announces a new sustainability commitment or launches an ad campaign about how it’s helping people and the planet. Many of those initiatives focus on improving the sustainability of products and operations in legacy or adjacent markets or on achieving sustainability gains by exploring new markets with a more diverse set of products. This is a variation on the classic “where to play/how to win” strategy, familiar to most executives.
Companies should make sure that their fertilizing strategy is not actually corporate opportunism. It takes little effort to bolt a sustainability claim onto a product without providing meaningful environmental or social benefits. This all-too-common practice can backfire and often provokes customers’ anger. Brands can avoid a customer backlash by demonstrating that the sustainability claims they are making are real and consistent with the brand’s legacy.
A brand that uses sustainability to enter a new playing field must deliver a benefit that’s valuable enough to compel customers to embrace the new offering rather than merely shrug when they first encounter it. The sustainability benefit should be as important to customers as other differentiators, such as convenience, price, and performance.
Ahead of the 2020 plastic-bag ban in New York City, photographer Tony Cenicola documented the many bags collected by graphic designer Sho Shibuya, who has acquired more than 200 of them since he moved to New York from Tokyo, in 2011.Brands using this strategy put a spotlight on a sustainability issue within their current product category or market and find ways to encourage customers to change their behavior to help address it.
Reckitt understood this when it leveraged its Finish dishwashing detergent brand purpose—“save water for tomorrow”—to change the conversation with consumers in Turkey, a country facing dire water shortages as soon as 2030 if consumption patterns don’t change. The brand discovered that in half of Turkish households, dishes were rinsed before being placed in the dishwasher, a colossal waste of water.
For Vanish, the laundry additive and stain remover, Reckitt initially adopted a fertilizing strategy that focused on reducing the carbon impact of its supply chain. But given the high environmental and social costs of the clothing industry, the brand realized that its sustainability efforts didn’t go far enough.
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