Social Responsibility and Sustainability News

TriplePundit is at SXSW this week, bringing you the latest thinking on CSR, social media, and more.

New Media and CSR: Communicating Corporate Good, moderated by TriplePundit’s very own Nick Aster, identified four major emerging trends in Corporate Social Responsibility in a free-wheeling discussion between:

• Chris Miller, Director of Corporate Consciousness for Seventh Generation
• Christine Diamente, Director of Corporate Responsibility at Alcatel-Lucent
• Mitch Baranowski, Co-founder of BBMG
• Dale Hart, Partner at Methodologie

It’s CSR 2.0 — rife with risks but full of opportunities.

Here’s the bottom line:

ONE: Your brand is decreasingly under your control
In the brave new world of social media, your brand is decreasingly under your control. You can publish all the fancy CSR reports you want, but it only takes one ill-timed (or ill-considered) tweet to generate a firestorm of negative publicity. What’s a company to do?

You’ve got to be in the game, engaging with stakeholders and addressing the tough questions. Hard to stomach, perhaps, but, as Seventh Generation’s Chris Miller put it, “To sit it out is more risky than playing.” The goal, according to Mitch Baranowski of BBMG, is to hold space for a conversation about your brand. The sustainable brand of the 21st Century, he says, has three dimensions: practical usefulness, a beneficial social and environmental dimension, and a tribal dimension that connects people to shared values.

To tell a 21st century story about how you’re solving 21st century problems, you need 21st century tools. For interesting examples, Dale Hart of Methodologie suggests Coke’s “Arctic Home” project, and RecycleBank.

But, like it or not, the tools of CSR 2.0 require an often unpredictable dialogue — not a simple broadcast message. Which leads us to the second trend.

TWO: Transparency is terrifying, but authenticity is the reward
All the panelists agreed: Complete transparency is terrifying to companies. They’re simply not used to it, and the lawyers really, really hate it.

Too bad. As Alcatel-Lucent’s Christine Diamente noted, people want to know where their products are coming from, and companies can’t hide. If you don’t provide it, they’ll get the information somewhere else. Do you want your customers to find out about the working conditions in your factories on Frontline? Probably not.

Ironically, being transparent — even about your faults — can lead to increased stakeholder engagement. For example, Patagonia’s “Footprint Chronicles” provides useful information on the environmental pros and cons of different items. It’s generated great buzz, and customers love it. It many ways it’s highly transparent, but inevitably it leaves some things out. What’s the total carbon footprint of the company? Who knows? But I can see a cool video of the childcare facility in their Mexican factory, and find out how far my new jacket traveled to get to me!

The first month of 2012 is almost over, but it’s still difficult to envision what this year will look like, especially when it comes to the interaction between consumption and sustainability. One of the people who came for our help is Raphael Bemporad, the founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer of BBMG. He offered on Sustainable Brands a list of five trends that he believes will shape sustainable brands in 2012. This is a great list and we’d like to share it with you, adding our point of view as well as two more trends to watch for.

1. The Ubiquity of C2C

“In 2012, we will experience a fundamental paradigm shift from a business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplace to a consumer-to-business (C2B) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace -where creating, buying, selling and sharing products and services will increasingly be driven by consumers themselves.”

This is part of the transition to a green consumption 2.0, where consumers are swapping, sharing, and collaborating to find affordable solutions to meet their needs. It’s based on user-friendly digital platforms and grows exponentially also thanks to added values, such as the sense of community or satisfaction from making a better use of resources. These added values provide a good chance to see this trend growing even if the economic climate will (hopefully) get better this year.

2. The Rise of Generation “Why?”

“The rise of the C2C marketplace is driven in part by the influence of values-aspirational, practically minded New Consumers looking for brands that deliver total value: products that work well, cost less, last longer and do some good. Youthful, educated, wired and mostly female, this New Consumer is asking “why” they should care about brands.”

While most of the New Consumers probably agree on the first three characteristics of value in products (quality, cost, lifetime), only third of them “strongly agree that it’s important to purchase products with social and environmental benefits, even in a tough economy.” So the bottom line is that green benefits will probably be in 2012 a nice to have and not a necessity, even for this progressive generation.  

3. The Race to Relationship

“We believe 2012 will see a race to relationship, where the most successful brands will break free of the lowest-price trap and deliver more value by empowering consumers with better products and experiences and championing their success.”