How do you become a sustainability trailblazer?

My colleague Sally Tarbit has been in the press recently talking about what brands can learn from the fashion industry when it comes to sustainability.

This got me thinking back to work we did 15 years ago with M&S. First to bring the now famous Plan A to life inside their business, and then to breathe more life into their Shwopping campaign.

Captain Energy was our first foray into work with M&S. He helped M&S smash their targets when it came to energy reduction through the efforts of employees. When it came to achieving that goal, M&S needed the commitment of all its people. So how did we help?

As our executive creative director David Recchia says, “we looked at the data we could, and we could see that the more communicators told people about how important it was to ‘save the planet’, the less engaged they seemed to become. We then came to a conclusion. The simple human truth was that people needed less information that made them feel helpless and more entertaining information that helped them act.”

Captain Energy was an imperfect super-hero. He was an Everyman storyteller, and he simplified the messages, making them easy to understand. And because he was like you and I, he made the information less daunting and provided M&S staff with simple steps to follow.

As The Guardian pointed out at the time, the work M&S put in helped cut energy consumption by 23%.

But it was with Schwopping that we moved into the field of fashion and sustainability.

The M&S Shwop campaign began as an internal CSR initiative that later progressed to become their biggest non-product campaign rolled out to M&S customers.

The idea was simple: staff and customers donate their unwanted clothes, which are then sold in Oxfam shops, shipped to Africa for resale in local markets, or recycled to support the environment. 

Internally there had been a big push for staff to take part twice a year. In 2014 there was particular emphasis on staff participation as the UK government had pledged to double any donations made. 

But in the preceding years, awareness around shwopping had petered out a little. This is where we came in. 

We helped the M&S internal communications team trigger the emotional connection between shwopping and its beneficiaries.

What we discovered from our research with staff was simple. People wanted to see what their money was doing. We translated that into an engaging campaign idea. 

Once all the stats are collected, it’s amazing to see just how valuable one sack of clothing can be.

For example, one Shwop sack could pay for equipment and seeds to feed an entire family, improving their diet and income.

When messages like this get portrayed through upbeat, bright and colourful posters, with quick and easy-to-digest information on how to get involved, you’ve got some compelling communications. 

The lessons for internal communicators

We’d draw your attention to three things:

  1. Listen to the data and take your creative inspiration from that. In the case of Captain Energy, we recognised that what appeared to be the most compelling messages were in fact creating barriers. Never create campaign ideas from your perspective. Create them from the perspective of your intended audience. We needed to chunk down the message into smaller and achievable goals. This is something our applied behavioural scientist Mark Hauser has explored in his latest blog series on sustainability. As he says, “Celebrate small actions while keeping the bigger picture in view.”
  2. Give people meaningful actions and measures and introduce friendly competition. If you’re committed to reducing your impact on the environment then identify all the simple steps people can take, from closing fridge units to powering up stores at the last moment. And publish the results. That transparency is probably going to be your biggest challenge when it comes to discussions with the leadership, but without transparency meaningful change gets hamstrung.
  3. Where appropriate, entertain people. Serious subjects need to tap into a level of humour. And by humour, we go back to the original meaning of the word: tap into the mood of the time. Shwopping worked because we were able to show the simple magic that came from donating unwanted clothes and turning that cash value into something that would make a difference. The mood music was simple: people wanted to see the impact of their actions.

There’s so many more lessons to share, and if you want to talk more about how we create internal campaigns, then just drop us a line.