why”). It’s an invitation to share a deep, emotional connection that really gets to the heart of your reason for being in business. This invitation is ideally suited to the PRIME principle of exchange because it plays to your strengths: rigor, openness, passion and authenticity.
It has been said that “advertising is the price of being boring,” you have successfully demonstrated that you’re not boring because people are actively seeking you out. They want to talk with you about …well, YOU. Similar to Sinek’s proposition of starting with “why,” Scott likes to put this in terms of three key factors: who you are, what you stand for and why you matter. Your goal now is to listen to these individuals and be prepared to share these things (among others) with them regarding their favorite issues: an exchange of meaning, sincerity and value.
Lately I’ve had several organizations seeking out help with their “social media strategy.” As I spend more and more time explaining these things I’ve started to initiate the process by asking a series of questions: who is your customer? who is your brand? where do they meet? why?
Ultimately this hinges upon one observation: we seek out and sustain connections in the social web in order to create value. This is an oft-stated thesis, but an important one nonetheless. My goal today is to briefly introduce how and why this is and how it relates to brands.
a glimpse at life in the Clif Bar breakroom
In the brand strategy world we often encourage a client to “let the brand drive the decision process.” This brand-based thinking is also very useful in the social media world. If your brand makes rubber gaskets for industrial widgets it’s probably more important that you have a solid blog (and Twitter account) that enables you to discuss industry trends/topics related to your customers and their up- and downstream needs than for you to have a Foursquare mayorship incentive or a Facebook page with giveaways. If your washer brand is based upon integrity, quality, service and price and your customers are industrial widget makers, then you’ll probably want to use your social web presence to enhance their experience of you and your brand: respond promptly to customer input, share behind the scenes content that enhances your brand and its story. Use it as a means of differentiation: put up that funny photo of the time the account manager’s dog got into the breakroom leftovers. Have your senior product designer put up a technical blog post that shares R&D information about how and why the new line of washers is superior to the competition. Post a write-up of the company’s Relay For Life team. Don’t try to get Justin Bieber to tweet about your product. The supply chain manager mightn’t care if you have a Facebook “like” button on your homepage, but you might build a closer connection with them if they come across the Relay For Life post and see that there are people behind the email addresses with which they interact. Whatever you do, make sure it’s valuable: simultaneously in service to the brand and the customer’s needs.
Seeing as it’s the social web, there is even more potential for socially-oriented brands. If you have a brand that cultivates supporters, this is a great way to solidify that relationship and turn them into evangelists. Again, this is done by utilizing your social media efforts to be valuable. Give them a behind-the-scenes peek at the brand they love. Save them time and money. Share content they care about. Give them something exclusive that rewards them for reaching out to your brand. Be fun. The tricky part is understanding how customer needs and expectations interface with the brand. There is no ready solution to this challenge—no “app for that”—only active listening and earnest interaction. That being said, the process is moved along greatly if you make sure to “let the brand drive the decision.” As someone who loves consumer insights and digital ethnography, I speak from experience when I say that there is MUCH that can be learned about your business by working with the people who evangelize it. They are, after all, the very reason you do what you do. They love what you stand for—the way you make them feel—talk with them about it. Find out what more can be done.
There are several factors that you must keep in mind when constructing a social media strategy. A few important ones:
Objectives – what is your desired outcome? (and don’t just say “more money!”) More brand impressions? A 10% increase in sales of product X over the next 60 days? More followers on Twitter? More blog comments? Improved clickthrough from the point of first contact to the product page? More positive ratings on Yelp? The first mistake that brands make is to step into the social web without a coherent strategy and set of desired outcomes. Make a strategic plan and work from there. Revisit it frequently. Make mistakes, own up to them, learn, improve.
Available resources—Be honest with yourself: do you have 5 hours a week to do all the requisite legwork to keep a sustained and engaging presence online? 10 hours? 1 hour? Your social media strategy is better served by 2 hours of precise, effective and well-aligned efforts than 5 disoriented hours of standing in front of a “firehose” of digital information. Many organizations are tempted to hand it all off to a “Social Media Intern,” but I’ve always encouraged a reexamination of this. Would you leave an intern in charge of your press releases, customer service calls, sales generation, media relations, copywriting and branding? Of course not. The social web calls for strategic thinking and execution. Invite all the appropriate parties to the table for strategic planning and work from there. If you have an intern and you think you need to spend 20 hours/week executing this plan, you need to involve them in the whole process. Find someone who has what it takes to be a director-of-social-media-in-training and groom them for the big time. If you treat the social efforts as being that thing that the intern does between getting the mail and replacing the coffee filter, you’re going to get what you paid for.
Creativity—One of the things that I love about the social web is how much room there is for innovation. It’s wide open, folks; you can do more than just self-promote and give away swag—take this as an opportunity to refine and demonstrate your brand promise and identity. A couple examples of interesting (though not necessarily recommended) initiatives:
Skittles changed the front page of their website to simply display any and all tweets that had “Skittles” in the title. …with interesting results.
Air New Zealand asked trivia questions about New Zealand and got over 4,000,000 organic brand impressions.
Jimmy Choo’s exclusive and high-end Foursquare treasure hunt encouraged fans to seek out destinations that were a part of the fashion scene.
OMG, I'm FAMOUS!
These campaigns all come back to that recurring theme of value as a factor of branding. Skittles, who for so long encouraged us to do the impossible act of tasting rainbows, opened their front door and enabled us to do the impossible: instantly find ourselves on the front page of Skittles.com. Jimmy Choo offered a way for high-end customers who care about fashion to use their smartphones to more readily hone their visibility on that very scene, all by virtue of being encouraged to interact with a brand that thrives in the space.
You can see how this value-building process is delicate: it would make little sense for an elite, niche brand like Jimmy Choo to open up their front page to a Twitter search, and Skittles would be tremendously off-brand if they were to send you on a treasure hunt among fancy shops selling $200 T-shirts. A brand must first understand their customer and how their customer wants to interact, then brainstorm–come up with a fun, surprising and meaningful way to make that happen. Try it. Don’t worry about figuring out if you’re doing it right; you’ll know because they’ll tell you.
This is part five of an ongoing series of developing thoughts on the intersection of authentic messaging and sustainability. In part one I introduce the concept of greenwash-fighting marketing that follows 5 “PRIME” principles: Participation, Rigor, Intentionality, Mutuality and Exchange. In part two I elaborate on the concept of participation. In part three I gush about rigor and how strong, verifiable sustainability information is one of the surest antidotes to greenwashing. In part four I discuss intentionality in terms of expressing an organization’s true sustainability aims: how to do it well and why it’s sometimes more important to be honest than good. Please join me now as I consider the role of mutuality as a valuable step in moving authentic sustainability messaging externally, into the public realm. As always, comments are appreciated and encouraged.
Mutuality
Sustainability claims: Use, whenever possible or necessary, third-party partners for support and advancement of their goals [Mutuality]
As we’ve discussed so far, sustainable systems are not easily implemented, let alone discussed publicly. Many organizations find themselves in a Catch-22 where they vacillate between their interest in exploring elements of sustainability and their fear of reprisal for any missteps (or misstatements) along the way. The PRIME framework is specifically designed to work through these issues. Mutuality is concerned with the advancement of an organization’s goals and partners who can help it do precisely that. There are two parts to this: the goals and the partners.
We’ll get to goals in a moment but first I want to say that, regarding third-party partners, it’s important to recognize that it is not only unnecessary but sometimes counterproductive for an organization to clamber for any and all certification and legitimacy-building labels they can muster. It’s not about racing to get the most third-party partners; it’s about collaborating with the best, most mission-aligned organizations that are out there. If you’re an architecture firm whose designs don’t reflect any concern about environmental issues, it would be kind of silly for you to go to brag about using partially recycled paper or having an Energy Star refrigerator in the office. You’re an architecture firm; most of your environmental impact is going to be associated with the production and utilization of your buildings, not the device your office uses to keep lunch cold. Conversely, here at From The Rooftops, the designs we produce are conceptual rather than physical—some of the largest parts of our footprint will be associated with commuting, paper and energy consumption. For us, using an efficient refrigerator would be a much more sizable chunk of our footprint.
You can see how this relates to goals, then. The goal of an architecture firm is to design great buildings, not refrigerate leftovers in a slightly more efficient manner. To be sure, it’s great to do that, too, but an organization needs to be honest with itself regarding its identity and purpose (not to mention the way it expresses such things): if you design buildings and you want to lay some claim to sustainability, you’re probably going to want to be conversant in all things LEED and other green design organizations and standards. Why does your organization exist? And don’t tell me your answer is just, “to make widgets.” Hopefully the goals of your organization are more significant—to help solve a certain problem; to bring about greater happiness; to design enduring aesthetic structures that not only shelter but inspire—something that matters, right? Right. Okay, how does this match up with your sustainability aspirations? If those deeper reasons for your organization’s existence lack a legitimate sustainability element, you’re going to be hard-pressed to talk about it authentically. Pepsi’s brand goals might be promoting “enjoyment,” but if their brand is held back by various issues (water, bottles, corn syrup), they will have a hard time talking about “enjoyment [+ sustainability].” An architecture firm that has credentials for and designs passive homes or LEED projects? Yeah, we can share more enthusiastically in their story of: “designing enduring aesthetic structures that not only shelter but inspire [+ sustainability].” Once our imaginary architecture firm has their in-house ducks in a row (via participation, rigor and intentionality), they have the foundation and legitimacy from which they can begin to move externally and seek additional verification and symbiotic relationships (like certified passive homes, LEED, etc.) through which they might be able to enhance the magnitude of their efforts.
The PRIME principle of participation requires demonstrating the systemic, deep internalization of sustainability. Rigor helps you talk about it in a manner that is validated and meaningful to an increasingly skeptical audience. Intentionality concerns the discussion of such things in line with a frank, brand-aligned and consistent narrative. Mutuality can be seen as a step toward moving this process externally—finding real-world partners that are aligned with the deep system of internal, well-supported and brand-aligned claims and activities. Such brand- (and therefore goal-)aligned partnerships are often mutually beneficial: by adopting and promoting a third-party standard, the firm gains tangible support for their green claims and the third-party organization gains increasing legitimacy in the marketplace (by virtue of a “network externality” or “network effect”), thus enhancing the value of the standard and encouraging others to adopt it as well. In this way, the adoption of such standards can be not only beneficial for the adopting organization and the third-party auditor but for all others—past, present and future—working with the auditor, too. I guess you could say that, sometimes, 1 + 1 can equal 3 …unless you’re Mr. Garciano, my old math teacher, in which case you’d shake your head and say, “Caleb, how did you ever make it past elementary school!?”
Much of the public is quite skeptical about sustainability claims (and for good reason); the better equipped you are to demonstrate your chops, the better (and more differentiated) you are. This is exchange: the last (and perhaps most rewarding) step in the PRIME marketing process. You’ve set the foundation (participation), backed it up with integrity and depth (rigor, intentionality), talked about it accurately (intentionality), supported it with partners (mutuality) and have now successfully piqued the curiosity of the market. Relax and enjoy the ride: you’re doing good work and people want to talk with you about it.
