Sustainable Brands, Sustainable Business Models

What does it mean to “create and manage brands” – to do branding and marketing – and what does that have to do with sustainability? At Monnou, drawing on our systemic design practice, we go beyond “branding” as mere communication and delve into the design of the business model itself.

At the recent event of the Sustainability Cluster of the Valencian Community, we gave a talk precisely on this topic. We opened the presentation with questions such as “What phrase should I put in my Instagram campaign so that our communication isn’t taken as greenwashing?” or “What should my company logo look like if I want it to be associated with good sustainability practices?” – of course, questions we posed with irony. Because building brands is not about these superficial issues, but about building relationships.

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Building meaningful brands

Brand management today is a strategic and systemic process – it is not limited to visual identity, but encompasses the alignment of values, promises and experiences that shape relationships between stakeholders, guide the development of solutions, and ultimately foster trust and the adoption of those solutions.

In reality, building a brand is building a business. The brand is not only a representation, a word or an image, but the way in which we build relationships with our different stakeholders. Not only clients and users, usually on the right side in the business model canvas; but also the rest of the stakeholders, on the left side of the model. Our strategic partners are stakeholders, certainly, but so too are suppliers and our entire value chain, employees, etc. – and Nature is also a major stakeholder. So if you are a company operating in Elche (Alacant, Spain) and using material derived from the palm tree, the rich palm groves of Elche are also your stakeholder.

Thus, our brand is the interface between our business and all these stakeholders. We can view “Branding for Sustainability” as the work of “democratising the business”. We talk further about this in our reflection about Communication & Sustainability trends.

Beyond communication: the brand as the business

Elena Rodríguez Benito, in her model of Marketing for the Common Good, criticised how marketing has been reduced in our current economy to mere “promotion” or “advertising”. It has also been shrunk to a short-term vision, anchored to metrics solely of short-term financial return.

When marketing, in reality, is supposed to be about identifying the real, unmet needs of our stakeholders – not creating fictional needs in order to impose a product we have invented without considering them, but identifying real needs – and then determining how to create the most appropriate solutions and deliver them. Perhaps because “marketing” has been reduced to the absurd in our current economic model… at Monnou we prefer to speak of “strategic design”, as a more systemic practice that can afford not to focus solely on selling, but on addressing real problems.

Designing sustainable business models

Sustainable Business Models (SBMs) can be classified following the ESG dimensions: the E – those that focus more on improving relationships with “environmental” stakeholders; the S – with communities, workers, etc.; and the G – business models we might call “enablers”, which focus on organisational forms, financing models, and so on.

There are many SBMs, from businesses whose value delivery lies mainly in reverse logistics solutions for the circular economy, to the “sharing economy” (with BlablaCar as an example), which in reality can fit into all three blocks, or models whose value lies in optimising intermediation between supply and demand.

On the environmental side, we like to talk about the “servitisation” business model – offering a Product as a Service. This is the case of ABSOTEC, an industrial company from Valladolid focused on manufacturing and marketing acoustic solutions – booths, partitions and sound-absorbing islands, etc. At Monnou we supported them in their transition from simply offering their product for sale to a servitised model in which the product, now remaining the property of the company, is offered as a service, whether through rental or within an acoustic conditioning service that includes installation, deinstallation and return to the factory for repair and maintenance, etc. This circular business model allowed, according to the Life Cycle Analyses, a reduction in carbon emissions of between 57% and 80%, depending on the product, minimising the extraction of raw materials and the generation of waste.

On the social side, as Waka Waka does, micro-payments consist in not having to make the full initial outlay, but being able to pay for use over a set period of time, which facilitates access to basic products and services for certain people. It is also interesting how this brand not only targets vulnerable communities in certain regions, but the very same proposal also connects with European hipster cyclists, hikers… “explorers”. “We design for explorers, and for those without light.” In fact, this is how they develop their “Robin Hood Pricing” business model which, in very simple terms, means that “explorers” pay more so that people in more vulnerable communities can pay less.

Of course, every business model comes with its own communication needs. As we have said, the brand is the “interface” between the business and the stakeholders… and this requires designing those relationships, including communication. We discuss communication trends related to these business models in this other reflection.

From sustainable businesses to impact businesses

We could speak of an even more interesting – but more demanding – variety: Impact Business Models. These are highly relevant in BCorp certification.

Whereas Sustainable Business Models simply seek to conduct business, redundantly, in a more sustainable manner, for Impact Business Models, the business is the excuse, the tool through which to generate a positive impact on a specific stakeholder group, whether social or environmental.