Sustainable design often has a bad rep. For many, it's synonymous with beige, blandified branding that fades into the background, but that's far from the truth. For Anna Öhrling, co-founder and CEO of creative impact agency Onward, sustainability belongs at the heart of strategy.
To learn more about building authentic eco design, I caught up with Anna to discuss the brands that are nailing it, the cause of the current beige plague, and the value of credibility in practice. If you missed it, check out my recent 5 Questions with Anna Öhrling to hear more about her insight into building brands with purpose.
Why does sustainability so often resort to beige design?
Beige sustainable design is the forgettable, bland, cringe sustainability design each of us has seen. Slapping on all the shades of green. Random leaves added to a logo. A recycling triangle thrown in. Maybe a water drop hanging about.
I believe this phenomenon exists because it's a shortcut to saying something you’re doing is sustainable. But shortcuts are also lazy and can harm your brand. And in fact, with more stringent regulation, it could result in classing your design as greenwashing with commercial implications.
This happens for three main reasons: lack of experience, as sustainability is unfamiliar territory to a lot of brand teams; lack of a clear sustainability strategy; and a lack of communication skills, as sustainability often sits outside of the day-to-day world of the brand.
Brand teams, who live and breathe creativity, are often given a set of claims from their sustainability teams, who live and breathe technicality, and told to stick with the claims. With a lack of experience and a lack of strategy, that’s what they do – and voila, we have beige sustainability design and comms.
Can you give me an example of sustainable design done well and what makes it successful?
I’ve got three that are important for different reasons.
For a disruptive brand: Norrsken’s Open letter on electrification to the EU. To get people to notice their open letter for the electrification of Europe’s energy supply, their rally cry is: Make Europe the Electro Union. And this has opened up a whole brand world for them, tapping into Europe’s rich electro and cultural scene for their design. It all holds beautifully together. If you’d heard the words EU, renewable energy, open letter and VC – I bet you would have imagined something pretty beige.
Instead, the result is a sharable GIF heavy design world, building a mental link between electrification and the world of electro as the symbol of it. The cut-through of their letter has driven signatures from the likes of H&M and Oatly to name a few.
For a mass brand: Decathlon’s No Tent Left Behind. Decathlon has an impressive commitment to integrating circularity into its business model, with a focus on resale and recycling. But they recognised that this, on its own, is unlikely to get people excited or get them to notice. So, with festival season approaching a few years back, they saw an opportunity. Many young people need a tent for the season, but they don’t have the space to store them once the season is over. Which means a lot of people end up leaving their tents behind in fields or throwing them away.
So Decathlon saw an opportunity – to sell tents with the promise of buying them back from their consumers for recycling or resale at the end of the season. And to get this message to land, they designed a brand world for the campaign: No Tent Left Behind. It builds the Decathlon brand, whilst having its own identity that would speak to this specific audience.
For a born good brand: WWF’s Instagram page. To cut through on Instagram, they’ve recognised the need to break out of the beige of most NGO sustainability comms, and embraced the beauty and variety of the natural world. And the design simply sings. What an ode to the beauty of the natural world. You can feel the beauty of the world radiate from your screen.
Why is sustainability such an important consideration when it comes to brand strategy?
The world currently feels uncertain, untrustworthy and short-termist. I believe sustainability counters those heavy, anxious concerns. It is a brand’s opportunity to counter those anxieties. To tell the world that you’re a brand that can be trusted. And in today’s world, that’s gold.
But trust is hard to build and quick to break. So this only works if you’ve got something worth saying, if you’re willing to be transparent about impact and willing to put in the time to translate your sustainability investments into consumer benefits.
What does the current climate of sustainable branding get wrong?
Most brands forget to think about what the benefit of their sustainability action is to the consumer. They make a claim, and then stop. Which is mad – it misses the 101 of marketing.
In the same way that if you went on a date with someone and they’d spend the whole time bragging about things they’ve achieved, patting themselves on the back, you’d probably say ‘no thanks’. The role for brand teams is to think about what benefit your actions have on the consumer, the person sitting opposite you at dinner. Does it make your product experience better for them? Does it give them a way to look good in front of their people? Does it make it literally experience the product in a different way?
How should brands pivot to make sustainable design that engages audiences?
Give it a role. The due diligence to work out your sustainability strategy for your brand.
Treat sustainable design with the same respect you would your brand design in terms of process, resource and ambition, whilst appreciating that you need to play by somewhat different rules to comply with greenwashing regulations and consumer expectations.
Find the people who can bridge the world of your brand and the world of sustainability – who get it – and hold on to them. There aren’t many out there.
How do brands avoid greenwashing and create authenticity?
I think a good starting point is to make sure anything you communicate is credible. We use the credibility compass at Onward to ensure work is credible, and steering clear of greenwashing. You can download the compass for free on our website.
If you can’t confidently say that your actions are credible, then our advice would most likely be to avoid communicating about it. Focus instead on identifying specific areas which have the most potential for your brand – something like water scarcity in local communities - and invest in making a difference and measuring the impact of your work. That’s the moment at which you should then think, ‘How do I make this famous’?
Once you have creative concepts, flow the work through greenwash checks – both human and AI – before you enter production or design.
Anything else to add?
There’s a misconception that sustainability is somehow out of touch with today’s consumers. That it somehow is reminiscent of more optimistic times, that it’s too far removed from the day-to-day struggles of people, that it’s naive to communicate about. This is so far removed from the truth of what people are actually asking for. They’re asking for brands to be more useful, more aligned with their values and to take action. Just look at the Decathlon example – their brand is booming, because they’re not communicating about sustainability for sustainability’s sake. They found a way to make a circular marketing innovation a benefit to their consumers, their business and the planet.
At Onward, we believe here is such potential for brands to grow trust, relevance and memorability through sustainability. They just need to grab it.
