Posts in category: Insights

There is a lot out there on how to put together a sustainability report, how to build the story, check lists etc. From individuals who have the experience in developing a sustainability report to firms and consultants.

What is not out there is much on how to communicate the sustainability report and its story. How to reach the right stakeholders, how to develop a marketing and communication plan to ensure that your efforts are effectively conveyed to your target audience for the long term, till the next report is out.

The communication plan for a sustainability report needs to start before work beings on the report, not after its completion. A close collaboration between the sustainability team and communications team is the best way to ensure a successful plan.

In addition to a pdf, a press release and perhaps a press conference a digital first (interactive and responsive reporting) approach should be the first decision made to complement your overall plan.

Here are some items that should be part of your marketing & communication plan:

1. Identified Key Messages
2. Defined Target Audience
3. Marketing Channels
4. Engaging Content
5. Social Media Campaigns
6. Events or Webinars
7. Employee Engagement
8. Analytics
9. Feedback and Conversation

For anyone who would like to find out more, feel free to DM me.

There is a steady increase in mandatory sustainability reporting globally, and a greater understanding that sustainability does have an integral part in the strategy of a business. Having influence on the financial returns, opportunities and wellbeing of a company in the long-term.

The question being asked by those new to sustainability reporting, is where do we start? One good place to start is to look at the existing tools and systems in hand, such as your company risk management system.

Traditional risk management actually plays a vital role in sustainability reporting, by integrating ESG risks into your conventional risk management framework comes a richer analysis around the companies risks and a more meaningful cohesive narrative through your corporate reports.

The following are some key areas that traditional risk management looks into, which would contribute to providing a structured and systematic approach in identifying, assessing and monitoring sustainability risks. Subsequently creating a well-rounded company risk management system.

1. Identification of Risks
2. Materiality Assessment
3. Integration of Sustainability into Overall Risk Framework
4. Scenario Planning:
5. Quantification and Measurement
6. Mitigation and Controls
7. Reporting Transparency
8. Regulatory Compliance

Would love to hear your thoughts on how sustainability and risk management can align.

Although digitalisation in the world of sustainability reporting is increasing, there still seems to be hesitation amongst businesses and decision makers to make the transition from just having a pdf to also having digital responsive report (microsite).

When presented with the advantages, many can see how it makes sense to make the transition, yet the common concerns that arise are to do with costing and a resistance to change.

Cost: Digital responsive reporting is not necessarily a costly affair. In fact, in comparison to the investments being made on software solutions that help companies track and report on ESG metrics, there is no comparison.

In a recent article by Deloitte, the prediction is that the revenue from software tools will climb from under an estimated US$800 million in 2023 to just more than US$1 billion in 2024.

I can confidently say that companies are no going to be spending US$1 billion on their sustainability communications.

Resistance to Change: Most of us do not take to change that easily, especially if we are comfortable with existing methods. What many are failing to understand is that changes in the reporting landscape are unavoidable, even more so no than in the past. Stakeholders are increasingly demanding greater communications and transparency. Digital responsive reporting is just the first step in a Digital 1st approach.

Ultimately, the decision on whether to go with digital responsive reporting is increasingly becoming a no brainer. The concerns and advantages can be weighed, but companies need to more engaging, which cannot be done via a pdf.

Whether it is by choice, or mandatory, sustainability reporting is not exclusive to large and listed companies; listed or non-listed small companies can also benefit from and should engage in sustainability reporting.
Although small companies might have different resources and capabilities, they can still make meaningful contributions to sustainability and enjoy similar benefits that a larger company may; in areas such as stakeholder trust and engagement, risk management, investors, attracting new talent and a having a competitive edge.

Here are some key considerations and tips for small companies when engaging in sustainability reporting:

1. Start with Materiality: Identify the most relevant sustainability issues for your business and stakeholders. Focus on areas where your company can make a significant impact and align with your core values and business activities.
2. Set Clear Goals: Define specific and achievable sustainability goals that are meaningful for your company’s size and capacity.
3. Focus on Key Metrics: Concentrate on key sustainability metrics that demonstrate your company’s impact and progress.
4. Use Simple Language: Choose clear and concise language in your sustainability report to make it easily understandable for all stakeholders, including customers, employees, and investors.
5. Leverage Technology: Utilise digital tools and platforms for data collection, reporting, and communication.
6. Engage Employees: Encourage their participation and contributions, as they can be valuable advocates for your sustainability initiatives.
7. Collaborate with Partners: Highlight your collaborations in your report to showcase your commitment to sustainability.
8. Be Transparent about Challenges: Don’t shy away from sharing challenges and areas for improvement in your report. Transparency builds credibility.
9. Tell Your Story: Stories can resonate with stakeholders and showcase the value of your sustainability efforts. Content is value, use social media to keep on sharing.
10. Keep It Concise: Focus on quality over quantity and keep your report concise and relevant.
11. Benchmark and Learn: Compare your sustainability performance with industry peers and learn from best practices.
12. Involve Stakeholders: Stakeholder engagement demonstrates your commitment to listening and responding to their needs. This includes shareholders, investors, partners, employees and consumers.
13. Integrate with Business Strategy: Link your sustainability efforts with your overall business strategy.
14. Consider GRI Standards: If applicable, consider using the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards as a framework for structuring your sustainability report.
15. Update Regularly: Communication builds trust and demonstrates continuous improvement. Come up with a communication strategy so that your hard work and content does not go to waste.

You spend a great deal of effort and expense developing creative assets such as designs and logos to support your brand. These assets need to be maintained. If you think of brand creative assets as physical assets, then just as you need to periodically service your car, so you should service or refresh your brand designs. Without timely refreshing, you risk having your designs becoming a liability rather than an asset for your marketing efforts.
We do brand refreshes as a service and find these elements often missed when designs are being refreshed

Hero image still doing the job?

The hero images in marketing collaterals and touch points are often reflective of your target market demographic or their aspirations – hence the use of slim models in weight loss advertising or images of rugged, wide-open spaces in advertisements for 4-wheel drive vehicles.

The self-perception of target markets changes with time and so it is necessary to change hero images in your visual communications as well, otherwise the imaging you use will not attract customers and in fact could even alienate your market

Colour choices in design getting harder

Even the inexperienced designer knows that different colours portray different emotions and the colour choices in your marketing designs were probably chosen for very good reasons in order to invoke the desired action by consumers.

The colour choice can be the make or break of an advertisement and so it is critical to often revisit the colours used in your corporate designs. An annual review is probably the right frequency because our markets have become very demographically complex and are changing all the time. There are two mega trends affecting colour choices and making colour decisions very difficult.

A globally ageing population means that markets for most products have a very wide age range. For instance, a new car model is bought by a twenty-five-year-old, but the same model is also bought by a fifty-year-old and as every designer knows, colour preferences change with age. So, do you use colours aimed at the 25-year-old or the 50-year-old?

The erasure of geographical market borders in online markets has an even bigger impact on colour choice because colours have different meanings in different cultures. For instance, in western cultures the colour of mourning is black but in many eastern cultures the colour white denotes mourning. On-line your product is sold internationally, so which cultures should you aim your colour choices at for greatest effect?

Changing emotions of vocabulary

Everyday vocabulary changes with time. Not only are new words added but the meaning and emotion attached to some words also changes. The classic example is the word, ‘Gay’ which used to mean joyous or happy, but now denotes homosexual or lesbian. As another example, in the 1950s who would have thought that ‘mouse’ would be a computer device or that ‘Sick’ would be an awesome feeling.

It is unlikely that your marketing collateral will have words that have changed meaning so dramatically because surely you would have noticed, Right? Believe me I have pointed out the current meaning of ‘gay’ as recently as 2020! You do need to review the word content of your designs for subtle and recently trending changes in popular meaning – just imagine the deep thinking that the manufacturers of any product that contained the word ‘Corona’ would have gone through during the pandemic.

Look out for any changed emotions or implications attached to words that you use in your PR or marketing designs.

Remember the fonts

Even Fonts change with time – Times New Roman was supremely popular in the 80s, now it would be seen as old or certainly classical. So, if classical or dull is not the mood you want to create in your designs then you may just need to change font.

If you want to have a certain uniqueness of design going forward, then you may even want to create your own font. Incidentally fonts can carry copyright so this is something to be conscious of when reviewing and refreshing your marketing designs.

Key Takeaway

Consumer habits and behaviours are changing constantly and so should your marketing designs; otherwise they will lose relevance and their effectiveness. The total overall effect of a design is what counts, however, there are some key elements which often seem to get dated if they are neglected. The good news is that an outsider’s eye can usually pick up the difficulties very easily and simple changes can give a brand new life to your designs.

Branding Gold Insights

If you are designing a logo or refreshing the existing logo of your business, then try to keep it simple in order to maximise its effectiveness. Simple logos have a number of benefits:

1. Simple logos are easier to recognise and remember

Simple logos are easier to recall by customers. In fact, trials have shown again and again, that complex logos, especially those that have words or a tagline, are far less likely to be remembered than simple designs. There are hundreds of simple logos around us that belong to very successful companies: Starbucks, Mercedes-Benz, MacDonalds, Google, FedEx… the list is endless and easy to think of, whilst honestly, I can’t think of any complex logos that are well know!

2. Lose the words

Avoid words in the logo, because having no words in the logo simplifies things. However, you may have to ignore this if your business is very new and the name is totally unknown, In this case, you are almost obliged to have the name of the business in the logo in some way, otherwise the logo will have no meaning to your audience.

If you are at the beginning of your business journey and relatively unknown in your market, then try to create a design that incorporates the name of your business rather than tagging it on to the logo or under the logo as is commonly done.

Alternatively, design in such a way that the name can be removed at some future date, when the business is better known. A case in point – the Mercedes Benz star is internationally recognised – most people would recognise the star without the words underneath. At some stage, your branding will be strong enough in your niche that you can drop the actual name from your logo if you want to.

Looking around, you are sure to find many logos that you have seen evolve over time.

Branding Gold Insights

Visual branding such as logos, marketing collaterals, websites and advertisements make up a large proportion of the branding and communications of most companies.

Graphic designers are a crucial part of getting these visuals right for the brand and so it follows that unless you can communicate your brand strategy effectively to designers, you will put a large part of your branding collateral at risk – and that’s a huge risk!

The main method of communicating branding objectives to designers is the “Brief”. Get this wrong and it will result in lost time, frustration, cost, missed deadlines and substandard output. Here are the four worst types of brief and you must avoid them with a passion.

The Read My Mind Brief

“I think you understand what we need!” These words are the kiss of death for a designer. Even if you have worked with a design team for years, they still cannot read your mind.

Of course, the words actually used in a brief are not as blatant as suggested here and would usually be couched in terms such as, “design in accordance with our standards,” or “designs appropriate to our branding strategy” or “as explained in previous briefs”. The kicker is that the standards and branding strategy are seldom shared.

The good brief articulates what you want the design to achieve and for whom; otherwise, you are almost certain to get something unusable. It is like expecting an architect to design a house for you, without sharing vital information such as the number of rooms, bathrooms or the age of the resident.

Every brief must articulate, what you need, the objectives, the target market or consumer group for whom the design is being developed and any mandatory elements such as the use of certain words or timing.

The Micro-Defined Brief

On the other end of the scale, is the brief that gives a list of requirements from colours to fonts, to the number of curves allowed and the number of straight lines all detailed to the nth degree. Marketing teams that provide this kind of brief often mistakenly believe that the purpose of the brief is to tell the designer what to do.

This is not true – the design is the designers job and the designer’s expertise. In the brief you need only say what you want achieved, not how. For instance, it is valid to ask in the brief, “The design should evoke a light happy feeling for our target consumers, who are mainly in their 40s, married and have one child and a mortgage and are of xxx descent, living in yyyy” Now it is up to the designer to create designs that achieve the objective of a, “light happy feeling”, using the other information provided to good effect.

The ‘Give Me Some Options’ Brief

Translated this means, “I won’t know what I want until I see it. I am just fishing for inspiration, so please spend tons of time on ideas, of which I will reject 95% or indeed all of them.” This is both inefficient and incredibly demoralising. Much better to spend some time to write a good brief that forces you to think about and define what you want. The required design will appear quicker and more economically whilst retaining the sanity of the designer and the relationship between marketing and design.

The Personal Preferences Brief.

This type of brief is not hard to abide by, but doing so will probably do a disservice to the client. It is not uncommon to get a brief which stipulates, “minimal white space” or “preferred pastel colours”. When these requirements are based on evidence from the target market, then they are very useful. However, if based on personal preference then they could hinder the effectiveness of the design, because the target market’s preferences could be quite different from your own.The takeaway from these nightmare briefs, is that for an effective design brief it is best to explain the objectives of the design to the designer not how to do it. Then provide a briefing about the characteristics of the people who will consume the design. Next, leave the designer to get on with the job and finally and most importantly, judge the end product through the eyes of your target market and not the lens of your personal preferences.