In today’s world, businesses produce goods and services, and people purchase them. This cycle generates an unsustainable amount of carbon emissions, threatening the future of all living beings. To mitigate this impact, we must fundamentally change how, when, and what we consume, leading to a cultural shift toward sustainability.
Reduce Scope 3 Emissions and Reinvent Consumerism
Why focus on consumerism? Because cultural habits and values drive consumption, influenced by perceptions of wealth, status, ownership, and novelty. Businesses play a crucial role in shaping these behaviors through their products, services, marketing, and advertising strategies.
Promotional tactics often encourage unsustainable behaviors, such as ‘frictionless purchasing’ with easy returns, disposable products, and ‘buy-now-or-miss-out’ offers. These practices promote accumulation and waste. Instead, businesses should adopt circular and regenerative innovation models, emphasizing long-term value and sustainability, thereby reshaping consumer desires and expectations.
This effort should be reciprocal. At COP26, we emphasized the need for organizations to reduce the burden on consumers. It’s a collaborative approach where organizations and people interact in new ways, including customer-business relationships, employee-leader interactions, and inter-organizational partnerships.
Overhauling Sustainability
Sustainability needs a redefinition. Most people (three in five) don’t strongly relate to living sustainably. There’s an opportunity to redefine sustainability, making it more relatable and actionable. By humanizing sustainability, we can better align it with people’s lives, fostering widespread engagement. This shift is essential and timely, marking “Our Human Moment.”
Extending Responsibility
Businesses are increasingly pressured to extend their sustainability efforts. With Scope 3 emissions becoming a regulatory focus, sustainable customer experience is now as crucial as traditional customer experience. Stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, and even CEOs’ families, demand better practices in product creation and consumption. Businesses must unite efforts in product/service design and lifecycle management to meet these expectations.
Marketing officers will need to deliver products and services that align with sustainable values, balancing consumer demands with sustainable production practices. They will bear greater responsibility for both production and marketing.
Aligning Words with Actions
Corporate transparency is essential. Public and regulatory scrutiny ensures that internal actions match external sustainability claims. Misalignment is common; in 2020, the European Commission found that 53.3% of environmental claims were vague or misleading. The Commission’s Green Claims Directive proposal aims to combat greenwashing by requiring accurate environmental labeling and messaging, with penalties for non-compliance. Similarly, the US FTC is reviewing its environmental marketing guides, potentially imposing stricter penalties for misleading claims.
Aligning internal activities with public sustainability messaging fosters brand sincerity, loyalty, and value generation. Consumers increasingly consider sustainability in purchase decisions; 74% say sustainable practices are important, and 80% agree that clear sustainability commitments add brand value. A poor environmental record is a major concern, with 76% believing companies should uphold environmental commitments throughout the supply chain. Misleading sustainability credentials can harm consumer relationships and business success.
Rewriting the Narrative
Brands have the opportunity to change mainstream culture through storytelling, creating new myths and behaviors around consumption. For example, IKEA’s “Buyback and Resell” scheme during Black Friday shifts focus from bargain-hunting to sustainability. Coors Light’s “Plastic-Free Future Mart” showcased a store made entirely from sustainable materials.
Getting Started with Sustainability
- Focus on Big Targets: Reinvention starts with high-income consumers, whose behaviors significantly impact carbon emissions. Brands can lead this cultural shift.
- Simplify Messages: Make sustainability concepts easy to understand. Simplification helps embed sustainability across the company.
- Be Honest: Transparency about challenges and failures fosters collaboration and inclusivity, making sustainability more relevant and actionable.
Organizations are uniquely positioned to reinvent consumption by combining creativity with sustainability expertise. They can integrate new communication and design modes with circular manufacturing and distribution, creating consumer experiences grounded in equity and inclusivity. By making sustainability relevant and accessible, we can transform events like Black Friday from cultural fixtures to historical footnotes.
Published on Accenture Blog, September 15, 2023