Challenge 12: How do you communicate sustainable innovation to your stakeholders?
Diagnosis
Sustainable product innovation and its communication with consumers are essential for the realisation of sustainability through sustainable consumption. Consumers are the receivers of the products developed and the services offered, and they make decisions on the consumption of the products and acceptance of the services. Therefore, it is important to communicate the sustainability information of the products and services to the consumers, to achieve the sustainability goal.
Sustainability refers to ensuring a balance between economic growth, environmental protection, and well-being, to fulfil needs of current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Sustainable innovations offer creative technical solutions that do not have a negative impact on environment and society and still have an important contribution to the economic sector in the long term.
The less you communicate about your sustainability activities and sustainable innovation, the more you will lose a competitive advantage against your competitors.
To try to understand the importance of correctly communicating sustainability and sustainable innovation, please analyse the aspects presented in the table below.
Positive aspects | Negative aspects |
|---|---|
Are you authentic in your communication? Are you being transparent about both your efforts and your challenges when it comes to becoming more sustainable? | You simply prepare messages that you consider appealing for your customers and other stakeholders. You write what you think other want to read about without taking into consideration the fact that they may be much more prepared than you in identifying exaggerations or even lies. |
Do you put an emphasis on your sustainability achievements and present them as clear and concise as possible? Do you use real numbers and statistics to support your sustainability efforts? Do you present the real social impact of your sustainable activity on the community and environment? | You do not put an emphasis on your achievements and do not talk much about the benefits of sustainability in what your company is concerned and how it changed the perspective of both stakeholders and employees. |
Do you encourage others to participate in your sustainability journey? Do you share your sustainable goals with others and ask for constructive feedback? Do you organise activities in which you invite employees, customers, communities to join you towards better sustainability implementation (e.g., recycling programs)? | You consider that small recycling events have not much impact on the sustainability strategy of your company. They are time and resources consuming and no direct influence on the development of any sustainable innovation. |
Do you use a positive tone when communicating sustainability? Do you focus on the positive side of the sustainable effort even if you acknowledge it is not an easy path? Do you talk about benefits such as environment protection, health improvement, or well-being? | You want to present the real situation of the entire sustainable innovation process which is not at all an easy one. You confront with a lot of problems on the way and people must know this. |
Do you use all communication channels available to present your sustainability efforts and achievements? | You do not consider that using all available channels will help you more to better communicate sustainable innovation. It will imply a lot of effort to customize messages for each channel and the impact is not easy to evaluate. |
Do you present your company as an entity that gives meaning to employees’ jobs by promoting sustainability? | You do not consider that there are employees that will change their jobs if the company does not implement sustainability procedures and only look to get hired by companies that have sustainability as a core value. |
Do you communicate the company focus on sustainability as a differentiating advantage that generates cost savings, reduces risk and improves competitiveness? | You have the impression that almost all companies are involved towards sustainability and do not analyse in detail what your competitors, sector or industry is behaving. |
Do you communicate sustainability as the next possible step your company is taking to show its respect and loyalty to its customers and other stakeholders? | You do not think at communicating subtle advantages of sustainable innovation for others and focus on what your business can gain out of this. |
Do you take into consideration when communicating sustainability also possible investors? Do you take into consideration that your company can be attractive enough by promoting sustainable innovation to possible investors that could help you increase your business in a healthy way? | The difference between the general image the company built in the business sector and the way employees communicate puzzles the clients and creates strong dissatisfaction |
Do you consider your company to have a thing to say about sustainability on the market? Do you consider your company to have a vision that supports people changing behaviours regarding environment protection and adopting a more responsible lifestyle? | You do not consider your company to have such a huge impact on the market that could really change people’s behaviours. You limit your communication to basic data related to the market, sector on industry in which you operate. |
1. Fill in the table with your initial assessment regarding each aspect and the way it is reflected in your company.
2. Take 1 – 2 weeks to intentionally observe the way your company communicates about the sustainability strategy and sustainable innovation according to every area stated in the table.
3. During this period, observe your own behaviours and cognitive biases towards how best communicate sustainability in general and sustainable innovation in particular. Try to find out as much as possible about communicating sustainability and the way other companies run their communication campaigns on this subject.
4. At the end of the selected period, organize a meeting with managers and employees directly involved in communication and discuss the conclusions of what you have identify as weak and strong points in your organisation from the sustainability and sustainable innovation point of view.
Actions for implementation
If you observe that negative aspects are common in your company, while positive aspects are barely present, you must take seriously rethinking your entire communication strategy on sustainability and sustainable innovation.
Your objective should be to consciously integrate sustainability in your communication strategy. This implies sending the right messages to all your stakeholders about company’s sustainability achievements and efforts.
Communicating sustainability helps your company build a good reputation, prove its commitment to improving health conditions for communities, society, planet, and actively participate to the further sustainable development, including increasing innovation culture.
Actions to be implemented to reach your goal can include:
1. Create an engaging sustainability story. You can improve your story by taking a stand, presenting your strong point of view on a social or environmental challenge. You do not need to offer a solution to the problem you stand for, but to offer your authentic opinion and offer your real support on the matter. Creating concise content can also help you build a relevant story. Do not crowd your story with unnecessary details and, most important, have always in your mind that it must be interesting and inspiring to catch your audience.
2. Build your own communication plan. Depending on your objectives, you will most probably need to send customised messages to multiple audiences, different channels and at different times. To ease your work, you create and use a template like the one suggested below. You can upgrade the template and change it according to your own needs and company special features.
Business & Communications objectives What are your business objectives? What are your communication objectives? How can you best meet both business and communication objectives? | Measuring success How will you measure your campaign success? What aspects will you monitor in order to track your success? | ||
Audiences Who are your target groups? | Messages What type of message would you consider more appropriate for each target group? | Channels What are the channels you plan to use to send your customised message to the targeted audience? | Timing When will you schedule the customised message to be delivered to the targeted audience using the selected channel? |
Audience group 1 | |||
Audience group 2 | |||
Audience group 3 | |||
3. Create your own communication calendars. Use a printed or digital calendar and note the date when you want to start communicating on a certain subject, mark the length of the communication campaign on the chosen subject and mark the deadline to have the communication materials ready for being sent throughout the selected channels.
You will be able to visualize on a monthly and yearly basis all the communication campaigns to plan to do, adjust their timing if they are overlapping another event or campaign already planned, and be ready to evaluate the campaigns results after getting the data from online monitoring tools or specialised marketing agencies.