By Nicola Robins (13 Oct 2010)

Presentation to Brands and Branding for Good Conference, Sandton Convention Centre.

While I am certainly grateful for the invitation, this is not a conference I could have imagined myself talking at one day. Branding is not my thing; being good… well frankly, I am a deep sceptic. When I was a small girl, my father told me a nursery rhyme that went:

There was a little girl who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good she was very, very good.
And when she was bad…  she was phenomenal.

Like all good girls I probably laughed to please my dad; but I understand it now.  There is nothing more powerful than a human being acting from the depths of their passion. This passion is what arises when we do something that is unqualifiably right for us.  Goethe wrote of Dante’s passion for Beatrice – the one and only thing Dante knew in his dark night was that truth was in her direction. It is the most powerful force in the world.

And that’s the thing with sustainability.  In all my days of trotting around corporate corridors, I never met one person who was more passionate about being good than making money.  And equally, I never met one person who actually rocked up to work in the morning and said: “Let’s destroy the world and create rampant inequality today.”

We inhabit an economic system of perverse incentives.  We are relentlessly driven to short termism and consumed by a consensual delusion that material goods can satisfy non-material needs.  Neither of these assumptions is particularly useful, and of course you branding folk know far more about each of them than I do. But I would like to suggest that for many of us old sustainability hacks, a reasonable dose of scepticism would significantly enhance the appeal of branding for good.

Is being good the same as sustainability??

My own scepticism comes from the ease with which “being good” is usually equated with sustainability. It shouldn’t be.  Incite was launched five years ago with the aim of shifting the way people see sustainability: from being largely philanthropic, green and (to most investors) marginal; to being about core business strategy, about people and disparity as well as environment, and anything but marginal.

We recognised the need to shift the brand of sustainability itself. And the one thing we’ve learnt for sure so far is that we know very little about branding. But over the years, my colleague Jonathon Hanks and I have learnt a few things about sustainability. We have also noticed that many of us prefer to avoid grappling with what sustainability is due to its complexity and its obviously stressful implications.  But I think it’s important to grapple with it. Sustainability is a serious issue and a complex one.  But actually it is not complicated; it is, in fact, alarmingly simple.  It can be encapsulated in a simple diagram that comes from an organisation called The Natural Step.

The first line indicates a decline in life sustaining resources: not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute its downward trend.   The second line represents an increasing demand for those resources – a result of increasing population and consumption. By turning this into a 3-D image, a funnel appears.  And inside this funnel – where we and all our companies are – we tussle with issues of energy security, water security, food security; high degrees of disparity, increasing conflict; and hence increasing turbulence.  Studies show volatility in all forms has increased significantly over the last four decades. And there are no signs to suggest it is diminishing.

Simply put, sustainability is about making sure our actions don’t feed this funnel; and making sure our organisation is able to compete effectively inside it. Of course, this is not a static picture, but presently it is a dismal one.  And if Martin Luther King had said “I have a nightmare” we probably wouldn’t remember him.  So let’s paint the dream here.  Based on the best possible scenario, we see three time periods ahead:

• Scramble (1990- ) Sustainability is on the agenda but most people are not really sure what it is or what to do about it;

• Transition (2012- ) Businesses have realizes that sustainability is critical to their operations and are integrating it into their business strategies; and

• Transcend (2020-) Sustainability ceases to be an issue because it has simply become part of the way we do things.

If we haven’t reached a breakthrough in our thinking by then, we’re definitely not looking at the best-case scenario. Whatever we decide, it will take us through to a transformative experience in the next few decades.  This will either be a breakthrough or a breakdown to a less complex way of organising society. This is why sustainability is not a fad. It will be around until it is integrated into our culture or until we as a species have disintegrated from the planet.

Making a strategic choice

Taking sustainability seriously means we have to make a choice on how we approach this turbulence. We have roughly four choices:

• Risk getting dumped: Comply with the law while providing a cash reserve (war chest) for unanticipated consequences. (The business case is based on externalisation of social and environmental costs.)

• Stay afloat: Reduce costs and lower the risk by protecting the present value proposition.  (The business case is based on cost reduction, risk and reputation management)

• Surf the waves: Seek competitive advantage by differentiating products or services on sustainability criteria.  (The business case is based on product or process differentiation, enhanced market access)

• Create the waves: Actively shift the industry or sector by introducing new business models that address sustainability challenges. (The business case is based on disruptive innovation). Note that we are not talking about just any innovation: sustainable innovation must restore or enhance social and natural capital, as well as creating financial value.

These are very different strategies and each may be valid depending on your business strategy.  Some are good, some not so good; and only a very few phenomenal.  The key point is that each will require different competencies within the organisation. About 90% of SA companies are in the first or second category. And of that 90% only a small number are developing the competencies they will need to compete effectively in what the Chinese like to call “interesting times”.

A viable brand requires internal competence. I’d like to make a proposition: when it comes to sustainability, a viable external brand requires a level of internal competence.  I’m suggesting that without a degree of internal competence, we are faking it. Now generally I am a great believer in the “fake it till you make it” approach to life.  I seldom trust that so-called authentic persona that is much in vogue today.   In the sustainability arena, however, faking it can constitute a serious liability.  To an extent this is reputational (someone, somewhere, sometime will probably be inclined to out you); but primarily the liability relates to self-delusion: we convince ourselves (as countries or companies) that we will have the competence—the ability to compete—in a time of systemic change when in reality we do not.

And so, we avoid transformation and stay with surface changes that are accommodated without venturing from our comfort zone.  We know this so well in South Africa: we have indaba rooms, and pap en marog in the canteen and black faces on the board, but deep down it’s the same – the black faces and women are there inasmuch as they are able to bring forth their inner white male (which most of us have inside in some form or other).  This is not diversity: this is skin-deep – admittedly it has its uses, but it should not be confused with transformation. It’s the same with sustainability.

Skin-deep sustainability – the brand without the internal competence – carries a tax that our organisations will be called upon to pay sooner or later.  We can recycle our coffee cups, list on the JSE SRI, fill in the CDP, tick off the GRI, and donate 1% net profit after tax to worthy causes – and these are absolutely worthy things, and please all do them – but don’t confuse them with sustainability. They hardly begin to develop the competence our companies need to operate in a time of disruption.  To confuse them is to diminish any hope we have of opening the walls of the funnel. Opening the walls is about being phenomenal – it will require uncommon passion.

And if this takes getting in touch with a bit of our badness – a craving for power, unspeakable wealth or world domination – then I say bring it on.  As Jung said, “We do not become enlightened by imagining light, but by making the darkness conscious”. Put another way – and I think it was Nick Cave who said this – if there are no cracks (in our uber-authentic, do-gooder persona), then where does the light get in? I would rather hear how a company really screwed up and came to learn from it, than keep listening to the dull hum of continual excellence that seems to distinguish our corporate giants.

Thoughts on the branding journey

Based on this proposition, I have three take home messages to leave you with on the branding journey.

They are as follows:

1. Beware of branding on the booby prize.  We are interested in the real prize. Don’t tell me what you do with 1% of post-tax profit – tell me how you make those profits. If the profits are made in the same old life-compromising way, I’ll take your branding for good with a pinch of salt. I’m more interested in how you use your organisation’s power and innovation for real change than in your generosity of heart.

2. Contemplate the contradiction of consumption. This is a tough one and perhaps a tad controversial for this conference.  But the essence of the point is that if our branding efforts are leading to more and more stuff being sold and consumed, albeit a little lighter on the planet per widget, we are just not going to make it. As US architect William McDonough put it: “Driving south more slowly is not the same as turning around and driving north”. Yes – we are in skin-deep sustainability.

For the most part, eco is marketed as a luxury brand for caring (read: guilty) consumers.  The prevailing assumption is that a fundamental lifestyle change is unnecessary: being green means paying extra for organics, driving a hybrid and recycling our waste. This creeping eco-materialism has nudged some desperate environmentalists towards eco-fascism: pre-eminent British scientist James Lovelock said, “I have a feeling, that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.” Lovelock is hardly some sandal-clad radical; and he is not alone in his sentiments.

A less authoritarian but no less radical alternative to eco-fascism is the move to silence corporate advertising.  This has been both overt (such as in São Paulo, seventh largest city in the world, where outdoor advertising has been banned) and covert, where artists in New York City and Toronto have launched blitzkrieg attacks on billboards, replacing commercials with art. Their efforts have put at least one visual polluter out of business. What a lovely creative opportunity. If it’s still about more and more stuff for more and more people, we are simply buying time and, for many ardent greenies, this means war. Sitting on the fence may get a little uncomfortable.

3. And finally, a cry from the heart of this beloved country: Don’t gush on green in the face of disparity. We’re happily importing green messages from the north – perhaps it’s a welcome respite from the vagaries of domestic politics.  But the struggle against apartheid and the struggle against inequality is the struggle for sustainability. The struggle for diversity is the struggle for biodiversity – if we don’t address disparity, we may as well not address anything at all.  In South Africa, we have an alarmingly high gini co-efficient (this measures the ratio between the richest 10% and the poorest 10% in the country).

So while we’re busy branding for good, let’s hear about the internal gini co-efficient of these good companies: the ratio between the top 10% of earners and the bottom 10%.  Don’t be surprised to find disparity levels in excess of 1:400 or more.  This is not OK.  To talk about saving the planet when our corporate engines generate this level of disparity is ethically indefensible. Sustainability is unavoidably about getting to grips with what this means and becoming more conscious of and transparent on how we are dealing with it.

When we get down to serious sustainability, it’s edgy. The sustainability managers in the audience will bear me out on this one. As Dostoyevsky said: “Consciousness is a disease. A real bloody disease.” When you really work out what it is, you wish you’d never heard of it. But we have no choice – our time is literally up. And once we start this journey for real, our awakened soul will not let us drop it quietly even as our comfort zone slips slowly from our grasp.

Why I still do this work I’ve probably said quite enough. Unfortunately none of my closing thoughts provided me a particularly inspiring way to end this talk, so let me at least share my personal reason for still being in this game after twenty years: I am utterly convinced, along with most of my colleagues, that this is simply the most exciting time to be alive. We are re-designing the global economic system and have about a decade to do it in.

To quote Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest (2007):

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a heart.

I have shared with you some of the shadows of branding for good.  By confronting and integrating these things, I believe we can set the global pulse racing. I wish you every strength in being phenomenal.

Thank you.