In business, sometimes simplicity is praised and sometimes it is scorned. It can be hard to predict which reaction will win out.

Each year, GlobeScan and SustainAbility survey sustainability experts across corporate, government, NGO, academic, research, and service organizations in 75-plus countries to determine which businesses are perceived to be sustainability leaders, and why. This year’s results remind us that simplicity is a more complex phenomenon than it might appear.

The 2012 Sustainability Leaders Survey was released this month. …

You do all the right things: establish goals and targets, publish an annual sustainability report, seek employee and public input — and then repeat the cycle. Yet despite your efforts, those around you don’t seem to be moving fast enough to address the world’s environmental challenges, and you sense that real progress will require more involvement on the part of consumers, investors and government leaders.

What do you do? How will you make your company’s engagement efforts …

It’s hard to think about brand leadership without thinking about Apple, now neck-and-neck with ExxonMobil as the world’s biggest company by market cap.

Last week, Apple was top of mind for many of us, with two major pieces of reporting: the UK release of Adam Lashinsky’s book, Inside Apple, which describes in part-admiring, part-unmerciful detail Apple’s tough organizational culture, and the New York Times’s excellent investigation into conditions in Apple’s supplier factories in China.

This last piece spurred CEO Tim Cook …

Sustainability labels should focus more on actual company performance

When we talk about the “eco-label model” we’re really talking about a combination of three things.

First, standards – a set of requirements, usually taking a consensus-based approach. Second, certifications – providing assurance of conformity against this standard. And, third, the eco-labels themselves – on-pack marks that indicate conformance with the standard.

This model came into being over…

I was in Austin last week for a Sustainable Life Media (SLM) double-header. First a meeting of the Sustainable Brands Advisory Board, then the SLM Corporate Members meeting.

Hosted with aplomb by Dell, sessions included a tour of the Dell Social Media Command Center (a fascinating, real-time window into what everyone, everywhere is saying about their Dell experience), and an inspiring visit to the new LEED Gold certified offices of Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG Foundation, with both proving there is more going on in Austin than music, football and great Tex-Mex like Guero’s (though those are fine too, with Guero’s servings proving again that everything is bigger in Texas).

For everything packed into the two days, I left thinking about a presentation by Simon Mainwaring, the best-selling author of We First …

Sustainable consumption has been high on our agenda in recent months. Most recently, our latest report Signed, Sealed… Delivered? highlights the diminishing returns from sustainability labels and calls for sustainability to be ‘built-in’ rather than ‘bolt-on’ (or, in this case, labelled-on) to consumer brands.

So with my antennae sensitised for unsustainable consumption, I was stunned to flick through the Financial Times‘ Weekend magazine Christmas Unwrapped and read endless exhortation of excessive consumption…

As SustainAbility’s new report, Signed, Sealed… Delivered?, explains, certification marks can help build trust in brands and influence consumer behaviour. But they are not universally successful, for all people, in all circumstances. What alternative approaches can be usefully employed? Business in the Community’s Simon Lee explains the findings from their recent report, Influencing Consumer Behaviour – A Guide for Sustainable Marketing.

Why aren’t people acting?

Trust marks undeniably provide a quick, easy method to communicate a company or product’s sustainability credentials to consumers. Yet…

Labelling has an important role to play in conveying information about sustainability to consumers, but it is by no means a panacea for all the ills of unsustainable consumption. Consumer awareness does not simply equate to consumer action; it must be accompanied by incentives, disincentives and, crucially, the phasing out of products and services that have the greatest impact.

This logic does not only apply to the issue of sustainability. Research consistently points to the need for multi-pronged approaches to changing consumer behaviour in areas such as nutrition, financial services, and pharmaceuticals, to name but a few. All the evidence suggests that point-of-sale information alone is not enough change consumer behaviour.

SustainAbility is thrilled to be on the cusp of launching our latest research report, Signed, Sealed…Delivered? In addition to the global public release online and in print November 16th, we will host in-person launch events in Washington, DC and London on November 16th and 18th, respectively, where our findings will be debated and dissected in workshop format with representatives from certification and labeling initiatives, engaged businesses and other stakeholders.

On October 31st the UN proclaimed that Earth’s seven-billionth inhabitant had arrived. Over eight million babies have been born since I wrote my previous blog on consumption. The figures are staggering. However, we know that the threat to the planet has less to do with the absolute number than with what, how and how much we consume. The challenge of how we meet the nutrition, health, shelter, apparel, energy, and entertainment needs of the next billion without further eroding the planet’s finite resources is surely among the most significant of our time.

In my last blog on consumption, I highlighted four trends…

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe.” Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has passed away at the age of 56, having transformed the way we use and think about technology. Those of us working toward a more sustainable world would be wise to pay attention to how he did it.

I was working in the mobile phone industry in January 2007, when Jobs stood up on stage and revealed the iPhone to the world. Many of my colleagues looked on unimpressed – sure it looked good, but it was too expensive, too big, too slow for internet browsing, too hard to type on… in fact too just-about-everything. The consensus seemed to be that Jobs, as an ‘outsider,’ just couldn’t understand the complexities of the mobile landscape we all inhabited. What my colleagues missed was that Jobs wasn’t looking to find his own place in that landscape; he was planning to terraform it. And terraform it he did. Five short years ago very few people outside the industry had ever heard the term “smartphone,” but now it seems that every other handset you see is either an iPhone or an imitation of it.

What does all this mean for the business of sustainability? Well, Apple may not be known as a leader on environmental or social issues, but its winning formula serves as a great model for those who aspire to be. Jobs built an organisation that actively sought to shatter the status quo in every market it entered. The iPhone is just one of a number of successess – Macintosh, iTunes, iPad, and so on – that prove how a single company can really change the game if it thinks differently.

A global culture of consumerism has firmly taken hold – the average British woman buys half her body weight in clothing every year; a typical American purchases more stuff every day than an average American weighs; more than 30 million tons of food was dumped in landfills in the US in 2009; and the largest shopping centre in Europe has just opened as the gateway to the London 2012 Olympics. Yet as resources become more constrained, economies stall and businesses begin to think more innovatively about different ways of delivering value to the customer, there are some signals of hope for a reversal in the way that consumers value and use products and services.

The Lancet recently published a major international study revealing that 347 million adults worldwide suffered from diabetes in 2008 – a number that has doubled since 1980 and exceeds that shown in previous studies. As it was a scientific study, it doesn’t address the staggering economic implications of this number in terms of lost productivity and exorbitant healthcare costs for treatment and support. However, a study also published in June in Value in Health contends that nearly one in five people with diabetes are regularly unable to attend a full day at work due to disruption caused by episodes of dangerously low blood sugar. And one in every ten healthcare dollars in the US is spent on diabetes and its complications.

I write this on the plane back to London from a wonderful (if logistically bumpy – thank you State Department and friends for getting me home!) trip to the States, where we kicked off our Signed, Sealed… Delivered? research by running sessions at Sustainable Brands 2011 in Monterey, California (hosted by KoAnn Skyrzniarz and team at Sustainable Life Media), Starbucks (hosted by Ben Packard and Colleen Chapman of the Starbucks global responsibility team) and Method (hosted by director of sustainability Drummond Lawson – see my colleague Mark Lee’s blog for a recap).

With the wonderfully diverse set of B2B and B2C (food & beverage, retail, paper, household & personal care, biotech, industrial materials and carpet) and functional perspectives represented (from procurement to brand & marketing), our goal was to explore the following questions…

San Francisco is a trend-setting kind of place. Politically, technologically, environmentally, gastronomically, oenologically and otherwise, it’s a city that’s had a few moments.

A relatively recent addition to the Bay Area avant-garde is Method, a line of home care products launched in 2000. The products are colorful, effective and non-toxic, so you don’t need to worry about having them under your sink, while Method’s package design comes as close as possible to making soaps sexy – you actually want them on display…

Luxury brands have long suffered the wrath of environmentalists for their perceived role in fueling excessive, conspicuous consumption, promoting materialism, yielding unnecessary waste, and driving further inequity. However, it seems lately that luxury brands are keen to turn over a new leaf…

I am in Monterey, California this week, at the Sustainable Brands conference, where I gave the opening plenary talk on Wednesday, June 08. This blog post was adapted from those remarks.

Play on

The theme of each Sustainable Brands conference sets an important tone. This year was convened under the aegis ‘Play On’, providing attendees the opportunity to learn how to apply the creativity, innovation and sheer fun inherent to games and sport in their work on sustainability issues…

I’m on my way to the Sustainable Brands conference in Monterey this week where my colleague Mark Lee will be delivering the opening keynote. While I’m looking forward to tapping into (and trying to help shape) the latest thinking on a variety of topics in this space, I’m probably like a lot of participants who are dying to see how the current mini-debate over the state of green marketing itself – touched off a few weeks ago by Joel Makower’s great provocation that green marketing is over and it’s time to move on – will play out at the conference. We briefly framed the debate in another post earlier today, which I aim to complement here with a few further thoughts and opinions.

For more than two decades companies have valued our ability to serve as their early warning system, to interpret what is happening in the world today and how it may impact their business tomorrow.

Our “Radar” services range from the general – monthly cross-industry trending digests – to the bespoke – tailored analysis of the most critical emerging issues to your business, and recommendations on how to tackle them.

This is the first in a series of blogs giving a glimpse into what’s on our radar. If your company could benefit from an early warning system, to identify key threats and opportunities as you navigate the rapidly evolving sustainability landscape, please contact us.

On Our Radar: Green Marketing is…Contested

Cindy Gallop is a force. She is a magnetic, dynamic character that oozes positivity and passion in ways I have never encountered.

An ex-advertising queen, she recently founded IfWeRantheWorld.com, an incredibly innovative micro-action platform designed to turn good intentions into concrete action. Based on a crowd-sourcing principle, Gallop’s venture is meant to motivate people to do things by partaking in micro-actions that can effect great change in the world…