*That builds on someone else’s theory

By Kathleen M. Hosfeld

Imagine a bell curve (or Ann Elk’s theory of a brontosaurus) which is very thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again on the other end.  On the far left point is a small group called “innovators.” To the right of the innovators are the “early adopters.” In the much, much thicker part we find first the “early majority.” As the thicker part begins to decline again we find the “late majority,” and finally at the thin-again part we have the “laggards.”

You may have heard the term “crossing the chasm” and wondered what it meant. It’s an insight that builds on the bell curve described above, which was the work of Everett Rogers , author of “Diffusion of Innovations.” Geoffrey Moore, who penned the book “Crossing the Chasm,” used Rogers’ work to help market new  technology. Moore’s book centers on a key insight that applies to many types of change, including – my theory — sustainability in business.

Innovators snatch up new technology even before it comes on the market. Moore says they do this because “technology is a central interest in their life.” Early adopters, like innovators, are able to quickly perceive the potential benefit of new technology for their lives. They look to innovators as guides for what is worth trying.  The early majority also relates well to technology, but tends to be more selective. Its members need references and proof of concept before they invest. The critical point Moore highlighted is that winning the early majority is the key to profit and growth. Yet, insofar as many technology firms are made up of innovators and early adopters, it’s often hard for them to relate and sell to those who don’t share their passion.

Proponents of sustainability may face a similar challenge. The innovators – the Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, Tom’s of Maine – and locally Harriet Bullitt’s Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat – were those for whom sustainability was a central interest of their life. They inspired the early adopters — Seventh Generation, Fetzer Wines, Whole Foods,  and others  –   many of which are now at scale and thriving. The next step beyond the second wave is to increase sustainability in traditional firms – to create the early majority.

But watch out for that chasm. The next step is a doozy. As Moore points out, a wide gulf separates the first two groups – innovators and early adopters – from the early majority, and the gulf has to do with motivation.  Innovators and early adopters love sustainability for its own sake. The terminology they use is “because it’s the right thing to do.” They want the potential early majority to love sustainability the same way they do, but the early majority doesn’t share their passion. As Moore says in his book, innovators and early adopters want revolution; early majorists want evolution.  They want proof that something works.  The chasm is built on these differences. To further sustainability, we need to find a way to bridge the chasm.

Three things will help:

Discernment. Companies that are just starting out are not going to be exemplary. They’re going to start small. The business community and media need to encourage nascent attempts and not crush them with premature accusations of greenwashing.

Empathy. A colleague of mine recently started a Seattle-based solar nonprofit. She came from a traditional business background but had an infectious passion for evangelizing solar energy. Members of the green community to whom she reached out for help treated her like an outsider.  The ability to take the perspective of others, understand their  frame of reference  is a critical success factor for creating change.

Experience. The early majority cares about what works in operating a business. The motivational bridge is the business case. In this regard, the best thing innovators and early adopters can do is share their stories of achieving and sustaining their own profitability, and how sustainability contributed to their success.

In a recently released MIT Sloan Management Review, most of the 1,500 executives interviewed didn’t have a business case for sustainability in their organizations.  Most said sustainability initiatives in their firms were a response to regulatory pressures. Regulation plays a crucial role in catalyzing change, but ultimately it only goes so far. Winning hearts and minds is the key to sustainability adoption, and that begins with meeting and respecting people where they are.

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Kathleen Hosfeld (Ms.) is a strategy and marketing consultant. She has a second theory.

As much as organic models of organizations may be taking root, and the industrial metaphor of “business as machine” may be dying back, the latter lives on in marketing. As a result, many companies may be missing one of the biggest opportunities of social media as a tool for growth and profitability – supporting authentic relationships.

In the industrial paradigm, marketing is a machine that makes sales. Depending upon how many resources one plugs into the machine, one can turn a crank and expect sales as an outcome. The machine pumps messages through pipelines directed at target audiences. The messages fall upon the target audiences, a portion of which respond. It’s believed that the more resources one puts into the machine, the more sales occur. The problem is that many companies feel the machine has become unreliable.  They are putting more and more resources in, and getting fewer and fewer sales as a result.

A Machine That’s Running Down

Continuing to conceptualize marketing with this metaphor is to ignore many cultural shifts that point to change. The emerging metaphor depicts marketing as a series of co-creative dialogues with stakeholders. A book published a decade ago, The Clue Train Manifesto, put this idea on the map: “Markets are conversations.” Mutually constructive dialogue builds trust, which leads to sales.

The traditional paradigm of marketing is a push model, where target audiences are passive receptors (or at times victims) of marketing campaigns. While most good marketers understand the role of dialogue, in the push model it’s a relatively small part of the overall mix.

Strengthen Your Core

In the trust paradigm, marketing starts as dialogue with a core group of stakeholders that share the company’s passion for its products or services.  This core group can be viewed as the center of an ever-widening series of relationships, depicted as concentric circles (but not nearly as neatly categorized). In the center of the circle, the relationships with the company are the strongest and are the most likely relationships of advocacy. As word of the company and its products or services travel outward through layers of connection, the marketing message is propelled by the network’s relationships with each other rather that a direct interaction with the company.

What gets lost for many companies is the importance of cultivating that inner core. One of the important tasks for companies is to determine who the key stakeholders are. Who lives in the center circle? And what do they need to be advocates for the company? Traditional marketing focuses primarily on customer prospects, but employees and other stakeholders are often part of the core.

In his book, The Gort Cloud, author Richard Seireeni notes that many of today’s successful green brands used little or no push strategies during their start-up phase. Contrast this with the start-ups of many of the dot.com companies in the ‘90s that spent millions on brand awareness and mass media (many failed). The companies in Seireeni’s book didn’t have those funds and couldn’t grow that way. Instead they cultivated a network of advocates – employees, suppliers, specialized journalists – that grew steadily until the companies reached critical mass and were able to scale.

Pushing less

What’s the role of “push” tactics – traditional advertising and promotion – in a trust-based paradigm? Increasingly such tactics focus on permission-based or “opt in” techniques like search marketing and social networking.  Even when a company is doing all it can to collaborate with its core, there may always be a role for push strategies that invite people into permission-based relationships. The degree to which this is necessary will vary by industry. The point is that push strategies and their associated costs will diminish as a percent of marketing budgets and activities.

Unfortunately, many of the organizations using social media don’t recognize this paradigm shift. They are using social media as another form of push marketing, instead of a tool for dialogue. It’s a step in the right direction to convert to permission-based or opt-in communications with prospects or customers. If that’s where social marketing ends, however, a great opportunity for relationship and mutual advocacy is lost.

Who’s Your Primary Relationship?

Using social media only as a push strategy places the emphasis on customers’ or prospects’ relationships with each other, rather than their relationship with the company. Building a sense of community around your products or services is a great thing to do – it’s what makes Harley Davidson, as one example, as successful as it is. These communities take the company’s message out through viral networks. This works best, however, when the company is an integral part of that community and strong relationships have been established at the core.

What are some ways to capture the benefit of social marketing to foster authentic relationships?

Start With Face to Face Dialogue With Core Stakeholders – Identify your core stakeholder groups. Who cares deeply and passionately about your product or service?  Design in-person, face-to-face conversations with people who are core stakeholders. This certainly will include employees, some customers or clients (but not all), suppliers, regulators, distributors, etc.  Adopt a position of mutual learning. Nurture these relationships over time.

Use Social Networking to Continue and Broaden the Conversation – After establishing key issues with your core stakeholder groups, invite more people into conversations on those issues. Include feedback options social marketing campaigns. These can take the form of polls, surveys, discussion groups, etc.

Networks That Connect Other Stakeholders – Many of the free social networking resources are more appropriate to prospective customers or customers. Remember to support ongoing dialogue with other stakeholders through online collaboration software or other technology appropriate to those audiences.

Not Everyone Uses The Web – While many people do enjoy connecting online, there are many high-value contacts that don’t. An inclusive approach that designs opportunities to connect in person in person or on the phone will ensure you do not miss important customer segments.

Don’t Spread It Too Thin – Nurture the core.  Remember Gerald Weinberg’s Law of Raspberry Jam: “The wider you spread it the thinner it gets.” Keep in mind that the mass communication doesn’t take the place of face-to-face in creating a core of committed advocates.

Many younger companies have used this model because they didn’t have the money to do it any differently. Yet for decades, companies with diverse clients – from highly affluent individuals, other businesses, athletes, foodies, and more –  all have gone to scale, and navigated numerous lifecycle transitions by cultivating relationships of trust with key stakeholders. Social media, in this context, can be a powerful tool for cultivating these relationships.

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This article began as a conversation with my associates Jenny Mish and Ron Benton, at the Portland State University Business and Sustainability Conference in October 2009.  It evolved in conversation with Matthew Wesley of Agility Partners. Thanks to all of you for collaborating with me.

Companies engage in sustainability initiatives in stages.  Starting small, and usually with operations-oriented steps, companies’ first experience with sustainability is focused on saving money.  Creating new revenues from sustainability happens at deeper stages of engagement.  At these deeper stages, marketing, which may have been only peripherally involved before, now plays a strategic role in creating new opportunities to fulfill sustainability’s potential to the company and to stakeholders.

We’ve written before about the various stage models of sustainability engagement and how marketing shows up at each stage. In the early stages, when companies are experimenting with waste, energy and resource management issues, their focus is on cost savings. This doesn’t translate well to marketing action, although in some rare cases, such as Cisco’s used equipment recycling program, it can become a new line of business.

Changes in the environmental features of products and services that occur in the middle stages of sustainability engagement can prompt marketing departments to redefine their respective value propositions. They can also activate marketing’s promotional, publicity and public affairs capacities to manage perceptions around green washing (allegations of superficial claims of environmental benefits).

At the deeper levels of sustainability engagement, where companies seek to fully integrate sustainability into product and service design and business model development, marketing plays a strategic role. At this stage, the ability to research and interpret customer wants and needs is essential to tapping the top line potential of the commitment to sustainability. It’s a significant opportunity for marketing to make a strategic contribution to the direction and focus of the organization.

Team-Based Innovation Planning: Baking it In

Up to this point, the changes the company has been undergoing are technical changes. You can hire a consultant to help you conduct a lifecycle analysis, measure your carbon footprint, advise on resource, energy and waste strategies.  But redesigning and re-imagining whole products, services and lines of business from a sustainability standpoint is “adaptive change.” At this stage, sustainability has been bolted on, now the task is to bake it in from scratch. It’s probably not something that anyone in the organization has done before. As a result, executives assembling and commissioning teams to do this work need to consider how best to convene, commission, guide and support them.

Start from the Future – In the September 2009 edition of Harvard Business Review, R. Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad, and M.R. Rangaswami write about research they have conducted with 30 companies integrating sustainability into their operations. “Don’t start from the present,” they advise.  Rather, start from a desired future state and work back. When Hosfeld & Associates works with clients on these issues we like to start with the question: “What is the change we want to see in the world because of our work?” What business should we be in as a result?

Feed the Process With New Insights – At this stage of sustainability engagement, customers and other stakeholders can play a co-creative role. Effective design and implementation of customer and stakeholder research can tap insights that will feed the innovation process. Marketing specialists on the innovation team best help other departments interpret research and learn how to understand customer needs.  Great ideas can also come from anywhere in the organization.  Effective approaches to sustainability innovation will tap the hidden genius of the organization.

Build Engagement From the Start — The result of the planning process will be a strategy that must be implemented. As my colleague Ron Benton says “to be effective, strategy has to be constructed and owned by those who execute it.” This means creating cross-functional teams across organizational silos that can work together to solve complex problems. It also means creating opportunities for engagement during the planning process with those who may not participate directly in it.

Mitigate the Challenges of Change – As an adaptive process, strategic sustainability innovation has the potential to create anxiety. It’s important to anticipate the anxiety of change and provide innovation teams with new tools. Building the team’s capacity to have fearless, frank and authentic dialogue and move quickly through areas of disagreement is fundamental. This means using conflict and resistance as tools for learning. Clear objectives and metrics can also provide guidance and support for making good decisions, assuring engagement and supporting execution.

Keep It Moving – If the goal is competitive advantage, strategic sustainability innovation can’t get hung up on internal turf squabbles, or get squashed by the tyranny of day to day operations. Organizations seeking this type of advantage must support teams with clear direction and the resources to keep it a top priority.

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If you are interested in knowing more about how to integrate marketing’s capacity for innovation with your sustainability initiative, please contact us.

Check out the Sustainability and Innovation edition “How Green Will Save Us” Harvard Business Review

Are you a member of a progressive organization trying to figure out what types of marketing strategies will 1) work for you, and 2) fit your values? If you are then you’ve no-doubt run into a blizzard of marjarg (marketing jargon) that ’s both dizzying and disorienting.  Marjarg outside the world of progressive values is bad enough – buzz, spin, viral, marcomm, Web 2.0, SEO, etc.  When entering the realm of sustainability oriented, or corporately responsible marketing, you may be even more confused.  To get you started, here are a few definitions of marketing terminology you may encounter.

Green Marketing – Green marketing is often used as short-hand for any kind of marketing that attempts to include the values of sustainability. According to the American Marketing Associations, however, green marketing is marketing that focuses primarily on the environmental benefits of either the product/service being marketed or the environmental qualities of the process of promotion/advertising.  Green marketing is typically focused on the product and the promotional aspects of the marketing mix. So far, I have yet to see a comprehensive model of green marketing that takes into account all aspects of the marketing function (product, price, promotion, distribution/sales).

Triple-Bottom-Line Marketing – This is a seldom-used term, but one that speaks to marketing practices that seek to account for financial, social and environment measures of success. As a result of this, triple-bottom-line marketing seeks to address more of these measures in all aspects of the marketing mix. Just as there is no comprehensive model of marketing for Green Marketing there’s even less written about triple-bottom-line marketing.

Stakeholder Marketing – Stakeholder marketing is based on stakeholder theory which asserts that companies are obligated to a variety of stakeholders not just investors, stockholders and owners. Although the argument has been primarily an ethical one, recent studies demonstrate that this orientation makes companies more profitable as well.  The primary stakeholders included are investors, employees, customers, partners and society. Stakeholder marketing is “an orientation toward a firm’s marketing activities that goes beyond consideration of the firm’s immediate targeted consumers to include others that may be impacted by their activities. It considers impacts of marketing activities on a larger base of constituents, and encourages consideration of the impact of these constituents in fashioning marketing activities.”(Gregory Gundlach, University of North Florida). The Aspen Institute has collaborated with Boston University in hosting the Stakeholder Marketing Conference. Exemplary firms that practice Stakeholder Marketing are profiled in the book: Firms of Endearment.

Social Marketing – Social marketing is the application of business-oriented marketing principles and practices typically in a non-profit , government or NGO contexts  to change behavior to achieve a social good.  In practice however, this term is being used as short-hand for Social Media Marketing. Social Media Marketing is the process of engaging online communities like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. Social Marketing got its start with nonprofit organizations trying to effect behavioral changes such as reducing smoking, and encouraging the use of condoms. Social Marketing seeks to create behavior change that does not necessarily involve a purchase that benefits the marketer’s organization.

Social Media Marketing – As referenced above, Social Media Marketing is the process of engaging online communities via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. Another term for Social Media Marketing is Social Networking. Today, many who are unaware of Social Marketing as a discrete discipline are using that term to refer to Social Media Marketing. Social Media Marketing is not primarily concerned with values, sustainability or the triple bottom line, although it represents a set of tools that may be used by organizations who are.

Service Dominant Logic – Service Dominant Logic (SDL) is used by its authors (Robert F. Lusch, University of Arizona, and Stephen L. Vargo, University of Hawaii) to describe what they consider to be radical reframe of the marketing process. One element of SDL is to redefine everything that an organization sells as a “service” whether it is a physical good or an intangible service or experience.  By “service” they mean the benefit of the good sold.  This shifts the perspective of the seller from one of a manufacturing focus (inward) to a customer/market focus (outward.) The second element of SDL is the notion of “co-creation” of value between the customer and the company. The company consciously gives equal power to the customer in the exchange process through intentional interaction.  While laudable in its intent, SDL assumes that all customers want to co-create their experiences with companies. Real world situations demonstrate that when offered a co-creative opportunity not all consumers want one.

The TARES Test – The TARES test is a five-point test for what the authors call “ethical persuasion.” Published by Sherry Baker, a professor at Brigham Young University, and David L Martinson, of Florida International University, the TARES test seeks to establish robust principles for ethics in marketing and to support the creation of a more ethical approach to persuasion – particularly commercial persuasion such as that which takes place in the marketing process. The TARES test consists of five principles: Truthfulness (of the message), Authenticity (of the persuader), Respect (for the persuadee), Equity (of the persuasive appeal) and Social Responsibility (for the common good).The TARES test is included in some marketing and advertising text books and can also be found here. The TARES test is used primarily in evaluating advertising and promotional materials, but could also extend to sales and other persuasive business speech.

Do you have another example of marjarg or have a question about a term? Contact Us. We’ll try to answer your questions and respond to your comments.

We in the Seattle area watched this month as nearly three decades of changes in the newspaper industry brought down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It would be simplistic to say that loss of the original purpose was the turning point in the newspaper industry’s demise. Many complex factors including the rise of the Internet have contributed to their current dire circumstances.

While many reporters and editors remained motivated by the ideal of a free press, their management was focused on a specific form of revenue creation (selling advertising) which did not allow newspapers to adapt as the market has changed.

Ted Levitt made this point years ago in his famous “Marketing Myopia” article: adapting over time means focusing on the evolving needs of customers, not selling a particular business model. Holding fast to the importance of a free press as an agent of enlightened democracy might have helped newspapers cling less tightly to the advertising paradigm and evolve their revenue models in service of the greater purpose.

A focus on how we seek to make the world a better place helps companies stay clear and resilient in troubled times.  When economic conditions are volatile, business models focused on purpose provide clarity about what needs to change and what should never change in the business. This focus on purpose does four things for an organization:

• Provides a strategic focal point for aligning all aspects of the organization
• Creates the basis for powerful, trust-based marketing
• Establishes a foundation for positive corporate culture, and
• Taps the motivation and passion of employees and other stakeholders.

According to an article in the February 12 Gallup Management Journal, it’s more critical than ever that businesses and customers know what companies stand for.

The article describes the work of GSD&M Idea City in Austin Texas, a branding agency, as it helped Southwest Airlines describe their purpose. While many see Southwest as simply the low-cost provider, for founder Herb Kelleher, the point is making air travel accessible. The agency gave him the language to describe his purpose: “democratizing the skies.”

A friend of Hosfeld & Associates, Kip Gregory, author of Winning Clients in a Wired World, also runs a purpose-driven business. He works with clients to help them tap the enormous potential of the Internet and everyday technology to make their businesses more profitable. For Kip, the Internet is a banquet and many businesses can’t find the door in.

In talking with Kip about his purpose, I paraphrased: “You’re not in the technology business, Kip, you’re in the abundance business. Hundreds of the resources you share with clients are free, and yet they offer the opportunity for breakthroughs in productivity and profits.”

Kip is successful because people recognize he’s not a geek who loves technology (not that there’s anything wrong with being a technology-loving geek); but a client champion who uses technology to make them more successful.

Studies suggest that purpose-driven businesses outperform companies without a purpose. Southwest Airlines is one of several firms cited in the book Firms of Endearment, which describes the characteristics and performance of companies committed to a purpose. Firms of Endearment (or FoEs) that they studied returned a 1,026 percent for investors over the 10 years ending June 30, 2006, compared to a 122 percent return for the S&P 500.

Companies with purpose are not immune to economic downturns. Some of the firms described in the book, including Harley Davidson, have taken significant hits in the last several months. Yes, further studies suggest that companies committed to purpose recover more quickly after economic challenges.

Companies with purpose, those that take a stand and build their business on making the world a better place, stand out with consumers. They foster trust and loyalty. Companies with loyal customers succeed in good markets, and have more going for them in difficult times.

If you’d like to find out how to align your organization’s operations and brand around a compelling purpose, please contact us.

Experts and Speakers – Blogs are places where media find guests and interview subjects on unique topics. Elisabeth Squires, known for her expertise on women’ breasts, says that she was booked on Good Morning America and the Tyra Banks show after producers found her blog.  The media coverage in turn results in speaking engagements: “Most of my speaking engagements have been referrals and through media coverage,” she says.  Speakers or experts who are interested in writing a book, may develop their material on their blog, shaping the content as they get feedback from their audience.

Consultants and Members of the “Creative Class” — For those that make their living through ideas, creativity and innovation, blogs are places to demonstrate your credibility and brilliance. Blogs are places to share knowledge and your most recent work. Kim Screen, founder of Good Stock, a press and bindery firm that makes custom books, uses her blog to share recent projects and to connect with customers.  “Blogging (both writing my own and reading other blogs) is like my office water cooler – the way I connect with people,” she says.

Manufacturers – Blogs are the lifeblood of the high tech industry, whether you are a software or hard ware manufacturer. Corporate and developer blogs are where reputations for quality rise and fall, and where providing fast-response technical advisories can be a matter of survival.

Professionals and Advisors – Attorneys, financial advisors, accountants and other professionals who deal in environments where laws, standards and rules are frequently changed or re-interpreted  can use blogs to keep readers apprised of changes. Making this expertise available helps position the professionals as experts, which may bring in more clients.

For many of these types of businesses and more, the well-designed blog becomes a search engine magnet that can be used to point organic (unpaid) traffic to the company’s main web. The ultimate success of a blog is to provide content so valuable that other bloggers link to you.  With the effective use of keywords, proper submission of the blog to directories, and effective linking strategies, blogs can make a valuable contribution to the overall visibility of the web site, and, as a result, your company.

If you’d like additional information about how to use blogs to achieve your business objectives, please contact us.

Optimizing organizational strategy follows the same general outline.  It starts with understanding of how a business works, and what is working well.  It must look at marketing practice (similar to processes), the people/human elements that make strategy successful (individual and cultural), and technology (systems, IT and otherwise) that support the strategy.  A strategy optimization process leverages the best assets, the best of what’s working, and identifies the potential for growth.

Strategy optimization starts from the perspective that the management of strategy is equally important to the creation of strategy. Many companies craft wonderful strategies that are poorly implemented.  Successful strategy optimization looks at both the structural integrity of the strategy as well as the management environment in which it thrives.

By Kathleen M. Hosfeld (with Jenny Mish)

Thousands of sustainability oriented startups are creating game-changing innovations in products, services, industry partnerships, supply chain management and more as they seek to integrate values of social justice and environmental stewardship into their business practices.

As startups, they represent one part of the new sustainability economy. The other side is existing “traditional” businesses seeking to integrate sustainability into both the culture and business processes at the same time. For the former group, the challenge is making it work without a roadmap. For the latter, it’s creating change in systems that seem to have worked “just fine” before sustainability came along.

Until recently, there hasn’t been much recognition of the role that marketing can play in furthering sustainability. Superficial promotional claims of green characteristics of products and services in the 1980s — what’s now known as “green washing” — actually created something of setback for the sustainability movement. Today, marketing functions – such as product design or supply chain transparency– that are critical to success may not – in some organizations – have been seen as part of marketing.

As more organizations have succeeded in integrating sustainability, marketing researchers and people in the field are noticing an emerging picture of what sustainability oriented marketing looks like.

Jenny Mish, a doctoral candidate in marketing at the University of Utah, and I saw the outlines of this emerging picture in data she gathered as a part of her doctoral work. She completed a study of “Exemplary Triple Bottom Line Companies,” in the summer of 2007. She identified several themes emerging as characteristic of marketing in sustainability oriented companies:

• They view their situations through a complex, systems perspective – highlighting interrelationships of components and stakeholders
• They take a long-term triple bottom line approach – finding third-way solutions instead of creating trade-offs between goals
• They engage a broad array of stakeholders
• They integrate full-cycle product (or service) costs into their understanding of what creates value and relevance for customers
• They emphasize relational, trust-based communications and sales approaches

Many of these organizations express these characteristics as “authenticity” – saying they reflect their values (“This is who we are”). Comparing Jenny’s interview data with my consulting experience in the field, we have created a series of polarity diagrams that demonstrate the contrast between marketing that is not at all sustainability oriented and marketing that fully embraces sustainability. This comparison begins to create some guidelines for those companies who want to practice sustainability oriented marketing. This offers a picture of what they might or should be striving for.

Marketing “Before” And “After” Sustainability

This series of three diagrams contrasts a simplistic, single-bottom line oriented approach to marketing with a complex, triple-bottom-line approach to sustainability marketing:

• It’s important to stress that the two ends of the spectrum do not exist in pure forms. The right side of each diagram actually represents a collage of sustainability oriented marketing“best practices.”
• We suspect that lower profitability on the left side is the result of a more limited marketing skill set that coincides with a simplistic approach.

Figure 1. Managerial Orientation

To make a transition to sustainability oriented marketing, the values and perspectives of sustainability must be reflected at the top. Although some studies show that sustainability efforts can “start from the middle,” – marketers need agreement and support from other managers to make sustainability a
priority. Without this, the pressure on marketers to drive only short-term sales targets will create either/or situations where marketers are forced to choose between profit and sustainability goals. Figure 1 contrasts the managerial orientation of the two ends of the spectrum.

Figure 2. Relationships with Stakeholders

What we see in organizations that make this transition is that at some point the expectation of the marketing function flips. The extreme polarity on the left represents marketing as strictly the job of “selling.” (Again it’s important to stress that the two ends of the spectrum are not descriptions of actual businesses, but rather extreme points of view.) At some point, exemplary organizations pursuing a triple bottom line demonstrate a perspective that marketing is the stewardship of relationships in the context of assumed reciprocity. They certainly don’t remove the sales imperative from the table. However,marketing is charged with accomplishing the goals of the organization for sales, profit and mission by providing superior benefit and relevance to not just customers alone but also to other stakeholders.

Figure 2 depicts the key relationships of which marketers become stewards in a sustainability oriented setting.

Figure 3. How Stakeholder Relationships are Stewarded

The final figure demonstrates how various aspects of marketing practice – from budgeting to research to pricing to promotion – change in character when the purpose of marketing shifts from “selling stuff” to “stewarding relationships.”

What we notice in this chart is that a much higher degree of marketing sophistication is required to practice marketing from a stewardship perspective. For example, whereas many organizations do not have a defined approach to pricing – for example, they price intuitively based on what the market will
bear – sustainability oriented organizations must develop the capacity to measure the full cycle cost of a product or service and base their pricing accordingly.

The approach to market intelligence or customer research also changes. On the left, consumers are studied so that their needs can be addressed in sales and promotion. Sustainability oriented marketers, on the other hand, seek to foster ongoing dialogue with customers and other stakeholders. It’s considered a continuous conversation, where even “co-creation” may take place when that is valuable on both sides.

Another characteristic that was noted from Jenny’s study is that in sustainability oriented marketing, marketing functions and expertise are dispersed throughout the organization. Marketing – or rather stewardship of stakeholder relationships – is “everyone’s job.” It’s important to note that many companies who haven’t consciously adopted sustainability principles yet practice a high degree of ethics and have high standards for authenticity and trust in customer and other stakeholder relationships. We sense that these companies are well placed on the continuum toward the right hand side of the polarity diagrams even if the ideas of social justice and environmental stewardship are not yet part of their corporate consciousness.

What Does All This Mean?

For those companies who are already embracing sustainability, this comparison of “before” and “after” may identify new areas to deepen their practice. For those who are just getting started, leaders in organizations may want to take note of the following:

• Marketers need to be supported in integrating sustainability and its values into their practices. They may need to be challenged to hold financial, social and environmental goals simultaneously. Or they may need assurance from the top that the company is serious about measuring success by all three.
• Marketers may also need to be challenged to think and act from a systems perspective. They need to be supported and trained to look for “third way” solutions rather than seeing multiple bottom lines as areas for trade-offs. In the end this may pay off in innovation. The ability to hold multiple objectives simultaneously and search for the “third way” has led, in the past, to new products and services, as well as more efficient manufacturing and delivery systems.
• The overall marketing skill of the organization must be enhanced. Marketers should receive professional development in areas where they may lack experience. A sense of “stewardship of relationships” should be fostered in the company as a whole so that sustainability oriented marketing becomes “everyone’s job.”

A “printer friendly” version of this article, with larger graphics, is available here.