Moral imperative motivating action

A cultural transformation underway now in food, beverage and lifestyle categories is having an impact on the path to purchase. Are you ready for it? Consumers are moving away from buying decisions founded entirely on evaluations of “what’s good for me” to also embracing “what’s good for the world around me.”

• In a recent study conducted by our insight research partner Brand Experience Group, 66% of US consumers are either passionate or concerned about sustainability commitments by brands and retailers. This insight is translating into marketplace behaviors as consumers look for more sustainable solutions at retail.

A form of moral imperative is rising to the surface in how consumers view their purchasing decisions. Increasingly, consumer buying is founded in symbolism and signaling to the outside world not only their own values, but also the sustainability readiness of the brands they prefer.

Conscientious Consumption has arrived. It is a criterion in the hierarchy of meaning consumers assign to brands. People are now voting their values and beliefs at the cash register. They want to align themselves with brands and retailers who are signaling environmental responsibility and standards of performance. Is your brand sustainability ready? Is this embedded in your go-to-market plan?

How brands address this shift on the path to purchase is creating significant questions about brand messaging strategy, as well as aligned on-pack and shelf communication to inform users of sustainability bona fides.

The coming shopping friction

How does the consumer actualize their moral motivation when shopping across multiple brand choices in food, beverage and lifestyle categories? How can they assess the sustainability readiness of Brand X vs. Brand Y? Consumer sentiment is once again tracking ahead of the current marketplace reality. Brands and retailers that step in to help guide shoppers on environmental standards will reap the benefits of added relevance multiplied by surprise and delight.

• For food retailers much as the “international” aisles became a shopping destination point years ago, can there be a health, wellness and sustainability section that features brands with an environmentally-responsible story to tell?

If brands don’t step up to acknowledge this change and improve communication based on these insights, it becomes near impossible to translate sustainability investments into tangible balance sheet outcomes. For those who do, the rewards may be great!

• The formula for sustainability success is science and metrics-based environmental and climate mitigation analysis of your operations and supply chain, served alongside clear established metrics for change and improvement. This performance is then multiplied exponentially by a strong, creative communications platform to tell that story to the right audience. Awareness of this narrative drives purchase.

Feeding the primacy of emotional outreach

Product feature and benefit selling has been the hallmark of CPG communications for decades. The emergence of these new societal and moral imperative considerations on the path to purchase recommends a more culture-forward brand messaging strategy. “What’s good for the world around us” is, by definition, an emotional construct.

In a recent Marketing Dive interview, Matt Kleinschmit, founder and CEO of insights research company Reach3 said, “Brand loyalty is really something that is, in fast-moving consumer goods, more of an aspiration than a reality. As a result, modern marketers in the CPG world have latched on to this idea of trying to establish emotional connections with consumers. If there’s an emotional connection, that will often trump functional benefits,” he reports. “Brands that can execute that in a smart way are winning.”

Smart in this case is recognizing the importance consumers are already placing on sustainability and environmental performance. From there brands can work through investments, policies and actions to demonstrate in credible ways how that readiness manifests in the products on offer. When higher purpose and mission intersect fully with product outreach strategies a form of engagement magic can occur. Now the motivation to buy takes on deeper meaning and added importance that transcends any existing parity (similarity) on price and formulation.

Is a trust mark needed?

Is it time to begin thinking about the development of a trust mark that employs credible independent third-party analysis to validate sustainability readiness? A mark could serve as a visual piece of retail shelf-friendly evidence that a brand is a better choice based on its verified sustainability bona fides.

Emergent is examining this idea in greater detail and will report back to our readers on potential solutions. The objective: create an anchor for trustworthy choice and credible reassurance that the fox isn’t guarding the hen house on the veracity of sustainability claims.

Stay tuned.

Closing the loop to digital marketing and activating purchase in the moment

Walmart recently announced a major partnership with Meredith, publishers of media brands like Better Homes & Gardens, Eating Well, Parents and Real Simple. The new AI driven integrated marketing platform they jointly create will feature “shoppable” content in the first-ever ‘Bookazine’ to feature embedded ecommerce links. The content will allow consumers to purchase directly from the delivered stories and recommended meal experiences.

• Imagine how this could evolve in stories related to climate readiness, sustainability issues and developments around standards of performance that promise new metrics-based mitigation targets. Consumers could execute a purchase right then and there at the “point of thought and realization.” The high emotional index coupled to commerce-in-the-moment is a truly powerful idea.

Media partnerships connected to shoppable content can open an entirely new window of brand relevance on top of a value proposition built around deeper meaning. This is exciting! The created content becomes actionable, fully closing the loop from awareness to sale authored by the most worthy of buying motivations. Wow.

Matching sustainability readiness to business performance

If you understand the powerful paradigm of sustainability as a concern among your customer base, now is the time to optimize this development on the path to purchase with emotional messaging and digital shoppable content.

Use this link to ask questions and explore this concept further with our Brand Sustainability Solutions team.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Our online questionnaire can help you avoid gaps and misfires

In a recent study conducted by our insight research partner Brand Experience Group (BXG), an analysis of sustainability strategies among UK-based grocery retailers revealed the top three banners were leaving more than $9.5 billion in sales on the table. This is revenue they could have earned if the right strategies had been fully implemented to meet shopper expectations on clearly communicated sustainability policies and performance.

The incredible irony: every single one of the food retailers has some form of sustainability program or messaging in place. All of them are underperforming because the programs are either not fully built out, ineffectively communicated to stakeholder audiences or both.

• The same business case with similar outcome metrics has been calculated in CPG food and beverage categories. What’s going on here?

A significant percentage (55%) of your customer base right now, today as you read this, cares deeply about the sustainability bona fides of the brands and businesses they prefer. The banners that step ahead of the competition to correctly leverage sustainability commitments will win in sales and share gains.

There is a clear, proven business case for an optimal strategic game plan on sustainability.

• The operative words here are “correctly and fully.”

Half measures, absence of key baseline assessments and mitigation targets plus anemic communications are often the root cause of subpar outcomes. Collectively these diluted tools operate to marginalize performance on what will be an important 2022 strategy to elevate your business results.

Think of it this way: if you don’t get this right, other enlightened brands will ultimately gain competitive marketplace advantage at your expense.

What should you do now?

We recommend investing 6 minutes of your time to take our online Sustainability Readiness questionnaire. There’s no cost. The questionnaire covers four key areas of potential readiness practices. It has a readiness scoring mechanism underneath to help quantify current conditions. When you click submit, our team analyses the answers and produces an outcomes scoring report. The meeting we have with you to review the scores and discuss implications is also complimentary – and often described as “enlightening.”

We will make topline recommendations for improvements; an integrated approach that can create and deliver the right sustainability strategies. That said, it is entirely up to you whether we move ahead to dive more deeply into customized solutions or leave you with new readiness intelligence on your business.

What will happen when you take the questionnaire?

Discovery

• Organizations that have already completed the questionnaire report it’s elevated their awareness and understanding of the key best-practice components in a sustainability program.

Clarity

• We have found brands thought they were doing the right things – but learned of deficits and gaps in their current efforts and communications programs.

Readiness

• In every case we’ve found that readiness can be improved in key areas that are critical to success, to generating business from the investments and avoiding greenwashing – which is a vulnerability.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is. Sustainability is a key component of brand value no matter if your company is Fortune 50 or just starting out.

You will find the questionnaire outcomes meeting to be informative, educational and eye opening. It requires no investment on your end except completing the questionnaire with honest reflection on what you’re currently doing. The questions involve simple yes or no answers. We provide comment boxes if you’d like to add any texture.

Top performing sustainability strategy isn’t just a nice-to-have. The BXG study has confirmed the business case. Without optimal programming you may be leaving significant sales on the table while also ceding marketplace advantage to brands that are ahead of the readiness curve.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Use the link below to take the questionnaire. You’ll find it interesting and the outcomes discussion helpful to planning.

Our Sustainability Solution team

Here’s the team that created the questionnaire and the Brand Sustainability Solution program – the first integrated answer to improved sustainability business performance:

Emergent – Chicago-based marketing communications company with strategic brand guidance and creative skills to build a multi-faceted outreach program that persuasively conveys your sustainability story to key stakeholders.

Brand Experience Group – London-based consumer insight research company to help determine what your core customers believe about sustainability practices, what initiatives matter most to them and establish the KPIs that measure business performance from your sustainability investments.

Informed Sustainability Consulting – Seattle-based consultants build the baseline with science-based carbon footprint assessment and Lifecycle Analysis to determine exactly where your production and supply chain are on sustainability performance. ISC also helps you set climate mitigation targets and identify sustainability improvement opportunities.

Click here for the Sustainability Readiness questionnaire.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

…It isn’t the supply chain or manufacturing

Imagine an out-of-control cruise ship bearing down on the sunny Island resort dock at 30-knots full speed with no captain at the wheel. 200,000 tons of steel coming in hard to shore, kicking up a gigantic spray of water behind it. There you are at the coffee shop in front of the pier, enjoying your latte while waiting for the ship to arrive. You watch in horror as this gigantic floating hotel with 4,000 souls aboard is barreling right for you, the bow getting taller and taller in the closing moments. You freeze – unable to move as the disastrous, tragic end draws near – paralyzed by _________.

The word is fear.

You didn’t see it earlier, but painted on the bow in bright green, it’s the USS Climate Chaos coming in hot …literally.

Sustainability at one time was more leisurely focused on clean energy use and efforts to improve, say, recycling and clean energy from the manufacturing plant to customer warehouses. The annual report would recite the efficiencies and efforts made to use less fossil fuels in the daily routine of manufacturing, shipping and commerce.

But wait; more recently we learn that greenhouse gas levels, despite the economic shutdown caused by the pandemic, have reached their highest concentration in 4 million years and shows no signs of slowing down. The planet is rapidly warming. Climate impacts start to get closer and closer to home through unrelenting wildfires, droughts, super-storms and wild weather shifts. You can feel it and see it now.

Then as if on cue, along comes a series of reports that reveal the incredibly significant relationship our food system has to climate impact, now the second leading contributor of global greenhouse gas production at 24%. Consumers who are already increasingly aware and sensitized to big societal issues like climate trouble, begin to realize there is a relationship between their food choices and climate outcomes.

The word sustainability acquires new gravitas and deeper meaning as it is redefined to signal climate threat from supply chain actors like livestock production and soil-damaging industrial agriculture practices.

• Who knew it took 1,600 gallons of water, massive land resources and two years to produce one 16-ounce steak?

• Why didn’t we know before that the world’s largest carbon sink, the Amazon rainforest, is disappearing at the rate of an acre per second due to repurposing the forested land for animal agriculture and crops to feed them?

Sustainability may now be the most popular term in modern marketing

Yet it is still vastly underserved as companies wrestle with its deeper meaning and implications. Will we get to solutions soon enough to prevent portions of the planet from becoming uninhabitable? Or will the streets of Toronto begin to resemble Beverly Hills with giant royal palm trees lining the Yorktown shopping district, while the southern hemisphere reels from millions of climate refugees running north for survival?

• Sustainability is an operational imperative that starts at the field or ranch and works its way forward to the retail store. The challenge ahead begins with understanding what an organization’s carbon footprint looks like though objective, data-driven scientific analysis that runs all the way back through the supply chain and forward through manufacturing, distributing and recovery of packaging materials.

Within this analysis comes visibility to the conditions that impact climate threat contributions and identifying where improvements can be made, and carbon mitigation targets set.

The biggest threat to progress here is various forms of organizational fear

Given the speed at which climate threat is turning into a passion point for consumers on the path to a purchase decision, there is a need to get this right sooner rather than later. Yet some companies still struggle to navigate.

Why?

Fear of change

Change is hard. No one likes it except the most progressive leaders who see it as a path to reinvention and growth. Changing institutionalized thinking and processes is difficult. But change it must. We need a wildfire of movement towards credible sustainability solutions.

Fear of risk

The street looks for quarterly reports that repeat positive progress. Companies may worry that fundamental changes in infrastructure and operational standards will be a risk – that even with disciplined planning, to some degree, – they’ll still be steering in uncharted waters. Yes, but it’s a necessary risk worth taking.

Fear of truth

Every business resides in a glass house these days because anything that can be known, will be known. Are there some policies and behaviors that under scrutiny in the light of day could cause a little unease?

Transparency is demanded by users and stakeholders at a time when missteps can be discovered and reported globally in the digital age of communication. You already own that problem. The larger social responsibility demerit is knowing the problems exist yet doing nothing to improve them.

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine…

Thinking differently – turns out robust sustainability commitments and policy are actually a path to improved innovation, financial outcomes and business growth.

Our partners at Brand Experience Group (BXG) made the business case, quantifying the impact of holistic sustainability strategies on balance sheet progress. Overwhelming evidence points to business growth from progressive sustainability programs, properly communicated to all relevant stakeholders. The research also proves that absence of these programs leads to sub-optimal business performance. (if you want to see the report, request it here).

How can this be true?

Because the number of consumers who care about sustainability investments, programs and verified outcomes is NOT some small tertiary cohort. According to BXG:

• 34% of consumers are deeply passionate about sustainability progress, and
• another 33% are “concerned” about sustainability policies and behaviors.
• That’s 67 percent of your consuming marketplace.

If consumers want it, you need to deliver, right?

In a sentence: sustainability is good for business.

It may require changes in how the company operates, sources and manufacturers, but these changes are necessary when the great ship Climate Chaos is coming in all gas and no brakes to ultimately reward the climate caretakers and punish the deniers who claim they didn’t see it coming.

Is this going to be expensive for our economy?

Not if the thesis set out by think tank RethinkX is correct. They forecast ambitious but realistic targets for change in the next 10 years, based on deployment of technologies we already have in place, such as precision fermentation in food making. They state:

“By leveraging the power of market forces, mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions can be transformed from a costly expense into a lucrative investment at every scale from local to global. Regions, nations, communities, cities, businesses, and investors choosing to embrace and lead the disruptions rather than resist them will reap enormous economic and social rewards as well as environmental benefits.”

Decarbonizing the global economy will not be costly, it will instead save trillions of dollars…

“By leveraging the power of market forces, mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions can be transformed from a costly expense into a lucrative investment at every scale from local to global. Regions, nations, communities, cities, businesses, and investors choosing to embrace and lead the disruptions rather than resist them will reap enormous economic and social rewards as well as environmental benefits.” – RethinkX Climate Change Report

Time to get on board and pilot the new Climate Threat ship to a better, brighter and hopefully cooler future.

If you want to get a clear understanding of how to get ahead of the unstoppable and pervasive need for sustainability readiness, read our Brand Sustainability Solution report. You can download it free here.

If you want to know exactly where your business is on climate readiness, take our five-minute online Sustainability Readiness questionnaire. It is complimentary along with the scoring and follow-up report on what the results mean. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain by knowing exactly where your company sustainability challenges reside. Here’s the link to take the electronic questionnaire.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Vulnerability for climate chasers is escalating…

What sustainability stands for is expanding and the process to earn credit for acting sustainably has taken on a new look.  Here, we examine how to prevent the risk of unintentional greenwashing. This article sheds light on what may well be the key driver of marketplace competitive advantage for progressive brands in the year ahead.

What is the most popular word in modern CPG and retail marketing right now? Sustainability. It is invoked, announced, trumpeted, billboarded, spotlighted and worn like a new suit of climate- positivity relevance. If you’re not sustainable, what are you? Most assuredly not enough.

Sustainability may also be one of the most misappropriated terms in modern CPG and retail marketing. What’s on the horizon is significant vulnerability for brands and businesses that fail to dial in the infrastructure and bona fides that make sustainability claims real and trustworthy. As the marketplace moves to embrace this issue more fully, scrutiny levels will intensify as stakeholders, investors and consumers become increasingly knowledgeable about what is authentically working to reduce the impact of climate damage from what isn’t.

The sustainability goal posts are moving

At one time sustainability was focused primarily on fossil fuel consumption and other forms of non-renewable energy and water use. Now we’ve learned that agriculture and meat production are the second largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions and thus food choices actually have a climate impact. The rigor required to address climate impact assessments and policies has gone way past using “earth-friendly” straws in a beverage or putting solar panels on the roof of the office building.

The pathway to verified and validated sustainability behavior is connected directly to overall carbon footprint and is paved with science, data and comprehensive analysis of:

• Brand higher purpose
• Processes and production
• Supply chain and ingredient standards
• Distribution systems, transportation and in-market behaviors
• Over-consumption of land, water and non-renewable energy
• Physical facility operations
• Employment policies and practices

The goal of this thorough examination is assessing a product’s carbon impact to the planet. In the near future carbon footprint scoring will come to product labels. Consumers want to purchase products that are mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and will need help at the shelf to make accurate comparisons.

Eco-product design

Similarly, these analytical tools can be deployed to conduct an environmental evaluation of product design. This helps brands determine where they can swap out high carbon ingredients, source from deforestation-free suppliers, and cut down on unnecessary waste all while evaluating cutting-edge packaging solutions.

Why all of this matters to your immediate future

Emergent’s consumer insight research partner Brand Experience Group (BXG) recently conducted a ground-breaking study on consumer attitudes about sustainability. The report found a significant rise in the number of consumers who will hold brands accountable for sustainability practices and behaviors.

• 34% are committed or passionate about sustainability claims and policies
• 32% are concerned about the issue and paying attention to it

Segments showing the highest degree of sustainability concerns skew younger in the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts and reside mostly in higher income households.

Bottom line: these concerns are becoming widely held in a significant swath of the population and continue to grow.

Greenwashing risks

Brands that invoke climate faithfulness while taking a half-baked stance on managing emissions are risking marketplace disruption. We are all living in a challenging media environment where posers are likely to be outed.

That’s why Emergent has come together with BXG and Informed Sustainability Consulting to create the first fully integrated brand sustainability services program that:

• Marries scientific carbon footprint analysis with consumer insight research guidance on user attitudes and opinions

• To inform a comprehensive suite of brand communications tools that help businesses convey their sustainability story to consumers and stakeholders

Use this link to ask any questions, share your thoughts or request a preview of an upcoming special report on climate risk assessment and communications.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.