So what makes a brand marketer’s job sustainable?
The demand from customers for brands to be good and green keeps on growing. Few brand managers ignore the trend. But not all think through the implications and take a good hard look at what this means for them: their skill set, their knowledge and their networks. But they should. Communicating brand and product difference and connecting with customers have taken on a new dimension. There’s a real need for a radical update of the old brand management approaches. So what is likely to appear in a brand manager’s job description of the not too distant future?
For a start, the new brand marketers will need to know how to access a broader range of insights and analyse a new array of trend sources. They’ll have to know how to gather insight from NGOs, thought leaders and opinion formers, as well as consumers or customers. And they’ll be expected to put treehugger, Business for Social Responsibility, the Ethical Corporation, The Ecologist, and Green Futures on their reading list as valuable sources of trends.
They’ll be completely unphased by concepts of lifecycle analysis, carbon or water footprinting and eco-impact assessment. In fact, they’ll able to have a relevant and meaningful conversation with their sustainability or CSR manager – which both sides understand. They’ll actually have read their company’s sustainability report and know how they’re doing against targets. And they’ll be able to build the business case for sustainability and convince any cynical or unenlightened board member that it really is about opportunity and reward, not risk mitigation and tokenism.
They’ll have an up-to-date view of how to set success measures for the brand – ones that measure the environmental and societal value of any campaign, innovation or activation, as well as the impact on traditional definitions of brand equity and return on investment. They will, of course, be familiar with how to track consumer views on sustainability as an integral part of research programmes.
But they’ll also be using those still so valuable core brand marketing skills: to translate the complexities of sustainability into clear and compelling reasons for choice for the consumer or customer; to spark innovation that makes the right difference and to engage their peers in making sustainability part of everyday good business and brand management.
With all this, the sustainable brand manager of the future will be an asset no company could ever do without.
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