SUSTAINABLE BRAND

Building a sustainable brand from the start is crucial for success and recognition after

Iulia Pirvu
Studio Visite
Published in
5 min readJun 13, 2023

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As sustainability becomes a mission for all of us, we propose discussing the importance of building a well-defined sustainable brand for your business right from the start. To explore this topic, we invited Helena Sustar Ph.D., to share her experience as a sustainability consultant and founder of Habitania Institute.

A wise start is to ask “Why?”

During the past five years, while establishing my sustainability consultancy — I’ve been working on numerous company cases and service redesign projects that reinforced the notion of how crucial it is to start by building a well-defined brand to encapsulate the essence of a startup or business.

Where to start with building a brand?

Contrary to popular belief, which limits the concept of “a brand” to “the visual representation of the brand”, you don’t have a concise and durable approach regarding your brand if you don’t start by clearly outlining objectives and strategies.

The key questions you need to answer to start the process of defining your brand

From people to the planet — our framework starts with the people you serve as a brand, goes through mission and vision, and finally brings everything together by setting your sustainability-related purpose.

→ People: Who do we want to reach?

→ Mission: What our future looks like?

→ Vision: How are we going to get there?

→ Purpose: Why is this important?

Case study: the framework in action

Let’s look at the case of a startup we’ve been recently working on. We’ll break down the process into four stages: Current situation, Assessment, Co-creation, and Implementation.

The analyzed start-up uses up-to-date technology and recycled materials to produce limited-edition products in the entertainment industry.

The brand’s core values reflect circular economy principles. They are committed to our planet, believe in people’s skills, trust, and creativity, and are driven by science-based innovation.

Their entire business model is based on circular economy principles, offering sustainable products and services made of sustainable materials supplied by trustworthy stakeholders. So, we could say that sustainability principles are dispersed across all levels of the company’s segments.

Current situation

The start-up demonstrates strong knowledge and expertise with its products and services development process and, most importantly, shows a great passion for its work, mission, and sustainability. All decisions, big or small, have the sustainability factor taken into account. For example, their website is built on a hosting platform with low digital carbon emissions.

The company is exploring new markets by experimenting with various sales channels and unique to-industry service offerings to identify the most cost-effective and impactful circular business model.

The Company’s recognized challenge: The company’s goal is to improve its brand recognition while communicating its significant environmental and societal impact.

The assessment

In this step, we look at the start-up’s sustainable/circular practices already put in place and identify challenges and opportunities for short and long-term sustainable development.

To kick off this process, we use a tool designed for this purpose — the online sustainability assessment questionnaire, followed up with interviews with the start-up owners. Furthermore, we use various service design tools like circular business models and open discussions with different customer target groups to have an overview of their business practices.

The initial assessment revealed the following challenges:

  • brand inconsistencies across their touchpoints and online presence
  • unclear structure of their service offering and sales channels
  • weak communication strategy toward their end customers, investors, and potential collaborators

The solution

To answer these challenges discovered during the assessment, we have proposed a 3-point solution, as described below:

1 - Creating a holistic, sustainable brand

Achieving brand clarity and coherence would demonstrate a higher level of brand focus and transparency and reflect better on the brand competence and expertise. Also, addressing this issue is paramount for answering the company’s goal of building trust and strong brand recognition.

This phase starts with a set of co-creative workshops involving the start-up members to craft the company’s mission, vision, values, and purpose. This will be then followed by the development phase when the strategy is translated into tangible brand assets.

2 - Crafting a clear value proposition offer

The start-up was initially considering four different ways of offering its products/services. Our task was to identify a sales model that aligns with customer needs, supports brand focus on circularity, and is the most cost-effective at the end of the day. To achieve these goals, we started to discuss with various potential customer groups and created three customer profiles. We wanted to understand their lifestyle, values, and needs, and use these findings to design the sales channels. Then, we created for each profile a journey map, demonstrating how the customer will use a particular sales channel to reach the start-up’s product/service.

3 - Communicating sustainability targets and commitments

The start-up’s mission in terms of communicating its sustainability has three main pillars: first, towards end consumers, so they are informed about the circularity of the products and services through sustainable sales channels; second, towards investors, to prove its sustainability roadmap; and finally, to demonstrate compliance with SME’s sustainability regulations. To answer these three objectives, we prepared a sustainability communication strategy. During the workshop, we co-created the brand’s sustainability story, outlined clear communication objectives, and defined the audience, the key messages, and the channels to deliver those messages. Finally, we offered the start-up tools for implementing and tracking the progress of its sustainability communication strategy.

Conclusions — Why is it essential to have a clear brand structure from the start?

  1. Defining a core brand strategy at the beginning sets a structure for other company decisions, consolidating your choices as a brand, and outlining a clear focus in building the experience you want to deliver.
  2. The branding process helps create clear messaging for investors, stakeholders, and customers — stating clear brand values, ethics, and objectives.
  3. Connecting the branding and the sustainability strategies empowers you to create a brand that is more durable, deeply rooted in meaning, transparent, and committed to its mission.

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Iulia Pirvu
Studio Visite

I’m a brand strategist passionate about sustainability and innovation.