A Focus on Transparency at GreenBiz Forum 2014

Phoenix played host to the GreenBiz Forum 2014 last week and there were some truly interesting perspectives on objectives and approaches in green business marketing.

Participants openly debated many topics directly related, and tangential to, sustainability... Is corporate social responsibility all it’s cracked up to be? Are consumers engaging with, or recoiling from, aggressive humanitarian marketing? What about green business as a whole?

Themes of openness and accountability were pervasive throughout the conference. Actress Jessica Alba, one of the event’s headliners, and co-founder of the Honest Co., a company that curates organic and eco-friendly products for children, stated:

“Let’s educate and comfort the world and show them the authentic reality of a business, one that is incredibly transparent.”

In other words, consumers want to know exactly what makes a firm environmentally-friendly. And while we appreciate hard facts, most of us actually relate to feelings, expressed through authentic stories, that demonstrate a company's unwavering commitment. Similarly, consumers like having numbers if they need them -- but hate being forced to dig through mountains of data or jump through hoops just to find information that should be front and center... Specifically, what constitutes the “green”-ness of a product or business in the first place!

Indeed, LEED has evolved past "can contribute to LEED points" when referring to building products, to a new level of transparency requiring environmental product declarations (EPDs) and lifecycle assessments (LCAs) for products used in LEED buildings.

Also present at the Forum, Anne Kelly, the director of public policy at Ceres, a nonprofit business sustainability advocate, described how internal and external communications pertaining to sustainability need to flow openly in all directions to ensure that everyone knows what a company's true objectives are. This is a key point, not only for any business operating in the green space, but also building design and construction professionals involved in green building projects where there can be a significant number of different stakeholders involved.

What’s more, public/private partnerships (PPPs) were encouraged wherever they make sense. Naturally, if there are for-profit, non-profit and governmental factions that can collaborate effectively in a way that are beneficial to all parties, they there’s little reason to shy away. However, such collaboration needs to be transparent and well communicated to external stakeholders in order for full value to be achieved.

In the end, the message regarding openness was clear: consumers are demanding transparency like never before and the companies that most efficiently satisfy the demand for honest information are those who will most thrive.