Sep 185 min read

An A-Z of Sustainability: P is for Products

A lot of attention is put on the impacts that a company has in its operations and what it can do opposite suppliers in understanding risks and opportunities. But how sustainability fits with the product offering and how to leverage commercial advantage can often be meaningful and trickier. In this article I’ll look at some approaches that can be taken and how to embed sustainability into the product development process.

Apart from a small group of consumers and businesses, sustainability aspects are not the primary purchasing criteria. That’s not to say the topic isn’t important, it’s just that people generally don’t want to compromise on quality or pay more for something unless it offers other benefits in addition to sustainability. All else being equal, there are many who would then choose a more sustainable option, provided those other factors are met first.

So, it seems more worthwhile not to spend a lot of time and effort trying to convince customers they should care about sustainability and make it their top purchasing criteria, but rather accept that’s just the way it is and make it easier for them by meeting their primary purchasing needs and giving them a more sustainable choice?

For business-to-business customers there is the added dimension of helping them meet their sustainability commitments, so it not just about the benefits for the world, it also the benefits versus their sustainability targets as well. Maybe the way to think about it is how does it benefit their world first, and the world second.

In some categories customers are starting to ask for products to have a lower impact, particularly with regard to carbon emissions. Requests for product carbon footprints are increasing in some cases replacement products must contractually demonstrate a lower impact, either in embodied carbon or from the product in use, particularly important for anything that needs power to be used.

In the first instance, you need to think about how you will embed sustainability thinking into your product development process. Most companies use some sort of stage and gate process to bring products from ideas to launch. At each stage the proposition is developed further, and a decision point (or gate) will decide if it can progress to the next stage. These gates provide a straightforward way of integrating sustainability thinking into the process. Adding one or two criteria that must be met before a project can proceed makes sustainability an integral part of an existing process, which is much quicker to establish that creating a separate process or simply relying on awareness raising. These criteria could be to conduct assessments at each stage so that the sustainability impacts are known and considered, or they could be more about setting minimum standards e.g. a lower carbon footprint that the product it is replacing. Of course, one can evolve into the other over time too.

Another benefit of this approach is that you can use it to facilitate cross functional discussions on how to reduce environmental impacts. Innovation processes should already have these inputs as part of the process and it is often from manufacturing or R&D that ideas will come on how to improve sustainability impacts, aspects that marketing folk would not perhaps have thought about.

If you take this approach it is vital that you train people on what is expected and give them the tools to make the assessments you want. Something that is often overlooked though is training the “gatekeepers”, the decision makers who will decide if a project has met the criteria to progress to the next stage. If they do not pay proper attention to the new sustainability criteria and let things through regardless, then the new requirements will not be taken seriously. Sometimes failing a project because of either missing sustainability data or inferior performance soon after implementation can make a statement that you are taking it seriously.

Often a place of near-term focus is product packaging. This can often be easier and quicker to change than the product itself, particularly if there is a multi-year approval process due to regulatory or customer requirements. With this in mind, it can be useful to separate out packaging impacts from the product itself when considering projects through development.

One aspect that people often struggle with is trade offs between different aspects of environmental impact. Is it better to have a lower carbon footprint even if the water usage goes up? And what about if packaging impacts are reduced but more damages result which increases waste? There is no easy answer to this, but key is understanding all the impacts and taking a decision in the round. You could set absolute thresholds or make certain high impact materials not acceptable.

Some companies measure progress by looking at how their products are becoming better over time. They compare the new product to the old product, or sometimes the mainstream product in the market, and say that it must be better on at least one environmental dimension and no worse on the others. In that way you are clear that compromises can be made and that it doesn’t have to better on everything but there is at least a minimum of the current or mainstream product to set a threshold on each dimension. This approach has the benefit that you constantly have to be improving to stay ahead of the market, although that can be uncomfortable for some to set targets in this way, as you are not totally in control – your competitors could move the dial before you do!

However you approach this you need to consider the internal aspect of measuring progress and the external aspect of how you communicate the benefits. Depending on the approach you take this may be the same or different. You may choose to keep that comparative metric an internal target, with the communication of the product benefits being about the actual performance rather than relative to anything else. One thing to bear in mind though is something that I covered in an earlier article – Greenwash.

Regulators have really focused in this area and any marketing claims really do need to be backed up with hard data. EU legislation has particularly focused in this area, but also in the UK the Advertising Standards Authority has forced some ads to be pulled because of unsubstantiated claims.

Going back to an earlier point though, show customers how your product will save them money from less electricity used, or use less product the competition, or last longer or whatever it is that will focus their attention and then demonstrate to them that it will also lower their environmental footprint. Make it easy for them and show them that better products for the environment are also better products for them too.

About the Author

Chris is a senior strategic leader with over 25 years’ commercial experience including sales, marketing, strategic planning and major business change initiatives at AkzoNobel and ICI. He has a wide knowledge of sustainability and how to integrate this into business having held senior sustainability roles at AkzoNobel for 12 years, including as Global Sustainability Director Decorative Paints and AkzoNobel Planet Possible Programme Manager. Chris is now an independent sustainability consultant and a pension trustee director.