Branding for Sustainability - to overcome the communication bridge

One of the challenges experienced when we explained our venture Ignition, was that people either wanted to place it as a non-profit NGO, or just another "clothing brand". There was a "social consctruction" with hard-wired brains, fixed world-views and institutional barriers of thinking to overcome, where both prejudices and fear of the unknown and/or unidentified had to be challenged and defeated. The process is still there, and this entry is of course a part of getting more attention to this communication problem.

What we have done to help us out, is to talk about "Sustainability Branding" - meaning creating an identity for a line of offerings, collectively, that sparks the mission and intention behind the venture. In our case it is "sustainability profile clothings", where we offer merchandise and customized printwear/clothings/apparell to companies and organizations who wants to profile themselves as sustainable, in campaigns etc.

After an intense brand naming round, we landed at "Ignition".

We hope that we now can communicate with greater ease our sustainopreneurial venture with this move, also to develop a framework on a generic, abstract level, for these new "in-between" ventures.

In between for and not for profit.

In between commercial vs. non-commercial.

In between cash and cause.

With this, predominantly stakeholder value creation is in mind, where we define the ultimate stakeholders to be the People and the Planet.

Another way to dissolve this unneccesary either-or division is to talk about "for prosperity ventures".

It is viewed that branding is the easiest way to communicate this new land in between.

As a part of this conceptualization and popularization of these new ventures, I took part in the Brands with a Conscience committee last year, arranged by the International Think-Tank on Branding, with well known branding experts, authors and consultants, Medinge Group.

A related blog post dealing with this is found here, also presenting some of the winning cases Watabaran and First Mile Solutions;

Top Brands with a Conscience 2006