Sustainability Is The Future Of Corporate Branding & Here’s Why

A generation that cares about the environment and values transparency from brands they purchase products or services from. Sounds like you? Well, it really should. Since businesses started to expand even more overseas, competition started to become a significant threat. What differentiates a memorable brand today is its unique products or services and how they conduct business and create interactions with consumers.

Imagine the following scenario: would you instead buy from a company that you know about the manufacturer process in its entirety or from a company that keeps on the low where its raw materials come from? You may not care about where all your products come from, and that’s okay because it’s definitely a lot to keep up to. However, in the field you are most interested in and love to purchase products from, wouldn’t you rather be loyal to a brand that aligns with your personal values?

The future of corporate branding is to create unique experiences for customers to build a lifestyle around a product or service. Definitely, one of the key ways to do so is for a brand to be transparent. To be transparent in the business world means to allow consumers and investors to know where and how all processes of the company works. It’s about providing information about the resources: where does the raw material come from? Where are the workers located? What are the work conditions? Can consumers have access to supply chain traceability in its entirely?

Creating a lifestyle around a brand is definitely a challenge, but it makes a brand stand out in the market and be successful. What seems to be a trend that may be on the lookout for the future of corporate branding is adopting a sustainable production chain that can relate back to sustainable lifestyles from consumers. According to research made by SuperOffice in 2021, customer experience is a top priority in businesses for the next five years, being 45.9% the most crucial component while purchasing a product or service. Consumers no longer limit their choices to sustainable products, but whether the experience the brand provides to them is actually from a sustainable source. 

Undoubtedly, cultivating sustainable practices can be an expensive decision-making process for a brand. Still, according to the same SuperOffice research, 86% of consumers are willing to spend more on a standard product just by the experience it provides to them.

How does this relate to you? Should you know which brands are sustainable or not? Not really. The main point here is to realize and reflect with yourself if you instead invest your resources in brands that only provide you products to use and then dispose of, or invest in brands that offer products, experience, and align with your personal values and lifestyle. Consumerism should not be limited to having more and more, but yet having a good amount of excellent quality. Plus, knowing if the work practices of such a company does not violate what you believe in is the most honesty and correct thing to do.

Millennials are often considered the innovative, prosperous, and self-conscious consumer group. This generation is entering the market as the primary consumer group as it is constituted by people born from 1981 to 1996. With that, companies start to wonder:

How to attract millennial consumers’ attention and influence others to buy their products?  

This high-tech generation is very much concerned with environmental issues that corporates can address around the globe. Not only that, but millennials also seek to invest their resources in brands that promote inclusion and diversity. For that, this group of consumers expects brands to provide value for their investment and take a stand on important topics. According to Euclid’s research, about 52% of millennials shop at brands that align with their personal values.

For a brand to be sustainable is not only needed to produce products that do not impact the environment when disposable, but yet promote fair work practices and truly live by this corporate responsibility promise. Many companies have said to be sustainable and got backfired when consumers found out they were not that sustainable. So, how can a company be sustainable? The brand can engage in environmentally friendly movements, adopt sustainable business policies in its internal environment, provide benefits to employees related to this approach (for example, using green transport), or simply providing free access to the supply chain for its consumers.

As consumers, our responsibility is to identify with the brand on some level, being for your creative endeavors, personal values, or even the brand’s vision. In the future, a company that does not make the consumer part of its production processes may not survive. With globalization, the world is expected to become more unified, consequently developing a deeper level of sustainability knowledge and strategy.

Remember that the next generation of consumers is focused on self-care practices more than past generations. Being these not only going more to the gym or doing therapy regularly but also only investing their time and money in brands that provide them a sense of community and lifestyle.

Do you agree that sustainability is the go-to strategy to boost corporate branding in the future?

• Branding
• millennials
• sustainability
• sustainable brands
• Sustainable Living