The Pulse On… Green Businesses
Gucci recently pledged to stop using fur starting with its Spring 2018 collection. This came on the back of its wider sustainability plan, and the lead of its creative director Alessandro Michele, who followed a string of other luxury fashion designers including Armani, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren in shunning fur.
Green, it seems, is the name of the game especially if you want a piece of that environmentally conscious millennial pie. With millennials making an effort to understand fair trade, proper material procurement, or if a restaurant has taken a stand against shark’s fin consumption, it adds up.
It’s not just the millennials who are showing concern for the world; sustainability and climate change are hot button issues among the elites at Davos. This annual summit is not a highfalutin’ all-talk-no-action session – its subtlety in putting pressuring the elite to adopt a mindset of incremental transformation is deemed respectable. From inclusive growth to preventing dumping of more plastics in the ocean, it has been successful on many counts than it is typically recognized or lauded for.
How did we end up having to play catch-up in this regard?
Well, before green became the color of the day, it was black. It was always about being ‘in the black’ – fat profit margins at the expense of the environment. So instead of proper waste disposal, dumping was the cheaper option. The trade-off was a no-brainer, just pass the problem to someone else, until people began to realize that this zero-sum game thinking was a long-term suicide plan; soon enough, there would be no one else to pass it to.
At this moment, while green gains increasing importance in corporate strategy, the question comes with whether sustainability is in itself sustainable? After all, something that sounds noble but makes little business sense is… pure nonsense. To answer that, sustainability needs to prove that it is equally as black as its activists would like it green.
At the end of it all, it takes two hands to clap, so finding the intersection between the consumer’s willingness to pay a premium and a business’ efforts to go green is key. Having the former without the latter would result in unscrupulous and unethical profit-making ventures. Having the latter without the former would lead to a green business eventually turning red and going belly up.
This is where the art of storytelling becomes an integral role in educating customers on sustaining sustainability. Customers need to know that they are not just getting a quality product or service, but the manner in which it is done necessitates the premium that they pay. They need to hear that buying cheaper could really mean that the environment will feel the brutal brunt of social irresponsibility. They need to understand that we are all obliged to steward what we have been entrusted and, to borrow Patek Philippe’s tagline, “merely look after it for the next generation”.