How Do You Build Sustainability into Your Brand?

In the early 1980s, the visionary Austrian/American Designer, Victor Papanek, pioneered a paradigm shift advocating for inclusion, social justice, and sustainability. His roots are in product design, but his ethos remains relevant today across disciplines. Today, inclusion, social justice, and sustainability are even more heightened, and should be baked into your brand, from the beginning if possible. If sustainability in your business is important to you, then community and people should be at the heart of it, internally within the business, and the community the business is advocating for. It is all about people and environment being an important and authentic part of your brand.

In today's business landscape, embracing sustainability isn't just a choice, it's a necessity. Whether you are driven by regulatory directives like those from the EU, the UN or a personal passion, integrating sustainability into our business practices is becoming as fundamental as managing our finances.

So How Can You Start to Make an Impact?

Here are my 12 questions to ask yourself in relation to building sustainability into your business and your brand:

1. What is your business model, and can it change to include sustainability?
2. Think about diversity and inclusion. How can you respectfully integrate these principles into your business, in a way that makes sense for your brand? What you stand for and against?
3. Is there a social justice issue that needs to be solved? Can you help solve it in a way that makes sense for your brand in an authentic and truthful way?
4. How can you ensure equality and fairness are fundamental to how you do business, your processes, your people?
5. What about your suppliers? Do they also reflect your sustainable values? What if they don’t? What are you going to do about that?
6. How will your customers know that you care? How do your teams, your investors, your consultants, your visitors know you care? How can you build this into your processes?
7. If you have products, how are they manufactured and delivered? What materials are being used? Are the employees treated and rewarded fairly and equitably?
8. How will you show up in a way that creates sustainable value and meaning? And how do you remain committed this your brand?
9. What marketing and events do you run, and how can you ensure that you are not damaging the environment with what you produce? For example the one off t-shirts that end up in landfill, the stickers you produce to say you are sustainable are not themselves sustainable because of the glue, or exhibition stands that are used once and dumped.
10. What communications do you produce? How will you produce them, what paper will you use if any, what can you do digitally to reduce energy usage? What promotional products are you using and are they made ethically?
11. How do your products, physical communication pieces, furniture and business waste get disposed of at the end of their lives? What can you do to upgrade, repair, reuse, and recycle responsibly?
12. How will you make a lasting impact to be relevant in the future as Victor Papanek was in the 80’s?

Why Should Your Business Care About All of This?

Apart from the desire to do business through good, which is the right thing to do, we will be bound by EU directives. For example, The Green Claims Draft Directive from the EU has just been published, and what that means is that if you make a ‘green claim’ in your business you must respect how this claim is substantiated and communicated. Claims will also have to be independently verified and proven with scientific evidence in the near future.

In the future, businesses who can’t provide authentic green credentials may not then have access to grants and funding.

There will be regulations around environmental labelling of these claims, and you will have to have answers for reliability, transparency and independent verification of the claims.??

While some of this is with larger businesses and corporation now, it is going to filter down and be obligatory for small businesses.

Start with your brand, ask yourself the questions I set out above, and build it in so that it becomes part of who you are and how you show up.

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#journorequest? #brandexpert?#purposedrivenbusiness #sustainable #sustainablebusiness #visionary?#entrepreneur?#smesector Agile Executives Venture Business Network LEVEL C All-Ireland Business Foundation?#businessallstars

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Sparking Transformation Beyond Boundaries

If this post resonated with you, I can help you gather your thoughts. Take my complimentary Purpose Pathfinder here and I’ll give you an hour of my time.

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