So, the debate is pretty well done and dusted – the Green movement is dead. A victim of the same monarchical culture that has buried so many other great ideas and business over the years. Adam Werbach pointed all this out to us in his speech “Eulogy for the Green Movement” at the Commonwealth Institute in San Francisco way back in 2004. The mistake he made then was not to offer an alternative and as a result he was vilified by old Greenies, the press and a bunch of other people with no imagination or brains to work it out for themselves. As he said, people don’t like being called “dead”! So, he returned to the same venue in 2009 with the missing pieces, which he has called “The Birth of Blue“. Yes, without a doubt, Blue is the new Green, so start adapting your wardrobe.
In fact, Blue isn’t anything new. Just as the demise of Green followed the familiar path beaten by Communism, a few religions and other movements that relied on compliance under threat rather than a voluntary embrace. Adam isn’t alone in what has done, but where he scores the bonus is in introducing an imaginative and practical solution, in this case, by adapting a proven approach to a different problem. I say proven with the certainly of first-hand knowledge, because along with all the other initiatives, cultures and institutions that have successfully adopted this kind of strategy, I have been following it for years with my programme of brand transformation that I call Brand Discovery.
History couldn’t possibly give us more conclusive proof that a culture based on strict rules will fail, yet its not surprising that governments worldwide have adopted a heavy-handed approach to getting us all in line behind the sustainability thing. When you throw old ladies in jail for putting paper in her rubbish, or stick tracking devices and chips in wheely-bins you really can’t expect anything, but resistance from folks. The same applies to any community, brand or organisation. If you make a community welcoming, comfortable and rewarding enough people will want to be a part of it. Conversely, if you want to drive people away from a place you make it threatening and unpleasant. Maybe if we gave less thought to prisoner’s rights and conditions incarceration might represent more of a disincentive to criminals? However, I digress.
Green failed because it didn’t welcome people to its community and brands fail for the same reason. What constitutes “welcoming” is another discussion and will vary from one brand or community to another, but what I want to do now is focus on the process involved. Its simple really. You firstly need to lay out all the facts and associated issues in a clear and unbiased way (something that governments just don’t seem capable of). You then fuel debate and discussion and LISTEN (something that few organisations of any kind find natural). People will work out their own relationships with the problem or issue at hand and if you really are listening, you’ll discover that they are writing your strategy for you.
Sustainability, affects us all. It influences communication, travel, jobs, in fact pretty well everything in everybody’s life. As our schoolkids are learing (and these future customers are way ahead of us on this see Graeme Codrington’s Hanna’s Rules) nobody can avoid it, so its really just a matter of helping people understand how it affects them individually. Then you can start to offer them suggestions of things that they can do to help, if not themselves, their kids, avoid a future that’s far less inviting than that which we have today.
Brand Discovery encourages brand stakeholders to nominate things that they can each do to ensure that they are contributing to a bigger shared objective – the delivery of a brand promise. Blue takes the same approach by asking people to nominate a DOT – Do One Thing – that will bring them closer to living a sustainable life. What Blue also realises is that entire national populations are too large to work with successfully, so it relies on dividing nations into smaller work-groups. They, cleverly chose businesses … large ones. Their first candidate was Wal-mart, a community of almost two-million employees, not to mention partners and suppliers (I’ve visited countries with smaller populations!) where the approach has proven to be a great success. More including Morrisons and Sainsbury’s in the UK are following their lead.
The issue isn’t going to disappear by itself and the emerging generations of customers and consumers place sustainable living far higher on their list of priorities than we or our forbears have so its not difficult to see the attraction for a corporation of engaging in sustainability. In fact, businesses that don’t embrace the cause are going to suffer big-time in the future.
However, if you think it’s just a case of flying a sustainability flag outside your corporate HQ you are wrong. Apart from their understanding of the importance of sustainability, emerging consumers have inherited a realisation from our generation and they just mistrust pretty well anything that the corporate world tells them, so you are seriously going to have to walk the talk. What we are talking about here represents a significant change for most organisations. You are going to need a strategy and there are few organisations around with the perspective and in-house resources to tackle this alone, but before you even find your partner to help you with this you need to understand that blue really is your colour and be ready to trust in your chosen Gok Wan.
In the coming months I will be working on this with my clients, testing out, ideas, introducing initiatives and all the time doing all I can to live sustainably. Next week I’m off to Marketing Week Live in London and, as I try always to do, I’ll be minimising my carbon footprint by travelling by train. I’ll be tweeting as I go and hopefully producing a bit of audio on Twaud.io or Cinch.com from the show. Among the questions I’ll be asking of the people I meet there will be how their organisations are rising to this challenge. So follow me on Twitter @thefulltweet and make your own contribution.
