For my last blog post, I thought I’d write down some of my biggest takeaways from my semester with sustainability. I took Sustainability Marketing because it sounded interesting even though I wasn’t the most sustainability focused at the time. I recycled when I could, I would read environmental news sometimes, and I’d try my best to reduce waste in my life. But generally, I wasn’t as engaged as I could have been. I also had no specific plans to integrate sustainability in to my career.

Throughout this course, I learned that innovation and sustainability will go hand in hand in the future. It will be a competitive advantage for companies who choose to lead the pack today and innovate in a way that has positive externalities for the environment and society.  As resources dwindle, the least resource intensive products will conquer. As consumers increase their social awareness, the ethically sourced products will conquer. This course has provided me insight in to green consumer segments and targeting strategies that will help me be an innovative and sustainable professional.

I also learned that green products must be great first. With all the examples we discussed in class, this now seems intuitive but we face a market that has been saturated for years with lower quality green products. It is an uphill battle staged against consumers who are downright convinced green products don’t compare to their less green counterparts. Our products must be the best and the greenest to win over the most skeptical consumer.

A personal takeaway, that wasn’t necessarily in the syllabus, was that sustainability is an ever-evolving topic that we must always continue to educate ourselves on. We are far from knowing all there is to know about the environment and we most likely never will. Nothing is black and white. We must never be complacent in our knowledge but rather always seek out more. Innovation will be based on the most up to date knowledge of the environment and the things we are doing today will probably be outdated and replaced by much better practices in the future – we have to always be ready for that change.

Not only is sustainability ever evolving, it’s a complicated mix of both science and opinion. I don’t mean the climate change deniers when I say opinion, rather I mean everyone else’s opinions. We each have different hierarchies in our mind of what is most important – whether it’s our planet, our people, or even our animals. It is nobody’s place to set out a hierarchy for all. Rather our companies should reflect a purpose that is inherent to our business practices, our workforce and most importantly our consumer. There is no perfect and so there is no company that can stop striving to be better.

Thank you to everyone in the class – I learned a great deal from our discussions and will take it all with me in to the workforce. See you on the forefront of sustainable innovation!

When we discussed customer cost in class I immediately thought of the clothing company, Everlane, who I had just purchased a sweater from online a day before. In class, we had discussed how important pricing is for the differentiation of the product. In most instances, price is a reflection of the quality of the product. Usually, a lower price indicates lower quality or lower demand and subsequently a subpar product. Everlane takes this notion and turns it on its head.

Everlane sells quality clothing items online at a reduced price while utilizing unprecedented honesty in its marketing and web content. They call it ‘Radical Transparency’. They give in depth information on all of the factories and distribution centers they use as well as the cost at each step of their supply chain, focusing on the relationship they have with these companies and their focus on ethical labour practices. This is done for each product so when you are looking at one of their backpacks for example, you can see it was made in the Dongguan factory. You can also see the cost of materials, hardware, labour, duties and transport.

On top of all this, they show their markup and compare it to the ‘traditional retail’ markup. This is the part of the process that allows them to utilize price as an indicator of quality (the traditional retail markup) while still using lower pricing as a differentiator. While their backstory sounds quite altruistic, this is a genius marketing ploy that has worked in their favour.

We talk about how consumers are willing to pay higher prices for quality goods but they often don’t know the quality and cannot act out this rationality in the way they think they do. So for a company to not only showcase quality and be transparent in its pricing but to also do so at a reduced price for consumers is a surefire success.

They have room to grow in terms of environmental sustainability, but with a clear focus on radical transparency – they need to make sure that whatever they do, it is the correct path to take, as they cannot hide anything. No ‘Shaded Green’ for Everlane.

What do you think of Everlane?

Our in-class discussion of partnerships in sustainability was quite interesting. I hadn’t realized how many companies there are working together on environmental and social initiatives. Most of our discussions revolved around large companies in partnerships with other large firms or non-profits, presumably due to the fact that their emissions are much larger and important for the overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and waste. But growing up with a small family business, I was more interested to see what initiatives there were, if any, for smaller firms to form partnerships.

After conducting some research online, I found several articles about a ‘partnership’ of 24 small breweries. They came together to sign a ‘Climate Declaration’, which media purports pledges them each to take their own actions to reduce emissions and to support political action at the national level in the US. These news articles stated that these breweries are recognizing that their business is currently inefficient with large usage of energy and water. As well, the hop and barley needed for beer is sensitive to climate change, so supporting political action that goes further than their own reduced emissions is important since such small brewing companies can hardly make a large enough impact on their own.

This climate declaration is organized through a third party non-profit organization called Ceres and doesn’t even have any commitment attached to it. The declaration has been signed also by several other businesses in the US. It is simply a statement that climate change is a real and an important issue in the US to show that American companies are in support of climate change policy. While the President has tweeted positively about it, the efficacy of the declaration is unknown. It does allow small businesses to have a voice along with larger firms, which is nice to see. But it also acts as a statement to consumers that these companies are in fact doing something sustainably when in reality, they could only be hiding behind the declaration itself.

What do you think of the climate declaration? Just buzz or real game changer?

Read more about it here:

Why this company signed the declaration.

Oregon’s Breweries join the declaration.

Ceres talks Breweries.

When we discuss sustainability communications in class, it always seems focused on showcasing benefits and value for the consumer. The consumer holds a lot of power in this way and so any advertising or messaging is done to please the consumer. Shaming the consumer with pictures of dying animals or messaging that talks about environmental harms has been proven ineffective. But what about shaming them with much harsher language?

An anti-littering campaign in Toronto caused quite a stir online last year when it was revealed. The ads showcase pieces of distinctly branded trash on the ground with the package lettering spelling out different insults for the type of person who litters like ‘Dipstick’ or ‘Lowlife’. The copy on each ad reads “Littering says a lot about you”. These ads spread across the Internet rapidly last summer on Tumblr, Reddit, and other media outlets. It received 130,000 notes on Tumblr within 24 hours of being posted. On top of that, I found these ads on Tumblr today, which means that they are still floating around even months later.

Unfortunately, the ads had to be pulled from use in the city only a month later due to copyright infringement cited by several of the companies who’s products were used for the trash. But no matter, the ads have clearly had a second life online where many people have since seen them.

It is hard to say whether this type of advertising is all that effective. The ads are very unique and tonally interesting. They are abrasive without being harsh or preachy but this may not have any direct relation to decreased littering behaviour. I personally enjoy these advertisements but I think I fully appreciated them when I could see them all at once in a sequence online, rather than individually on the street or in the subway. I also enjoyed the fact that something Torontonian was receiving positive attention for once. I’m also not sure that Toronto is facing the right littering problem. In Toronto, the trash and recycling bins downtown are often overflowing and messy or there are too few or far between when you need one. Increasing the accessibility of bins and how often they are emptied is probably more important.

What do you think of the ads? See the rest below. Continue reading →

We’ve discussed it several times throughout the course, and I’ve even discussed it in my very first blog post, but it bears repeating that innovation is essential to future sustainability. One example of such innovation is incredibly interesting to me and it is urban indoor farming. While several groups are planning such farms, the world’s largest indoor farm already exists in Japan and is toted as 100 times more productive than traditional farming methods. Custom LED lighting helps plants grow two times faster, shortening the day/night cycle. The plants grow on a series of shelves with highly regulated temperature and humidity.

While this lives on the opposite end of the spectrum from locally grown foods, it’s potentially more in line with current projections of overpopulation and growing urban areas. But with other innovations in food not always living up to expectations (GMO’s), it will be interesting to see whether indoor farmed foods will have different genetic properties making them more or less healthy. It is also questionable whether production of the special LED lightbulbs, the shelving units and the massive buildings themselves will be sustainable. In the particular case above, the farm is housed in a factory building left vacant after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. I am sure there are numerous buildings like this, especially in other areas affected by natural disasters, which could become much-needed local producers of fresh produce. Other indoor farming firms suggest utilizing existing public basements, as well, while some designers are interested in creating new vertical structures.

Examples of innovation like this are not only usually fascinating projects but they are key in creating discussion around climate change, sustainability and the environment. When surfing through environmental news online, I use a variety of sources like The Guardian or Reddit, and the discussions usually surround environmental innovation rather than much of what we discuss in class, including partnerships or small projects, which have much less viewership online. I find it quite interesting that the sustainability conversation is potentially biased towards the more novel solutions rather than the best solutions – what do you think?