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 Super Bowl is well known for expensive, flashy commercials that tend to be even more highly anticipated than the game itself. But this year, the commercial that’s gotten the most attention wasn’t a Super Bowl ad at all. This year’s unlikely advertising showstopper turned out to be a Chipotle ad that’s been on YouTube for months, but was aired nationally for the first time during the Grammy Awards show last Sunday. The two-minute spot, Chipotle’s first national television ad ever, features Willie Nelson singing Coldplay’s potent and popular song “The Scientist” over a sweet and simple cartoon story about a farmer’s journey to industrialization and back. A review in Time’s Entertainment section captures it well:

“Like many a great commercial, “Back to the Start” is a journey, in this case both figuratively and literally. The action unfolds linearly in a continuous left-to-right flow on the screen, absorbing you in the simple, children’s show-like visuals and engaging you in figuring what its narrative is about. It starts with a farmer, and some pigs, a pastoral setting that becomes gradually more industrial and alienating, as it erects corrals, then sheds, then animal warehouses and a mechanized distribution system—the modern industrial-food chain. The grim scene plays out, and out, until the music crescendoes and the farmer decides to “go back to the start,” tearing down walls and letting his animals range free.”

The ad’s clear and potent message, simply and beautifully illustrated using graphics and music, seems to have really hit home with a lot of people. The ad is being talked about all over the internet and was even praised by the unlikeliest of all news outlets. Believe it or not, Fox News came out in support of the ad’s message in an article on Monday, saying that “while people may dream of animals roaming free before being taken to slaughterhouses, in reality, most meat comes from animals held in cramped cages their entire lives, pumped full of drugs and food that plumps them up in a short amount of time.”

Is it possible that the trend toward more sustainably and humanely produced meat has finally entered the main stream? Chipotle has been making strides on the issue of local food sourcing as my colleague Akhila Vijayaraghavan covered back in June. All of Chipotle’s pork is raised in a humane, ecologically sustainable manner which means that the pigs get to be pigs. They also get no antibiotics and vegetarian feed with no animal by-products. One hundred percent of Chipotle’s chicken and 50 percent of its beef is also sustainably raised and the company is working to get all its beef to meet these standards as well. As Akhila pointed out, this makes Chipotle the largest restaurant buyer of humanely raised meat.

Other fast food outlets should take notice of the positive attention that Chipotle’s sustainable food sourcing is having as it presents a distinct opportunity for them to get into the game.

The Nature Conservancy may have just raised a few eyebrows, some in dismay, others from a more voyeuristic perspective at their recent decision to partner with the Sports Illustrated magazine and luxury retailer Gilt, in a new fundraising campaign. This highly respected, international organization, which, unlike other environmental advocacy groups, protects fragile and important wilderness areas by buying or leasing them, cannot do what it does without money. So they have decided to take a bold move in what some might consider a rather unconventional direction.

A special sales event coinciding with the launch of this year’s SI swimsuit issue, will feature swimsuits, photographs, surfboards and tickets (starting at $1000) to launch parties where the highly exposed models will be in attendance. Proceeds from the sale will go to the Nature Conservancy who will use them to protect the very beaches on which the pictures were taken.

Glamour and luxury are rarely considered to reside in the same domain as wilderness and environmental conservation. On the contrary, they might be considered opposites, bywords for indulgence, representing the sought-after pinnacle of Madison Avenue-manufactured desire. They derive their distinctive and expensive qualities, not nearly so much as treasures of the natural world, as intricately manipulated, carved, polished and presented artifacts, created with little apparent regard for cost, be it financial or environmental.

So what prompted the Nature Conservancy to seek out these strange bedfellows? Are they selling out? Have they betrayed their mission of protecting the non-human world and signed a pact with the devil? Are they following in the footsteps of Sierra Club’s partnership with Clorox?

Keith Goetzman, writing in Utne Reader, wags a scornful finger at what he wryly calls the Conservancy’s new “stripped down approach to environmental protection.” He says, “The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has long been an overhyped exercise in sexual objectification and anorexia induction, and I’m not sure why The Nature Conservancy thinks it will benefit from hitching its green message to the marketing machine that cranks out this cheeseball, throwback brand of softcore year after year. The association seems to risk putting off every potential supporter who doesn’t think Mad Men is a look back at the good old days.”

Certainly he is not wrong to point out these serious issues with the way that sex in general, and images of a certain type women in particular, have been used to sell everything from fast cars to shaving cream ever since Freud’s nephew came over here in the fifties and established the field of public relations. My reaction was much the same when I first saw the item.

There is, however, another way to look at this. Goetzman admits that he’s not sure why the Conservancy thinks it will benefit from doing this. Perhaps the answer remains to be seen. But as someone who has thought long and hard about the question of how to preach beyond the choir in spreading the message of environmental sustainability to those who might not otherwise be interested, I can put myself in the shoes of the folks at the Conservancy. In fact, this was exactly the reason why Roger Saillant and I decided that instead of writing a textbook on sustainability, we would write a series of eco-thrillers instead, with action, romance, and yes, even a little sex.

This is all about access. You might not like it, but perhaps that is part of a larger point that I would like to try to make here. This country today is both highly polarized and gridlocked. There appears to be no room for compromise. There are two monolithic ideological blocs and most people belong to either one or the other. Either you are a Democratic, blue, liberal, environmentalist, feminist, social justice advocate concerned with the growth and abuses of corporate power to the detriment of those less fortunate, or you are a Republican, red, conservative, pro-life, pro-gun, business supporter concerned with the growth and abuse of government to the detriment of yourself and your family.

In either case, even if you might be sympathetic to even one aspect of the other group’s bloc, you wouldn’t dare admit it for fear of being seen as betraying your group.

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.”