Let’s start at the beginning…

The plan was simple: let’s be what the others weren’t. They were synthetic; we were natural. They were about sweaty men; we were gender inclusive… They were about hard adventure; we were about kinship with nature. They were about function only; we were about design and creativity. Exploring for us wasn’t the highest peak, but an exploration of something much bigger – nature itself.

These words from CEO, Jeremy Moon, brilliantly capture the essence of Icebreaker – the New Zealand outdoor clothing brand, whose nature-inspired, pure merino wool outdoor clothing system is another fabulous example of brand- and sustainability-driven business strategy.

My blossoming love affair with the brand only intensified last weekend as I popped into Snow+Rock to buy my four-year-old daughter a new set of thermals. For me, it was an encounter that added yet another layer (no pun intended) to their brilliance – a perfect combination of sausage and sizzle…

First the sausage…

Emotional ‘sizzle’ is for nought without product ‘sausage’, and product performance is where the Icebreaker system really scores, thanks to taking its cue from Mother Nature.

The merino wool fibre, it turns out, is a miraculous thing – not only providing outstanding insulation, but also incredible softness and breathability. And because of its natural antimicrobial properties, it doesn’t stink either, even after a sweaty run.

By all accounts there are folks who’ve been able to go for months without having to wash their Icebreaker, so brilliantly does it work (not something you can say about the synthetic competition); and, when you do eventually wash it, you can do so on a perfectly ordinary washing cycle (no need for special detergents to get the whiff out).

Feels better. Warms better. Breathes better. Smells better. That’s a clear victory for natural merino wool on product performance, and what was really great to see at the weekend was how the whole Icebreaker value proposition was reflected in the packaging of Lottie’s new gear as well…

Compact and 100% recyclable

Firstly, you’re immediately struck by just how compact it is, and the fact that the inner tray and outer sleeve are both made out of nothing but 100% recyclable cardboard. Look a bit closer, though, and you realise they’ve done something else really clever…

'The Pack with the Hole'

Notice the hole on the front of the outer sleeve (one that on other packages might have been covered by a bit of clear plastic)? That’s genius because it immediately allows you to touch the product inside. ‘Wow, that’s soft!’ you say, and all those messages about superior product performance encircling the cut-out are given an extra kinaesthetic kick.

…then the sizzle…

There’s no shortage of emotional sizzle either, with some wonderfully irreverent copywriting on the back of the box (a bit reminiscent of the kind of copy that appears on Innocent’s smoothie cartons):

The New Zealand merino sheep’s amazing all-weather coat lets him roam the rugged Southern Alps in snow, rain, sun and wind. Now you can wear the same outdoor clothing system – minus the horns, hooves and dags (that’s New Zealanders’ word for sheep poo!). Your Icebreaker doesn’t itch, feels light against your skin, looks great and locks in warmth – and it’s good for the environment. Your Icebreaker rocks!

Accompanied by mini-testimonials (including from 8-year-old, Alex, who says that, if his mum wants to wash his Icrebreaker, she basically has to steal it from his room under cover of darkness!), this helps to create sense of fun, playfulness and love for the brand that amplifies, still further, the contrast between the ‘soft’ Icebreaker and its ‘hard’ competitors.

There’s another lovely little touch, too, with the finger puppets stamped into the cardboard of the inner tray (hours of fun, no doubt, for the younger wearer.)

The piece-de-resistance here, though, is undoubtedly Icebreaker’s pun-tastic invention of the ‘Baacode’ – a unique number on the clothing label that, if you enter it on their website, actually traces the sheep stations from which the fibres that make up your garment were sourced. Complete with extensive bios of the farmers concerned, it’s a great way for Icebreaker to illustrate its commitment, not only to its suppliers, but also to full product transparency.

Tracing your garment

Where the fibres came from

Personal stories from the sheep stations

In conclusion…

Ultimately, I guess, this is all a rather long-winded and effusive way to express my admiration for a not inconsiderable amount of integrative thinking; also, though, to illustrate an important point from a previous post…

Actions taken in the name of sustainability are liable to be worthless – indeed can be positively harmful to a company’s brand and the bottom line – if the underlying principles aren’t demonstrably applied to day-to-day decision-making (i.e. sustainability ain’t about PR; it’s about culture!)… The authenticity of your commitment stems from the materiality of your actions – i.e. beyond the thin veneer of charitable giving, cause-related marketing etc., that commitment should be self-evident in the very products and services you provide.

In case you were wondering what that might look like in real life, I reckon the above offers a pretty decent example.

Enjoy…

Having mentioned the utterly brilliant outdoor clothing company, Icebreaker, in a couple of posts – and figuring there are probably still a lot of folks out there who know little or nothing about them – I thought it might be worth sharing this TV interview with company founder, Jeremy Moon.

Icebreaker, for me, is rapidly becoming the new Interface – another living, breathing example of how companies can do extraordinarily well by putting sustainability at the heart of business.

Witness the extent to which Icebreaker has managed to completely buck the downward trend in retail – a company that started in a guy’s bedroom 15 years ago in New Zealand now turning over $120 million, with a presence in over 3,000 outlets in 37 countries, and set to re-double in size over the next few years.

Witness, too, Jeremy’s emphasis on a singular clarity of purpose and his exquisitely simple treatise on the powerful combination of differentiation and meaning that his biomimetic, merino-wool product delivers – one that commands a premium price not on the basis of its sustainable credentials alone, but because those credentials actually translate into a superior product that outperforms its less sustainable, synthetic alternatives (rather like Puma’s clever little bag I posted about a few months back).

And what wonderfully modest, natural and authentic delivery too!

All-in-all a thoroughly impressive and switched-on bloke…

Nevertheless, with five books already in the bag (attracting nothing but four- and five-star reviews on Amazon too, btw), another three in the latter stages of development, plus ideas for at least another two, maybe it’s not a total pipe-dream?

To these hopefully soon-to-be-completed guides – including the 55-minute-guide to corporate branding (Dave Allen), user-centred design (William Hudson) and cross-cultural communication (Indy Neogy) – it’s also probably about time to add second editions to the books that started it all off, namely The Talent Journey and Live Long and Prosper.

For my part, I just started thinking this morning about my opening gambit for an updated book and figured I might as well share it here. Have a butcher’s and let me know what you think…

Preface to 2nd Edition

So, what’s changed since the first edition of this book was published two years ago?

The short answer, somewhat paradoxically, is both everything and nothing.

Slightly depressingly, what hasn’t changed is the vast majority of companies’ understanding of what it really means to be sustainable.

The ones who get the concepts and arguments laid out in this book have got it for a long time already. These include not only more recent start-ups, like the brilliant Icebreaker in New Zealand, for whom sustainability is the very essence of their business; they also comprise long-established corporations like Interface in the US and Marks & Spencer in the UK, who have recognised the changing frame conditions within which we’re now operating and that their long-term prosperity depends on nothing less than the redesign of core business strategy and operations.

Meanwhile, in general, those who didn’t get it before recession struck still don’t get it now. Indeed, if anything, all recession has done is to entrench short-term thinking.

And yet…

Everywhere I look, momentum is growing. Sustainability is no longer the exclusive realm of hair-shirted environmentalists and pie-in-the-sky idealists.

The need for business to reconnect strategy to a sense of social progress – that creating shared value is perhaps the competitive advantage of the 21st century – is rapidly gaining currency, even in the hallowed corridors of Harvard Business School and other temples of traditional, left-brained management thinking.

When strategy guru, Michel Porter, starts proselytising about a more constructive form of capitalism, you know it’s time to pull on your track shoes. The kind of stuff that people like Paul Hawken, Ray Anderson and Jonathon Porritt have been talking and writing about for ages has finally hit the mainstream!

And for every poster-child of old-world CSR to have come an almighty cropper in recent times (not least BP, whose ‘Beyond Petroleum’ greenwash has come back to bite them royally on the bum in the wake of the disaster in the Mexican Gulf), there’s a story of another major corporation embracing new-world sustainability.

Consider the launch last year of Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan, for example, explicitly framed by CEO, Paul Polman, “not as a project to celebrate, but a new business model to implement,” based on the fundamental understanding that materially addressing sustainability not only offers opportunities to save costs, but is also a critical engine of innovation and brand equity.

In short, then, the case for building sustainable brands – and for a book that gives sympaticos and sceptics alike a quick and easy way of getting to grips with the big idea and how to action it – has never been stronger.

Don’t worry. While slightly expanded, with additional thoughts and visuals culled from my blog and my practical experiences of consulting with clients, I promise you’ll still be able to read this book from cover to cover in under an hour.

I hope you enjoy it.

Live long and prosper!

D.

As I read a lovely email from Karen Hall of Interface, congratulating me on my new job, I wasn’t quite prepared for the sting in the tail.

“You know about Ray I presume,” it said at the bottom, followed by a blog link. I clicked through to find that, after a long and courageous battle, my biggest sustainability hero, Ray Anderson, had sadly lost his fight with cancer and passed away on Monday.

They say you should never meet your heroes; that the experience will inevitably end up being a disappointment.

Well, thanks to the relationship between Interface and Ashridge, I did meet my hero a few years back at the launch of a joint consulting venture, and I can say that – at least as far as Ray was concerned – nothing could be further from the truth.

As I wrote immediately after the event, he was immensely inspiring; not only for creating, in Interface, an undeniable example that sustainability and profitability can be perfect bedfellows, but also – having achieved what he and the people of Interface have – his extraordinary generosity and humility in sharing the benefits of his experience.

And that spirit of generosity is something I benefited from directly too.

In hope rather than expectation, when I’d finished writing my book, I fished out Ray’s business card and dropped him a line to see if he might be willing to offer me his feedback and – if I was really lucky – an endorsement.

It was a stone-cold punt, I thought. After all, he was the founder and chairman of a $billion corporation, and I was just some giant, speccy bloke he’d chatted with for 5 minutes over a cup of coffee at Ashridge!

I was wrong.

I got a response back from Ray within the day. He was about to head off on vacation for a couple of weeks, he wrote, but would be taking my manuscript with him and would get back to me as soon as he returned.

And he did – with a lengthy, thorough and thoughtful response – and a lovely quote for the cover to boot.

Ray: you weren’t just a true pioneer of sustainable business, you were a great human being, and I wish you could have been around to see Interface make it all the way to the summit of ‘Mount Sustainability’.

RIP.

Now, it seems, I’ve got another reason to like him…

As my old MBA buddy, Neil McCrossen, kindly pointed out to me today, Coren has recently begun incorporating sustainability criteria into his restaurant reviews for The Times, drawing upon scores awarded by the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) - see here.

[A small aside: it turns out that the SRA's co-founder is one Giles Gibbons, not only the founder of leading sustainable business consultancy, Good Business, but also one of the luminaries who saw fit to endorse my book. Small world or what?! Anyhoo...]

The SRA score is awarded according to performance against 14 different criteria – everything from the obvious issues of local, sustainable sourcing of ingredients and waste management to the social responsibility they take for staff and the local community.

What’s really great about what Coren is doing with this, though, is that he’s not just tagging that score onto his reviews as an afterthought. He’s fully integrating it into his overall rating for the restaurant, which, as he explains in his own inimitable style, means that…

…depending on the SRA’s audit, a restaurant’s overall rating could be affected by up to three points out of ten. I could have a great meal and give 8/10 for both food and service, and then a bum rating from the SRA could lead to its getting as little as 5, and being quite furious with me for giving so much credence to environmental issues, but then maybe thinking about changing.

That, my dear Mr Coren, is a master stroke, and I salute you for it!

Of course, having worked closely with Kevin Keohane for several years now – both as a freelance consultant to his Brand & Talent practice and as partners-in-crime on CommScrum and the 55-minute guide series – I know very well that he (at least) gets the much more progressive take on sustainability I’m always spouting off about – i.e. sustainability understood in the context of fundamental, long-term business viability, rather than peripheral greening.

But – and it’s a very big but – I still have considerable doubts over the willingness and capability of most creative agencies to really get with the programme in terms of the implications of all of this.

Taking my definition of sustainability as, “a perspective on brand/business strategy that inextricably links long-term success with serving a higher social purpose,” what we’re ultimately talking about is sustainability-led business transformation – the re-design of core business in pursuit of shared value.

I know there are plenty of creative agencies that do an outstanding job of helping the already-converted, not only to report transparently on their own progress, but also to encourage other businesses to follow suit by offering compelling stories of the value those actions have generated (witness M&S’ Plan A update and How We Do Business Report, produced by Oliver Dudok van Heel, Ben Richards and the sustainability team over at Radley Yeldar, for example).

Likewise, as illustrated by Puma’s clever little bag posted about the other week, I know there are plenty of designers helping organisations to take promises of a much more authentic and material approach to sustainability (ones that so often end up as empty rhetoric) and give them tangible form in terms of core products and services.

And that’s great.

Really, it’s fabulous progress.

And yet…

I can’t help feeling that this is predominantly downstream execution for the minority of organisations that already get it.

What about those who don’t?

Let’s imagine that Company X, which doesn’t exactly have a stellar record on sustainability, approaches a bunch of brand/comms agencies for help.

How many would have the balls to front up and say words to the effect of…

Sure we can help you with your sustainability communications, but you know what? Communication alone isn’t going to overcome negative perceptions and deliver tangible value for your business.

Perhaps we could share some of our insights on what it takes to build a relevant and credible story on sustainability and, on the back of that, develop an initial programme of work to really understand what that means in the context of your business strategy.

…versus how many would immediately leap at the chance to flog some neatly ‘productised’ offering around building sustainability campaigns or sustainability reporting that, in completely failing to address the underlying issues of strategy and culture, will end up achieving absolutely nothing other than the short-term feelgood factor of having created some nice, glossy materials?

Not many, I’d wager.

We’ve all seen the stats on how often change efforts fail as a result of poor communication, and I think the sequence of statements below is potentially a very valuable lens for pinpointing why.

As you read them, I’d ask you to pause and reflect on your own experiences – whether at the helm, or on the receiving end, of change communication.

Where, for you, do the wheels tend to fall off?

And given that anything beyond item 2 is not in the exclusive gift of the change folks (NB my oft-cited mantra about how the messages implicit in organisational design and culture will always trump those explicit in formal communications), how and with whom do you think the most effective partnerships can be forged to make this stuff happen?

What is seen is not yet heard…

What is heard is not yet understood…

What is understood is not yet believed…

What is believed is not yet advocated…

What is advocated is not yet acted on…

What is acted on is not yet completed.

I’d be interested in your thoughts.

If you’re thinking “Packaging? Yuk, how dull!” just hold your horses for a second.

Quite apart from the fact that packaging waste is a major problem – 6 million tonnes of it discarded every year by UK households alone (much of it, of course, ending up in landfill) – a couple of the examples Chris cites are actually rather sexy and seriously bloody clever.

None more so than Puma’s aptly named “clever little bag” – an innovation developed by Yves Behar (he of XO Laptop fame) – which is just such a smart idea on so many levels, and amply illustrates the value that design can bring to the development of more sustainable products and systems.

What’s so clever about it is the way in which it simultaneously attacks the packaging waste problem from both ends of the life-cycle:

1. Tackling inputs – How can we design waste out of the system through our choice of materials? How can we reduce the types and volume of materials used, reduce the energy and water involved in their sourcing, manufacture and transportation, and ensure that they are safe and healthy for people to use at every stage (including all probable end-of-life scenarios)?
2. Delaying/preventing disposal – How can we migrate behaviours away from single-use packaging that’s instantly discarded once a product is opened? What if we could give packaging life beyond life? Once it’s fulfilled its purpose of protecting the product on its way to the customer, what other purposes could it usefully fulfil? How can we make it desirable to keep?

What’s even cleverer about this solution (to my mind at least) is the way in which it potentially reframes the value proposition of sustainability for consumers.

Sure, it ticks all the obvious environmental performance boxes (8,500 tonnes less paper consumed, 20 million mega-joules of electricity saved, 1 million litres less fuel oil used, 1 million litres of water conserved etc.), but it goes beyond that.

The “clever little bag” doesn’t just filter out the nasties; it gives the customer something extra – something they can continue to use, for example, to store their shoes in a suitcase or kitbag, to stop their other stuff from getting mucky.

That may not sound like much in practice but, in principle, it’s a massive shift – a reason to choose the more sustainable option not simply because it’s “the right thing to do” (essentially a proposition based on guilt), but because the solution actually outperforms its less sustainable alternatives (one based on added value).

That principle, writ large, is at the heart of creating mass market appeal for more sustainable products, experiences and business models and (as I’ve written in the past) where design can add greatest value – by replacing messages of doom and gloom with ones of hope and aspiration.

He concludes with the following lines – the importance of which is impossible to understate and deserves further unpicking:

I guess if there is a moral here it is to always remember that the definition of sustainability is context specific, and that the first part of any conversation – with stakeholders, with consumers, with each other – should be to answer the question ‘How do WE define sustainability?’

Amen to that, and – as ever, it seems – it’s the core principle of materiality that holds the key.

Why? Because materiality is the key to demonstrating an authentic commitment to sustainability and is essentially there to be examined and judged along two critical lines:

1. Company-based materiality – i.e. beyond the thin veneer of corporate philanthropy and cause-related marketing, organisations’ sustainability strategies should (at a minimum) be focused on addressing impacts directly related to their sphere of operations. (For example, if you’re a bank, sustainability has bugger all to do with painting schools in Africa and everything to do with responsible lending and investment!) Better yet, sustainability should be a fundamental design value underpinning business strategy and culture, such that your core products and services are geared towards creating value for the business and for society in one and the same act.
2. Market-based materiality – i.e. that goal of creating shared value should also see sustainability/business strategy geared towards helping to solve those problems and concerns that most greatly affect society in the specific markets in which you operate. Take my Saudi mobile phone client as an example. In Saudi Arabia, where chronic health conditions like CHD and hypertension are one of society’s most pressing concerns, it’s material to consider how mobile technologies might be applied to improving access to, and effectiveness of, healthcare services.

Much to the chagrin of clients who wish you’d just reach up to the shelf labelled “Best Practice” and pull down a nice, neat cookbook solution, the upshot of all of this is that no two strategies are ever likely to be identical.

The principle of materially dictates the consideration of a combination of contextual factors that will always vary from business to business and market to market. Whilst the basic principle remains constant, its embodiment in strategy and execution are necessarily different in each case.

This is the reason why Brian’s apparently innocuous question is of such vital importance, and why the commitment to real sustainability of anyone (provider or client) who suggests otherwise should be considered highly questionable!

—————-

* Sustainability is a perspective on brand and business strategy that inextricably links long-term success with serving a higher social purpose