Massive Uptick in Consumer Interest in Sustainable Consumption

Yesterday, I attended the Executive Council’s Value-Based Sustainability: The Business Case for Green & Clean event in San Jose. About 150 people attended and shared their case studies and stories of how they are approaching sustainability in their corporations.

Adam Werbach from SaatchiS was the keynote and he said there has been “a massive uptake of core and dark blue consumers – 30% – who want to substitute products that are more sustainable” into their regular shopping experience.

His core message, also laid out in his book Strategy for Sustainability is that companies need to work on three levels when it comes to sustainability; transparency, engagement and networking.

Transparency:

Adam claims that as part of their research at SaatchiS, consumers are not only drawn to companies that are more environmentally aware but that they also reward companies (he specifically sited cosmetics, phone and paper products) for being honest (the example he gave was a phone company admitting to having mercury in their phones).

Engagement:

If you aren’t engaging your employees you are not only losing ideas that might lead to innovation (Walmart employees engaged in their own personal sustainability plans around energy savings came to work with that in mind and took the lightbulbs out of the vending machines in the store…which led to a $1M savings as it spread throughout the retailer nationwide) but it also increases your business risk (he gave the example of the ConAgra factory workers that didn’t let management know there was a leak in the roof of their factory which eventually led to the big salmonella recall of peanut butter).

Networking:

The ability to scale the impact of your sustainability efforts – the network effect – was illustrated with a P&G example. When P&G did their corporation-wide carbon footprint analysis they found that their worst culprit was in people taking  home their laundry detergent and doing laundry in hot water. …and Tide coldwater was born of that learning.

Finally, Adam believes that companies should pick a NORTH STAR goal like P&G’s – to sell $15B of sustainable products by 2010. These goals should be;

• actionable by every employee
• core to the business
• solves a global human challenge
• achievable in 5-15 years
• inspirational

It has been proven over and over that engaged employees can ignite passion in the organization and build your brand equity amongst consumers.

I was really surprised to see that employee engagement numbers in the US are only 17% according to Towers and Perrin. That means that 83% of employees in your company are not fully engaged. Imagine the impact that has on productivity and your bottom line. Employee engagement tied to your business goals needs to become the norm from an innovation, productivity, and retention standpoint.

Please share your thoughts. Do you think employee engagement in sustainability can drive innovation and higher productivity?