By Vicky Grinnell-Wright, Head of Citizen and Consumer Sustainability Practice at Best Foot Forward and Co-Curator of UK Dream
Sustainable living is still a subjective, abstract and amorphous concept, the holy grail for the few, conflicted and hotly contested ground for most. One person’s sustainable lifestyle is… another’s idea of purgatory? A land of should-not, must not, do less of and self-sacrifice.
Can we ever comprehensively define ‘sustainable living’? Should we even try? And if we do, can we neatly package it all up into a compelling and accessible lifestyle with populist appeal?
M&S’s Plan A and Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan are excellent examples of brands and business working hard at innovating from the inside out. High Street brands including H&M, Puma, Mars and B&Q have invested heavily in business-model reinvention and social-purpose ideas. Significant strides have been made as brand owners reach out beyond their own four walls, with programmes such as street club https://www.streetclub.co.uk/ and Schwopping. Purpose beyond profit is proving an engaging place to start. And engagement is a battle that carbon reduction fought and lost.
Gucci rocked Twickenham stadium recently, to a social brand beat which included Madonna, Beyonce, J-Lo and Florence and the Machine, Jessie J, Ellie Goulding et al raising approx £4M for crowd-sourced projects which would lift women and girls out of poverty and social injustice. But – and it’s a BIG self-serving ‘But’ – this was people buying into music with a heart. It was compelling stuff. Star-studded line up. It was not ‘fall on my sword’ self-sacrifice. To most people, this was un-recognisable as ‘sustainable living’. It was gratifying, it was now and it FELT good and cool and sexy and a whole host of other adjectives which helped Gucci ‘Chime for Change’.
When it comes to ‘whole lifestyle’ we still have a lot to learn from Gucci and some way to go towards creating a genuinely compelling, and powerfully engaging populist agenda and resultant clamouring demand for an alternative to our perpetual stories of stuff and conspicuous consumption. The ‘last mile’ to the consumer has proven map-less, sat-nav-devoid terrain with endless condescending shouts of ‘recalculating’, when yet another well-meaning, yet false turn is made.
The fact is that resilient and enduring brands will rely ever more on citizen and consumer attraction, engagement, trust and retention. They also rely on retaining their licence to operate. Conversely, short-term thinker brands and quick-buck shareholder promises rely on a schizophrenic CSR policy, trumped by a cry of ‘the public gets what the public wants’ and the get-out-of-jail card which is consumer ‘choice’. This is a brand cul-de-sac, taking us nowhere fast.
New business models need demand as well as supply. Innovations that deliver better environmental or social outcomes are great, but how do you create a market for the new and previously unimagined? You change the language, the message and the message makers, perhaps?
It is time re Remember… As human beings, we respond to basic desires – our desire to belong, to be popular, to exert status and to appeal to the opposite (or same) sex… Our tribal desires to belong matter and cannot be ignored. This is why ‘green’ products, services and whole pious and self-sacrificing lifestyles of ‘less’ are destined to fail for as long as they pit themselves as ‘other than’ mainstream.
As Tom Compton of WWF puts it: “People’s decisions are driven by the values they hold – frequently unconsciously, and sometimes to the virtual exclusion of a rational assessment of the facts.” Rational arguments about our planetary host being in peril… it really is time to exit stage left.
UK Dream is a programme convening storytellers, brands and behaviour-change people to reframe the debate, change the language and create a shared platform for change which we can all get behind – the UK lifestyle equivalent of a great big Twickenham stadium chiming for change because they want to, not because they have been told to or are scared not to. UK Dream is empowering brands to use their collective wisdom around human insights to deliver genuine and appealing changes, towards more sustainable lifestyles. But sustainable lifestyles that FEEL good before they ‘do’ good and which are all dressed up with lashings of populist appeal, fashion, gloss and social soul.
Rational and reasoned argument around sustainable living being better for future generations will always fail when sold against a shinier and more salient promise of a shiny new handset ‘upgrade’ here and now. Or at least it will for as long as this social norm, expectation and badge of belonging prevail. We humans will almost always take the gratification of ‘me’ now over the future promise of ‘good’ for someone. It is about proximity and relevance. Does it feel good, to me, now? If it just does good, for someone, at some future date… you have lost me… So, it is time to change those aspirational norms to ones that compel AND sustain and to popularise them.
Vicky Grinnell-Wright
Head of Citizen and Consumer Sustainability Practice and Co-Curator of UK Dream
