CorpComms Magazine

This year, and in every year that follows, communications professionals will take an ever more prominent role in tackling the challenge of sustainability. Climate change and carbon will continue eclipse other green issues, and the scale and urgency of the challenge means that we'll need every tool in the box from education to regulation to 'choice architecture' to drive behaviour change amongst consumers, employees, and suppliers.

Lots of brands are beginning to play in the space called 'sustainable lifestyle' and with the dead hand of the recession somewhat lifted, more experimentation is on the way this year. Where Marks & Spencer led with Plan A, expect other major brands to engage in a new, richer dialogue with their customers and suppliers (who between them account for 80 to 90 per cent of product impacts) about living better by consuming differently.

There's an increasingly sophisticated grammar of sustainability communications, and we all have to work out when and how to use 'gloom and doom', creativity and fun, naming and shaming, the power of small changes, heroes and celebrities, community based approaches and a range of other tactics to empower sceptical punters to pick sustainable options.

Water - including embedded water in supply chains - will go big in this year, and along with carbon will quickly become another hygiene factor that organisations will have to have a good story on if they are to manage reputational risk. With no prizes for the basics of environmental management, the organisations that use sustainability thinking to innovate new technologies, services and experiences will be the ones grabbing the limelight. And anyone who works out how to sell happiness without the skipful of plastic, heavy metals and other scarce resources will end the year poised for triumph in 2011.

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