Replacing sustainability with regeneration

2023 will be looked back on as the time when the bill came due. For me this is a statement filled with positivity rather than with pessimism. I am a big believer that the pandemic years between 2020 and 2022 were far worse than this and robbed us of the world’s most precious thing, time. They locked us up physically, metaphorically and virtually. When you reflect, it was far from a great re-set and really more of a great standing in place. Now that we have all mostly had our revenge vacations, changed jobs and moved back to the city, it is back to the business at hand we would have had to deal with it in 2020. We are just three years late. Sure, it would be nice to have a later checkout even if it comes with a Dan Andrews style surcharge for the room service you thought was on the house, but life tends to give you what you need, not what you asked for.

Everywhere you look everyone looks exhausted by trying to make up for lost time, by creating their optimal schedule and trying to establish a new momentum in their lives. My grandad always said one thing about the war. If he wasn’t digging trenches in the sun in Algeria he would have been digging coal in the rain in Stoke on Trent. Perspective. I wonder if the ‘New Normal’ was not the best slogan since Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ because it feels more like the ‘Old Normal’. The trends we experienced as new were already happening. Only sped up. It brought forward the retirement of the richest generation in history, it drove the final transition in media to digital and it accelerated the end of a work model developed in the 1950’s, for single breadwinner families does not work for today’s dual income, indebted, portfolio career based middle class.

The future will be costly

Whether it’s developing the future sources of energy for our planet, the need to address the increasing polarity in our societies, or the justifiable concern about what AI really does mean for those who make a living selling time, tomorrow should cost more than today. The challenge for us all is that it also must be better. This is also the challenge facing brands.

Brands have always drawn their power from the culture of the times. They are part ethereal because they contain aspects that are tangible and intangible. Cola is just brown sugary water but enter Coca-Cola and you have a brand associated with the intangibles of American optimism. The great and enduring brands offer both superior functionality and resonate emotionally. Levi’s makes tough jeans that stand up to wear and in its peak of popularity stood for the working class counterculture of the day. Tesla makes a good product and draws it cultural power from our modern age of technology worship following the path paved by Apple.

Modern culture is finally emerging

Culture narratives are timeless because they are based in human beliefs. What changes are the stories that are used as proof of our beliefs. Today brand managers are responding to a different cultural context from which to create value which is not about rebellion and liberation but about social justice and regeneration. This is why it’s important to come back to the need for all brands to deliver against category drivers. Drivers are really the best expressions of how we humans are going to respond when making choices.

The job to be done is to then attach your brand through culture to have a different take on the drivers of behaviour. Our culture has shifted. I am not sure about you, but I reckon the shift in our collective acceptance that our planet is in danger was the combo of wildfires and flooding that every continent has seen in the last five years. It is harder and harder to find climate sceptics these days as our collective culture has seen enough demonstration that the world around us has changed through our actions.

Being less bad is no good

There has long been little correlation between brands doing good and any form of sustainable competitive advantage. Most often the brands that did good were born from good people, not good corporations. What I mean by that is that their founders baked it in. Whether it was pre Mondelez Cadbury, The Macy Family behind Macy’s, the Lever in Unilever or Yves starting Patagonia they did what was good and just and built a business model around it. It is not the role of a business to do good although it's always great when they do. The role of a brand owned by the business is to seek, find and maintain differentiation.

Professor Robert Jones and I discussed the idea of regenerative branding as a way that captures this thinking (watch the conversation here). For brands to really step up to the intersecting crises of climate change, equity, and justice, being less bad is not good enough. Rather than solely claim value from culture and maintain it, Regenerative Branding explores ways for brands to draw power from reshaping the systems in which they operate. In essence they move solely from brands created in image to brands grounded in action. They step back through their own supply chains, own promotion and own funding and find ways to solve the problem. At one level this is good business but increasingly it is also becoming better branding. Why? Because brands must move to keep up with the cultural norms of the day.

How can companies embrace regenerative branding?

1. They can take direct action

Brands can help the world regenerate through taking different types of action. Rather than speaking to change they can demonstrate change.
Think: Ikea committing to be a circular business by 2030 and L’Oreal making all its plastic packaging reusable, refillable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025.

2. They can make us aware

Showing diversity is not a nice to do, it is a necessity to address the modern cultural aspiration to include everyone. Brands are putting inclusion, diversity and difference front and centre in their communication.
Think: Dove and the campaign for Real Beauty, Who Gives a Crap and recycled paper and Nike with Women’s sport.

3.  They can adjust

Acting on sustainability rather than talking about its importance is vital. Brands are stepping back into their supply chain to showcase the actions they are taking to create differentiation for themselves.
Think: Primark committing to a fully sustainable supply chain, think Mars moving to 100% paper based packaging or Wal Mart running its own electrical grid through its store network.

While I love the idea of space travel, I also do not want to live on the moon digging rocks for Elon because we made the earth inhabitable for humans. Brands can’t and won’t do it all but those who help through focusing on being more good, not less bad, today will stay relevant in the culture of tomorrow.

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Be better to each other.