As the French media geared up for the 10th annual celebration of Sustainable Development Week, we were asked (again) by a French journalist: Is all this green stuff just a fashion or is it a long-term trend? 

Or, to put the question another way, if sustainability has a fabled tipping point, have we tipped?

In some ways, it feels like the green communications trend in Western Europe has come and gone…at least at a superficial level.

There was the pre-period, in 2006-2007 when most of our multinational marketing clients weren’t hearing any of it. Green wasn’t a priority and there were not budgets to invest in it. Consumers were starting to express some interest in the topic, but, with the exception of the 10 percent activist niche, they weren’t buying “green,” so selling projects internally was a challenge. And management wasn’t demanding sustainable initiatives or incentivizing them. So why bother?

The tide started to turn in late 2007. All of a sudden, the phone was ringing off the hook. Marketing directors were asking us to help them go green and now!

This change of heart was primarily driven by corporate social norming: The media had made enough noise to get the attention of consumers, corporate management and opinion leaders. Sustainable development directors had been appointed and were asking bothersome questions. Certain upstart brands were communicating on the topic and making the non-communicators look bad.

This was a tricky period because we wanted to encourage new companies to climb on board the sustainable train. But we had to get them to understand that this was not about tourism; they needed to be in it for the long haul.

The year 2008 was a busy time in the sustainable marketing consultancy world: Added Value received many communications briefs that we gently massaged into innovation strategy projects. Our repeated mantra: “Before we focus on what you want to say, let’s explore what it is you want to do."

We spent a fair amount of time introducing our marketing teams to their internal environmental, sustainable and supply chain counterparts. I can cite on more than one hand the number of times I have said to the marketing team: “There is certainly someone within your organization who has the answer to that question -- let’s go find him or her.”

Where lifecycle analyses hadn’t been done, they were strongly encouraged. We organized many conversations with experts and opinion leaders to bring murky issues to the surface; we benchmarked exciting initiatives being done in other categories that could serve as inspiration. And yes, we also spoke to consumers…not so much to ask them whether they cared about sustainability (of course, most of them care!) as to understand their trade offs, their triggers and barriers. While we are firm believers in co-creation, experience has shown that consumers work best when they are exposed to seed ideas and asked to react and build. So before meeting with them, we developed rough ideas and then used focus groups/on-line platforms to evolve them. And so innovation eco-design and sourcing projects were born.