sustainability marketing green sustainability marketing...

I chalk this one up to the Rube Goldberg machine that was built where the limits of reasonable human understanding and retention meet marketing.

This morning I was perusing the news when I read the curious headline 'Sustainability is the new "Green"' in my Google search email. It was an article detailing Aberdeen Group's findings about marketing sustainability. In addition to the rather uninformed headline, they state that businesses around the world have decided that 'sustainability is not synonymous with "green" or environmental initiatives.'

Hmmm.

I love consulting, and consulting firms. Consultants hold the power to come into an organization and innocently state truths that people in the organization know but cannot say, have said and can't get any support on, or have completely missed. But they also have the characteristic of not knowing the inner workings of the organization, so they have to kind of pick it up as they go. They adopt some organizational buzzwords, which is often switching one out for another, like using "strategy" instead of "game plan" or "path forward". They identify how to structure their messages so the findings are relevant to the company strategy. They also identify potential mine fields to avoid when they go about reporting said truths. But there is only so much time that they can spend on this. The result is that they end up having a 'profound naivete' feel to their reports.

Consultants are extremely valuable, and this is backed by the fact that they continue to be paid well. Outside observations and research can be pure gold. But sometimes the way their communications come across is just weird. The fact that businesses have drawn a distinguishable line between 'sustainability' and 'green' may be a direct result of many, many occurrences of this phenomenon with marketing consultants.

Sustainability is striving to remove all generators of 'waste' in human society, to streamline, simplify or remove the Rube Goldberg machines we built on top of nature's perfect, if emotionless, zero-waste system. Waste is not only physical stuff that we no longer see value in, it is also wasted money, wasted time, wasted labor, wasted productivity, and so on. It is anything that cannot be used for anything else.

After Al Gore put out 'An Inconvenient Truth,' marketers finally decided to go along with this 'trend' en masse and tried to figure out how to market the infinitely complex product of sustainability using conventional methods. Simplification was necessary, so they approached it in chunks: organic, local, recycled, renewable, and eventually, green. Perhaps assisted by the association of the color of trees and plants which was entirely overused in umpteen thousand ads during this time, consumers gradually recognized the term 'green' as a label under which all other sustainability concepts could be filed. As far as they understood them however, 'sustainability' was largely limited to an environmental context.

By this time, organizations who had been using the 'green' marketing label for years in the renewable energy, permaculture, organic, sustainable building, and other leading industries had learned to avoid the term because it was too vague and had become a way for folks who didn't want to hear about sustainability to nail down and invalidate an idea using technicalities. Like 'sustainability' had worn out its welcome before it, 'green' was poisoned and had to be replaced with something more sophisticated in order to retain its potency. Bob Willard found it.

Bob Willard, a 20+ IBM career man who had an epiphany much like Ray Anderson's of Interface, made a new career out of explaining how to talk to the business world about sustainability after his initial experience using the term in a board room. Business is constantly striving to maximize the value of its business assets, and dislikes vague, unactionable concepts like sustainability. Willard figured out that sustainability should be referred to as 'asset management' because ultimately sustainability is about maximizing the value (monetary and otherwise) of every asset (money, capital, labor, time, and so on). For proof, he cited the company Arthur Andersen. As it turned out, 90% of the accounting firm's 'assets' were not their employee talent or services but their trustworthiness. It wasn't on any balance sheet, but it single-handedly sunk the company once Enron's malfeasance revealed Arthur Andersen's manipulation of accounting numbers. Willard's approach offered a way to quantify sustainability concepts and directly measure their impact on company value. In Willard's simplicity, he had defined the true essence of sustainability in digestible terms.

So, after the bleeding edge of sustainability marketing and communication had shed terms like 'green' and 'sustainability' in favor of sophisticated, business-class language like 'asset management,' regular consumers were finally getting a handle on the concept summed up with the term 'green.' As that was happening the bandwagon effect kicked in, and greenwashers of various degrees looking to capitalize on the success of the new branding jumped on board and corrupted it. Networks of (mostly) third-party auditors developed, reviewing products and claims. Now there are so many facets to sustainability that thousands of these auditing groups are out there, saying different things as we try to sort it all out. It's very tiring.

The days of the term 'green' as a viable, reliable concept are numbered, at least from the perspective of the business world. As the article notes, businesses have pressed forward with their asset-based value creation, which, as Bob Willard promised, has proven "dramatically" effective, and have decided that they're okay with the term sustainability after all. But to them sustainability has nothing to do with 'green.' 'Sustainability' is business-grade asset management while 'green' is consumer environmental stuff (that these same businesses are presumably selling to their customers) and there is a clear difference between the two.

Ain't marketing grand?

So now we get to watch marketers come up with another name for the same concept to keep it hip and new. Meanwhile, having the headline suggest that 'sustainability' has replaced 'green' as the hip new trend is just irresponsible. Or profoundly naive.