How to Create Strong Positioning
One of my favorite positioning examples is Ben & Jerry’s.
This article is the second in a 3-part series on positioning. Other articles in this series include:
Part 2: How to Create Strong Positioning
Part 3: How to Incorporate Sustainability into Positioning (Published next month!)
How to Create Strong Positioning
One of my favorite positioning examples is Ben & Jerry’s. Co-founder Ben Cohen has Anosmia, which limits his sense of smell and taste. So when he and co-founder Jerry Greenfield began developing ice cream flavors in the late 1970s, Cohen focused on texture.
At the time, commercial ice cream manufacturing equipment could only process small inclusions – think pureed strawberries or tiny chocolate chip pieces. Large chunks meant customers might eat a spoonful of ice cream without a flavor chunk. Cohen and Greenfield chose to differentiate their ice cream by bucking the norm, prioritizing the possibility of a big chunk in every bite.
Ben & Jerry’s launched with untraditional flavors such as Heath Bar Crunch and Oreo Mint using small- batch equipment. However, scaling chunky ice cream required a significant technological investment, particularly as they innovated new flavors. In 1984, after a year and a half of research and testing, they introduced the first ever Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream.
Consistent with their anti-incumbent positioning on chunks, Ben & Jerry’s seamlessly integrated their countercultural values on environmentalism and social justice. It worked by differentiating Ben & Jerry’s from the rest of the ice cream brands at the time, pitting the small upstart brand against the conglomerate giants.
Here’s how I’d describe Ben & Jerry’s positioning:
A playfully irreverent, socially conscious brand offering unapologetically chunky, indulgent ice cream.
The Core Positioning Framework
While Ben & Jerry’s positioning strategy was built on their intuition and personalities, you can take a more systematic approach by defining the four core elements that underpin a strong positioning: customer, category, competitive alternatives, and compelling differentiators. I recommend identifying them in sequence initially, but the process is iterative and may require revisiting each category.
Positioning isn’t static, but it should remain consistent for several years. Establishing a clear territory in your customer’s mind requires consistency over time. Constantly evolving muddies the simplicity and clarity you aspire for.
Customer
Positioning is defined by how customers perceive you in a sea of alternatives. You need to determine who—specifically—you create value for. Customers have different needs and perceptions. If your target is too broad, your efforts to differentiate will be less effective. A broad customer target is a recipe for vague, vanilla positioning that doesn’t resonate. A narrow customer group allows you to solve a common specific problem and lays the groundwork for strong positioning.
Inspired by heavy metal and punk rock fans, Mike Cessario founded Liquid Death after noticing concertgoers consuming water out of Monster Energy cans. He created a brand with a countercultural, aggressive design and tone of voice. Cessario defined a specific customer group—people who desired a non-lame way to drink water—effectively differentiating his brand from dozens of water brands in the market. He also played heavily into the can’s recyclability with a “death to plastic” slogan.
Category
Second, clarify your category according to your customers’ worldview. Some brands, particularly those in services, have the freedom to define the category. For others, the category is set, but these brands can still draw inspiration from related categories to create differentiation.
Liquid Death first launched in the bottled water category but likened itself to energy drinks. Even though it has expanded to sparkling water, iced tea, and electrolyte drinks, the brand continues to leverage its edgy, energy-drink-inspired positioning to attract new customers.
Competitive Alternatives
Clarifying the category enables you to define your customers’ alternatives. Alternatives can mean competitors or alternate approaches that aren’t sold. This exercise forces us to define all the ways our customers accomplish their jobs.
For project-management software tools like Monday.com and Asana, the most common alternative frequently isn’t another project management tool but instead a handwritten to-do list or an Excel spreadsheet.
In the case of Liquid Death, concertgoers weren’t buying a different water brand. They were buying Monster Energy cans to hold their water.
A true alternative must be something your customer would consider. For example, some European companies offer consulting services for purpose-driven brands comparable to mine. However, they are not competitive alternatives because virtually none of my potential clients would hire a European firm. Just because a company delivers similar solutions doesn’t mean your customer views it as a genuine alternative.
Compelling Differentiators
Your compelling differentiators clarify why you are the obvious choice for your customers. These differentiators create a distinctive advantage that drives the desire to purchase over competitive alternatives. The customer, category, and competitive alternatives provide context for the compelling differentiators.
There are nearly endless ways to differentiate. Below are six categories with specific inspirational examples, but keep in mind this is not an exhaustive list.
How to Develop a Unified Positioning Statement
If you’ve done any work with positioning, you may have come across the standard positioning statement.
Not to mince words, this is a useless tool.
The standard positioning statement follows a generic formula: “To [customer], we are the brand of [category] that [insert list of benefits] so that [insert value created] that’s because unlike [competitive alternatives] we [list specific reasons you are different].”
While this exercise might be a nice summary statement of all potential positioning options, it gives you zero strategic direction.
Instead, take the four core elements of a positioning framework—customer, category, competitive alternatives, and compelling differentiators—and work through a prioritization process to create a simplified positioning statement. come
Your positioning statement may draw from any combination of the four core elements, but should only include the most critical, defining aspects of your brand. Distill this output into one sentence, or a partial sentence, for the clearest strategic direction.
Here are a few examples from common brands. Note that because positioning is an internal—and often highly confidential—company strategy, these are simply examples of how to express and write positioning rather than the company’s actual positioning.
Food Retailers:
Costco: Premium bulk products at wholesale prices
Whole Foods: Highest quality natural and organic products with rigorous standards
Trader Joe's: Curated selection of unique, high-quality foods at everyday prices
Cars:
Volvo: The safest, most reliable family vehicles
BMW: High-performance luxury driving machines
Toyota: Dependable, practical cars that last
Tesla: Cutting-edge electric vehicles that make gas cars obsolete
Positioning that Stands the Test of Time
Positioning is not guaranteed to last. The market shifts, technology advances, competitors evolve, and customer preferences change. But the best brands find a way to stay true to their core, preserving the foundational aspects of what differentiates them, while shedding the irrelevant.
Ben & Jerry’s positioning has remained both consistent and relevant over the past 40 years. The brand has effectively mixed its personality, values, social mission, and cultural relevance with indulgent, playful flavors. The inclusions and flavors have changed, but the chunkiness persists. The social issues the brand advocates for have also evolved, but the challenger mindset remains consistent (even going so far as to sue its parent company, Unilever!).
Fundamentally, positioning is a strategy. It is nearly impossible to run a simple A/B test to see if you “got it right,” as its effectiveness won’t be immediately clear. Even if the positioning is right, the execution might be wrong, which could muddy your analysis. You can only evaluate a positioning choice over time. However, a leading indicator of a strong positioning is asking the following question:
Do our customers consider our positioning meaningful enough to influence them to purchase our brand?
If you get this right, you are on your way to validating a strong positioning.
What is Positioning and Why You Need It (Part 1)
Positioning is one of the most foundational, misunderstood, and under-utilized parts of a company’s core business strategy.
Positioning is one of the most foundational, misunderstood, and under-utilized parts of a company’s core business strategy.
Poor positioning leads to higher marketing costs, lower margins, and slower growth—yet many companies invest more time in tactical marketing decisions than in getting their positioning right.
This article is the first in a three-part series on positioning. Here’s what we’ll cover over the next three issues:
Part 1: What is Positioning and Why You Need It
Part 2: How to Create Strong Positioning
Part 3: How to Incorporate Sustainability into Positioning
What is Positioning?
Positioning can be tricky to explain, so let me illustrate with an example:
My daughter recently got her ears pierced. The piercer told us to clean her ears daily with saline. So I trotted over to Walgreens in search of saline.
My first stop was the contact aisle. I found a saline solution for contacts, but suspected other active ingredients might be in it, which Google quickly confirmed.
Then I headed over to wound care. There were a few brands with a special spray nozzle, which I didn’t need, and the prices seemed crazy expensive for what is basically salt water.
I racked my brain, wondering what other category might sell a cheaper saline. Baby care! I remembered that Boogie sells saline nasal spray.
In this example, saline is the solution—the basic product, service, or technology. It has many benefits, serves multiple uses, and creates value for multiple customer groups. These products represent three different positioning strategies.
A positioning strategy clarifies your choices about who you serve, what category you play in, and why you are a superior choice.
Positioning informs almost everything about your marketing strategy and impacts decisions such as:
Who is your customer?
How, when, and why do they use the product?
Who are the competitors or alternatives?
What is the packaging? (This can be physical packaging or how services are “bundled” to create a service product.)
How is the product/service sold, distributed or accessed?
What are the benefits, results, or claims?
What is the price?
Your choices influence positioning. But ultimately, positioning happens in your customer’s brain. Customers evaluate your solution in the context of alternatives. You can make strategic decisions to influence how your brand or product is perceived, but you don’t control it.
A positioning strategy isn’t obvious. Rather, it is the intentional and often challenging process of narrowing to a more granular usage and context for how your solution shows up in the market. Just as with the saline example, a business must make choices to intentionally focus on a specific market, purpose, or usage context, so the customer knows the product is for them.
Consider the following:
Gum that cleans your teeth: Is it gum or toothpaste?
A sparkling fruit juice: Is it soda, a mocktail, or a prebiotic?
A digital transformation firm: Is it management consulting, IT services, or software development?
There are two primary types of positioning: product positioning and brand positioning. For the purposes of this article, I won’t delineate between the two as these principles generally apply to both types of positioning, but if you have questions about how your product/service positioning connects to brand positioning, reach out as I’d be happy to explain.
Customers Make Associations Based on Positioning
When we give our customers a specific category context, they make associations. These associations are neither inherently positive nor negative but must be considered to inform your positioning strategy.
When customers compare your product to alternatives, they will have specific expectations about:
Price
Benefits and functionality
Quality of service
Areas where you may underperform
For example, if you position a product as an eco-friendly cleaner, people may expect:
There are no chemicals in it (so they will have higher standards when reading the ingredient list)
The product may not clean as well
It comes in recyclable packaging
It will cost more than traditional cleaners
Evaluating how your solution performs against these expectations helps you frame your product to appeal to the right audience.
Common Positioning Pitfalls
Poor positioning creates internal and external confusion. Without a clear strategy, you risk appealing to no one and create ambiguity about the top priorities for your innovation, sales, and marketing efforts.
Here are three common positioning pitfalls for purpose-driven brands.
Pitfall No. 1: Positioning is too Broad
If you try to appeal to all your potential customers, you lose the ability to specialize for any one group. You will water down your benefits and your solution won’t resonate because you have failed to design and communicate for specific buyer needs.
Take our saline example. If you went to market with a generic saline solution, here’s what could happen (terrible design intended😊):
The retailer won’t know what aisle to put your product in.
The consumer won’t know if your product works for their situation.
Your messaging will become overwhelming and confusing as you highlight different types of uses and benefits.
Your product formulation and packaging will be sub-optimized for the specific use cases (e.g. wound care spray vs. contact solution).
Notice how even the claims are confusing. “Gentle on eyes and noses” may be technically accurate, but it’s difficult for a customer to envision how a single solution can do both functions well.
Pitfall No. 2: Creating a New Category
I commonly see companies who think they are creating a new category, believing “no one else is doing this.” As a result, they explain their offer in a vacuum, as though there are no other alternatives, and assuming the value is obvious.
This is a mistake.
First, if you don’t attach yourself to an existing category, your buyer will do it for you.
Second, true category creation is extremely rare and, even when it does happen, you still need to associate yourself with an existing category to help customers understand what you are and how they would use you.
Most products and services fit within an existing category. Understanding your competitive advantages and disadvantages compared to alternatives will set you up for a stronger strategy.
Consider Uber at launch. Rather than comparing itself to a taxi or introducing “ride-sharing services,” a category that meant nothing at the time, Uber called itself, “Everyone’s private driver.” This concept leveraged customers’ understanding of a premium car service while elevating brand perception, enabling them to charge more.
Image Source: Medium
Pitfall No. 3: Positioning Isn’t Your Purpose
Many purpose-driven brands lead with mission or purpose as their messaging strategy, thinking it creates a distinct market positioning. But if purpose or impact doesn’t influence a buyer’s decision, it’s not a core factor in positioning. Positioning is about understanding the landscape of options and how you fit into those options in your buyer’s mind. Sustainability or purpose is often a peripheral factor in a buyer’s decision.
Additionally, values and purpose may actually be undifferentiated in categories where most players have similar purposes and similar environmental benefits. It’s important to communicate purpose to align with customer values and create relevance, but sometimes these efforts are table stakes vs. differentiators.
Tesla’s roadster is positioned as a premium sports car, even though Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. You don’t need a purpose-driven positioning for your business to have an impact.
Back to my saline story. I bought the Boogie saline spray, not because it optimally delivered my specific need but because it was the lowest cost per ounce of saline. (Side note, this is an amazing nasal saline spray, if that’s what you need!)
Had there been a product specifically designed for piercings – an easy-to-use wipe form that eliminated the need for gauze and claimed to prevent piercing infections – I would have chosen it (and paid more). Perhaps, this market is too small, at least for distribution at Walgreens. Still, the power of positioning is often also the power of pricing.
Do you have a clear positioning strategy?
In the next article, we’ll cover how to create one. Stay tuned!
If you need help crafting a strong positioning strategy, schedule a free 30-minute consultation here:
Grow More with Less: 5 Principles to Power Your ’25 Strategy
Startups think a lot about product-market fit (PMF). Established companies? Not so much. This is a missed opportunity.
It’s the new year and, along with millions of others, I am wrapping up my beloved annual planning process.
I enjoy this both personally and professionally – taking time to reflect on past goals, the learning and growth that resulted, and defining new plans for the year ahead.
Without exception, I end up with far more ideas and activities than are possible.
And it’s not just me.
Companies achieve only about 63% of their strategic plans’ potential financial performance. While there are many factors at play, one critical issue is a lack of clear priorities.
This year, I urge you to consider doing less.
I know this is counterintuitive. Growth, by definition, means more.
But as we pursue more things to achieve more growth, we create fragmentation of scarce resources and sub-optimal execution. We create products and services that our customers don’t want or need, resulting in unnecessary waste.
Consider what happens with a magnifying glass in the sun. When light passes through it, the focused energy can create enough heat to start a fire. Without the laser-like focus of the magnifying glass, the sun’s energy is scattered. It’s warm but not enough to catalyze a reaction.
To achieve maximum impact, we must narrow our focus to outperform
In Good to Great, Jim Collins’ research showed companies with a single-minded “Hedgehog Concept” had 6.9 times greater returns over 15 years compared to the rest of the market. Inspired by a parable, this concept compares foxes (traditional companies), which are “scattered, diffuse, and inconsistent,” to hedgehogs, who narrow their focus to what they can be truly best at. Hedgehogs offer products and services that deliver real value, a hallmark sign of a purpose-driven business.
As you wrap up your 2025 strategic planning, here are five specific ways to pursue “less” and why it will result in more growth.
1. Fewer Customer Segments
Companies often target too many customer segments or have too broad an overall audience, which results in a vague and cursory understanding of customer problems and needs. Rather than trying to serve all potential buyers, focus on the narrowest segment of customers for whom you offer the best solution. Work to understand them deeply and design all your products and services to meet this segment.
Example: Hubspot
HubSpot proved the power of a single ideal customer when they eliminated their small business segment (1-10 employees) to concentrate solely on mid-market companies, even though they were already a $50M business. This narrowed focus allowed them to build more tailored products and services for their core segment and accelerated their growth.
2. Fewer Messages
What is the one thing you want people to remember? When we say too much, we say nothing. Narrowing to one core message forces you to truly understand what matters to your audience (point No. 1). Validate that the message you chose is the right one.
Example: Volvo
With an unwavering focus on safety since 1927, Volvo is one of the strongest brands in the automotive industry. From inventing the three-point seat belt to their current commitment that no one should die in a new Volvo, this single-minded message has defined their brand and their product innovation strategy for nearly a century.
3. Less Innovation
A huge number of product launches fail. We feel pressure to launch new items to compete with other brands with multiple new launches a year. Paradoxically, this can limit growth. Rather than more frequent launches, focus on fewer, better, more meaningful innovations that are noticeably superior. Like an overcrowded garden, launches for the sake of news cannibalize scarce resources, resulting in sub-optimal growth.
Example: The Columbia University "jam study"
This famous study study compared an instore tasting display of 24 jams compared to 6 jams. The larger jam selection attracted more tasters than the smaller one, but it resulted in one-tenth the sales. This 'choice overload' principle suggests that focusing on fewer, better products can drive more sales than constantly launching new varieties that overwhelm customers and create decision paralysis.
4. Fewer Channels
An “omnichannel” marketing strategy is to be everywhere all the time. There are thousands of ways to reach our customers—we can’t be everywhere. Decide on a limited number of channels where you will win rather than pursuing channels simply because “everyone else” is there. If you can’t (eventually) master a channel, it’s not worth doing. This applies both to distribution and to content.
Example: Trader Joe’s
While competitors rushed to e-commerce during the pandemic, Trader Joe’s stayed firm in their store-only approach, choosing to invest in people and products rather than digital infrastructure, a decision that has helped maintain their strong culture and customer loyalty.
5. Less Speed
In the current pursuit of growth at all costs, businesses move at a frantic pace, expanding rapidly into new markets, rushing product launches, and scaling before systems are ready. But sustained growth is, by definition, sustainable. Moving thoughtfully allows you to build a strong infrastructure that ensures quality as you scale.
Example: Chick-fil-A
Chick-fil-A opens just 80-100 new locations annually, just a fraction of their fast-food counterparts. Their methodical approach to expansion focuses on quality and culture, creating more value than a rapid growth - their stores generate the highest revenue per store in the industry, twice that of McDonald's.
I share these principles not as rules but as aspirations from a fellow “more” addict. Following these directives isn’t easy to do. Implementing systems to create checks and balances is essential to ensure we don’t creep back into the “more” mentality. Systems provide structure that protects the resources and time required for true excellence.
Creating systems to do less
Here are a few specific tactics and approaches to enable a strategy of “less”:
Pre-set limits: Determine in advance a preset quantity of strategies or work; for example, two core customer segments, three strategic initiatives, four channels. Do not stray from this limit even if it seems there is a huge “opportunity.”
Do a resource planning exercise: Map out the actual people, hours, and dollars it will require to deliver each output. This will help you quickly realize what is and isn’t possible.
Conduct a memorability check: Wait one week after creating a plan (for example, annual strategic initiatives, a set of core messages, or new product initiatives) and ask the participants what they can recall from memory. If no one can remember each component, there are likely too many.
Adopt a one-for-one protocol: When you add something new, make sure you subtract something from the list.
Sustainable Growth Requires a Sustainable Pace
We say we want growth, but really we want sustainable growth. When we try to tackle too many things, our priorities are scattered. We cultivate surface-level learning and expertise. We create less value for our customers. We burn out. Making the intentional decision to set limits on markets, investments, initiatives, and messages requires tremendous discipline. But when adopted, the organization or individual has the ability to develop true mastery and value beyond what most others can deliver.
This year, I encourage you to do less. Let’s see how much more you can accomplish.
Do You (Still) Have Product-Market Fit?
Startups think a lot about product-market fit (PMF). Established companies? Not so much. This is a missed opportunity.
Startups think a lot about product-market fit (PMF). Established companies? Not so much.
This is a missed opportunity.
Established businesses tend to assume that a track record of financial sustainability indicates having reached and maintained PMF. This is not necessarily the case. Companies must evaluate PMF with each new market expansion or product innovation and continuously re-evaluate.
The concept of PMF is relevant whether you sell products or services and whether you’re a 100-year-old or 100-day-old company. Every company I work with is trying to grow. Growth requires improving current offerings, expanding to new markets, or offering new products or services—none of which can occur without a foundation of successful PMF.
Purpose-driven businesses especially benefit from PMF. When we offer true value and solve real customer needs, we don’t need aggressive or manipulative sales and marketing tactics to acquire customers. As Peter Drucker says, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
So What is Product-Market Fit?
While the general concept of selling products that meet a market need has existed since the industrial revolution, Marc Andreessen popularized the phrase in his 2007 blog post, “The only thing that matters”. His description: “Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
But what is a good market? And what is a product? Let’s break it down with my own definitions as they pertain to PMF:
This includes not just traditional products, but also services, experiences, information, and ideas offered or sold as concrete units (digital, physical, or conceptual) that deliver value to the customer. This definition is particularly important in the services sector where the salable unit isn’t obvious. Service examples include a month of consulting advice, unclogging a drain, or a year-long access to software.
The most critical element of this definition is sharing a common problem. Industry verticals aren’t markets. They are often too large and don’t necessarily share a common problem. Your market must be big enough to deliver your revenue goals, but specific enough that you can offer a valuable (and concrete!) solution to the shared need. Market specificity should set you up for a compelling “right to win.”
Your market ideally speaks the same language, shares common triggers, and is a set of individuals vs. entire organizations. Examples include health-conscious Gen Z consumers who track their macros, sustainable children’s apparel shop owners, or B2B SaaS Product Managers using Jira for project management. As your business scales, so too can your market. For example, Dropbox started with tech-savvy creatives who needed to share large files, and now, it serves nearly anyone needing digital file storage.
Product-market fit exists when a specific market consistently chooses your solution to solve their shared problem because it delivers superior value at an acceptable price.
How Do You Know if You Have Product-Market Fit?
Traditional PMF metrics, such as organic growth, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer lifetime value (CLV), repeat or retention rates, are useful indicators of success. But they don't tell you why customers value your offering, how to improve it, or how sticky you are.
My favorite indicator is a question from authors Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown in their book, Hacking Growth:
The authors’ benchmark (based on working with over 100 tech startups) states that if more than 40 percent of your answers are “very disappointed,” you have achieved PMF.
To avoid catering to everyone, the authors suggest improving the product using the “very disappointed” group’s suggestions rather than input from those who are “somewhat disappointed” because it focuses your improvements on your best customers’ needs.
While the 40% benchmark may vary across organizations, this question is helpful for all businesses. It strips away attributes that may muddy the data, such as brand perception, strength of customer relationships, aggressive sales or marketing tactics, and switching costs.
Instead, the metric exclusively focuses on product value. It helps you understand how replaceable you are. For example, someone may be “very satisfied” with your quality or service but “not disappointed” if they couldn’t use your product anymore because of suitable alternatives.
Ask this question (followed by “why?”) every time you revalidate existing PMF. It’s also an extremely helpful question to ask after initial pilots for new product launches or expansion into new markets. Being able to answer this requires a handful of customers to have actually experienced the product or service. Sometimes, businesses pour tons of resources into product launches without first validating PMF.
How to Ask:
In customer reviews and customer advisory board meetings
Through formal customer research (surveys, qualitative interviews, and pilot programs)
During trade show conversations and industry events
Via prospect discovery meetings and market interviews
How to Improve Product-Market Fit
If you don’t have PMF or you have lost PMF (due to market changes, new competitors, or cuts that have resulted in lower quality or performance), you must modify your product or market. It’s an iterative process of refinement to maximize value creation for your customer.
Lack of PMF usually comes down to four common pitfalls:
1. Lack of Customer Understanding
You can’t solve a problem you don’t fully understand. Most companies think they know their customers but may have dangerous blind spots, especially as the external market shifts. In some cases, businesses have too broad a customer base which prevents them from identifying the primary problem they address.
Example: In her first job, positioning guru April Dunford called users of an unsuccessful startup product. The first 20 people said they hated the product or couldn’t remember using it. The 21st said it changed their life. After 100 calls, 94 users had no interest. Six said the product was life-changing. Thanks to those six users, instead of killing the product, her team clarified the product’s specific use and refined its features.
What to do:
Create a monthly “customer connect” program where leadership directly engages with customers (no sales agenda!)
Map the complete customer journey, focusing on pain points, use occasions, and triggers
Implement feedback collection systems at key touchpoints (particularly after purchase and first use)
2. Wrong Customer
Catering to the wrong customer is doomed to fail. You must validate a real problem for which a customer will pay for a solution.
Example: Dinnr, a meal-delivery app, created meal kits for special-occasion home cooking, delivering pre-portioned ingredients and recipes for romantic dinners. Their assumption failed when they discovered that target customers preferred buying ingredients locally or ordering ready-made meals.
What to do:
Analyze your most satisfied customers to identify common characteristics and use cases
Exit or deprioritize segments where you can’t deliver exceptional value
Reallocate resources to segments where you have a clear competitive advantage
3. Wrong (or Outdated) Solution
Your solution may not effectively solve the customer’s problem, even if there’s a clear market need. For established businesses, a solution that may have worked ten years ago is now outdated and doesn’t reflect the changing needs of the customer. Kodak didn’t evolve to meet digital photography needs, and Blockbuster ignored streaming; both became irrelevant.
Example: EventVue built a platform for conference attendees to network before events. Organizers loved the concept but weren’t willing to pay for what they saw as a non-essential feature, revealing a fatal flaw in the business model.
What to do:
Analyze how customers currently solve their problems (including non-traditional competitors and workarounds)
Identify which features or benefits drive the highest and lowest satisfaction before investing in improvements
Validate that your solution delivers better outcomes than an alternative
4. Poor Solution Quality
No amount of marketing can compensate for a product that doesn’t deliver on its core promise. That promise is an always-moving target as the competitive environment changes and customer expectations evolve.
Example: Tesla’s early Roadster, while revolutionary, had significant quality issues that limited adoption. They had the right customer (luxury performance car buyers interested in sustainability) but needed to improve quality before achieving true PMF.
What to do:
Implement quality metrics that directly tie to customer success measures
Create rapid feedback loops between customers and product development
Focus improvements on product elements that create real customer value
Rethinking Product-Market Fit for Purpose-Driven Business
Traditional PMF frameworks overlook a critical third dimension: values. When we expand beyond just product and market to include values, we create a more comprehensive model that considers impact on all stakeholders—employees, community, environment, supply chain. Alignment with customer values and societal needs creates a foundation for sustainable innovation and growth.
This expanded approach reveals common PMF failures in established companies:
Selling what exists rather than creating what's needed
Using marketing to mask poor product-market fit
Ignoring the negative externalities of their solutions
Failing to evolve products as values and needs change
Consider Instagram’s recent launch of its Teen Account, a response to years of criticism about negative social impact. This example shows that companies must evolve beyond traditional PMF to consider broader societal impact and alignment of values.
Product-market fit isn’t a destination—it’s an ongoing journey of alignment between your solutions and evolving customer needs. For purpose-driven businesses, this journey must balance commercial success with positive impact. True PMF allows your marketing to focus on authentic connection and value communication rather than manipulation or artificial demand creation.
Regular PMF assessment gives you early warning signals when market needs shift, helping you adapt through innovation rather than aggressive marketing. By maintaining strong PMF, purpose-driven companies can grow sustainably while staying true to their mission and values.
The Marketing Funnel is Failing You: Growth is a Flywheel
The marketing funnel is pervasive. This framework—the dominant mindset among marketing professionals, whether B2B or B2C—is built on a series of assumptions:
The marketing funnel is pervasive. This framework—the dominant mindset among marketing professionals, whether B2B or B2C—is built on a series of assumptions:
First, we need to make people aware.
Then, a subset of those people become familiar with what we offer and consider purchasing.
Even fewer purchase.
If we’re lucky, we have a small sliver of buyers who advocate on our behalf.
We lose people at every stage. It seems like an unavoidable reality.
But what if this mindset is all wrong?
This innocent enough triangle forces us to accept systemic loss. There’s no momentum. There’s no feedback loop. There’s no priority on reducing friction. There’s no relationship between advocacy and awareness.
As a result, we pour money into the top and hope that what comes out on the bottom is enough to meet our business objectives.
This framework isn't just inefficient—it's increasingly out of step with how modern businesses, especially purpose-driven ones, create sustainable growth. The funnel's emphasis on volume over value, and transactions over relationships, limits its effectiveness in today's market where trust and authenticity fuel business success. We burn bridges spamming thousands of people with ads and emails they don’t want, not considering the cost to our brand.
Enter the growth flywheel.
The flywheel concept was originally conceived by Jim Collins. This iteration of the growth flywheel originated in the B2B tech world, and surprisingly has not permeated the rest of business. Applying this tool represents a huge opportunity for any business (even non-profits) to accelerate growth.
The growth flywheel can and should forever replace the marketing funnel.
Understanding your flywheel isn’t just about mapping the customer journey—it’s about identifying what’s holding back your momentum at each stage. Just as friction points limit a physical flywheel's speed, specific constraints at each phase limit your business growth. Identifying and addressing these constraints is critical to accelerating growth.
I’ve made a few modifications to the common tech flywheels so that it’s broadly applicable to all businesses. Let's examine each phase, considering both our goals and the typical constraints that might be limiting progress. (Note: I’m starting at the top, but you can start anywhere on the flywheel.)
Ideal Customer
At the center of the flywheel is the ideal customer. Your flywheel strategy must target customers where you have a clear right to win and who have sufficient market potential to achieve your business goals.
Customers → Delight
Our goal is to ensure customers fully appreciate the value of our product or service. I intentionally put delighting customers on top, rather than building awareness. We first must ensure a quality product before we invest behind building awareness. While one enter the flywheel from any point, focusing on delighting customers as the first step toward awareness building is an important mindset shift.
At this stage, limiting constraints often center on product quality, experience or service delivery. Even great products can be undermined by poor onboarding, insufficient customer support, or unrealistic expectations of performance. If you’re not delighting your customers, you have no hope of a sustainable business.
Advocates → Enable
Our goal is to make it easy and natural for delighted customers to spread the word, creating a virtuous cycle that attracts new strangers to your business.
The limiting constraint here is almost always a lack of infrastructure that makes advocacy easy and rewarding. Traditional tech growth flywheels often lack and explicit “enable” strategy. Brands can delight without creating advocates, so you need an intentional strategy to turn happy customers into brand promoters.
Strangers → Attract
Our goal is not just to build awareness, but to attract the right people to our business. We need to reach the right people where they’re naturally receptive to our value proposition.
The common limiting constraint here? Often it’s not how many people have heard of our brand, but whether we have identified, reached, and resonated with the right audience, especially given increasingly crowded channels and categories saturated with options.
Prospects → Engage
Our goal is to turn interest into action by engaging prospects meaningfully. This requires understanding their needs and making our offering and information clear, relevant, and helpful.
The limiting factor is often the capacity and capability to engage prospects effectively—whether that’s sales expertise or systems and content for nurturing relationships.
In a recent interview, Sean Ellis, author of Hacking Growth, says that he never puts significant resources into building awareness until he fully optimizes the flywheel. That is, he makes sure he reduces loss and friction as much as possible before investing to build awareness to scale. I see so many companies focus on awareness, customer acquisition or lead generation before they have solid engagement, product performance or advocacy strategies in place.
For example, Zoom didn’t enter the video-conferencing market with massive marketing campaigns. In fact they had no marketing team for two years. Instead, they recognized that their key limiting constraint was product experience. As such, leaders focused relentlessly on creating a solution that would delight users and spark natural advocacy. Their “freemium” model led to fast adoption and word of mouth advocacy that spread organically.
Four Ways the Flywheel Transforms Growth
1) It expects continuity over loss.
A funnel expects drop-off from one stage to the next. A flywheel is only operating efficiently when there is minimal loss. While traditional marketing accepts waste as inevitable, the flywheel pushes us to address the limiting constraints at each stage. This creates a more efficient and sustainable system that prioritizes genuine value creation over volume-based marketing tactics.
2) You can activate the flywheel from any starting point.
If you have a killer product, begin with enabling more advocates. If the flywheel is already humming, put more effort into building awareness to attract potential customers. If sales is your growth engine, optimize your sales process to close any leaky buckets, converting more prospects into customers. Unlike traditional push marketing, this flexibility allows you to lead with your strongest value proposition.
3) It integrates and values each of the core growth functions.
Marketing, sales, product/service, and customer success are the core growth engines of a business. The flywheel shows the unique and essential role each plays in delivering growth. Just like any athletic team, each function must play their position with excellence, otherwise everyone loses. The flywheel promotes building lasting customer relationships rather than just driving transactions.
4) It turns customers into awareness generators.
A funnel considers advocates “nice to have,” not core awareness generators for the business. And yet, most people prefer and trust word-of-mouth recommendations over ads or content coming from the business itself. This is especially true for purpose-driven brands, where authentic customer advocacy carries both the product value proposition and the brand's broader mission. When we enable our customers to advocate on behalf of our business, we activate a powerful engine for trusted (and low cost!) awareness building.
A Case Study: Allbirds
When Allbirds entered the footwear market, they chose an unconventional path to growth. They attracted attention through material innovation (notably wool) that connected to their point of difference on comfort, combined with an extensive focus on sustainability, including carbon footprint labeling.
• Delight: Since inception, Allbirds has delighted customers with a focus on comfort, supported by their choice of sustainable materials. Their retail staff, customer service, and impact initiatives like "ReRun" resale program keep customers engaged beyond the first purchase.
• Enable: A sophisticated advocacy program combines micro-influencers, user-generated content (#weareallbirds), and shareable sustainability metrics, making it easy for both casual fans and committed environmentalists to spread the word and attract new customers.
• Attract: Allbirds builds awareness through a powerful mix of word of mouth referrals who are activated through their ambassador program, social advertising, sustainability leadership (carbon labeling), and selective retail locations that let customers experience their materials firsthand.
• Engage: They convert interest through simplified shopping experiences (limited styles, clear pricing), risk-free trials, and targeted messaging that spans both lifestyle benefits (comfort, design) and environmental impact ("Flight Status" scores).
How to Measure Flywheel Effectiveness
The following relevant metrics will prove your growth flywheel is working.
1) Conversion rates from one stage to the next: These should increase over time, including the percentage of customers who advocate.
2) Increasing word-of-mouth attribution: As advocates build awareness, higher volumes of new customers will materialize.
3) Customer acquisition costs decline: If the flywheel is operating efficiently (all else being equal), the cost to acquire new customers should go down.
The Future of Growth is Circular, Not Linear
The funnel served its purpose to help brands understand how business and marketing objectives change throughout the customer journey. However, this model is not helpful to deliver real value to customers. Exclusively relying on paid mass awareness building is inefficient, expensive and increasingly ineffective. The flywheel model doesn’t just drive more efficient growth; it creates the conditions for long term sustainability by aligning business objectives with customer value. When we shift from thinking about marketing as a linear process of loss to a circular system of momentum, we unlock the potential for both profit and positive impact.
What limiting constraints will you address first to get your flywheel spinning?
The Brain’s Guide to Building a Brand
You only need to look at a fraction of one of these logos, and your brain fills with images and experiences.
You only need to look at a fraction of one of these logos, and your brain fills with images and experiences.
The Nike logo reminds me of an ad I saw over 20 years ago, featuring a montage of athletes in the moments before their competitions begin. Right when the whistle or gun was about to sound, the screen turned black. “Just do it” appeared. I still get chills thinking about that ad and the anticipation I feel competing.
Most people think about branding backward. Conventional marketing says companies create brands.
Not so.
Our brains create brands.
Companies can influence how a brand is perceived but do not control it.
To help create a strong brand we must begin with the brain and how it processes brands.
What is a Brand?
Let’s use Starbucks to illustrate the concept of a brand.
When driving on the highway, you pass a sign for Starbucks at the upcoming exit. It instantly triggers neurons in your brain to fire, activating memories and experiences associated with Starbucks:
You think of your favorite drink order and the relaxation you feel when you take your first sip.
You picture the smile of the barista, the dim lighting, and the earthy, comfy furniture in the stores.
You think of the ridiculous price tag and the painfully long line in the airport Starbucks as you fear missing your flight (just me??).
All of this is triggered nearly instantaneously by a company name with a color, font, and picture you recognize.
A brand exists when you experience repeated associations with a company that activates multiple parts of your brain to give you an impression of a company. A combination of sensory, emotional, visual, auditory, and conceptual experiences form memories and strengthen the neural networks surrounding the brand. When we say a company has a “strong brand,” we mean that a company or product activates a set of consistent, positive associations in the brain.
Neurons that Fire Together Wire Together
The neurons in your brain form complex networks of connections. When signals are repeatedly transmitted along certain routes, they form connections called neural pathways, which are like roads. Some roads are dirt paths, some are two-lane residential streets, and some are eight-lane highways. When one neuron repeatedly stimulates another, the strength of the signal between the two increases.
The more frequently neurons fire together (say, the mermaid logo and the delicious smell of coffee), the more pavement gets laid down on that road, making it faster to travel from one association to another. The stronger the associations between attributes and a brand (i.e., the bigger the roads), the quicker the brain activates all other associated attributes.
At a market level, “brand” is a culmination of the dominant attributes most people associate with your product or company.
That is, a brand is what other people perceive about you, not what you say about yourself.
Product Category is Your Brand’s Foundation
The product category is your brain’s most important association with a product or business. This association allows your brain to classify your brand within a familiar structure.
Let’s test this. What brand do you think of when reading these words?
Low cost
Friendly service
No frills
Colorful
Quirky
Having trouble? It’s probably difficult to think of a specific brand because you don’t have any context for these descriptions. What if we add the word “airline”? Now, what brand comes to mind?
If you didn’t guess Southwest, you likely narrowed it down to a few options. The category gave you context for these descriptions.
The category is a brand’s foundation. Associations and differentiation are nearly always built on top of the category.
This is why building a brand for a new category can be so difficult. Our brains don’t yet know how to process the category. The brand’s associations are essentially in limbo until we connect them to something familiar. A useful tactic for new categories is to borrow a familiar concept. Consider the common use of a cross-category metaphor: “Uber for groceries” (Instacart).
Category familiarity also explains why it can be challenging to brand services or concepts such as “cloud computing” or “mortgage-backed securities.” Unless the audience understands the category, any hope of brand-building is moot. If you sell water bottles, establishing your category can take milliseconds with a simple photo of a water bottle. IT consulting services may require more explanation to ensure your audience understands what exactly it is that you do.
Marketing doesn’t own the brand
Marketing is often thought of as the “owner” of a brand, but this mindset can be deceiving. While marketing typically sets brand strategy—such as positioning, messaging, color, and tone of voice—brand cohesiveness must be a multi-functional effort. The product experience, customer service, retail experience, sales, and marketing all influence the brand impression. The departments with the greatest influence on brand perception are those that have the most frequent interactions with the customer.
Consider a B2B software provider whose brand identity is more strongly influenced by frequent product usage, interactions with the sales rep, and annual conferences rather than advertising. The teams most accountable for the brand impression would be the sales, engineering, and events teams.
Compare this to a product such as toothpaste, whose brand touchpoints are dominated by product usage and advertising—the innovation and marketing teams would have the most influence over how the brand is perceived.
3 Principles for Building a Strong Brand
So, how do we apply this information to our daily work? Here are three simple principles to integrate into your strategies, practices, and reviews to help create a strong, brain-based framework for building a brand. Though simple on the surface, they are hard to execute.
1) Consistency:
Regular, reliable, and repeated exposure to the same brand elements creates stronger brand associations in the brain. This requires a consistent overall message, tone of voice, color, logo, and general brand experience. Messages can be slightly modified to fit the context, but aim for as much consistency as possible. Repeated exposure to the same elements will strengthen the neural networks.
Common Consistency Mistakes:
Product launches that seem totally from one another, as though they are come from different companies
Different messages in different channels
Changing brand assets too frequently (such as positioning, packaging, tagline
2) Congruency:
The entire brand experience must be cohesive. If advertising promises one thing and the product doesn’t deliver, customers experience dissonance. For example, an airline can’t boast about on-time flights when customers are frequently delayed.
Common Congruency Mistakes:
Messaging overpromises what the product delivers
Customer service or sales interactions don’t have the same tone of voice or vibe as marketing
Actions go against the company’s stated mission
A company promotes sustainability or social-impact efforts in one domain but is silent on a vulnerable issue for that category
3) Connection:
Connection in branding is about creating positive neural associations in your customers' minds. Aim to deeply understand your customer and demonstrate genuine empathy for their needs and challenges. By aligning your brand with their values, using storytelling to relate to their experiences, and building personal relationships, you create meaningful connections.
Common Connection Mistakes:
Evoking emotion without a purpose, such as creating tear-jerking content or humor without relating it to the brand or products
Trying too hard to appear “relatable” or “authentic”
Eliciting fear, guilt, or insecurity to try to sell more product
My hope is that you have shifted your thinking from brand as your asset to brand as your customer’s perception. Your role is to influence the desired impression you want your customers to have about you. The more intentional we are with consistency, congruency, and connection, the stronger our brand will be.
The Power of Positive Intent: Building Customer Trust
Imagine you’re in the airport, famished, waiting for a flight. You buy an enormous, puffed-up bag of potato chips. You tear into the bag, relishing the idea of stuffing yourself with salty, greasy goodness.
Imagine you’re in the airport, famished, waiting for a flight. You buy an enormous, puffed-up bag of potato chips.
You tear into the bag, relishing the idea of stuffing yourself with salty, greasy goodness.
It’s one-fourth full.
What??!!! You think to yourself, This bag is practically empty!
You unconsciously make assumptions, questioning the intent of the company. Here are two possible interpretations:
They are trying to make the bag look big and scamming me out of chips.
The added air in the bag protects the chips during transport.
The output is the same – a puffy, less-filled bag—but the thinking and motivation behind that business decision may vary. Customers make assumptions of intent based on past experiences and brand trust.
Positive intent, transparently communicated, builds trust and ultimately leads to loyal customers. We need to be conscious of the intent behind our business decisions, incorporate our customers’ interests (if not already considered), and understand how our intent may be perceived so that we can communicate effectively.
Business Has an Intent Problem
This potato chip example is a recent theme, dubbed “shrinkflation”—the practice of downsizing products while maintaining the original price. Some companies claim this is done to accommodate a higher cost of goods, and they may or may not intentionally hide the size reduction.
Most consumers, however, assume a negative intent. For perspective, the shrinkflation community has 135K followers on Reddit, and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown has introduced the “Shrinkflation Prevention Act” to “crack down on this greedy practice.”
Perceived negative intent exists whenever we hear or say, “That company is just trying to sell me something.” Frequent criticism of businesses reflects an inherent distrust of motives. Consider that someone rarely says, “That farmer is just trying to get me to buy their tomatoes,” or “That musician is just trying to get me to go to their concert,” or “That artist is just trying to get me to buy their painting.”
And yet, in each of these professions, the provider earns income based on a transaction. Here, the perceived intent is positive. We give the seller the benefit of the doubt, assuming we benefit from the purchase just as they do.
Since the 1970s, the business world has been dominated by the era of "shareholder primacy," with an near-exclusive focus on performance. This shift has bred widespread distrust in businesses, as consumers increasingly assume that most companies prioritize sales and profits over customer well-being.
Many of us have personal experiences that validate this skepticism. Perhaps you've bought a product that failed to live up to its promises, leaving you frustrated and disillusioned. On a larger scale, corporate scandals like Wells Fargo's deceptive practices—driven by misaligned incentives for sales and profit growth—have further eroded public trust.
The disconnect between a company's stated intent and its actions can be glaring. Take Facebook, for instance: while its purported purpose is to connect people, the platform faces widespread criticism for spreading misinformation and negatively impacting mental health.
Why Does Intent Matter?
As Simon Sinek famously said, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Simply put, intent influences sales. Intent is the foundation of trust.
Trusting customers share more positive news, spread less negative news, and remain loyal if they assume positive intent. If customers know—or believe—a brand doesn’t have their interest at heart, they will walk. Here are a few stats to support the importance of perceived positive intent:
Purchase Consideration: 81% of consumers say a significant purchase consideration is “I must be able to trust the brand to do what is right” (Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2019)
Pricing: 86% of consumers “are willing to pay more for a great customer experience” (Source: SuperOffice) and customers who enjoy a positive experience are likely to spend 140% more than those reporting negative experiences (Source: Deloitte)
Advocacy: On average, customers tell nine people about a positive experience with a brand, but share a negative experience with 16 people (Source: Deloitte)
The holy grail is to create a win-win. In this mutually beneficial arrangement, the company considers and elevates the customer’s interest. And in return, the customer rewards the company with payment for delivering value to their life. We can’t sacrifice one for the other.
How to Identify Your Intent
In business, we must first understand and declare our intent to understand how we will be perceived. When making any decision, the starting point is often business-centric—grow revenue, acquire new customers, or increase profitably. Sometimes, we lose sight of the customer during the course of these decision processes. Therefore, a more specific analysis of intent is necessary.
To align our business goals with customer priorities, we can reflect on these questions:
What is our goal?
Would our customers distrust us if we told them our motivation?
What are the expected and unintended consequences of our actions on our customers?
Would our customers perceive those consequences to be in their best interest?
How can we incorporate our customer interests into this decision?
When intent and interest equate, it’s our responsibility—and opportunity—to communicate effectively.
Case Study: Compacted Laundry Detergent
Consider a laundry brand that concentrated its detergent to reduce its environmental footprint and cut costs. The new formula meant less volume for the same number of washes. However, when the smaller product hit the shelves, consumers perceived it as fewer doses, and sales declined. The brand reverted to the original height and width to address this value-perception issue but made the package thinner.
The company’s intent was to offer the same dosage at the same price in a more compact, environmentally friendly form. While making the package thinner could be seen as manipulative, consumers actually received the same value as before and arguably more, given the lighter product and reduced environmental impact. If communicated effectively, most customers would likely appreciate this positive intent.
Contrast this with a detergent brand launching a thinner package containing fewer washes. Here, the consumer receives less value, and the company appears to be cutting costs without increasing value to the consumer. If discovered, this practice would likely erode consumer trust.
How to Balance Customer and Company Interests:
Ultimately, we need to avoid situations where we put company interest ahead of customer interest. This does not mean jeopardizing the financial well-being of the company, rather it means finding ways to create a mutually beneficial understanding about what it takes to create value. Following these principles can help you articulate positive intent and reduce the chance of being misunderstood:
Transparency: Provide context and clear explanations
Proactiveness: Give notice and plenty of time to adjust and adapt before it’s found out
Sacrifice: People believe you when it costs you something
Congruency: All actions of the company need to match communication
Shifting from Negative to Positive Intent: Practical Scenarios
Below are some common scenarios where we may be tempted to put the business interests ahead of the customer interests. In each example, I identify the negative practice and offer an alternative that incorporates customer interests.
Many of these examples extend beyond marketing and branding, but anything that creates distrust inevitably reflects on the brand. At its core, communicating intent is about managing expectations. Even potentially controversial decisions can foster brand loyalty when done clearly, transparently, and with empathy.
Customers understand that businesses must be profitable to survive and that external factors, like rising material costs, may impact pricing. However, they also expect fair treatment, respect, and good value. Above all, customers appreciate being informed and included in the conversation. Aligning company interests with customer needs is more than just ethical—it’s essential for long-term success. This alignment doesn't mean sacrificing profitability; it involves creating mutual value through transparent, customer-centric practices.
Longevity: The Undervalued Brand Growth Strategy
This is my Coach purse. It recently caught my eye in a photo taken 13 years ago when I noticed it hanging over my shoulder. I had purchased it years before that and have used it nearly every day since
This is my Coach purse.
It recently caught my eye in a photo taken 13 years ago when I noticed it hanging over my shoulder. I had purchased it years before that and have used it nearly every day since. Thankfully, I’m no fashion maven and care little about style trends, so using one purse for 15-plus years has not cramped my “image” (as much as it pains my girlfriends).
A little worn, with some loose threads and tarnished metal, it has held up well. Beyond well. It’s what I would call durable, which is somewhat remarkable for a product designed in an industry where disposable is dictated by style rather than deterioration.
It’s comforting, refreshing, even shocking to have some goods last so long. A 15-year-old purse is an anomaly. A few other products I own have also stood the test of time. They work reliably, perform their role, year after year. And through those years they’ve build memories, yes, even the vacuum.
My 19-year-old Toyota.
My 14-year-old Timberland hiking boots.
My 20-year-old Specialized road bike.
My 13-year-old Dyson. (Perhaps we should use this one more frequently …)
It was pretty darn hard to come up with a list of items that have lasted more than 10 years. Heck, I’ll even put my 3-year-old Peloton on the list of products I’m surprised haven’t broken yet. We are used to buying new. Most of us don’t even know how to fix things anymore. The cost of replacement is often far less than the time and monetary expense for repair.
We’ve all heard our parents or grandparents remark “things just aren’t made like they use to be.” And it’s true. My kids still play with my husband’s Fisher Price trucks from the 1980s and they show no signs of wear. Many of today’s brands don’t stand a chance in 40 years.
Short-Lived is Short-Sighted Business
Purposefully producing goods with a limited shelf life or at a lower quality is called many things: planned obsolescence, perceived obsolescence, value engineering, or simply the latest style or trend. Companies that utilize this business strategy believe in the rewards of cutting costs by removing value from the product and planning frequent updates or new launches despite minimal real innovation.
The rewards do seem appealing. This business model supposedly assures a steady stream of customers, guaranteeing more consistent revenue with lower costs and, therefore, higher margins.
But this approach is bad for the environment, bad for the customer, and, I argue, bad for your brand.
Great marketing needs to be built on top of a great product.
Continuing to erode the longevity and quality of one’s product may appear to yield short-term benefits, but it comes with long-term consequences.
Part of the problem is simply our expectations about product lifespan. A classification used in industry analysis and financial reporting is “consumer non-durables,” which includes products expected to be used or replaced within three years, such as clothing, beauty products, and food. This language reinforces short-term thinking in product development and marketing, encouraging a disposable, “single-use” mindset rather than repairability and longevity.
The Relationship Between Long-Lasting and Business Growth
When I purchased my Toyota, I originally planned to buy a used one. I shopped the used lots and realized cars five to 10 years old cost only a few thousand dollars less than a brand new one. Instead, I bought new, confident that it would last and trusting the value would remain if I wanted to sell in the future. Rather than going to an intermediary, Toyota received my full margin.
What if we thought about how to put more value into our products? Make them last longer? Create longer cycles between repeat purchases? What if we designed our products to be so durable that we worried about whether our customers would need to buy again? Would we lose money? Call me naïve, but I think we’d build a reputation for longevity. The reward of that reputation? A strong, enduring brand and the ability to price much higher in the market.
Tiffany & Co. and Patagonia are just a couple of iconic brands known for durable, stylish products that have experienced sustainable growth over the past few decades. Tiffany & Co., which has focused messaging on quality, premium craftsmanship and timeless style, has grown steadily since the 1990s before being acquired by LVMH in 2021. Patagonia, with an emphasis on repair, returns, and durable materials, quadrupled its sales in the past decade. A Time reporter covering Patagonia who had a hole in his Patagonia fleece was told by then-CEO, Rose Marcario, that he didn’t need a new one. “You can just patch it,” she said.
Why Longevity Builds Purpose-Driven Brands
Creating durable or longer-lasting products can be a meaningful differentiator in a competitive landscape saturated with lower-quality offerings. Focusing on longevity is a powerful strategy for purpose-driven companies to build a trusted, enduring brand. Doing so:
Elevates Brand Value:
Durable products fulfill or exceed customer expectations, reinforcing quality and reliability as core brand attributes. An extended product lifespan keeps customers engaged with the brand longer, fostering trust, loyalty, and a higher likelihood for repeat purchase. These brands often generate strong secondary market value, which further reinforces the brand reputation.
Commands Substantial Price Premiums:
Products known for longevity can significantly outprice competitors. Customers willingly pay more, viewing durable goods as investments rather than expenses. Brands like Rolex, Tumi, and All-Clad leverage their reputation for lasting quality to charge multiples of standard market rates, boosting profitability and perceived value.
Promotes Word-of-Mouth Referrals (and therefore lower marketing costs):
Durable products earn advocates who talk on your behalf. For example, the “Buy It For Life” movement (#BIFL) on Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook has become a thriving community of word-of-mouth marketing and endorsement for products that last.
Focuses Resources on True, Meaningful Innovation
When a brand identifies durability as a differentiator, innovation resources are spent on substantial improvements versus superficial product launches for the sake of news. With these brands, customers come to know that any product advertised as “new” truly means “better.” Marketing campaigns rooted in substantive improvements often generate more significant visibility, media and retailer interest than those with slight changes.
Reduces Environmental Impact
The most sustainable product is often the one already in use. When products last longer, they require less frequent replacement, resulting in fewer materials, less energy and water during manufacture, and less waste. Efforts to reuse and repair extend product lifecycles, further reducing the environmental impact. For brands seeking to attract sustainability-minded consumers, durable products are a natural fit and are easy to communicate environmental benefits.
6 Longevity Strategies from Long-Lasting Brands
So, how do you integrate durability into your business and marketing strategy? Here are some specific examples:
1) Osprey: Lifetime Guarantees Via a Generous Return Program
Osprey offers lifetime guarantees on almost all its products. If they can’t repair the product, they will replace it. Generous return and repair programs create loyal customers. For brands with a shorter shelf life, such as food and beverage, this can include a “guaranteed fresh” promise.
2) Miele: Testing for Durability and Innovating to Improve Longevity
Durability doesn’t just happen; it requires rigorous testing and innovation. German appliance brand Miele tests its appliances for the equivalent of 20 years of use. These stress and durability tests identify the parts that don’t hold up and then improve them for longer-lasting performance.
3) 80 Acres Farms: Redefine Category Lifespans
Longevity doesn’t just apply to durable products but consumables too. One of my clients is 80 Acres Farms, a vertical farm that sells lettuce, salad kits, and other vegetables. 80 Acres produce lasts 2+ weeks in the fridge, allowing the brand to make a differentiated “fresher longer” claim on-pack. This benefit delights customers who throw out spoiled lettuce less frequently and saves time with fewer store trips because lettuce can be purchased in one weekly visit.
4) Le Creuset: Generational Heirlooms as a Messaging Strategy
When products last, they can become family heirlooms. Cookware brand Le Creuset is explicit about this concept. Headlines on its website include “Heirlooms-in-the Making” and “Generations of flavor.” Durability is built into the brand’s equity.
5) Waterford: Timeless Fashion and Style
Irish glassware brand Waterford is known for its timeless elegance. Discontinued patterns are considered a desired vintage collectible versus being seen as out-of-date. Waterford’s Lismore pattern has been the No. 1 selling crystal stemware pattern for more than 60 years. Many home décor trends come and go, but this brand remains consistent while maintaining an enduring style.
6) Fairphone: Designing for Repair and Modularity
When products are designed to be repaired versus replaced, the entire approach to design changes. Parts can be separated and replaced without requiring an entirely new item. Smartphone brand Fairphone creates designs with modular components that can be easily replaced or upgraded.
We, along with consumers, have the mistaken belief that new equals better, or faster consumption equals more sales. These mindsets drive a myriad set of behaviors, product launches, and marketing focused on constant acquisition and replacement. Creating products that are long-lasting and/or timeless can replace this mindset with quality and value for your customers, resulting in increased revenue and profitability for businesses.
So I ask, what does long-lasting look like in your business?
Introducing the Marketing Hippocratic Oath: Redefining Industry Practices
First, do no harm. This is a central theme of the modern Hippocratic Oath, a set of principles governing patient care that most medical schools administer to their students. Most, if not all professions, have some form of a code of ethics that outlines behavioral expectations, and marketing is no exception.
First, do no harm.
This is a central theme of the modern Hippocratic Oath, a set of principles governing patient care that most medical schools administer to their students. Most, if not all professions, have some form of a code of ethics that outlines behavioral expectations, and marketing is no exception. However, the American Marketing Association (AMA) code of conduct, and most other marketing codes of ethics, falls short because it fails to address the specific ways that marketing causes harm. To rectify this oversight, I propose a voluntary code of conduct specifically for marketing—call it a Marketing Hippocratic Oath.
What Marketing is Missing
AMA’s Statement of Ethics begins with the following principles.
As Marketers, we must:
Do no harm. This means not only consciously avoiding harmful actions or omissions but also striving to benefit all stakeholders and society at large. We must embody high ethical standards and, at a minimum, adhere to all applicable laws and regulations in the choices we make.
Foster and maintain integrity. This means striving for transparency and fairness in all aspects of the marketing ecosystem.
Embrace ethical values. This means building relationships and enhancing stakeholder confidence by affirming these core values: honesty, responsibility, equity, transparency, and citizenship.
Three things stand out to me regarding AMA’s statement: First, almost none of these general statements are uniquely applicable to marketing. The principles would be almost entirely applicable if someone were to substitute the word “marketing” for any other profession. Secondly, there is virtually no mention of acting in the best interest of the customer. Lastly, while AMA begins its statement with “Do no harm,” there is a surprising lack of specificity or any real examination of what “harm” may be intentionally or unintentionally created by marketing.
An Asymmetry of Power and Information
In some professions, those who benefit from services require specific, critical protections. As a result, providers must be licensed with renewals based on continuing education and meeting certain standards.
Let’s look at a few examples beyond medicine. Each has not just a code of ethics but also a governing idea(s) that protect the beneficiary.
LAW: Rules of Professional Conduct, which vary slightly by state, specify the professional requirements and obligations to ensure attorneys act in the best interests of their clients, including fiduciary duty and attorney-client privilege.
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: Financial management professionals have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of their clients.
TEACHING: The Duty of Care is a legal and moral obligation to ensure the safety and well-being of students.
What’s common among these professions is an asymmetry of power and/or information. The institutions that accredit these individuals understand the necessity of protecting the beneficiaries of their care and services. While all these professionals earn a profit, and in some cases, they are extremely well paid (lawyers, doctors, financial management professionals), they have agreed to serve their client or patient first.
An asymmetry of power and information also exists within marketing and sales. Here are just a few ways in which we, as marketers and business leaders, have more information or power than current or prospective customers:
Product Knowledge: We know far more about our products than our customers, including benefits and drawbacks. This allows us to highlight benefits and hide negatives.
Persuasive Techniques: Because we know how to craft messages that influence buyers based on principles such as scarcity, reciprocity, framing, price anchoring and more, it can be easy to exploit consumer psychology.
Customer Data: Modern-day technology gives us tremendous knowledge and power about people’s shopping habits, preferences, and behavior, which allows us to segment and target customers within very specific groups. This is information that needs to be protected.
Regulatory Knowledge: While marketing has strict laws and regulations, loopholes exist. And importantly, consumers do not always understand their protections.
Possessing the above knowledge is not inherently bad, but with this power comes responsibility, just as in law or medicine, to use this information to better the customer.
If Not a License, How About A Voluntary Oath?
Imagine if, like many professions, marketing required a license. And what if that license required ethical training on what one can and can’t say, and the specific stipulations for putting the customer first? What’s more, what if you had to regularly renew your license with updated training on ethics surrounding the latest marketing platforms and tactics?
I recognize the many challenges that come with a license requirement, particularly when anyone can be a business owner, influencer or content creator. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to require anyone selling anything to be certified. But we, as brand leaders, could voluntarily train and agree to principles by which we will operate—a voluntary oath. Most companies have an employee code of conduct, but I have never seen one that also governs how that company expects its employees to market and sell to their customers.
A voluntary oath is not a new idea. The MBA Oath was written in 2009 by a group of Harvard Business School students who felt the need for a code of conduct to hold the business profession to a higher standard. Now in its 15th year, the oath has been signed by more than 15,000 students at 100 schools, “creating a community of MBAs with a shared standard for ethical and professional behavior”.
The Marketing Hippocratic Oath
I propose a voluntary code of conduct specifically for marketing—the Marketing Hippocratic Oath. These statements are identified based on the specific and current ways in which we, as marketers, advertisers, and brand leaders can do harm. As the profession evolves, so too must this oath.
I will put my customers' interests above my own. I will not profit at their expense or exploit them for financial gain.
I will do my best to create real value for my customers while ensuring that I protect the rights and interests of the community and our planet.
I will treat all those my marketing may reach as people, recognizing their emotional, social, and physical health.
I will seek to understand and uphold both the letter and spirit of the law.
I will protect my audience’s personal information in accordance with the law as well as their expectations.
I will not use my power, resources, or knowledge to manipulate, pressure, or encourage anyone to make a decision that is knowingly against his or her best interest.
I will tell the truth and will not lie, exaggerate, withhold information, or use communications to mislead or create unrealistic expectations for my audiences.
I will respect people’s lives, minimizing interruption, disruption, and unwanted invasion of privacy from my marketing activities.
I will work to reduce the way marketing contributes to consumerism and overconsumption.
I will respect all people through my communications. I will not divide, perpetuate stereotypes, reinforce negative perceptions, or manufacture fear, and I will instead use my communications to unite, educate, and inspire for the betterment of those who encounter my messages.
I will be transparent when I use artificial intelligence, and I will take accountability for its impact.
4 Ways to Implement a Marketing Oath
So now what? This all sounds great on paper, but how do we implement it? How do we ensure that we are living, day to day, according to these commitments?
Here are a few specific opportunities. Some require more systemic interventions, while others a single individual can undertake:
1) Character Interview Questions: In law, most states require passing a Character and Fitness Interview. The interview evaluates the individual’s competence and suitability to practice law based on their personal conduct and character traits. While many businesses evaluate a candidate’s values during the interview process, few likely ask character or judgment questions regarding marketing practices. Here are a few examples of questions to incorporate:
Tell me about a time when you did not pursue a marketing idea or tactic because you thought it was unethical.
Can you give an example of a brand that you think puts the company’s interest ahead of the customer?
Did you ever participate in a program when you felt pressured to communicate something in a way that exaggerated the benefit or value? How did you handle that situation?
Please share your understanding of the laws or ethical principles on X topic (e.g. privacy, influencers, advertising, etc).
2) Company Code of Conduct: Your team or business can update its code of ethics or conduct to reflect the specific ways you expect your marketing, sales, and communications teams to operate.
3) Voluntary Oath: Marketers can, individually or as a team, take an oath to follow these principles or to draft their own and review it as part of a personal mission, values, or professional development exercise. Teams can collectively review the circumstances when this oath was difficult to follow and identify potential interventions for future scenarios.
4) Teaching and Training: Academic institutions can include, and ideally require, marketing ethics courses to get a degree in marketing. Marketing associations, like the AMA, as well as other marketing events and conferences can incorporate these principles in their event and digital content through training, speaking panels, articles, and case studies.
I invite those in the marketing and branding profession and the business leaders who oversee or approve the work of marketing teams to voluntarily pledge the above marketing oath alongside me. I have posted it to my website here, and I encourage you to adopt a similar oath, using these ideas for implementation. But like harmful marketing, these can’t just be visionary, inflated words—they have to be lived actions, promises kept.
Stop Selling, Start Dating: All Marketing is Matchmaking
Picture this: You’re at a speed dating event and notice that many of your dates fall into one of three personality types.
Picture this: You’re at a speed dating event and notice that many of your dates fall into one of three personality types.
The Desperate Chameleon:
“Tell me all about you! What do you enjoy? I’m super flexible, so I’ll do whatever. I always try the hottest new thing because I don’t want to miss out—I like to feel part of “what’s happening.” I don’t really know what I’m looking for in a partner, but I like being liked.”
The Arrogant Persuader:
“It’s harder than ever to find marriage material, but luckily you met me because I’m extremely intelligent, very attractive, and earn a ton of money. I only participate in the most exhilarating, memorable hobbies which is why I love skydiving. If you haven’t tried it yet, I promise you, your life will change forever! You’ll finally feel alive and fulfilled, and you’ll realize how boring your current hobbies are.”
The Confident Learner:
“I am an introvert, but I’m looking for an outgoing partner who can carry a conversation. Painting brings me joy because of the creativity and the precision required. What do you think of painting? I love my work and put in tons of hours, but I’m open to working less as long as it’s fulfilling. Is work-life balance important to you? What are you looking for in a partner?”
So what does this have to do with marketing? All marketing is matchmaking. When dating, no one is looking for just any partner, they are looking for the right partner. Everyone knows that investing time, money, and emotional bandwidth in someone who’s not a good fit comes with a huge cost. In marketing, both parties – businesses and customers – have needs and interests (just like people do). Customers have desires, along with problems, pains, and challenges they want solved. Businesses have products and services that create value, improve outcomes, increase satisfaction, and save time.
The Desperate Chameleon and Arrogant Persuader both try to sell something to everyone, either by constantly transforming themselves to be relevant to the majority or by insisting their audience has a need and that they are the only one who can meet it. Approaching marketing—and dating—as a Confident Learner is key to a successful partnership.
Let’s look at the brand behaviors of each of these profiles:
Desperate Chameleons
Brands that are Desperate Chameleons don’t stand for anything. They cater endlessly to what their customers want. Without a solid identity of who they are and what they stand for, they constantly seek to mold their image, services, and marketing channels to the masses.
Practically this looks like:
Product innovation that expands too broadly because customers always want “more”
Marketing to everyone vs. a niche segment that most values the products or services
Trying every new trending channel
Mimicking successful competition
While some of these behaviors are warranted with a thoughtful, strategic approach, in many cases, they are entirely reactive to external circumstances.
I recently heard a story of an executive coach for Burger King’s C-Suite. The team was debating its strategy for a chicken sandwich, and the coach invited the entire team on a walk outside. He led them to the front of the building and pointed at a sign. “What does that say?” he asked. “Burger King,” they replied in unison. “Exactly,” he said. “Why are you all arguing about a chicken sandwich? Focus on the burger.”
In the early stages of business, brands fear being too narrow and not having a broad enough customer base, so they try to appeal to everyone. As brands mature and growth pressures compound, they risk becoming chameleons as they expand into more categories, attempting to generate mass reach and appeal. Stay narrow and focused. Be consistent in what you stand for. If you are everything to everyone, you are nothing to anybody.
Arrogant Persuaders
Brands that are Arrogant Persuaders have a me-first mentality. They prioritize their own agenda and business objectives over customer interests, adopting a “must-sell” mindset. Fundamentally, Arrogant Persuaders try to fit the market to their solution rather than their solution to the market. This approach requires brands to convince their audience that it has a specific need and that their solution is the only superior option, which typically require “pushy” tactics.
Practically this looks like:
Inflated claims
Creating an artificial sense of scarcity or exclusivity
Exaggerating the problem or creating a sense of fear
Bad customer service due to an inability to stand by what was promised
Much of the parenting literature I’ve read falls in this category. The books begin with the same formula: “If you don’t fix your kid now, they’re going to make you even more miserable, and he or she might become a failure in life. All those other parenting tactics don’t work. Here’s why my approach is best. Plus, you’ll see changes immediately!”
Some wellness brands overpromise results in ways that are not backed up by science. Diet brand Sensa settled false advertising charges by the FTC for $26.5 million for promising weight loss without dieting or exercise, while POM owner Wonderful Company was sued by the FTC and required to stop all ads that weren’t supported by a randomized, well-controlled human clinical trial. Luxury fashion brands create artificial scarcity to drive demand through a sense of exclusivity. Insurance companies often guarantee dire circumstances without their product. In all these examples, brands that are Arrogant Persuaders aren’t focused on finding the “right” match; rather, they try to force a match by creating demand through pressure and fear.
Source: Ad Age
To avoid being an Arrogant Persuader, you must shift to a customer-first lens. Inform, but don’t exaggerate. Provoke curiosity, but don’t mislead. Ensure that you deliver on whatever value you promise. Create interest by reminding people of their pain points without introducing new fears or insecurities that didn’t previously exist.
Confident Learners
Brands that are Confident Learners know what they stand for. They know who they are – and are not. They’re not trying to be all things to all people. Instead, they know the value they create for a specific audience. They stay in their lane. They are humble, yet self-assured. And yet they are also always curious, continually seeking to understand their audience, evaluating whether and how to adapt and modify while staying true to their core.
Practically this looks like:
Staying focused on a specific audience target
Innovation that builds on expertise and competencies
Using channels and capitalizing on trends relevant to an audience vs. generic popularity
Taking risks to be original and creative vs. following the pack
HubSpot embodies the Confident Learner. Founded in 2006, this Customer Relationship Management (CRM) SaaS business is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of inbound marketing, which focuses on creating content and experiences to attract or “pull” in potential customers vs. “pushing” promotional messages. Driven by an intimate understanding of its audience’s needs and a self-declared principle of “create 10X the value vs. competition,” HubSpot frequently launches products and services that deliver meaningful value to customers. To stay ahead of competitors, HubSpot aggressively experiments with AI and continually innovates content strategies, such as the HubSpot Podcast Network.
The HubSpot Academy offers free courses on marketing and sales topics, one of many resources to equip current customers and attract prospects.
Confident Learners need to strike a balance between being who they are and simultaneously adapting to customer desires in an evolving external market. There is a constant push/pull between the brand and the customer. Your core must be unshakable, and yet you must also have the humility to learn, try new things, and improve.
Don’t Sell. Date.
Ultimately, the job of marketers (and sales) isn’t to push or sell. It’s to find the right match. Some people or companies have needs, whether they are conscious or unconscious. Our job is to identify the audience that possesses the specific needs or desires we address and inform or educate how we can help.
We sometimes forget that what we do is in service of the customer rather than the company. We act as though when we promote the company’s interests, the customer will benefit. In reality, if we match well, the company will benefit.
When I first started my business, I was terrified of sales. As marketers, we often aren’t privy to our customers’ immediate reactions to our messages. Seeing potential clients face-to-face forced me to observe their immediate reactions to my pitch. During initial meetings, I felt like I was either asking for a favor, “Will you go out of your way to help me by giving me business?” or trying to convince people why they needed what I offered. But through that process, I realized I was not asking for help, nor was I convincing anyone. Some individuals had marketing and branding needs; others did not. When I could help a company solve its communication and growth challenges, they were grateful, and both parties benefited –they received a solution to grow their business, while I earned revenue and used my expertise to help others. In other words, we matched. Business development became a process of uncovering needs rather than selling a service.
How to Date Your Customer
1) Know your type. Avoid being the brand that is continually seeking out the wrong person. Sales has a process of “disqualifying” leads. So too should marketing. Ask yourself who is not a fit, and stop pursuing them.
2) Listen more than you talk. As marketers, this may sound counterintuitive, but listening and seeking feedback must be ingrained Talk to customers regularly, respond to complaints, read comments, and build in feedback mechanisms to ensure “selling more” doesn’t get prioritized over “meeting needs.”
3) Be yourself. Don’t manufacture an inauthentic image or tone, or overpromise something you don’t have experience delivering. Stay true to what your brand stands for and what makes you different.
4) Build a relationship. View your customers as actua people you can help versus transactions that can better your bottom line. Not every interaction has to be profitable, but in the long run, sacrifice builds trust and loyalty.
By thinking of marketing as finding the right match vs. selling, you are reminded of what you and your customers want. You ditch the “sell at all costs” mentality and stop “doing whatever the customer wants.” Dating your customers forces focus, intentionality, and matching with ideal customers who appreciate you, speak positively about you, and support you.
As anyone in a long-term relationship knows, the dating process never really stops. Even after finding a great match, there’s always more to learn as each person changes and grows. To preserve a fulfilling relationship, just as with humans, brands can never afford to stop dating their customers.
Navigating the Green Guides: Valuable Principles for Marketing Claims
I started writing this article solely from the lens of environmental claims, with the intent of educating brand leaders about the Green Guides.
This article is the first in a series on accurate environmental claims. All articles in this series include:
Part 1: Beyond the Buzzwords: Why Accurate Environmental Claims Matter
Part 3: Lifecycle Thinking: The Best Tool to Help Brands Master Sustainability
Part 4: Navigating the Green Guides: Valuable Principles for Marketing Claims
Part 4 - Navigating the Green Guides: Valuable Principles for Marketing Claims
I started writing this article solely from the lens of environmental claims, with the intent of educating brand leaders about the Green Guides. But as I dove in, I realized that the principles in the Green Guides, which are published by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and provide guidance to help companies avoid deceptive claims, apply far beyond environmental claims. In reality, they lay out a broad set of principles all brand leaders can adhere to, no matter our topic.
The Green Guides are a tremendously useful tool to help your organization communicate clearly and transparently. And as consumers, many of us seek to buy products that are better for the environment — my hope is that this article makes you a more informed buyer.
There are three principles in the Green Guides introduction that should inform all marketing claims:
Marketing isn’t just what you say – it’s what you imply. Look beyond your messaging and consider what you may be insinuating across labeling, marketing, promotion, and advertising. Words, symbols, logos, depictions, and product brand names are all elements that contribute to direct and implied messages.
Deception is evaluated by a reasonable interpretation. Consider how a “reasonable consumer” would interpret your marketing claims. Deceptiveness is dependent on a consumer’s “net impression” of the advertisement. Even if your specific words and statements can be validated, what is the overall takeaway of the communication?
All claims need to be truthful and supported. It is a brand’s responsibility to determine that the claims made (explicitly, implicitly, or unintentionally) are accurate and supported with data or proof. While these Green Guides principles are written to apply to environmental claims, they are all too often ignored in many facets of marketing today. Heeding these principles within communications builds consumer trust.
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this article in no way constitutes legal advice. Please seek legal counsel if you have questions.]
What are the Green Guides?
The Green Guides were first written in 1992 as a response to the increasing number of companies making environmental claims that were vague or misleading. According to the FTC, “Sometimes what companies think their green claims mean and what consumers really understand are two different things.” Updated three times since publication, most recently in 2012, the guidance includes 1) general principles that apply to all environmental marketing claims; 2) how consumers are likely to interpret particular environmental claims; 3) how marketers can substantiate and qualify their claims to avoid deceiving consumers.
Violations of these principles can result in the FTC taking action against companies, either by banning the advertising or issuing fines. Additionally, consumers can sue companies for deceptive practices, and many have settled for millions of dollars.
Here are some Green Guides highlights – note that if you remove the word “environmental,” most remain great principles for any marketing claim.
General, unqualified environmental benefit claims are deceptive. Claims such as “environmentally preferable” are vague, hard-to-interpret and often imply a huge environmental benefit or no environmental impact at all. Using the term “eco-friendly,” for example, would be deceptive unless it clearly and in close proximity states the product’s environmental attributes with evidence to support the statement.
Qualifications and disclaimers must be clear, prominent, and visible. This means plain, understandable language and big font size so the text is legible and easily read by the viewer. Often, qualifications or disclaimers are in a tiny font and hard to read or understand.
Do not overstate or imply an environmental benefit is bigger than it is. The Green Guides give this example: Moving from 2% recycled fiber to 3% and then labeling the product as 50% more recycled content. This is deceptive.
Comparative claims should be clear. Any statements of “more/most,” “better” or “-er” need to explicitly state what the comparison is to, whether that is an alternate product made by the same company or a competitor. Data must be up-to-date to continually ensure the claim remains accurate.
Certifications and seals of approval must be legitimate. The brand cannot imply that a product, package, or service has been endorsed by an independent third party when it has not been. The use of a general logo or seal, such as “eco-friendly,” likely conveys that the product offers a general environmental benefit. A more appropriate use of a seal or logo, for example, would be the percent of recycled content, or the fact that the package is curbside recyclable. All claims made or implied via logos or seals need to be supported with data.
Compostable claims must be specific and validated. If using this claim, a business must have proof that the product breaks down into usable compost in a safe and timely manner. Additionally, if a product cannot be composted at home, the company must disclose that information and must make clear the availability of appropriate composting facilities.
Biodegradable claims must have proof of degradation within one year. Companies must specify how a product will degrade in the typical environment where it will be disposed of within a one-year timeframe. For example, a trash-bag company that labels its bags as “biodegradable” is deceptive because trash bags are more frequently disposed of in a landfill where they will not break down within one year. On the other hand, a shampoo labeled as “biodegradable” is not deceptive if the company has data that the shampoo will break down in the sewage system within a reasonable timeframe.
Recycling claims must be specific and accurately convey ease of recycling. Businesses must ensure that their recyclable claims accurately reflect the availability of recycling infrastructure and clearly state which part of the product or package the recycling claim refers to. The Green Guides state that if facilities are available to a “substantial majority” (which the FTC defines as more than 60% of consumers), businesses can make an unqualified recyclability claim.
The Green Guides are a great resource because they offer several simple and easy-to-understand examples for each type of claim. The Green Guides are a useful, valuable resource, but they do not cover all aspects of sustainability — there are a lot of grey areas. The FTC is in the process of reviewing the Green Guides and is slated to release updated guidelines in 2024. These updates should provide more clarity on aspirational claims (benefits or environmental impact promised in the future); net-zero claims; “sustainable” claims; recyclable and recycled content claims; carbon offsets and climate change; and updated guidance on organic, sustainable, compostable, and degradable claims.
How to use the Green Guides in all your marketing claims
Read the Green Guides. Any marketer who is making environmental claims should be familiar that they exist, have read them, and understand the basic principles as well as the specifics that apply to the types of claims they are making (e.g. recyclable, biodegradable, compostable, etc.).
Apply the Green Guides through a standard process. If your brand is making any kind of environmental claims, you need to create a claims-review process to evaluate accuracy, comply with the guidelines, and analyze relevant supporting data or evidence.
Evaluate the perception of your claims. In the second article in this series on greenwashing, I argued that we need to understand whether the perception of what we say lines up with reality. The Green Guides attempt to outline this very thing. If you are not sure whether your claims are misleading, research your perception by talking to customers. It is difficult for us to assess how a “reasonable consumer” would interpret our marketing when we have an insider perspective.
Here is a practical example that illustrates how to apply these principles:
I was working with a client who was launching a new product, part of which included a biodegradable material that represented about half of the product materials. The initial messaging for the product focused on how the product was “biodegradable.” Because the company only had data to support the biodegradability of half the product, I considered the message to be misleading based on the Green Guides’ principles of a reasonable consumer’s interpretation. As a result, we reworked the messaging to make it extremely clear which part of the package was biodegradable and in which conditions (in this case, water).
This article wraps up our series on transparent and accurate environmental claims. My aim was to equip business leaders who do not have a large infrastructure for claims support to navigate this space with confidence. There are real risks to making statements that are misleading or cannot be supported. Accusations of greenwashing, lawsuits, and fines erode trust, cost money, and are a distraction to the business. Understanding the framework of life cycle thinking provides a critical foundation for understanding the core principles of sustainability and how environmental claims fit within the context of a product’s total environmental footprint. The Green Guides are a free and useful resource that provide specific guidance on how to communicate in a way that is not deceptive. Armed with this series, , my hope is that you are more informed, more equipped, and more motivated to communicate accurately and transparently about the environmental benefits of your products and services.
Life Cycle Thinking: The Best Tool to Help Brand Leaders Master Sustainability
A common dilemma I have is whether to recycle my yogurt containers. I know they are made of a recyclable plastic, and my children constantly urge me to recycle, but it’s not so simple.
This is the third article in a 4-part series on transparent, accurate environmental claims. All articles in this series include:
Part 1: Beyond the Buzzwords: Why Accurate Environmental Claims Matter
Part 3: Lifecycle Thinking: The Best Tool to Help Brands Master Sustainability
Part 4: Navigating the Green Guides: Valuable Principles for Marketing Claims
Part 3: Life Cycle Thinking: The Best Tool to Help Brand Leaders Master Sustainability
A common dilemma I have is whether to recycle my yogurt containers. I know they are made of recyclable plastic, and my children constantly urge me to recycle, but it’s not so simple.
Here’s why:
Water: I rinse out the container with warm water so the yogurt doesn’t contaminate the recycling stream. How much water am I using?
Energy: The water requires energy to heat it. What’s the source of energy use? Is it from mostly coal (highly polluting) or mostly renewables? And how much energy is required to recycle the plastic?
Waste: Does the yogurt container actually get recycled and reused? Or does the recycling company end up putting it in the landfill?
Even if yogurt brands claim their packaging is recyclable, which is typically accurate, the above aspects are not within their direct control. Companies must understand the myriad factors that can affect the environmental impact of their products to ensure the accuracy of their claims.
As illustrated with this simple daily behavior, sustainability is a complex topic. But there’s an incredibly helpful framework that can help us sort through the mess of terms and impacts: life cycle thinking.
In part 2 of this article series on environmental claims, I described greenwashing as “communications that mislead an audience by creating the perception of a better environmental profile than reality.” There are two key parts to this definition. First, what is the perception that is created? Second, what is the actual environmental profile? It is impossible to understand whether the perception of our environmental profile is accurate if we don’t know what that profile is in the first place.
Life cycle thinking is a helpful tool to better understand, structure, and explain the broad concept of sustainability and the holistic impact of products or services on the environment. The more business leaders and communicators can become familiar with this framework, the more we can deliver meaningful improvements and communicate transparently. In addition to environmental claims, the framework serves as a valuable tool for innovation and business strategy.
Let’s dive in.
What is Life Cycle Thinking?
Every product (and most services) has a life cycle that begins with raw material extraction that is then manufactured, packaged, transported, used, and finally, disposed at the end of it’s life. At each phase of the product’s life cycle there are inputs (materials, energy, water) and outputs (products, materials, waste, emissions).
Life cycle thinking, as defined by the United Nations, is a “way of thinking that includes the economic, environmental, and social consequences of a product or process over its entire life.” Here, I’m focusing on environmental impacts, beginning with the most basic footprints: water, energy, and waste. The visual below refers to a linear product life cycle because most products’ end of life today is a landfill. Later on in this article, we will dive into a circular product life cycle.
To understand your company’s environmental impact, you need to be able to answer these questions for each phase. In the beginning, focus on the most critical products, materials, and inputs.
Raw Materials: Where do we get the materials from? What was that material doing or being used for before it was extracted? What are the environmental impacts of its extraction?
Manufacturing: What are the material, energy, and water inputs required to make the raw materials and the final product? What waste is created during the manufacturing processes?
Packaging and transportation: How are the packaging materials made and transported? How is the product transported at different phases of the life cycle?
Use: What inputs are required to use the product (e.g., energy, water, materials), and what waste is created?
End of life: How is the product disposed (landfill, liter, recycled, or incinerated)?
Why is Life Cycle Thinking Valuable?
If the global population consumed like Americans, we would need 5.1 earths to support us. This current level of consumption is unsustainable, so businesses need new ways to manufacture, sell, and innovate products and services. Life cycle thinking can highlight ways to reduce the use of resources and emissions that contribute to unsustainable consumption and harm air, water, and natural ecosystems. Meaningful changes can then be communicated transparently and accurately.
Life cycle thinking is a helpful framework because it:
Provides context: Understanding a product’s life cycle creates awareness. It forces us to unearth our business’s full environmental impact, not just parts we can easily see. It gives us a reference point for how changes to one phase can positively or negatively impact other phases.
Reduces risk: Evaluating a product’s life cycle can help us better understand possible risk, including environmental risks, marketing risks from misleading or inaccurate communications (which can lead to negative PR), or previously unknown supply chain risks.
Informs decision-making: Life cycle thinking provides a systematic framework for evaluating decisions, helping us understand the tradeoffs and unintended negative consequences of making a change. With this knowledge, we can use information and data to proceed carefully.
How to Begin
Life cycle thinking is, as its name implies, a way of thinking. Applications can be quick and high-level, or extremely detailed, requiring months of analysis. Below are three specific methods that use life cycle thinking to analyze your product or total business’ environmental impact.
Conceptual map:
Sketch out the product’s high-level materials, inputs, and outputs at each life cycle stage. This level of analysis is essential for all businesses. It’s critical to understand which phases have the highest environmental impact and in which footprint areas. Doing so can also highlight significant costs and potential material supply chain or financial risks. Below is a template to help you get started. You can include actual numbers or simply color code the boxes as “low,” “medium,” and “high.” If you don’t know enough to fill it out, do some research to better understand your biggest impacts.
Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA):
An LCA is a thorough analysis of all inputs and outputs in each phase across dozens of different types of impacts. There are two general types: streamlined and detailed. A streamlined LCA is a less precise version of a detailed LCA and relies more on secondary data to gather information quickly and inform decisions. Many publicly shared, peer-reviewed LCAs are available online and present a wealth of data to pull from. Allbirds has an in-depth tool and guide to help those getting started. Additionally, numerous software platforms exist to support this analysis as streamlined LCAs are still a complex and technical assessment. Note: Because streamlined LCAs often do not use data from your specific business, they are typically not considered accurate enough to use for marketing claims.
Detailed LCA:
Detailed LCAs are extremely thorough and typically are executed by a qualified third party. These LCAs are verified and checked for accuracy of inputs and adherence to IS0 standards. Detailed LCAs should be conducted before making large environmental investments and are necessary to support environmental claims that span the full product life cycle (e.g. carbon footprint, water, or energy reduction claims). If you’re interested in learning more on Life Cycle Assessments, here is a great in-depth article that includes numerous tools and companies that can perform this service.
Applications for Life Cycle Thinking
Hopefully you now understand what life cycle thinking is, why it’s important, and how to create a rough map of impact. But what are the practical applications when running the day-to-day business, including communications?
Sustainability strategy
Identifying your biggest environmental impacts within a product’s life cycle helps you prioritize your sustainability efforts. Many organizations target waste because it’s so visible, but focusing on material sourcing or the consumer use phase can often have greater impact. The simplest impact reduction across the full life cycle is simply using less to get the same job done, which requires fewer materials, less transport and creates less waste.
Product or service innovation
Sustainable innovation begins with a basic understanding of a product’s greatest environmental impacts. For example, incorporating lower-impact raw materials, or designing products that rely on fewer resources during consumer use, such as high-efficiency appliances. P&G, maker of European laundry brand Ariel, used a detailed LCA to identify that the biggest use of energy (and therefore carbon footprint) was when consumers washed their clothes. This insight helped Ariel prioritize cold-water washing as the No. 1 opportunity to reduce energy use and carbon emissions. The product innovation required superior cleaning technology in cold temperatures to ensure buyers had confidence making the switch.
Inform claims and marketing
When making sustainability claims, communicators need to understand how claims in one phase relate to a product’s total environmental footprint. This helps marketers avoid unintentionally misleading audiences. For example, if Ariel (in the example above) made claims about energy reduction in its manufacturing facility, that could be misleading, because the biggest use of energy happens when consumers wash their clothes. With knowledge of the full life cycle, Ariel marketers would know to be especially careful about how and when they communicate any manufacturing energy improvements because they are a small part of the total impact.
Circularity: The Next Evolution of Life Cycle Thinking
One of the most common and popular applications of life cycle thinking today is the concept of circularity. This idea moves from a linear product life cycle to a circular one. In this model, the end of life feeds into the raw material phase of the next product’s life cycle. Rather than materials going to the landfill, the life cycle becomes an endless loop where materials from the end of one product’s life either feed back into natural systems to support new raw materials (think compost) or are recycled into raw materials for the next phase.
Design plays a critical role in being able to reuse, recycle or compost materials, so product innovation needs to consider end of life upfront. For example, in 2021, Adidas launched its “Made to be Remade” shoe as a product concept. Most shoes cannot be recycled because they are made of dozens of materials including dies, glues, and multiple different types of plastic. Adidas’ shoe was produced from a single material—without any glue or dye—so that it can be fully recycled. They designed a process for customers to return the shoe so it could be ground into pellets and transformed into a new pair. These new types of circular business models require new processes and will take some time to master. Adidas noted about its Made to be Remade program: “One of the main learnings was the need to collaborate with more partners along all steps of the value chain—everything from collection to processing of the used products.” Life cycle thinking gives us the map to begin our journey toward products and services that use less resources and create less waste.
A critical shift takes place when you start thinking about sustainable changes that can be made to your product or business with a life cycle lens. Using this framework is not a silver bullet. There is not always a clear and obvious answer as to which solution is better, because interventions in one area may often have tradeoffs elsewhere. However, adopting this mindset as business leaders allows us to ask more informed questions, forces us to gather more complete data before acting, and inspires new products and business models. As a result, we will be more accurate and transparent when communicating environmental impact.
Stay tuned for our final article in this series on environmental claims: Understanding the Federal Trade Commission Green Guides!
Do you need help applying Life Cycle Thinking principles to your marketing or innovation strategy? We help purpose-driven brands integrate sustainability into their brand strategy.
Unmasking Greenwashing: How to De-Risk Your Brand
In 2016, Keurig launched a recyclable K-Cup pod. Customers were thrilled. Those disposable pods, often the boon of environmentally conscious consumers who love a single cup of coffee, could now be dropped into the recycling bin. An asterisk in small print noted: “Check locally, not recycled in all communities.”
This is the second article in a 4-part series on transparent, accurate environmental claims. All articles in the series include:
Part 1: Beyond the Buzzwords: Why Accurate Environmental Claims Matter
Part 3: Lifecycle Thinking: The Best Tool to Help Brands Master Sustainability
Part 4: Navigating the Green Guides: Valuable Principles for Marketing Claims
Part 2 - Unmasking Greenwashing: How to De-Risk Your Brand
In 2016, Keurig launched a recyclable K-Cup pod. Customers were thrilled. Those disposable pods, often the boon of environmentally conscious consumers who love a single cup of coffee, could now be dropped into the recycling bin. An asterisk in small print noted: “Check locally, not recycled in all communities.”
Source: Keurig
What is your impression when viewing this ad? My assumption is that the pods are recyclable in most communities, including mine (an urban area with a large recycling facility).
In 2018, a plaintiff filed a lawsuit claiming that Keurig’s claims were misleading and that the pods could not be recycled in most communities because they were too small, often contaminated, and not made of a material that was frequently resold (#5).
Keurig countered that it was compliant with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) environmental claims guidelines because they included a disclaimer noting the pods were not recyclable everywhere. Additionally, Keurig said it had tested the pods with large recycling companies to confirm recyclability.
When judges did not dismiss the case, Keurig settled for $10 million without admitting any wrongdoing.
This Keurig example is an oft-cited one of greenwashing and one that demonstrates the complexity of this issue for businesses.
Interested in training your team on marketing sustainability? This case study illustrates how I helped educate a global media company’s sales team. Reach out to explore how to work together.
What is Greenwashing?
At its core, greenwashing is an accusation of deception. In many cases, accusers claim a company is intentionally using deceptive marketing tactics to create a false sustainability image.
I find this definition of greenwashing overly accusatory and assuming of malintent, so I propose an alternate business-friendly definition:
“Communications that mislead an audience by creating the perception of a better environmental profile than reality.”
Note in both definitions, it’s the “communications” that mislead, whether or not intentional. Call me naive, but I suspect that Keurig business leaders did not sit around a table and brainstorm, “How can we get our customers to think that our pods are recyclable when we know they are not?” Rather, I imagine they knew they had a business and environmental challenge likely believed their solution worked and met the FTC’s environmental claims requirements.
However, I wonder if the Keurig team would have changed its communications had it asked these questions to consumers prior to launch: “What is your impression of the environmental benefit of ad? Do you think you’d be able to recycle these K-Cups in your community? Would you check to see if they are recyclable before you recycle them?”
To identify greenwashing, we must ask ourselves two critical questions:
1) What is the audience perception?
2) Does that perception accurately reflect the product’s environmental attributes?
Whether or not one is in technical compliance with regulations, companies are still at risk of greenwashing if its messaging is perceived as misleading.
Why Does Greenwashing Matter?
It’s illegal to make false environmental claims, and one could be sued, fined, or required to change messaging. Additionally, promoting a product as more environmentally friendly than it is can erode trust and hinder true environmental progress.
As I mentioned in the first article in my series on environmental claims, consumers are increasingly distrustful of environmental claims from products and companies. Only 38% of consumers believe companies when they make these claims, down from 47% just a year earlier. Trust, the backbone of a customer relationship, doesn’t apply to one realm. If consumers distrust your environmental promises, they may discount all messaging. Some companies, like H&M, have recently won legal battles against misleading environmental claims, but the barrage of negative press can damage brand reputation.
True environmental progress requires change. We must be wary of reputational benefits that are purely marketing spin versus those that result from action. Customers seek an actual environmental benefit by purchasing products with environmental attributes. When a company can generate sales without making more extensive improvements, there is less incentive to advance a sustainability agenda. Moreover, misleading messaging can make it difficult for customers to differentiate between businesses that are aggressively reducing their environmental footprint and those that are seeking purely reputational benefits.
Forms of Greenwashing
While the most egregious type of greenwashing is explicitly false or inaccurate claims, there are additional forms that can be perceived as misleading. Here are four common practices, which apply not only to product claims but also to overall brand and campaign messaging, that often arouse accusations of greenwashing. Understanding these practices and how they influence audience perception will help you better detect your greenwashing risk.
Vague and Unsubstantiated Claims
General statements about a product’s environmental profile being good or better for the environment are misleading when they are absolute, not explained, or unsupported by data. Attributes such as biodegradability, composability, and recyclability, even though they seem specific, often need to be qualified to explain when they apply, such as in the Keurig example.
Examples:
Sustainable
Eco-friendly
Biodegradable
Better for the environment
Hiding Negative Impacts
Also called hidden tradeoffs, this type of sustainability messaging disproportionately promotes a smaller, more “environmentally friendly” part of a business, which creates the perception that all aspects of the business are “better for the environment.” The messaging overshadows, or hides, the business’s larger negative footprint. All businesses have a negative environmental footprint to some degree, so it’s important to help the audience understand the relative ratio of impact with respect to the entire business.
Let’s use an example: Imagine that a company promotes a product as being environmentally friendly by focusing on how it’s packaging is now plastic-free. However, 95% of the plastic used is in the product itself—only 5% is in the packaging. It could be misleading to excessively promote a 100% reduction in plastic packaging, when packaging represents only a small portion of total plastic.
A company is particularly vulnerable to hiding negative tradeoffs when its broader industry or business model is widely regarded as detrimental to the environment. Examples include the fashion, oil, and gas industries. In the case of fashion, low cost, high-churn fashion brands draw criticism for disproportionately promoting “sustainable fashion” lines, when operating within an environmentally harmful fast-fashion model. Similarly with oil and gas, companies face backlash when they advertise their renewable energy investments, despite a significant portion—often well over 95%—of their investment and revenue comes from expanding fossil fuel usage. This set of BP advertisements was highly criticized for representing 4% of BP’s energy investments.
Source: Treehugger
Implied Green-ness
This occurs when a brand heavily relies on the color “green” and nature-themed imagery to project a holistic, environmentally friendly image. While the use of green is not inherently problematic, it can potentially exaggerate the perception of environmental commitment that surpasses the brand’s actual practices. Consequently, it becomes crucial to evaluate the impact that imagery and color palette have on the audience to assess whether the overall impression accurately reflects the brand’s environmental initiatives.
Shifting Blame
Messaging that encourages consumer behavior change risks being perceived as trying to leverage an environmentally friendly image without substantial action. Shell, for example, faced criticism for encouraging consumers to reduce their own emissions. A tweet asking, “What are you doing to reduce your own environmental footprint?” resulted in severe backlash and mockery on social media, highlighting Shell’s significant contribution to climate change.
Focusing on consumer behavior in messaging is warranted when a brand creates a new product or service that requires a change in consumer behavior to achieve environmental improvement. An example is Tide Coldwater, a series of products that encourage consumers to wash their clothes in cold water versus hot water. Tide reformulated these products to work effectively in cold water, but the environmental benefit can only be realized if consumers reduce their washing temperature.
How to Avoid Greenwashing and What To Do Instead
To reduce the likelihood of misleading your audience you need to be conscious of the above common practices. A foundational guide to help you is the FTC’s Green Guides, which outline principles for making environmental claims—we’ll dive into these guidelines later on in this series. To avoid greenwashing, you must focus on how your messaging impacts the audience impression with consideration to context, industry familiarity, and the communication itself. There are no set rules for what to do, but the following principles will provide you with a framework to move forward in confidence.
Understand Your footprint
Larger corporations often have a comprehensive understanding of their environmental footprint thanks to teams of people who evaluate supply chain, materials, and manufacturing impacts. For smaller and medium-sized companies, this can be more challenging. Regardless of a company's size, it is crucial to develop an understanding of the material environmental impacts associated with the business. This entails identifying the most significant environmental impacts concerning energy/carbon, water, and waste across the entire lifecycle—from sourcing to consumer use. Gaining insight into the overall footprint provides valuable context for prioritizing environmental improvements and assessing their significance.
We’ll dive deeper into this topic in next month’s article on Lifecycle Thinking!
Validate with Data
Ensure you have validated data and, when possible, third-party certifications to support your messaging. Consumers and stakeholders often do not believe when a company makes its own environmental claims. Support from third parties can significantly increase credibility. Before leveraging claims about your supply chain, using phrases such as “sustainably sourced” or “made with recyclable materials,” gather data and third -party certifications from your suppliers. Company-developed seals and icons are coming under increasing scrutiny and will likely not be permitted in the next round of FTC claims guidance.
Communicate Proportionally
The focus on environmental benefits should be proportional to the magnitude of improvement. Specify what aspect of the product is improved and by how much, without conveying through visuals and broad claims that the entire product is “sustainable.” I love this example of Coca Cola Life, which initially launched with an all-green label and faced backlash of being perceived as a “natural” product when the primary sweetener was sugar. An updated version of the packaging calls out the specific sweeteners, and green covers only a fraction of the package versus the entire label.
Launch Updated
Practice transparency
Be honest and open about your company’s journey, progress, and areas of improvement. Remember: Every company has a negative environmental footprint, and some are working harder than others to reduce that footprint. Business leaders who embrace the challenges they face and communicate transparently about their progress and their shortcomings build more trust among their customer base.
Look at the example below from Patagonia’s website: As of 2021, only 33% of Patagonia’s factories are paying a living wage. My first reaction was not, “Wow, Patagonia is horrible for not paying a living wage to most workers.” Instead, I thought, “If they are willing to admit this, I wonder how much worse it is for other brands who are less transparent?” Counterintuitively, my perception is improved by an admission of imperfection. Additionally, the low statistics in one domain are then balanced by achieving closer to 100% in other focus areas.
Source: Patagonia
Educate your Communicators
Sustainability is a broad and complex topic. Communicators need to become educated about the technical details and the legal requirements, so training is essential. I recently worked with a global media to educate its sales team on what greenwashing is and shared principles on transparent, accurate environmental claims. Read the case study here.
Evaluate Your Perception
Because greenwashing is an allegation of misleading your audience, it’s important to understand whether communications are indeed misleading. The simple way to do this is to ask your audience, whether a consumer, client, investor, or non-profit. If their perception does not line up with your actual footprint, then the message is misleading. Certainly, there may be subjective differences in opinion, but knowing the perception in advance helps you evaluate risk and determine your course of action. Some companies, such as Unilever and Vodaphone have established panels of internal and external sustainability experts to review environmental marketing claims.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, one unfortunate outcome of increasing greenwashing accusations is that companies that are making meaningful progress in sustainability are, at times, afraid to communicate on the topic for fear of getting called out as hypocritical or deceptive. However, customers want to know what brands are doing to improve environmental footprints, and brands that are communicating environmental attributes are outperforming conventional products, as we explored in the first article in this series.
Communication is the only way to share progress. When done with intention, transparency, and an understanding of perception, environmental communications can increase trust, revenue, and accelerate innovation that addresses the world’s most challenging environmental issues.
Stay tuned for the next article on in this series: “Embrace Lifecycle Thinking”!
Beyond the Buzzwords: Why Accurate Environmental Claims Matter
I was recently gifted a reusable, insulated travel mug. The box and informational leaflet included numerous claims of “sustainable,” and “eco-friendly.” Excited and curious, I wondered what made it more sustainable. Were the materials sourced differently than traditional travel mugs?
This article is the first in a series on accurate environmental claims. All articles in this series include:
Part 1: Beyond the Buzzwords: Why Accurate Environmental Claims Matter
Part 3: Lifecycle Thinking: The Best Tool to Help Brands Master Sustainability
Part 4: Navigating the Green Guides: Valuable Principles for Marketing Claims
Part 1: Why Accurate Environmental Claims Matter
I was recently gifted a reusable, insulated travel mug. The box and informational leaflet included numerous claims of “sustainable,” and “eco-friendly.” Excited and curious, I wondered what made it more sustainable. Were the materials sourced differently than traditional travel mugs? Was reusable energy used to manufacture it? Could it be recycled? Was it made with fewer harmful chemicals?
I eventually found an asterisk in small print: “Compared to disposable coffee cups.” Disappointment sunk in. The mission was worthy—to help reduce waste—but without clearly specifying how it was more sustainable, I initially made my own assumptions, namely that its environmental benefits were compared to other reusable mugs, not disposable coffee cups.
Many brands make environmental claims, but they frequently lack specificity, clear comparisons, or validated data. The result is that consumers have become increasingly distrustful of companies that claim to be sustainable. In this article, the first in a four-part series on environmental claims, I explain the importance of accuracy, why business leaders and communicators need to become more educated on the topic of sustainability, and where to begin.
Environmental Claims are Advertising Claims
It’s easy to forget that environmental claims are merely a subset of advertising claims, which are regulated and required to be truthful. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is the legislative body in the U.S. responsible for overseeing marketing and advertising, states:
“Claims must be truthful, cannot be deceptive or unfair, and must be evidence-based.”
Just as we can’t make a false or deceptive claim about product performance, we can’t make one about environmental attributes.
One reason we see so many misleading environmental claims is that it is a complex and technical topic. Those responsible for crafting content (agencies, marketers, business leaders) are rarely well-educated on the topic of sustainability. While most businesses have product experts such as engineers, designers, or scientists to research and validate product performance, companies often lack professionals with sustainability expertise. Even if experts do exist, their knowledge is infrequently translated to those making external claims. The culprit is a lack of knowledge among communicators — not an intentional effort to deceive. But it’s a knowledge gap that’s critical we close.
Pitfalls and Consequences of Green Claims
One consequence of inaccurate environmental claims is that companies are accused of greenwashing—misleading an audience by creating the perception of a better environmental profile than reality.
Examples include advertising an environmental attribute that is vague or unsubstantiated or promoting a part of the business that has environmental improvements when the majority of the business has a huge negative footprint.
Greenwashing is often perceived as intentional, even when it’s not. Consequences range from reputational damage to lawsuits, which can lead to fines and having to remove deceptive advertising. In the second article in this series, we’ll more deeply explore the topic of greenwashing and share examples.
Why Brands Are Jumping On Board
Consumers are becoming more conscious of their role in improving the environment and desire products that have less packaging, are sourced sustainably, and use renewable energy. According to studies by McKinsey and Nielsen IQ, 78% of respondents said they placed importance on a sustainable lifestyle and more than 60% of U.S. consumers said they were willing to spend more money on a product packaged sustainably. When it comes to actual spending, products that made Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-related claims showed stronger cumulative growth from 2018-2022 than those without (28 percent vs. 20 percent cumulative growth, respectively). The chart below shows the difference in compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over this 5-year time period.
Source: McKinsey& Company
Additionally, according to the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business’s 2022 Sustainable Market Share Index, “products marketed as sustainable grew ~2x faster than products not marketed as sustainable.” As such, more brands are including environmental attributes in brand communication to capture reputational benefit, address customer desires, and increase sales.
Consumers Increasingly Distrust Environmental Claims
However, with the proliferation of “green” brands and sustainable claims, distrust is growing. According to GreenPrint’s 2022 Business of Sustainability Index, “only 38% believe companies when they make claims on environmental friendliness,” compared to 47 percent in 2021. Interestingly, corporate statements by CEOs and Sustainability Reports are considered particularly untrustworthy at 2% and 14%, respectively.
What’s more, executives agree there’s reason for distrust. Notably, in a global survey of executives by The Harris Poll for Google Cloud, 58% of business leaders said their organizations have “overstated their sustainability efforts.” Clearly, this is an issue we need to address. But how?
To build consumer trust, we need to ensure we are accurate and transparent in the ways in which our products and services improve or reduce environmental harm.
Moreover, to actually improve the environment and reduce our negative impact, we need to ensure that we are making meaningful improvements rather than simply capitalizing on perceived impact.
Where to Begin: No Product is “More Sustainable”
As a business leader and consumer, you may be surprised to learn that brands can’t claim a product is more sustainable. Sustainability attributes are specific, complex, and relative. Think of it this way: More sustainable compared to what?
Consider the claim that a product is “better.” We all know to ask: Better how? Is it cheaper? Faster? More Durable? Easier to use? Safer? Better is so broad and vague—and at this point, overused—that it’s essentially unhelpful because it doesn’t give customers the information they need to make an informed purchase decision.
Similarly, “more sustainable” is broad and vague. Is it less energy? Less waste? Less water? Fewer materials? And compared to what? Most brands rely on the customer perception that sustainability is a linear spectrum that ranges from “bad for the environment” to “good for the environment,” where the latter equals “sustainable.” The reality is that sustainability is a complex matrix of attributes that constantly changes based on the frame of reference. A foundational concept to help understand the environmental impact of a product is life cycle thinking. In the third article in this series, I’ll explain this concept and how it can help you understand the nuances of communicating sustainability clearly.
Because there is no simple answer on what is “more sustainable” and consumers don’t realize this, the FTC prohibits companies from making general environmental claims like “sustainable” or “better for the environment” without clearly specifying a particular attribute supported by science-based evidence.” The FTC states: “It is deceptive to misrepresent, directly or by implication, that a product, package, or service offers a general environmental benefit. In the fourth article in this series, we’ll dive into the “Green Guides,” the FTC’s guidance on environmental claims.
Future Articles in this Series will focus on:
Part 2: Unmasking Greenwashing: Explore the concept, learn from real examples, and discover strategies to steer clear of deceptive environmental claims
Part 3: Embracing Life-Cycle Thinking: Explore how to evaluate a product’s environmental impacts across its entire life cycle, empowering you to make informed and transparent sustainability claims
Part 4: Navigating FTC's Green Guides: Uncover the essentials of the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines, ensuring your business crafts truthful and transparent environmental claims while sidestepping potential pitfalls.
Stay Tuned for Next Month’s Article on Unmasking Greenwashing!
Creating Conscious Messages Part 4: Taking Accountability Beyond Words
"I'm sorry. It was my fault."
I have come to learn these are among the six most powerful words I can speak as a parent or spouse. Unexpected, disarming, humble, effective, and yet, even with frequent practice, difficult to say.
This is the final article in a 4-part series on how to craft conscious marketing messages without manipulation. Each piece shows you successful ways to communicate that respect customers, build trust, and create long-term value that grows your business. Additional articles in the series include:
PART 4: Take Accountability Beyond Words
"I'm sorry. It was my fault."
I have come to learn these are among the six most powerful words I can speak as a parent or spouse. Unexpected, disarming, humble, effective, and yet, even with frequent practice, difficult to say.
Taking accountability starts with acknowledging one’s contribution to the circumstances, but it doesn’t end there. In the business world, this idea has become synonymous with apologizing. Apologies are necessary—and there are still far too many circumstances where companies delay apologizing or don’t at all—but an apology itself is often insufficient. True conscious marketing requires taking action to prevent the situation from happening again and clearly communicating those actions with integrity.
We have become accustomed to grand corporate announcements, delivered by the CEO, but taking accountability need not always be so public. Businesses frequently make mistakes in daily operations creating numerous opportunities to acknowledge and rectify the situation. Whether poor customer service, lower than expected product performance, or instances of environmental pollution, each circumstance of unmet expectations offers an opportunity to demonstrate leadership through clear messaging and purposeful action.
There are three components to taking accountability:
1) Understand and acknowledge the issue
2) Take the necessary steps to make amends
3) Put in place systems to avoid reoccurrence
Without these, businesses risk losing customer trust and loyalty. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Accountability Gone Wrong
Here are some examples of companies that initially, or have never, taken accountability. In all three, you will observe that the initial response 1) Did not understand or acknowledge the issue, 2) Did not remedy the situation, or 3) Did not put in place the necessary steps to prevent reoccurrence.
1) Ticketmaster Blames Swift’s Popularity for Ticketing Fiasco
When Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert tickets went on sale in late ’22, fans waited hours with millions unable to purchase tickets. Initially, Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation issued a statement blaming unprecedented demand, emphasizing those fans who did receive tickets. Live Nation Chairman Greg Maffei said to CNBC, “Reality is it’s a function of the massive demand that Taylor Swift has. And despite all the challenges and the breakdowns, we did sell over 2 million tickets that day. We could have filled 900 stadiums.” After fans and Swift, herself found the response unacceptable, with lawsuits and anti-trust issues looming, Ticketmaster took down its initial statement and issued a formal apology.
While demand for Swift’s concert was unprecedented, Ticketmaster could have avoided further backlash by immediately apologizing and stating how it planned to improve future service. Denial, shifting blame to Swift’s popularity, and gaslighting fan’s complaints inflamed discontent.
2) Meta Denies Responsibility for teenage Mental Health Deterioration
In 2021, Meta (formerly Facebook) whistleblower Frances Hagen leaked hundreds of internal documents and appeared on “60 Minutes” discussing Meta’s knowledge that Instagram exacerbated eating disorders and mental health issues among teenage girls. Here is Meta’s response to the leaked documents:
”It is not accurate that leaked internal research demonstrates Instagram is ’toxic’ for teen girls. The research actually demonstrated that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced. This research, like external research on these issues, found teens report having both positive and negative experiences with social media.”
Dismissing the severity of the issue, Meta tried to portray a more balanced picture. If the consequences were less dire—such as customers not liking a particular flavor—this response might be reasonable. However, with accusations of suicide and severe illness caused by eating disorders, Meta’s response lacked an understanding of the magnitude of harm, and its denial rejected accountability, implying that it has no role in mitigating its platform’s negative impacts.
3) Wayfair Continues Doing Business with Border Detention Center Contractor
In 2019, Wayfair sold $200,000 worth of beds to a contractor who was using them to furnish detention centers for migrant children at the US/Mexico border. After employees communicated their disagreement, Wayfair responded via an employee email that it would continue doing business with the contractor:
“As a retailer, it is standard practice to fulfill orders for all customers and we believe it is our business to sell to any customer who is acting within the laws of the countries within which we operate.”
In response to the statement, employees staged a walkout of Wayfair’s Boston headquarters. While the company correctly stated its right to make this business decision, as it was not breaking any laws, leadership did not take the concerns of its employees seriously. Wayfair’s response lacked empathy and an understanding of customer and employee expectations of doing business ethically. Employees staged the walkout only after the company’s response, indicating that Wayfair had an opportunity to repair trust with employees—and potentially avoid national coverage and product boycotts—but failed.
Why We Don’t Take Accountability
We often forget that companies are made up of people. When people are accused of something, it’s our natural instinct to defend ourselves and point blame. I need only ask my children who broke the toy to observe this instinct. Within an organization, the decision of when and how to respond—especially in crisis—is nearly always a person or group of people reacting emotionally.
Accountability is a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s actions and contributions. It does not mean that one is wholly to blame, but it acknowledges one’s role in bringing about the result.
While there are many recent examples of companies taking accountability, many still do not. So often, we hear backpedaling, defensive language, ambiguous statements, blame of systems, processes, or external circumstances, or simply a lack of response.
Following are some common reasons brands don’t take accountability. The company:
doesn’t agree with the criticism or doesn’t think it was in the wrong.
believes circumstances were out of its control, and therefore isn’t accountable.
thinks apologizing looks weak and reduces customer confidence.
believes an apology will hurt the company’s reputation.
assumes taking accountability will lower the stock price or cause a loss of investor confidence.
doesn’t want the expense of the time and resources required to make amends.
fears lawsuits or increased regulation associated with any admission of accountability.
doesn’t know how to apologize or what taking accountability looks like.
has already apologized and believes it doesn’t need to do anything else.
The Business Case for Accountability
Initial denials are often met with an even more forceful response from those harmed or upset. Intuitively we know that taking responsibility is the right thing to do, but it can be extremely difficult in the moment, particularly when there is incomplete information. Companies often end up being forced or pressured to apologize. Acknowledging responsibility at the outset causes less reputational damage and can reduce customer discontent. One study by CRISP shows that 90% of customers are likely to shop with a brand again if it responds well to a crisis.
Another study from the University of Missouri found that companies can actually benefit when publicly accepting blame for poor financial performance. Companies that blamed their performance on other factors, such as the economy, competitors or the government, continued to see low stock prices for a year following their announcement. On the other hand, when companies took responsibility for their performance and communicated a plan to address the issue, their announcement stemmed stock price declines.
Customers appreciate honesty, especially when the message may be difficult for leadership to share, says study author Stephen Ferris, professor and senior associate dean at the University of Missouri Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business. “Investors will accept a forthright recognition of an honest mistake, expecting that corrective actions are likely to follow. When firms explain a negative event as due to an external cause, company leaders can appear powerless or dishonest to shareholders.”
Accountability Done Right
Let's look at a few examples of companies illustrating the three key elements of taking accountability well.
1) NETFLIX: Acknowledge the Issue
In 2011, Netflix made the decision to increase prices and separate its DVD business from its streaming business. After a few botched explanations, CEO Reed Hastings wrote a blog post (see its opening below). Beginning with “I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation,” he owns the mistake. He then demonstrates an understanding of customers’ concerns: “We lacked respect and humility.” The post was hailed as an example of empathy and humility.
2) ZOCDOC: Take the Necessary Steps to Make Amends
ZocDoc makes appointments on behalf of patients by logging into medical scheduling systems. Occasionally the systems don’t sync, resulting in a patient showing up for an appointment that ZocDoc failed to book. The begin by outlining the standard of service their customer can expect. Taking responsibility for the error, ZocDoc offers an Amazon gift card and, in the process, attempts to learn more about what happened so they can improve.
Source: Pipedrive
3) AIRBNB: Put in Place Systems to Avoid Reoccurrence
In 2014, Airbnb faced increasing complaints of discrimination among guests and hosts; an apology would not be enough. The company needed to take action to change its policies and operations to reduce discrimination. CEO Brian Chesky issued a formal apology stating Airbnb’s core beliefs and its failure to live up to them.
“Discrimination is the opposite of belonging, and its existence on our platform jeopardizes this core mission,” Chesky wrote. “Bias and discrimination have no place on Airbnb, and we have zero tolerance for them. Unfortunately, we have been slow to address these problems, and for this I am sorry. I take responsibility for any pain or frustration this has caused members of our community. We will not only make this right; we will work to set an example that other companies can follow.”
Beyond the apology, Airbnb took action by asking Laura Murphy, former ACLU head, to evaluate all of its policies and operations, and implemented the following changes based on her findings:
Updating and strengthening its anti-discrimination policy
Creating a policy to quickly rebook guests who experience discrimination
Increasing “instant book,” which reduces instances of discriminatory bookings
Voluntary anti-bias training for the Airbnb community
While these efforts likely did not end instances of discrimination, they illustrate the importance of taking action beyond communications—within policies, operations, and employee and customer training.
Tips For Taking Accountability
Whenever a crisis arises, it presents an opportunity to rebuild trust. Even if circumstances were out of your control, there is always something your business can do to empathize with customers and clearly communicate your actions. Here are a few guiding principles:
1) Understand and humbly acknowledge the issue
Respond quickly: Even without all the information, a fast response is critical. Sometimes this requires communicating the issue before many customers or stakeholders are aware, but it’s always better for your audience to hear your message from you.
Understand the issue: Troubleshoot to find the root cause. If you don’t understand why critics are upset, talk to them. If a system broke down, uncover the source.
Communicate with empathy: Be heartfelt and genuine. Demonstrate concern for customer, employee and stakeholder needs and criticisms. Avoid defensiveness.
Own it: Use the active voice and don’t blame external factors or systems. This doesn’t require taking full blame, but it does mean clarifying your role in the matter.
2) Take the necessary steps to make amends
Outline a standard: Explain your mission and values and declare what you stand for, what you aspire to, and what your audience should expect, even if the status quo is imperfect.
Provide restitution: Identify who has been impacted and whether anything beyond an apology is needed to repair damage and rebuild trust. Some examples are a discount, product replacement, a non-profit donation, or the reversal of a business decision.
3) Put in place systems to avoid reoccurrence
Take action: Consider what improvements are needed to reduce or prevent the situation from happening again. This may require a third-party review, as in the Airbnb example, or it may require overhauling systems, processes, products, or policies.
As guardians of our brands, we need to ensure that taking accountability is delivered consciously. This requires understanding the issue and communicating it back to the customer in an empathetic way. Brands must also honestly give assurance that, to the best of its ability, it won’t happen again by actually taking restorative action. Our words must line up with our actions.
Just like we have frequent opportunities to apologize to those in our life, so too do companies. Taking accountability is a sign of strength and courage. When brands build that muscle, we trust them more, knowing they will be humble enough to admit fault and make a change for the better.
Stay Tuned for Next Month’s Article!
Creating Conscious Messages Part 3: Shift from Aspirational to Achievable Marketing
Effective marketing that influences viewers can, on a larger scale, influence culture. Therefore, the way we communicate—the words we use, the images we select, the values we implicitly or explicitly endorse—all have more power than we realize to shape cultural norms.
This is the third article in a 4-part series on how to craft conscious marketing messages without manipulation. Each piece shows you successful ways to communicate that respect customers, build trust, and create long-term value that grows your business. Prior articles in the series include:
Part 1: Replace Fear with Value
PART 3: Shift from Aspirational to Achievable Marketing
Effective marketing that influences viewers can, on a larger scale, influence culture. Therefore, the way we communicate—the words we use, the images we select, the values we implicitly or explicitly endorse—all have more power than we realize to shape cultural norms. That influence can be positive or negative, giving us the opportunity—and responsibility—to consider how our messaging negatively impacts the individual and our culture.
Most marketing insights research focuses on identifying customers' needs and wants. In this article series, I have argued that our messages should address a meaningful customer need that is specific and solvable. I have intentionally avoided the language of “wants” because there are two types: those which can be satisfied and those which cannot. I find it less critical to distinguish between whether a specific, solvable solution is needed versus wanted (I might not need a fancy dinner, but I want to experience a unique, memorable occasion) and more critical to distinguish between what a brand can deliver on vs. what it can’t.
Marketing messages that target desires that can never be fully satisfied are commonly referred to as “Aspirational Marketing.” The aim is to tap into customers’ deep desires and longing, rather than their current realities, to create an emotional connection with the brand. However, marketing that appeals to image, power, beauty, and wealth takes advantage of the most vulnerable and insatiable aspects of human desire, creating a never-ending hamster wheel of longing for a reality that’s never achievable.
Because this strategy has become so pervasive, it’s worth examining its impacts. Let’s dive deeper.
The Problem with Aspirational Marketing
Most aspirational marketing emphasizes the importance of wealth, possessions, physical beauty, and external perception. Research shows that this type of marketing:
Increases feelings of negative body image and contributes to eating disorders
Encourages materialism and materialistic values, which has been shown to produce more negative emotions, lower self-esteem, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and even poorer physical health
Prioritizes external appearances over internal traits, which can reduce happiness, and increase anxiety and depression (Kasser, Tim. The High Price of Materialism. MIT Press, 2002)
Even if a person does not suffer from these specific emotions or compulsions, we are all exposed to a daily onslaught of messages that create an image- and consumption-focused culture. We have come to accept, mostly without question, that what we buy determines who we are. That it is normal to endlessly desire more: more power, more money, more youth, more admiration from others.
All this communication encourages us to buy more to satisfy our insatiable desires. By appealing to and reinforcing those desires, aspirational marketing creates unrealistic standards that we aspire to. When we cannot achieve these standards, we experience lower self-esteem and discontent with our current situation. As a result, we further overconsume, which creates clutter in our lives and disaster for our planet.
How Did We Get Here?
Our current “more” culture has not always been. During the US Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s and early 1900s, advertising was not yet an industry, and most product messages were entirely focused on functional needs and product benefits. In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, now known as the father of PR and notably the nephew of Sigmund Freud, introduced a new method of portraying products as a means to fulfill consumers’ subconscious desires. With A-list clients like P&G and General Electric, Bernays popularized this approach and it began to spread.
Around the same time after WWI, corporations and banks were concerned that the economy would stop growing unless people bought more goods. Lehman Brothers executive Paul Mazur wrote, “The community that can be trained to desire change, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed, yields a market to be measured more by desires than by needs. And man’s desires can be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.” (Mazur, Paul. American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences. 1928)
The confluence of these ideas gave rise to what has become our modern consumerist culture. Harnessing human desires that can never be fully realized—being admired, desired, wealthy, or powerful—creates seemingly endless opportunities to create demand for one’s products and services.
Here are a few examples of this approach—you will recognize that these themes remain pervasive today:
Image Source: © GM; © Saadia Group; © Emirates; © BMW
As consumers, our choices and decisions naturally reinforce or shift how we perceive ourselves. A brand that sells sporting goods inherently instills in its buyers a sense of being active and sporty. But there is a difference between portraying who your customer is, and showing them who they want to be, particularly when who they want to be is out of reach.
Why Aspirational Marketing Might Be Less Effective Than We Think
While we may concede that there are repercussions for an image and materialistic-focused culture, the reality is that most brands pursue this approach because they think it is effective. One branding company describes the intent this way: “Establishing your brand and product by marketing a lifestyle is something that customers are much more responsive too [sic]. Products that sell a lifestyle create an aspirational feeling, leading customers to think [my emphasis added] that this item will help them achieve a better quality of living, or grasp the kind of lifestyle that they’re striving for.”
But recent research shows that aspirational marketing might not be as effective as once thought. “This form of advertising builds on the principle of cognitive consistency theory, which claims that a fit between one’s self-concept and an identity-enhancing brand or product category leads to greater attraction,” writes Kenneth Dahl in his article, “Why Aspirational Marketing Fails 9 times out of 10.”
Research published in Journal of Consumer Psychology shows that if there is too significant a gap in an ad between a customer’s present-day reality and the aspirational life portrayed, it can result in negative emotions due to a loss of self-esteem, and these feelings can become associated with the advertised brand. Researchers concluded that the use of idealized “actors or spokespeople in the message, in order to convey the aspirational nature of the product, has damaging effects on the target market response.”
Additionally, the slowing growth of the luxury market in the US and Europe (combined with macroeconomic factors) may point to the idea that selling aspiration alone is insufficient. Pamela Danziger writes in Forbes, quoting a luxury expert, “We need to reinterpret luxury from labels and conspicuous consumption to a quest for goods and services that are personal, authentic, and unique. Many successful companies are returning to this definition.” Danziger adds, “The opportunity is to return to the key pillars of luxury – quality, craftsmanship, design, attention to detail, uniqueness, and authenticity.”
The Solution: Achievable Marketing
So what is the alternative? Simply stated, it’s portraying what’s possible. It’s communicating how your product or service will realistically impact customers’ lives. It’s showing what’s achievable.
Let’s explore a couple of examples of brands that have moved from aspirational to achievable marketing.
Retouching advertising, a common industry practice particularly for beauty products, can be both misleading and, in some cases, culturally harmful. With help from a professional photographer and lighting, not only is a beautiful, thin model typically featured—which is sufficiently out of reach for most of us—but standard practice is to edit photos to remove blemishes, wrinkles of fat, stray hairs, and discoloration—portraying the ultimate perfection.
The consequences of decades of this kind of marketing are eating disorders and women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies. In 2004, Dove researched the self-perceptions of beauty among women and girls and found that only 2% of women considered themselves beautiful.
While many brands may find it difficult to move away from the “ideal,” fearing loss of sales, Dove serves as a strong example that questioning the norm can build the business. On the heels of its 2004 study, Dove launched the Campaign for Real Beauty, featuring non-models of various sizes and shapes, showing their imperfections. In the first 10 years of the campaign, the brand grew revenue from $2.5 billion to $4 billion, representing a ~12% compound annual growth rate.
Image Source: © Dove
In 2018, CVS launched a program to inform shoppers whether the beauty imagery in stores had been digitally altered. According to Elena Folks, executive vice president of CVS Health and president of CVS Pharmacy, “80 percent of women feel worse about themselves after looking at beauty ads, and 42 percent of girls in grades one through three want to be thinner.” CVS’s initiative was designed to be transparent about the use of retouching and to avoid it as much as possible. Because most images in CVS stores are produced not by CVS but by beauty companies, the influence of CVS’s policy extended beyond its own walls and required all beauty brands to comply with retouching disclosures.
Image Source: © CVS
Many other brands such as Target, Aerie, and Modcloth have made the leap to the “no retouching,” featuring models of all shapes and sizes. They understand that using average-sized models may result in more sales than if they used size 0 models, as represented in this University of Kent study.
How to Restructure your Message
Brands that strive for authenticity and offering genuine value should consider whether they are taking advantage of aspirations that can never be satisfied, and whether they may actually be reinforcing and strengthening insecurities.
If you found yourself answering “yes” to the questions on the left side of the chart, and answering “no” to questions on the right, here are some approaches to restructure your communication:
1) Avoid appealing to sources of insecurity: Check if your emotional benefit is focused on image, wealth, status, admiration, power, or idealized beauty. These innate desires can be easily manipulated and a brand can never completely deliver on them.
2) Portray an achievable scenario: Research shows that advertising is more effective when the customer can relate to it, so try to represent your customer as you craft your communication. Consider that aspirational marketing is not always identified by the central message but is often the result of how we wrap our message with casting, locations, props, and retouching. Here are a few suggestions:
Cast everyday people
Show everyday situations/homes
Represent your customers as they are today or a realistic portrayal of what they could achieve vs. something they could never be
3) Acknowledge customer identity through action vs. association: Brands communicate their own identity, beliefs, and values, naturally attracting customers with a like focus. However, we want to avoid building our brand on an identity that we simply give our customers by association, as it can be both ingenuine and short-lived. We can do this by reinforcing positive identity through the experience of using your product or service, rather than an identity acquired simply by buying or owning anything with your brand’s name on it.
4) Affirm your customers: Watch out for scenarios that invite comparisons and contribute to feelings of inadequacy. If the gap between your target customer and the ideal you’ve created is insurmountable, the response may be feelings of unworthiness, resulting in negative brand associations. Find ways to reinforce a positive self-image through an encouraging tone of voice and relatable insights.
5) Focus on craftsmanship and quality over image: Some products and services have premium prices because they are of higher quality, manufactured with fine craftsmanship and design, or offer more comprehensive service. These attributes can stand alone and don’t need to be associated with exclusivity or image; they can simply be appreciated on their own merit. Consider focusing on how your customer enjoys the intrinsic benefits of the product or service rather than a perceived external benefit resulting from social perception.
What’s so hard about avoiding aspirational marketing is that deep down, our customers always want more. We all want more; people can easily be prompted to feel discontent. If our job is to generate sales, and therefore “create demand,” all we need is to stimulate the desire for status, beauty, or wealth. But if we remember that our brand messages can either enhance or reject those innate feelings of discontent we all experience, then we have the power to fight the cultural narrative of consumption as the path to contentment. The irony is that it just might be a better way to grow the business too.
Stay Tuned for Next Month’s Article!
Creating Conscious Messages Part 2: Balance Emotional and Functional Messages
In the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer rails on advertising, calling it “a multibillion-dollar industry that is intentionally designed to lie to you – to get you to believe that if you will only buy this or that product then you will be happy. Or at least happier.”
This is the second article in a 4-part series on how to craft conscious marketing messages. Each article explores a specific communication practice to avoid in order to better respect customers, create value, and grow your business. Additional articles in this series include:
PART 2: Balance Emotional and Functional Messaging
In the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer rails on advertising, calling it “a multibillion-dollar industry that is intentionally designed to lie to you – to get you to believe that if you will only buy this or that product then you will be happy. Or at least happier.”
As a marketer, I am disappointed that some individuals perceive all ads as communicating lies, but there’s a thread of truth at the core of this idea. Comer’s criticism is not that advertising explicitly lies about what products and services do, rather he critiques the promises brands make about how using their products and services will make you feel.
While effective communication should make you feel something – otherwise it risks being ignored and ineffective – we need to be careful that we are not setting up promises that a company cannot deliver.
Consider a few examples:
“Be proud of how you ship”
“Travel Confidently”
“Feel Sexy Again!”
With no context, each of these promises an emotional benefit without a functional solution, leading one to wonder: How? In the actual executions, these brands had varying degrees of specificity as to how they help you achieve the emotional benefit, but in all three, the functional solution was significantly deprioritized.
These examples highlight a central reason why so many people distrust the messages that brands communicate: Companies promise or exaggerate an emotional benefit without anchoring it in the product or service that creates the feeling. In essence, they divorce the emotion from the functional solution.
Why Balancing Emotion and Function Matters
Functional benefits are time-bound, physical, concrete, and/or task-oriented solutions to a problem, need, or desire customers experience. Emotional benefits are the feelings customers experience during or after they have used your product or service. Both messages have value, but when emotional messaging drastically overshadows functional messaging, we risk overpromising, misleading, disappointing, confusing or creating distrust with our customers.
Customers have problems or needs that require solving, and the only solutions companies can offer, consistently and reliably, are functional. Tony Ulwick, a pioneer of the innovation tool “jobs theory,” describes customer needs as “jobs to be done.” “Jobs are functional with emotional and social components,” he explains. Emotional and social benefits only result from solving a customer’s primary functional need.
All humans experience deep emotional needs such as happiness, security, confidence, to be loved, and to feel worthy. However, a brand cannot consistently and reliably solve an emotional need outside of the specific functional solution it offers. While a growing number of “lifestyle brands” promise a social and emotional identity to customers (a topic for a future article!), selling emotion without a solution is short-lived and, in many cases, an illusion.
To create and accurately communicate value, we can only promise what we can actually deliver: functional solutions and the emotional benefits tied to those solutions. When we do this transparently and humbly, we create more effective communication and build trust.
Why Do We Prioritize Emotional Benefits over Functional Benefits?
Standard message development processes often lead us to overpromise and exaggerate, even if that’s not our intent. We ask: “How does our product make our customers feel?” Perhaps the response is: “Happy. Joyful. Content. Safe. Confident.” When that insight is turned into a message, we appeal to the overarching emotional need, sometimes forgetting or significantly minimizing the way in which the product actually delivers those emotions.
One of the reasons we tend to see emotion play such a large role in messaging is that many marketers and advertisers believe that emotional benefits are more effective than functional ones. This thinking argues that functional messages engage the rational brain, whereas emotional messages engage the subconscious brain where most of our decision-making takes place.
Illustrating this point, a 2022 Gallup study found that “70% of decisions are based on emotional factors and only 30% are based on rational factors.” The Gallup article cites a study on luxury hotel brand, concluding that emotional attributes, such as feeling welcomed, were more important than physical attributes, such as furnishings, to influence customer engagement. This study ignores the fact that there are physical elements - a receptionist’s smile, the excellent service of a server or concierge, a clean lobby – that create the feeling of being welcomed. A customer must understand what a product or service’s functional benefit is in order to understand and believe the emotional benefit that comes from the solution.
The opinion that emotional benefits are more effective assumes that functional and emotional benefits work independently to influence behavior and can therefore be compared. But in truth, they are mutually dependent elements. For advertising to be effective, according to Ph.D. neuroscientist Elise Temple, it must first be easy for your brain to process, and then it needs to tap into existing memory structures that create context. In order to motivate action, such as filling out a contact form, purchasing a product, or engaging in content, the message must be simple, clearly communicate how it creates value, and provide context for how the brand fits into the customer’s life. Temple explains that functional messages can easily and effectively deliver on these elements of strong advertising, and are no less likely to be effective than what we consider “emotional” messages.
We often forget that functional solutions have intrinsic emotional benefits, and a brand need not always explicitly state them. For example, “Keep the weight off for good” is a functional benefit that a weight loss seeker automatically associates with confidence, discipline, and freedom. The emotional benefits are implied without being directly mentioned. Compare that to the claim, “Body Confidence Guaranteed,” where the messaging has shifted its focus away from the weight loss service it provides and (unless it provides a much more detailed explanation) begins to overstep the promise it makes to customers.
Functional messages also tend to be deprioritized because they are seen as boring and lack memorability. An article in Forbes states, “Emotions tend to trump facts when it comes to influencing buyers,” which illustrates the confusion that exists between understanding features and benefits. A feature is a specific attribute of your product, such as its specifications, dimensions, or how it’s used, and they often are factual in nature. A functional benefit is the value created for your customer by solving a problem or meeting a functional need; benefits are not necessarily factual. For example: “wireless” is a feature; “get access anywhere,” a benefit.
Without a clear explanation, features often don’t communicate how a product solves a customer’s problem and can risk being irrelevant, whereas functional benefits – when relevant to the customer and communicated well – can be extremely effective in creating purchase interest.
What Happens When We Separate the Emotional Benefit from the Functional Benefit
Let’s take a closer look at what happens when we prioritize the emotional benefit over the functional solution. Coke’s former advertising campaign, “Open Happiness,” which ran from 2008-2015, spoke to the concept of a lofty generic promise. At the core of this campaign idea was “Coke will make you happy,” which was a tall glass to fill (get it?!). The company’s reason for abandoning the campaign reflects the need for a specific and realistic benefit that the product can deliver. Marcus de Quinto, the CMO, explained, “…it failed to hammer home more simple pleasures, like enjoying an ice-cold Coke on a hot day.” He elaborated on the importance of focusing on the product and not inflating what the brand could realistically achieve. “We are a simple pleasure, a product that refreshes. Not one that's going to save the world. If by refreshing, you save the world, fine. We are going back to this truth."
One of Coke’s “Open Happiness” ads; © CocaCola Company
De Quinto cautioned, “Emotional marketing goes to the extreme; talking about message without product, and values without benefits. Over the last few years, we have been talking about happiness, and sometimes we forget we are a drink that tastes very good.”
While de Quinto did not cite business results, the industry attributed the campaign change to category declines and sluggish brand growth. “Open Happiness,” a campaign focused nearly exclusively on promising happiness - in a category under fire for obesity and tooth decay - did not deliver the sales growth the company desired.
How to Tie the Emotional Benefit to the Functional Solution
Let’s contrast the Coke example with a Pillsbury commercial I saw a few years ago where the brand realistically tied emotion to the solution. In the ad, parents and children baked crescent and cinnamon rolls together on a weekend morning. The kids anticipated the “pop” of the pressurized cardboard container when it opened, a father taught his daughter how to roll the crescent, and all peered into the oven, watching the dough rise while inhaling the aroma of fresh-baked goods.
The sights, sounds, and behaviors visualized in this ad accurately depicted my personal experience making crescent rolls with my kids. While the emotion communicated was joy and love, the sounds, smells, and feelings portrayed were all generated by the product itself in the specific context of baking as a family.
The key to accurately communicating emotional benefits is to focus on how the product itself can realistically achieve the emotional experience depicted. If your product cannot directly create that emotion, then it is ingenuine to associate your brand with that promise. If your service only delivers that emotion in a specific context, then you must convey that specificity in your message.
Once you’ve created your message, you can check the balance of emotional and functional benefits by asking yourself these questions:
Does my product or service directly and frequently create the emotions I convey in my message?
Am I showing or explaining how my solution creates the emotions I portray, and the specific circumstances in which that happens?
Am I exaggerating how much emotional impact my product will have on my customers life?
How to Restructure Your Message
If you find yourself prioritizing emotional benefits over functional benefits, either by deprioritizing or excluding the functional benefit entirely, the first step is to identify the functional and emotional benefits that your product or service offers. As a reminder, functional benefits are time-bound, physical, and/or task-oriented solutions to a meaningful need your customer has (which are not the same as product features!). Emotional benefits are the feelings customers experience during or after they have used your product or service.
When developing communication, ensure your message makes clear how your product or service addresses the functional need, either visually or through explicit statements. Incorporate emotional needs as they relate specifically to the functional need you solve for and in the context in which you address the emotional needs. If marketing messages or images portray only emotion, work to shine a brighter light on the functional solution.
Check to ensure the emotional promise considers the relative importance of the solution in your customers’ lives so that the emotion conveyed is not exaggerated. A lifesaving cancer drug would indeed have a far more significant emotional impact than a kitchen gadget that saves time chopping garlic. If you’re not sure, just ask your customer and they will tell you.😊
We owe it to our customers to deliver on what we promise: a solution to a functional need. And we can deliver the solution, assuming it’s a high-quality product. What we can’t promise is that they will feel a certain way by using our service. If we can reduce instances of exaggerated emotional marketing and focus our messaging on the simple ways we can improve lives, we not only make our messaging more believable, but our brands become more trustworthy. People can’t claim that we are selling them a lie if we don’t promise that our product will make them happy. Our products and services just simply need to do what we say they will do.
Check out the next article in this series on Creating Conscious Messages in November!
Creating Conscious Messages Part 1: Replace Fear with Value
This article series is about messaging: how to do it in a way that is transparent, realistic, and uplifting vs. exaggerated, manipulative, and negative.
This is the first article in a 4-part series on how to craft conscious marketing messages. Each article explores a specific communication practice to avoid in order to better respect customers, create value, and grow your business. Additional articles in this series include:
Introduction to Conscious Messaging
This article series is about messaging: how to do it in a way that is transparent, realistic, and uplifting vs. exaggerated, manipulative, and negative.
That all sounds intuitive and easy to agree with, but it’s pretty darn hard to put into practice. Case in point: writing the headline for this series. I wrote more than 20 iterations before making my final selection which embodies the ideas I’m espousing.
My goal is to change the status quo in marketing to make the discipline more conscious, but my draft headlines - “How to Avoid Manipulating Your Customer” and “Stop Using Fear to Sell” - were utilizing the very tactics that I’m about to argue we should all avoid.
This series lays out an aspiration for marketing and brand messages. An aspiration we might not reach all the time, but striving for it requires that we are conscious of the messages we create and the impact they will have on our customers and our business.
There is a common culprit behind communication that exaggerates or manipulates: putting business interests ahead of customer interests. We almost always think we are putting customer interests first, but when we closely examine how we use messages to sell our products and services, occasionally we unconsciously mislead and pressure to generate sales.
We all want to avoid these outcomes, both because it doesn’t feel right and because it doesn’t lead to long-term business growth, which is why it’s critical to expose these tactics and root them out of our messaging.
There are 4 common messaging practices that I consider unconsciously manipulative. Each article in the series will explain why we want to avoid these practices and what to do instead.
PART 1: Replace Fear with Value
I recently took my husband indoor skydiving for his birthday. The “flight” itself was thrilling, an experience I can’t wait to repeat. However, every other part of my customer experience was dominated by a single business strategy: upsell.
From the website where I bought my tickets two months in advance to the check-in process to check-out, I was bombarded with these messages: “You’ll wish you bought 4 flights instead of 2,” “Everyone prefers the high-fly,” “Don’t miss out on pre-buying a future flight because your 50% discount expires today.”
Contained within each of these messages are the seeds of fear, which elicit doubt, worry, and comparison: What if I’m not doing everything I can to make this the best experience possible? Only 5 minutes after entering the building, I was exhausted, full of distrust, and disappointed I couldn’t just enjoy the adventure I had already purchased.
These messages are everywhere. Whether by capitalizing on existing fears or creating a sense of fear that didn’t already exist, the dominant perception is that fear sells. Articles abound on topics such as “How to use fear to generate clicks,” and common messages highlight “5 Ways you are ruining….” or “Sign up for our newsletter or you won’t get access to….” The use is so pervasive, and in many cases subtle, that we might not even recognize the tactic as fear.
Using fear to sell is not new. We can see evidence of this strategy in a 1920 Listerine ad campaign pictured below titled “Don’t Fool Yourself,” featuring women who alienate their own children because of bad breath.
While using fear to sell is not a new idea, this practice has become explicit and normalized within the world of marketing, resulting in more brands intentionally using fear-based communication to incentivize sales.
Why Avoiding Fear Marketing Matters
I argue we should avoid creating needs based on fear for two critical reasons: First, using fear, even subtly, can have a negative impact on our customers. Secondly, it may not be as effective as we think.
A conscious marketer’s goal is to create value by offering a product or service that will make customers’ lives better - part of that value includes the message itself. Marketing can build trust, give hope, educate, and inspire, or it can pressure, generate skepticism, create anxiety, and spark negative emotions. Our messages present a great opportunity to put our customers well-being first.
How Fear Marketing Harms Our Customer
Fear-based communication activates a fight or flight reaction because the body senses an emotional threat. Planting seeds of doubt exploits this physiological response (“What if I miss out on X? Will I be successful without Y? Will this bad thing happen if I don’t buy Z?” ) creating or exacerbating feelings of inadequacy, negativity, comparison, and sometimes hopelessness.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) can negatively affect mental health, create sleep disturbances, and lead to overall unhappiness by reducing satisfaction with our own lives. Marketing that elicits FOMO, also known as “FOMO Marketing,” introduces new desires that make customers feel less off in their current circumstances in hopes of selling more. Whether or not the customer buys, the message leaves a residue of negative feelings.
Is that our goal?
We may think these strategies are harmless. What can one email headline do? Or one advertisement? But by employing these tactics, we give our consent, even our endorsement, to the practice of making people doubt or feel bad about themselves in hopes of persuading them to buy our products and services.
Fear-Marketing Hides Low Demand
Ethics aside, many marketers advocate this selling tactic because they think it works. While there is some data to show that fear-based strategies increase conversion rates and short-term sales, in the long run, they can contribute to lower retention and lifetime customer value and create brand distrust.
When fear is used in messaging, rarely is the goal to reduce or eliminate a customer's pre-existing concerns. Instead, fear is typically manufactured or exaggerated to induce a feeling of need. Why? Because the value of the product or service is not obvious.
A common message strategy involves helping your customers “avoid failure” in order to create urgency to buy: “If you don’t buy our service, all these bad things could happen!” Frequently, the harm or the risk associated with failure is exaggerated or infrequent and is based on an underlying assumption that there is not enough demand without fear.
If a brand depends on fear-based communication to generate interest, a bigger problem likely exists: the product/market fit may be off, customer needs are not understood, or the benefits don’t resonate. Addressing these fundamentals is a much more effective strategy to deliver long-term growth than using fear for short-term sales.
When we have a product that meets real customer needs, we don’t need to artificially create demand to sell our product or service. Rather, we can craft a value-focused message that explains how the product solves their problem.
Fear Reduces Customer Satisfaction
If customers feel pressured, buy more than they want, or the product doesn’t deliver on expectations, they often stop trusting the brand. Customers who feel disappointed share negative reviews, talk badly about the company, or stop buying altogether. For long sales cycles common in the B2B world, building trust takes months and sometimes years. Short-term fear-inducing tactics are counterproductive.
The “Joy of Missing Out” (JOMO), aimed at combatting FOMO, describes a state of mind of being present and intentional with one’s time and purchase decisions, and finding satisfaction in those choices, even when there are known tradeoffs. A study published in the Journal of Organizational Psychology looked at consumers’ satisfaction with purchases when the participants experienced FOMO vs. JOMO. Those who experienced JOMO showed significantly higher levels of product satisfaction compared to those who experienced FOMO.
This study indicates that when we use our messages to evoke feelings of JOMO - that is, being present, fulfilled, and satisfied - our customers experience higher product satisfaction and likely better brand loyalty compared to FOMO, which elicits negative feelings of anxiety, regret and fear.
Fear Drives Avoidance
Evolutionarily we are wired to avoid negative emotions. Research on brain responses to advertising shows that emotionally negative content creates a repel reaction that can prevent emotional engagement. Explicitly negative fear-based messaging often does not result in the desired behavior. For example, public service campaigns targeting anti-smoking, texting and driving, and climate change have been largely ineffective at using fear to reduce the desired behavior.
In academia, two philosophies explain how to motivate behavior. “Avoidance motivation” is a fear-based strategy and “approach motivation” is a benefit-based strategy. “Advertising that focuses on the negative can backfire because people avoid the advertising in the first place,” explains Elise Temple, Ph.D., a neuroscientist who specializes in testing the effects of advertising on the brain. “Very rarely does fear motivate people to buy a product. An approach-based motivation is often more effective, as it increases the likelihood that the viewer will engage with the main idea, and it associates your brand with positive messages.”
Showing a problem may remind a customer why your solution matters to them if they have a pre-existing need; however, even in that scenario Temple advises making problem communication extremely brief with the majority of messaging benefit-focused. Fear-based “clickbait” headlines may deliver clicks, but customers often feel misled and disappointed - emotions that won’t lead to sales.
Can You Spot Fear in Your Messaging? Ask Yourself These Questions:
⦁ Am I using fear or FOMO to induce a desire for my product or service?
⦁ Does my messaging diminish or criticize my customers’ current experience?
⦁ Do I exaggerate the fear beyond what my customer experiences?
⦁ Am I making my customers more afraid or anxious based on my communication?
⦁ Is using fear in my message grounded in actual harm or danger to my customer? (If so, this might be a legitimate use of fear in your message)
How to Avoid Creating Messages Based on Fear
If you find yourself using fear as a strategy, focus on the benefits. Regularly talk to your customers to identify needs and wants in their own words. We often overlook this step assuming we already know this information. Only after uncovering their real challenges and desires can we craft compelling messages that describe the value we create.
Once the message is defined, check for tactics that use scarcity and fear. They can sneak into execution even when the strategy is not based in fear. [As I mentioned, writing this headline required multiple revisions!]
There are three elements that you can modify to shift from fear-based messaging to value-first messaging:
1) Language & Copy: Use positive and encouraging messaging in your copy that focuses on what customers will get by engaging in your product or service and less so what they will miss out on.
2) Tone: Consider the tone of voice, music, and color palette to create an overall mood that helps convey the benefit vs. an anxiety-inducing or negative tone that inspires doubt or comparison.
3) Imagery: Show the benefit versus the problem as a more effective way to deliver the desired purchase behavior. Visualize people capable of reaching or experiencing the desired end state versus models who are so aspirational that they create an unrealistic standard for the customer.
Here are a few simple examples of how to transition from a fear-based message to a value-first message:
Not using fear pushes us to better understand our customers’ interests and forces us to better communicate the value we offer. In doing so, we avoid creating a sense of inadequacy, hopelessness, anxiety, and negativity. When we create emotions of fulfillment, intentional decision making, and being content with what one has, we can produce greater customer satisfaction. Not only is this the right thing for our customers, but it also results in messaging that customers trust which leads to long-term business growth.
Check out the next article in this series on Creating Conscious Messages in October!
Conscious Marketing: It’s Time for a Revolution
When I applied to my first job as a brand manager, I explained to my brother what the job entailed. He clarified, “So you’re going to manipulate people into buying things they don’t want?”
When I applied to my first job as a brand manager, I explained to my younger brother what the job entailed. He clarified, “So you’re telling me that you’re going to manipulate people into buying things they don’t want?”
His shrewd observation provoked me to ask my interviewer the very same question the following day (bold 22 year old that I was!) to assure myself I was not making a bad career choice. The interviewer responded, “People are smart and know what they want. They only buy things that they value and need.” His answer satisfied me for the time being, and so I began my career in brand management.
But my brother’s question has lingered in my mind throughout my career. Have I ever manipulated people into buying things? Am I giving my customers full information to make an informed decision? Do my messages and content improve their lives?
This personal journey has recently led me to explore “conscious marketing.”
What is Conscious Marketing?
There are a growing number of conscious movements discontent with the status quo, seeking a new way to operate: conscious capitalism, conscious consumerism, conscious travel, and conscious fashion are just a handful of examples.
I define this business-focused idea of “conscious” as: “Heightened awareness of impact, accompanied by purposeful action.” We can apply this definition to marketing:
CONSCIOUS MARKETING DEFINITION:
Marketing executed with awareness of its impact and purposefully designed to maximize good and minimize harm
According to this definition, I don’t think we are fully “conscious” yet within the world of marketing and brand management. We don’t always understand the impacts of our approaches which prevents us from taking purposeful action to maximize good and minimize harm.
The first step toward becoming more conscious is to evaluate marketing and branding’s positive and negative impacts:
On the positive side: Brands and marketing connect people to goods and services that improve their lives, and they can also be a source of inspiration, education, transformation, and creativity at both an individual and communal level.
On the negative side: Brands and marketing have the potential to harm to our customer and our culture through manipulation, unsustainable consumption, and by establishing unhealthy or unrealistic cultural norms.
We often assume that marketing or brand communications are neutral, but they are not. Words and images, and the channels through which they are delivered, have the power to build up or to tear down, and we need to reflect on the medium, the methods, and the message we use to achieve our sales objectives.
The power of marketing and branding to influence culture is undeniable. The sheer volume of content and spending dedicated to putting messages, images, and products in front of people presents a tremendous opportunity to impact the world for the good. An opportunity that, unfortunately, is often squandered.
Is Today’s Marketing Effective?
Let’s examine a few facts that should make us question whether today’s branding and marketing approaches are effective:
Only 34% of customers trust the brands they use, ranking quality, value for money and transparency as the top drivers of trust.
Advertising makes up 36% of all world spam content, totaling 44 billion emails per day.
81% of Americans believe businesses are not transparent in how they use personal information shared by consumers, who often become the product for advertising and lead generation.
Nearly 43% of customers use ad blockers, citing too many ads and intrusive ads as top reasons.
How did we get to this point?
My hypothesis is that we’ve accepted and normalized a set of practices and principles that we believe is “time tested”—and required—to grow business. Here are a few examples:
Using wealth and idealized beauty to create an aspirational lifestyle that is unattainable for our everyday customer.
Applying knowledge of brain science to modify our communications and increase its subconscious influence.
Following customers around the internet, capturing their data without their knowledge.
Maximizing the number of messages we distribute to "stand out" and "break through the clutter," even when they are unwanted by the recipients.
Exaggerating benefits, even if we are legally compliant and technically accurate, which results in misleading our customers.
Reinforcing customers insecurities and fears to create demand for our products and services.
Most brand leaders don’t intend to mislead or put their own interests ahead of the customers’. I, too, have used and benefited from many of these practices over the past two decades. I often feel like I’m operating in a system that is out of my control—it’s simply the way things work.
With an aspiration to positively impact the world, I find it’s essential to revaluate the methods I use to define what brands stand for and attract customers. We need more purposeful approaches to understand meaningful customer needs, develop messages that create value, offer pricing that is fair and transparent, and reach our audience with respect on their terms.
Conscious Marketing Practices: A Starting Point
Here are a few ideas to transform common marketing practices. We know that trust, transparency, integrity, and relevancy are the foundation of a strong and enduring brand, but it takes vigilance avoid defaulting to the norm.
Examples to Inspire Us
There are many brands to learn from who are doing this well today. Brands not just evolving their business models but the ways in which they communicate who they are and what value they offer to customers.
REI has closed on Black Friday since 2015 for its Opt Outside campaign, encouraging both consumers and employees to spend the day outside.
Dove and Aerie do not retouch or digitally enhance the models in their advertising.
Apparel brand The Slow Label publishes what it costs to make each one of its products, so that the margin is fully transparent.
Eileen Fisher and Patagonia have blogs are dedicated to educating customers on issues of sustainability, ethical fashion, and reducing product waste which complement their sustainably sourced materials and circular product offerings.
These practices are not necessarily the right ones for every business, but we can seek to understand the consequences of our marketing and branding choices and ask whether there's a better way.
We Can Learn Together
My view is that of a practitioner, not an academic or a journalist, so I understand that conscious marketing approaches must build the business.
I intend to write more about brain science, pricing, digital marketing, brand purpose and mission, sustainability, transparency, and advertising. In doing so, I will share strategies and methods that both grow revenue and respect our customers. Practices that expand market share and profitability without pushing products on customers who don’t want them. Messages that advocate for a more sustainable and ethical system and incentivize behavior toward positive change.
I welcome your ideas, your case studies, your do’s and don’ts. Please share examples of companies you see doing this well, so we can learn together. My hope is that collectively, we create a better way to grow, where branding and marketing are no longer part of the problem but part of the solution.
4 Reasons Your Company's "Good" Should be Part of Your Core Business
Frederick Buechner asked: “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?” This is a great question to pose when searching for personal purpose, but it also applies to brands and companies.
Frederick Buechner asked: “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?” This is a great question to pose when searching for personal purpose, but it also applies to brands and companies. Said another way from a business lens:
“At what points do our core competencies meet the world’s deep need?”
There is growing pressure on businesses to have a positive social and environmental impact. Consumers are voting with their wallets and their employment decisions for companies that serve society in addition to the bottom line. Governments continue to legislate on issues such as the environment, privacy, ingredients, and worker rights.
A common approach to address this call for action is to continue business as usual, and identify a separate set of social responsibility or environmental programs, establish a charitable giving program, or advocate for popular political point of view. While these approaches have merit in certain circumstances, they often ignore the most significant contribution a company can make to society—through its core business.
While it may seem obvious that the positive social and environmental impact a company has should be connected to its core business, I have seen many companies and brands invest in efforts that are not strategically tied to their products or operations. This Colbert Report clip (starting at 1:15) parodies the causes corporations support that seem disconnected from their business. At best it’s a missed opportunity for social and business impact, at worst it invites criticism of hypocrisy and growing backlash.
Here are 4 reasons we should focus a company’s “doing good” on the core business:
1) It’s Authentic
In an age of corporate distrust, where some consumers expect that companies are trying to get a quick win through a “do good” gimmick, helping through your core business is an intuitive fit. UPS donates shipping and logistics expertise during natural disasters. PetSmart promotes adoption of pets. Marriott trains employees to watch for signs of human trafficking in their hotel rooms.
Everlane, an e-commerce fashion brand, has made “ethical sourcing” part of its tagline. In an industry known for sourcing low wage labor in developing countries, Everlane shares the factory name where each item is produced, with extensive information and photos on each facility.
[Image source: Everlane.com]
On the flip side, many brands “go pink” during October in support of Breast Cancer. While raising money to support research for this disease is a noble cause, it’s easy to question brands’ motivations that have nothing to do with women or health.
Many companies are also taking political stances that don’t have a clear connection to their business. While leadership might feel they have a moral obligation to support a particular issue, I wonder if their voice is best used in that way or could rather advocate for needed change in their own industry.
2) It Motivates Employees
Much research has been done on the best ways to motivate employees, with growing evidence showing that the external motivators of bonuses and perks can be short-lived. Daniel Pink argues in his book Drive that the three most important motivators are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. He defines purpose as, “the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”
In order to successfully give employees a sense of purpose, it has to be about their core work. An annual employee volunteering day or the existence of a separate corporate foundation run by a handful of employees will not suffice. Each employee must understand how their daily work helps contribute to something meaningful and valuable.
A simple way companies can elevate the value of their core business with employees is through skills-based volunteering. Many firms such as IBM, Fidelity, and Deloitte, donate technology expertise and consulting services to nonprofits or communities who could never otherwise afford them. One of the biggest reasons these organizations continue such programs is not the social impact, it’s the leadership development the programs create for employees who participate.
[Image Source: IBM Service Corps]
Creative agencies often take pro bono work for nonprofits to help with issue advocacy and fundraising. When employees are doing their primary job in service of an under-resourced population, it creates a greater sense of purpose for their work. In turn, companies see higher employee satisfaction and higher retention. A friend who owns a small business told me he has approximately 2X longer employee retention because of his skills-based pro bono program. It works for the community and for his business.
3) It Builds Reputation and Loyalty Among Customers
Any buyer of TOMS shoes or Warby Parker eyewear knows that part of their purchase helps provide footwear and eyeglasses, respectively, to people in developing countries. These brands have been built around a business model that provides the same benefit to paying customers as those in need.
For 30 years, Annie’s has sold organic food, backed by a company mission of helping grow the volume of organic crops farmed nationally. Patagonia, a brand that stands for experiencing the rugged outdoors, has innovated with more responsible sourcing for over two decades, and products today are produced from nearly 70% recycled or renewable fiber. For four years, REI has shut its doors on Black Friday to give employees and customers a chance to #optoutside.
[Image Source: REI.com]
Each of these brands have a devoted following because they have remained committed to their core mission. Importantly, the brands’ product offerings and company actions seamlessly integrate product benefits with “doing good,” making the two inseparable.
According to the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study, 64% of consumers self-report as “belief-driven” buyers, expressing both hope and confidence that brands can address society’s social ills. But the brands that do this most effectively are those that integrate their beliefs and social good into the core strategy and identity of the brand.
4) It Does the Greatest Good
While the prior three reasons might seem to serve the company’s self-interest, the final one is about social interest. Companies are uniquely positioned to use their own innovation and expertise to solve social problems that only they or their industry can address. I would argue the pharmaceutical industry’s greatest contribution to society’s challenges isn't what their cash can do, it’s their drugs to populations that can’t afford them.
P&G, Nestlé, Unilever, Pepsi partnered on Loop, an e-commerce delivery service with reusable packaging, demonstrating a significant effort to address the massive issue of single-use plastic waste around the world. These are problems that the industry itself played a large part in creating. Many would say that they have a responsibility to solve, but they also might be the best ones to help solve.
[Image Source: Greenbiz]
There are many companies making important progress in integrating social impact into their core business strategy. However, even the prevailing concept of “giving back” assumes that business has “taken” something. My hope is that we continue turn our efforts of giving back to our core business, so that eventually business itself can be seen as “giving” through its primary goods, services and operations.
Importantly, this is not a selfless exercise on behalf of companies. What works for society also must work for business, as they too must benefit from their efforts. The exciting part is that GOOD business is also good BUSINESS.