The barrier for sustainability is price. Typically, this is blamed on consumers. Marketers say to themselves that consumers are not living up to their values, because if they were, they’d prioritize sustainability and pay for it. So, the job for brands is defined as getting consumers to follow through on good intentions. This involves segmenting consumers by sustainability attitudes to develop marketing appeals.
This is all well and good, but it frames the relevant question incorrectly.
The difficulty doesn’t lie with consumers. It lies with marketers. Marketers should take a step back and ask what problems consumers are trying to solve. The late Harvard marketing guru Ted Levitt wrote in one of his classic essays, taught in every business school, that the purpose of business is to solve people’s problems. The job of marketing is to find out what problems people are trying to solve and then develop products that solve them in affordable and profitable ways.
When we ask this question of sustainability, we realize that while there is a sustainability problem, it’s not a problem consumers are trying to solve for themselves. The problems consumers have are things like dirty clothes or unreliable transportation or nothing interesting to watch. Marketers try to convince consumers that the problems they have are actually dirty clothes without a sustainable solution or unreliable transportation without a sustainable solution or nothing to watch without a sustainable solution. Marketers are telling consumers they have problems that consumers don’t actually have. No surprise that consumers won’t pay extra, or oftentimes anything at all, for a sustainable solution. Sustainability is not a problem for consumers.
In practical terms, this means that sustainable products aren’t solving a problem. And if they’re not solving a problem, then there is literally no business there—because as Levitt noted, a business exists only by solving a problem. This is the fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of sustainability-oriented marketing.
But it is also the way forward for sustainability. The answer is to solve the problems people actually have with products that deliver better solutions that are also sustainable. This is sustainability as incidental not fundamental. Marketers must sell sustainable products on the basis of cleaner clothes or more reliable transportation or something interesting to watch. They could even sell these products at a premium—people will pay more for convenience or experience. That’s what sustainability marketing needs to do—be more convenient or more engaging. Forget selling something sustainable as ‘better for the planet.’ Make it better for the category, and that will take care of the planet, too. Indeed, if it’s not better for the category first and foremost, it will never get the chance to be better for the planet.
Put another way, category-first will take care of the planet. Planet-first will always fail because it doesn’t take care of the category.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar
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