This document discusses why brands should focus on sustainability and how they can do so. It notes that brands have potential to drive large-scale change as they have relationships with consumers. It recommends that brands define their contribution to a sustainable future, tackle product impacts, innovate business models, and collaborate with others. The document also emphasizes the importance of storytelling and making sustainability tangible to consumers.

1. Sustainability and Brands, Why,
What and How
Sally Uren, Deputy Chief Executive | Forum for the Future
Gemma Adams, Principal Advisor | Forum for the Future
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4. Leading company transformation
16 years experience working with ambitious
companies who want to develop strategies
that combine sustainability and business
success
Innovation coalitions
Bring together groups to solve bigger
sustainability challenges - including whole
value chains

5. why brands?
(you’re an NGO for goodness sakes)
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6. surely brands got us into this
mess?
Yes….and…….
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7. there are
short-term investors
systemic lack of enabling policy
barriers to disengaged citizens
mainstreaming unsustainable business
sustainability models

8. As the door to the
business model, and as
the entity with an
emotional relationship
with the end consumer,
brands have the
potential to act as
transformative agents
of change

9. and there’s the ‘aspirationals’
• Consumers in
emerging markets
twice as likely to
choose and pay more
for sustainable
products
• ‘Aspirationals’ look for
brands to provide
solutions to improve
their lives AND serve
society
Source: The Regeneration Consumer Study: BBMG, GlobeScan, SustainAbility
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10. PS
Logic applies to B2B brands too, particularly as a route
to business model innovation
(and really, it’s B2P)
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11. what?
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12. a new role for brands - steps to ‘brand
2.0’?
from awareness to activation from competition to collaboration
from single- to multi-channel comms kill the eco sub-brands
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13. 13

14. 14

15. how?
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16. 1. brand strategy and activation
what is your brand’s contribution to a sustainable future?

17. 2. behaviour change
tackling choice + the product use phase

18. 3. brand-led business model innovation
Futurescapes | Sony

19. 4. collaborate to
blast through
barriers

20. Sustainability & Brands
2012 Roundtable

21. Sustainability &
Brands main insights
2012 Roundtable
1. the importance of story:
why do you care and why
should your consumer care?
what’s your contribution to a
sustainable future?
2. know what you want to be
famous for and ensure that it
matches up with your biggest
risks, impacts and opportunities
3. make it real: break down
‘sustainability’ into topics that
matter to you and to your
consumer, and talk about those
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22. to summarise
after peers + family, it’s brands that we trust
time then to unleash their transformative potential
which means a new role for brands (or back to their
original purpose?)
and in turn, redefine some aspects of marketing and
branding as pre-competitive
less competition, more collaboration and co-creation
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24. Forum Network – upcoming events
Network Webinars
• 21 February – Forum for the Future & Which? Consumers 2030 – with Gemma
Adams
This joint webinar with Forum for the Future and Which? will debate the findings of the
Consumers in 2030 report, and explore how purpose driven businesses, brands and
organisations can respond.
• 19 March – Future casting - with Peter Madden
This webinar, hosted by our Chief Executive, Peter Madden, will introduce the main
futures techniques such as trends, horizon-scanning and scenarios, examine the benefits
of futures thinking for you, your organisation and sustainability; and share case-studies of
how loading companies have done this in practice.
www.forumforthefuture.org/events
For more information or to register for our events please contact k.byass@forumforthefuture.org
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25. Forum Network – upcoming events
Network events
• 13th March, London – Is your business wired for change?
Exploring the role of digital and communications technologies in enabling radical system
change, and what it means for you and your organisation.
• 7th May, New York – Breakfast with Bob Willard
• 11th June, London – Making the business case for step change
At our June Network event in London, we will be sharing the latest thinking from our
Sustainable Business work.
www.forumforthefuture.org/events
For more information or to register for our events please contact k.byass@forumforthefuture.org
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