Sustainability Gets Weak Publicity

The 2008 UT Sustainable Business Summit illustrated first hand the two biggest surprises for any business going green. First, transforming business procedures into sustainable procedures is surprisingly complicated. And secondly, when you do start making the transition, you’ll find it surprisingly difficult to talk about.

It quickly became apparent, after listening to some of the speakers and panel questions, that the mainstream idea of bad guys on one side and green guys on the other is not a realistic picture anymore. The Whole Foods keynote speaker on Friday evening, Lee Matecko, restated company founder John Mackey’s view that setting up the good guys against the bad guys is a false dichotomy, and gets in the way of dealing with the true complexities of sustainable practices.

Good guys versus bad guys

Let it be said that the original impulses to turn green started to resonate in corporate boardrooms largely because of activists exposing embarrassing truths and legislatures tightening regulations, and this will always be the underlying stick. There are carrots, however, and some of them are starting to work.

The keynote speaker from General Electric, Jeff Renaud, made it clear that GE’s green initiatives are part of a set of goals that include increased revenues. The company is learning, and teaching, that green business can turn a profit. Even with clear numbers on the table however, the old ways take time to overturn, and ROI expressed in any timespan longer than one year is a tough hurdle.

Institutionally too, the process of changing a company’s ways is not a simple matter. For one thing, companies that make large impacts on the Earth are themselves large, with multiple thousands of employees spread throughout the world in numerous clusters of hierarchy and focus. Internal communications within large companies are far from perfect: it takes time and often purely chance encounters for one part of the company to learn what another is doing.

Susan Ghertner, Environmental Affairs Manager for H-E-B, all but threw her hands in the air expressing this last point: she would ask people, what about the emails, the newsletters, the special notices everywhere? She was saying, try as hard as you may to communicate a new policy throughout the company, when you talk to people later it will still be the first they’ve heard of it.

But there’s a bigger problem than internal communication, and this is the publicity issue.

You think it’s hard to do, try talking about it

Where the real publicity risk lies in going green is talking to people outside the company. If companies are surprised at the number of tiny steps it requires to develop sustainable procedures just in one small part of their system, they recoil in amazement when they announce what they’re doing, and get slapped for it.

If a company is perceived as calling itself green, it will draw a storm of attacks pointing to all the areas that aren’t green. GE exemplified this in the keynote presentation, drawing several questions about cleanup efforts in its polluted brownfields. Jeff Renaud could only answer that a company 130 years old has a lot of legacy from earlier times.

This is a poignant concept. A company with a bad history will continue to be hammered even as it tries to change its ways. And rather than take the beating, many companies simply don’t publicize their sustainability efforts – they don’t want to draw fire.

In consequence of this fear of bad publicity, there are far more companies involved in proactive sustainable development than we realize. Making the situation even cloudier, parts of companies should still be activist targets, while other parts may even deserve acclaim.

The weak link

So the takeaway from the Summit for me was that going green is very complicated, and talking about it is even more complicated. But this is exactly what should be communicated. People in the mainstream should become familiar with the difficulties of going green, so they can extend support in meaningful ways at this fledgling stage.

Traditional corporate communications to the outside world have always been focused either on technical white papers or on artfully crafted releases designed to bolster the brand image. Portraying the complexities of genuine change seems to overtax the existing communications structures and resources of most companies.

It looks to me that traditional marketing communications methods and resources are just not up to the task of describing the growth of sustainability. We need better ways of spreading the word, and developing authentic engagement between companies and the mainstream public, their customers. For this, Web 2.0 methods are called for.