Brand and marketing professionals on both client and agency sides can unlock the latent commercial potential of sustainable luxury brands, provided they do so in an authentic and systematic way. This can be a complex task, but the following guidelines can make it easier.
1. Understand your brand. Conduct a “brand perception audit” to understand and define your brand’s true personality as it exists in the minds of both employees and consumers/customers. Include environmental and social elements in this and subsequent tracking studies. Identify the values in your brand’s traditions, and creatively explore what they can mean in current global contexts. Consider the inherent qualities of your product or service to see how it might affect the environment or society.
2. Understand your consumers and how their relationship with sustainability and ethics affects their esteem for your brand. Understand how your company meets your customers’ needs. Observe and understand the values, beliefs and lifestyles of your present and potential customers. Avoid assumptions about consumers, particularly in Asia and other emerging markets. Explore locally appropriate ways to generate consumer insights into the depth and authenticity of your luxury offering.
3. Get your house in order. Audit and improve your internal processes, from office management to production, supply chain, distribution, marketing and advertising. Minimise power consumption, water use and waste. Use environmentally-friendly cleaning products and office supplies. Accept responsibility for the practices throughout your supply chain by screening, training and monitoring the sustainability performance of its constituent parts. Take guidance on other important issues from the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative.
4. C(S)R: Handle with care! Learn from the leading companies and their latest understanding of corporate responsibility and sustainability as drivers for innovation and value creation. Therefore, neither treat philanthropy nor reputation management as the main concerns of the corporate responsibility function. Rather than restricting its focus on measuring and reducing risks and direct impacts, CSR should draw attention to opportunities. CSR units should work with the heads of the core business functions (including product development, sales and marketing) to develop key performance indicators (KPIs) of sustainable business practices. These KPIs should then be used for setting objectives and targets, reviewing performance and determining remuneration and career progression. They should focus on embedding social responsibility and innovation into corporate and brand DNA.
5. Innovate. Identify new and efficient ways in which your brand can help consumers do what they wish to do or feel how they wish to feel. Re-tune the corporate values and brand to resonate with attributes and attitudes that you see emerging in consumers on sustainability issues. Recognise sustainability as a new paradigm for design rather than just a passing fashion, and corporate social contributions as a new paradigm for core business operations, not an afterthought. Therefore, as your product or service progresses from inception through design and manufacturing, constantly query its sustainability at the most important levels and at all stages of its lifecycle. Think of new ways for your existing products or services to do useful jobs while enhancing people’s perceptions of themselves as environmentally or socially responsible. Think how changes to these products and services might make them even more useful and responsible.
6. Motivate. Reward and congratulate staff for meeting environmental and social objectives and targets, and for aligning with corporate and brand values. Do so, where appropriate, as part of their regular performance reviews.
7. Collaborate. Explore possibilities to team up, both internally and externally. Encourage staff participation in multi-functional, multi-skilled teams that include personnel from all relevant functions, including marketing, communications, investor relations, product design/development, brand strategy, financial planning and analysis, and corporate responsibility. Include staff from both brand and corporate level, if they are distinct. Collaborate with third parties (such as strategic partners and celebrity representatives) to improve environmental and social performance. Engage non-governmental organisations to advise on strategic business issues and ensure rigour. Partner with competitors and industry associations to lobby or plan for the better regulation of markets.
8. Communicate. Once you have done all of the above, communicate externally. If you are open, honest and heartfelt, then a bit of sniping here and there from your critics will just be grist to your mill. Avoid contestable claims about issues such as carbon neutrality, and be open about needing continual improvement. Think about how consumers interact with the new media landscape. Integrate your messages through the most appropriate channels, even if you have to invent those channels yourself.
9. Sign up your consumers to the sustainability journey that your company is taking – use them to create and ride the sustainability wave. Ensure that consumers come away from every interaction with your brands, products and services with as positive a self image as possible, and a new understanding of the meaning of luxury. If your brand makes them feel like better people at the same time as fulfilling its principal function, then it will thrive.
10. Measure, monitor and report continuously. Develop ways of identifying, measuring, evaluating and reporting the various elements of brand value, including those that relate to sustainability, so that they can be used by managers as indicators of performance. Specific targets may then be set to sit alongside shorter-term ones and be taken into account at staff performance reviews. Consider participating in creating a sector supplement to Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) on sustainability reporting by luxury goods companies.