Can Sustainability Sell?

by Chris Pomfret


When I was asked to speak at the 20 March 2002 meeting of the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), my first response was to question the title of the conference, “Can Sustainability Sell?”

I thought it was the wrong question. You may find this hard to believe from a company as focused on marketing as mine, but while Unilever as a whole and Birds Eye Walls in particular regards sustainability as absolutely critical to the future of our business, the fact is that our commitment to finding sustainable sources currently has little to do with today’s brand values, or with trying to increase our sales.

Unilever’s View of Sustainability
The reason lies in the fundamentals of our business. We rely on our ability to take high-quality raw materials be they fish, peas or palm oil and turn them into high-quality, added-value products that we can market and sell, with the help of brand values and consumer trust we have worked to create around them. If our supply of raw materials runs out, we cannot produce any more, and we cannot sell anything to anyone no matter how good our branding.

So sustainability is all about the long-term security of our supply chain. Which is why, in all our sustainability initiatives at Birds Eye, selling the concept has been the last thing on our minds. Instead, the driver is our awareness that if our business is to continue, then we need to sustain our sources of supply and the only way to do that is to make them sustainable.

This realization leads us to two conclusions. First, sustainability is the only way for a business like ours to thrive in the long-term, so ultimately we will have to sell it to consumers. Second, in the short term they are unlikely to buy into it because of the dislocation between consumers’ day-to-day buying behavior and their wider concerns. While many people have genuine concerns about global warming, over-fishing, and other issues, they don’t relate these issues to driving their car to the supermarket or buying Birds Eye Fish Fingers. Sure, they’ll accept a theoretical link between the two if it is pointed out to them. But a significant emotional bridge between people’s concerns over sustainability and their buying habits is yet to be built. Until that time, sustainability as a branding concept will not sell more peas, fish fingers or anything else.

Its Place in Our Business
You may wonder why Unilever became involved in sustainability in the first place. Simple: Unilever plc. is one of the world’s leading foods and consumer goods companies, with annual sales of around 30 billion in 150 countries. Every day 150 million people choose our brands for feeding their families and cleaning their homes. Within Unilever, Birds Eye Walls is the UK market leader in both frozen food and ice cream. Running a multi-local, multinational FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) business on this scale requires a tremendous amount of raw material, about two-thirds of which comes from agriculture and therefore has the potential to be sourced through sustainable farming, on land or in the ocean.

We need to know where our raw materials come from not just next year, but in a decade.

The Sustainable Pea Project
Initially, we are looking at sustainable sourcing for peas and fish but ultimately the effects will be felt across Birds Eye Walls and across Unilever as a whole. Birds Eye is the UK’s largest food brand and peas are our biggest product and the foundation of our reputation for great food, simply frozen.

96% of UK consumers eat Birds Eye peas, and we grow them all ourselves, on 520 independent commercial farms across East Anglia and Humberside, all picked and frozen in two and a half hours and each one individually inspected! So it’s logical that we’ve focused on peas in our main sustainable agriculture initiative in the UK.

Birds Eye has been working with pea growers since 1998 to develop a model of sustainability that can be applied to our entire frozen pea business. About 20 of our pea farmers take part in an initiative called the “partnership for sustainability.” It’s based on an unprecedented collaborative effort between ourselves, our farmers, academics, and NGOs including ornithologists, environmentalists, wildlife trusts, and Forum for the Future, the UK’s leading sustainable development organization.

Under their supplier contracts with Birds Eye Walls, our farmers have always been required to meet quality thresholds, co-operate with local pea-growing groups, and be close enough to our freezing plants to get their freshly-picked produce there within the requisite two and a half hours.

Under the partnership for sustainability, the commitment on both sides goes much further. It calls for Birds Eye and the farmers to work together to promote a definition of sustainable agriculture drawn up in co-operation with environmental groups.

We have refined 10 key indicators from soil fertility and health to pest management, from water and energy efficiency to social and human capital to define sustainable agriculture. They include:

* keep yields and nutritional quality high, and keep resource inputs as low as possible;
* minimize adverse effects on soil, water, air quality and biodiversity; make a positive contribution to these where possible;
* optimize use of renewable resources, minimize non-renewable ones; and
* support the principle that sustainable agriculture should enable local communities to protect and improve their well-being and environments.

The first pea crop under the sustainability project was planted in the spring of 1999. The results, so far, appear promising. Primarily, it seems possible that one can maintain quality and productivity, and encourage biodiversity, while reducing the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Unilever companies elsewhere in the world with tea, tomatoes, and spinach are achieving similar results.

Partnership for Sustainability
There are three aspects of the Sustainable Pea Initiative that may make it hugely significant. First, all our pea farmers in Eastern England are now implementing the pilot scheme. Second, the knowledge and experience we are gaining will help us increase the security of our future supply chains. And finally, the valuable body of research being built up in a commercial setting with proven, saleable, mass-market products will help develop procedures and findings to be shared across the food production industries, and across society as a whole.

Given our level of excitement over the Sustainable Pea Initiative, you might think Unilever has missed an opportunity to “sell” sustainability to consumers and thereby sell more peas. Again, that’s the wrong perspective.

I have already noted that one-day sustainability will have to sell because we have no alternative. But selling sustainability proactively as an overt brand value will have to wait. We include the Sustainable Pea Initiative on our packaging now, but in a low-key manner: on the back of a package of Birds Eye peas, we print a small text box mentioning our partnership with farmers to protect the long-term health of the land.

Why so little advertising? Because blowing our own trumpet now to an already-skeptical public would risk undermining the credibility of the whole project.

Although Unilever understands the creation and marketing of brands as well as anyone else in the world, in recent years we’ve see a major change in the nature of brands.

When I started in this busines
s 30 years ago, the relationship between the consumer and the brand was simple. People like the product, so they took them home and used them. Today, the issue is what’s behind the brand and how does that express a consumer’s values? A BMW says more about the driver than the quality of German engineering. Nike athletic shoes say more about someone being up-to-the-mark than fast off it.

Besides increasing the value and utility of brands, this shift also exposes them to closer scrutiny and higher risks. Nowadays people want to know what lies behind a brand. Is the company committed to high ethical standards of behavior? Is it a good corporate citizen? And does it apply the same values in all parts of the world?

Sustainable Fisheries
Now for a “sustainable fish story.” Unilever is a major global processor of fish and producer of branded frozen fish products and to stay that way, we need to secure our supply chains amid growing global concern over the depletion of fish stocks. Our strategy is to reach a position by 2005 in which all our fish supplies come from sustainable sources.

To achieve sustainability our approach has been to center our decisions on the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a non-profit body that was founded in 1996 as a joint venture between Unilever and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); it became an autonomous organization in 1999. The MSC helps create and certify sustainable fishing grounds and fisheries around the world. It does the former by engaging with a wide range of stakeholders and local communities to balance the long-term viability of global fish supply with the health of marine ecosystems. And it achieves the latter by benchmarking fisheries against a number of criteria principally that the fishing methods used makes a fishing ground sustainable.

The MSC recently certified its first major species, New Zealand Hoki, which we are now launching as a product. However, when it comes to marketing this fish and its sustainable sourcing, we face two issues: one is that nobody has heard of New Zealand Hokiso our new packaging proclaims it as a “new excellent alternative to cod.” The other is that nobody has heard of the MSC or what it does. The logo is non-motivating and obscure for most people. Even if they recognize it, consumer research shows that protection of fish stocks is not linked to purchasing habits. To start building that link, we have turned to the appeal of the ocean and have included a statement saying “Ocean Friendly” on the packaging.

The small mention of our Sustainable Pea Initiative and ocean-friendly sourcing on our packaging is a modest first step towards linking people’s concerns to sustainability as a brand value.

Lessons from the Organics Industry
There are important lessons to be learned from the organic food industry. The rise in demand for foodstuffs produced through organic farming has been a prominent feature of UK retailing in recent years, and the demand for organic produce, at what are still premium prices, is unquestionably impressive. The growth of organic farming here was very much led by the Soil Association, in a role that foreshadowed that of the MSC in fisheries.

The UK government now plans to triple the land under organic cultivation by the end of 2006and this continuing momentum was one of the reasons why Unilever acquired a small organics business in Scotland last year.

Certainly, as an alternative to environmentally-damaging agricultural practices, organic food has many attractions. Its promoters have linked organic produce with concerns over an array of issues, from the use of chemical pesticides, fertilizers and GMOs, to children’s health and food crises such as BSE (mad cow disease).

The Organic Downside
We don’t think organic products are the overall solution as there are some obvious structural problems in the organic marketplace. More than 70 percent of organic food eaten in the UK is imported. Also, proponents of organic food seem divided as to whether their goal is the organic food itself or the method and values of organic food production (i.e., by independent farmers and small landowners).

There are also doubts about consumer attitudes. The British retailer Iceland’s decision to commit itself to organic food was not very successful, although it must be said the demographics of Iceland’s customer base were less than ideal. Greater doubts are raised by recent research suggesting that today’s consumers have less faith in the health advantages of organic food over conventional produce.

What organics cannot guarantee is security of the supply chain or the social conditions of the people employed to produce it. I recently read an editorial which asked, “How can something be good for the environment if it is picked by laborers on slave wages and air-freighted half way round the world?” Unlike organics, any definition of sustainability must deal with the human inputs to the chain and the human aspect is crucial to ensuring the supply chain really is sustainable.

Finding The Right Vocabulary
What we can learn from the organics industry is that vocabulary counts. You would not sell organic food by slapping “Approved by the Soil Association” all over it. Similarly, sustainability needs a language that encapsulates what it means without turning people off.

“Ocean-friendly” is a start, giving us an accessible way of communicating what the Marine Stewardship Council is about. We haven’t yet cracked the right form of words for land-based sustainability, but we will. When we do it will enable us to draw a road map for sustainability’s role in the consumer marketplace. Having the right vocabulary will let us move from a defensive to a proactive approach, enabling us to build and then steadily reinforce the emotional link needed to make consumers more willing to buy products and brands from sustainable sources.

The Consumer View
But does the necessary level of concern over depletion of the world’s resources already exist? To an extent, it does. But its fragility and embryonic state means it needs to be nurtured carefully by marketeers.

If asked directly, consumers are, of course, worried about sustainability. But will they pay more for it? Probably not. Iceland’s experience is a warning to anyone putting too much commercial faith in the consumer’s level of environmental commitment.

If we manage to build the emotional link I keep mentioning between sustainable products and consumers’ nagging concerns over the future of the planet, then maybe one day they will pay a premium for it. Yet interestingly, the best way to build this link may not be through the selling process, but through education.

Consumers nowadays are intelligent and sophisticated enough to see marketing for what it is. Thus, if we present sustainability through a traditional marketing pitch and call to action, they will reject it. Instead, we need to develop a debate in straightforward language about the long-term survival of the land and sea as sources of food.

Good old Marketing Language, that which we traditionally use in mass communication, will not work here. This is my challenge to the experts in communication. We have to re-think how we relate to the consumer.

Competitive Advantage
Unless sustainable produce has a competitive advantage over whatever else is available, consumers will not buy it anyway. The conundrum here is that neither Unilever nor any other supplier can fence itself off from the rest of the world. If our fish stocks are sustainable but nobody else’s are, then the world will gradually r
un out of fish and we will have a cost disadvantage.

This means two things. First, we have to share what we learn making it the reverse of the traditional approach to research and development, which is targeted at building up competitive advantage. We are not creating proprietary intellectual property to be guarded and exploited, but instead we are identifying broad approaches that we need to communicate to, and allow to be used by, other companies facing similar issues.

Second, it means we have to be in it for the long term. Peas are grown in a seven-year rotation; there is no point being sustainable for one year and then spending the next six flagrantly using up resources. Similarly, the sustainable farm is not just a place that can continue to produce high quality food on a reliable basis. They must consider the needs of their workforce and local communities as well.

As a result, we feel sustainability is closer to the concept of “quality” than any form of “competitive advantage.” It is not a one-time opportunity to steal a march on the competition, but a long-term learning process to be shared.

The Consumer Dilemma
In the beginning of this piece I claimed that by asking whether sustainability sells, we were posing the wrong question. To illustrate why, I would like to highlight the dilemma that surrounds sustainability for a company like ours. In simple terms, the dilemma is that sustainability currently does not sell. Yet, it is essential to our future, for three key reasons:

* The survival and security of our supply chains
* As a defensive stance to ensure the continued quality and relevance of our brands in the future, and
* To ensure that we continue to attract and recruit the best young peoplemany of whom, as you know, place huge importance on the social awareness and responsibility of prospective employers.

Thus, the question “can sustainability sell?” is the wrong question. Instead, from the perspective of Unilever and Birds Eye Walls, the real question is, “Can a business like ours survive in the long term without sustainability?”

One day, sustainability has to sell. Not just because it is the only way for us at Unilever to secure our future supply chains, but also for the future of the resources on this planet. Like you, we don’t yet know when that day will come, but we hope it will not be too far away.

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FROM Rocky Mountain Institute Newsletter, a SustainableBusiness.com Content Partner.