Fishburn Hedges

30.04.2008

On 1 May 2008, Fishburn Hedges held a seminar on “What’s Next for Sustainability” in the light of the credit crunch.   The guest speakers were Stephen Hale, Director of the Green Alliance , Ben Page, Managing Director of IPSOS MORI Public Affairs and Michael Rae, Chief Operating Officer of the Carbon Trust.

Here, Anthony Perret, head of Corporate Responsibility at Fishburn Hedges gives his personal view.

What’s next for sustainability?

There’s a growing chorus that the credit crunch means the end of Corporate Responsibility and the death of the green consumer.  In fact, we are more likely to see a flight to quality, and good thing too.  But there will also be less.

There is still too much CR that is in the ‘me too’ school of communications and too much that is driven by a desire for headlines rather than impact. Over the next twelve months, at least, value for money will be more important, investment harder to come by and budgets across the board under pressure. And not just for sustainability initiatives.

Corporate Social Opportunity ?

CR has drifted into being an outpost of corporate communications. Harder finances will mean turning responsibility into opportunity.  That might be by using CR to build trust in the brand.  It might be by developing new products to meet the changing demands of “ethical consumerism”.  Hence, CR will increasingly become part of the business, rather than a communication from it.

CR heads will increasingly have to ensure that their programmes have a better business fit and a greater focus on business impacts, rather than column inches.  This will mean more alignment with the business objectives and less with the wider CR community as a whole.

For instance, while climate change has been the strongest single issue to drive the debate on sustainability, the debate may now need to go beyond environment issues, to social ones too.  The biofuels backlash is perhaps early evidence of this. 

Reasons to be cheerful

Several reasons to be bullish about the prospects for social responsibility have been laid out in CR press:

- CR saves you money, especially in a time of increasing energy prices

- The war for talent is more important in a downturn, as is the war for customers

- The threat of legislation still looms (though perhaps a little less), and voluntary CR is a cheaper and more flexible way of avoiding it

- Public commitments made in the good times will be hard to renege on – NGOs won’t be turning off their antennae because the banks are having a hard time

- Downturns lead to less business, which leads to less resources and emissions (inevitably a US view)

What’s next for sustainability?

To a degree, though, the CR press may be preaching to the choir.  In reality, progress is unlikely to be as quick as that and what we’re likely to see in the next few years is:

- From corporates: less leadership, less communications, and more focus on implementation as companies struggle to reach their public commitments to be carbon neutral and zero waste

- From Government: less leadership. Though we will still see the threat of regulation and ‘voluntary’ agreements on popular (or populist) issues

- From campaigners: a return to more aggressive tactics, as nuclear power gains political ground, GM is back on the agenda and less leadership elsewhere slows progress.

A stronger focus on social issues will be driven by abject failure on the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals on world poverty and the credit crunch trickle-down hitting the poorest, increasing the importance of social entrepreneurship, opening new markets, in people and products.

At the same time, greater competition to own the solutions will mean less sharing and transparency, more exclusivity and commercial confidentiality. While oil prices stay over $100 a barrel, sustainability will be measured as an income stream, not a reputation audit.

CRedit CRunch

Changing political priorities, and potentially political leadership, are hitting the green focus and reducing the impetus behind behaviour change campaigns. It would take a brave government indeed to push more green taxes on struggling businesses at this stage, or more regulation, even if that was what it wanted to do.

This, combined with the increasingly crowded public debate on climate change and a creeping uncertainty about how some of the promises that have been made will be kept, could mean there will be less demand for CR consultants as it becomes more main stream.

That said, though we may be heading for a period of consolidation, the phenomenon of a wider social responsibility from businesses has been through peaks and troughs before.  The underlying trend, though, has been upwards for over thirty years, and it will continue at least until a bigger shock than tighter credit markets.