by Colwyn Elder (@colwynelder) Sustainability is one of those big, hairy, honking subjects that everyone is talking about but no-one really wants to talk about, because let’s face it – we’re all guilty! Especially if you work in advertising, in other words: you’re a cog in the wheel of the over-consumption-machine without which we wouldn’t be having this uncomfortable conversation in the first place.
But even if you don’t work in advertising, keep reading, because if you drove your car in to work this morning (especially if you drove in your 
4×4 all by yourself), you’re guilty. And if you rode your bike into work, and then followed up with a long, hot shower, you’re also guilty. By and large we are all living, to a lesser or greater extent, an unsustainable lifestyle.
And there it is. The elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.
So let’s talk about it.
We live in a world where an increasing number of people will compete for finite resources. This requires a fundamental and significant shift in how we live.
I recently attended the Sustain Our Africa Conference in Cape Town, which succinctly summed up the notion of sustainability in a single pithy definition: ‘Enough. For All. Forever.’ It’s successful because it manages to wrap up sustainability’s triple bottom line of ‘People, Planet, Profit’, in an engaging and motivating way. It’s positive, inclusive and sounds like a future we’d all like to be part of, far cry from the ‘end is nigh’ commentary we’ve heard in the past. To achieve the significant level of change required, it’s important for people to see themselves as part of the solution rather than the problem.
And similarly, if we view business as a part of the solution – not the problem – we can begin to see the role of business in a future that has ‘enough, for all, forever’.
Last year I worked on a sustainability project for one of the UK’s leading banks and interviewed stakeholders across the breadth of the organisation. Interestingly all senior partners were in agreement that sustainability has ‘become part of the must-have’s of corporate culture’ and there’s ‘not a boardroom in the FTSE100 where this isn’t important to them’, yet they struggled to agree on what this meant for them as business. Answers ranged from the ‘cost of doing business to the world’ to ‘being here as a bank tomorrow’ and ‘innovating and evolving so that we can be relevant to our customers.’
Almost all of them spoke about baking it in, not bolting it on. In order to achieve this – and make business a part of the solution – we need to stop seeing CSR as a separate function. Applying good corporate citizenship across the business may work to minimize impact or even redress negative impact, but this simply brings us back to a zero base. Instead we should attempt to find new ways of doing business and create shared value – for customers, for commerce, for our world.
Unilever has a big ambition to double the size of the company whilst reducing their overall impact on the environment. At the same time it recognises that the majority of their footprint comes not from the manufacture of their products (29% comes from raw materials and manufacture), but rather in consumer usage of these products (68%).
In other words to reduce their impact, it is imperative to change consumer behaviour. Developing a more concentrated washing liquid means less packaging, which in turn means fewer trucks on the road. But most importantly Unilever’s customers can feel good about by using less to achieve the same level of efficacy.
Creating shared value is about finding the intersection between your business and society’s needs and challenges, creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society.
An example of business using innovation to create social value is Vodafone’s M-Pesa mobile banking service. Whilst 80% of Kenyan adults don’t have a bank account, they do have a mobile phone. M-Pesa offers a fast, safe and easy way to send and receive money, enabling customers to deposit, withdraw and transfer money – something they were previously unable to do – by means of their mobile phone.
As another of my research stakeholder’s said: ‘sustainability is an opportunity to surprise customers in a positive way by caring about something that s/he cares about’. If business thinks of itself in this way, as a creator of shared value, not just shareholder value, and as a contributor to society as a whole, then we can start to shape a shared future our customers will actually want to talk about.
Y&R strategy director Colwyn Elder (@colwynelder) has 17 years of experience in strategic planning, together with specific credentials in sustainability communications, social marketing, corporate social responsibility and cause-related marketing. She contributes the monthly “Green Sky Thinking” column on sustainability issues to MarkLives.