DO NOT MISS This Rare Opportunity to Roll Up Your Sleeves and Dig In with the Experts!
WORKSHOPS
Inspiring Sustainability in Skeptical Audiences
Are you struggling with a lack of enthusiasm or support for your sustainability projects? In this invigorating, hands-on workshop you will finally learn how to rally even the most difficult stakeholders toward your cause. Instructor John Marshall Roberts, author of a new book on the subject, will lead you step-by-step through the Transformational Design(tm) process, a new communication design framework built upon seminar research of psychologist Claire W. Graves. A seamless blend of systems theory, psychology, and common sense, this new paradigm will give you unprecedented insight into how to win over the cynical mind.
Topics covered will include:
* The four faces of environmental cynicism and how to engage them
* How to frame sustainability messages to create a sense of personal urgency in skeptical listeners
* How to leverage authenticity for enhanced trust and inspirational potency
* The art of 'scaled messaging' for reaching complex audiences, and more!
If you are truly ready to take your sustainability leadership to the next level, this workshop is for you. With these cutting-edge communication tools at your fingertips, you will be able to overcome mental resistance in any audience, and systematically transform your good intentions into sustainable, real-world results.
Futureproof your business: Understanding business strategy in the face of ecological limits
Climate Change, water scarcity, food prices… What in the world is going on? How do all of these trends relate to one another? How might these trends shape the future for your company, industry and the markets you sell into? Trends from biodiversity loss to fisheries collapse are all symptoms of "ecological overshoot", the fact that humanity uses more than the planet can provide. In fact, Ecological Footprint analysis reveals that we currently use resources 40% faster than nature regenerates them, which is already profoundly impacting companies, customers, prices, and markets. Please join us for a highly interactive workshop where we will present a framework for understanding these trends, and using a highly interactive process, explore future scenarios and their implications for you and your company. You will leave the workshop with greater insight into how to position your company for success.
Preserving Brand Equity when Acquiring a Sustainable Business
Consumers support brands they trust. Trust can be eroded when sustainable brands sell. How can acquirers preserve the goodwill they've just bought? Sustainable businesses often feel between a rock and a hard place: they want to scale, and need capital or strategic partners to do so, but they don't want to lose control of their mission. How can sustainable businesses preserve authenticity without independence?
Hear from investors and entrepreneurs at different stages of the sustainable business life cycle as they discuss their experiences growing and investing in sustainable businesses so their sustainability is built to last.
Proposed Panelists Include:
- Gigi Lee Chang, CEO of Plum Organics, talks about her recent sale to venture-backed Nest Collective.
- Joe Glorfield, GP of TBL Capital, talked about recent investments in Numi Organic Tea and Clean Fish.
- Adam Lowry, Co Founder of Method, talks about preparing for future liquidity.
Green Marketing and Eco-Innovation: Strategies for Success
Come to this workshop and learn from the master how to develop and sell greener products that consumers want. The real secret to winning at the Green Marketing game is to start by developing truly greener products in the first place. Oftentimes, that means more than a tweak so a product will more energy efficient, recyclable or even compostable. It means first “eco-innovating”— developing innovative new product concepts or business models that create a win-win for manufacturer or service provider and consumer—better products, affordable and credible. Then one needs good green marketing—marketing that is transparent, engaging, and educates the consumer without a hint of greenwash.
To help you understand the finer points of both eco-innovation and green marketing, we have enlisted the nation’s foremost expert on both topics, Jacquelyn A. Ottman. Ottman is the author of Green Marketing: Opportunity for Innovation, 2nd edition (now going into its third edition), and in her 20 years of exclusive experience in green marketing, she’s consulted to nearly every star in the green marketing world including Energy Star, Nike, 3M, IBM, and GE.
This session will be highly interactive, fun, and engaging. Every participant will receive a handout of all key points, and will be able to address many of their own green marketing and eco-innovation challenges.
Envisioning a Future for Sustainable Brands: A Scenario Workshop
As the global financial crisis evolves, will sustainability remain both a priority and a growth opportunity or will it be displaced by urgent issues and short-term fixes? On the other side of the crisis, will sustainability be "playing catch up" or will it emerge as an even more fundamental imperative, serving to rapidly accelerate opportunities for those organizations that continued to invest in sustainable assets and capabilities? Although we can't predict the future we can imagine and prepare for the different paths that might unfold. Join Monitor's Global Business Network for an interactive scenario workshop on the future of sustainable brands. A world leader in the development and evolution of scenario planning, GBN helps companies, governments and nonprofits to adapt and grow in an increasingly uncertain and volatile world. In this half-day session, led by senior practitioner Olaf Groth, a leader of Monitor/GBN's West coast sustainability practice, you will use scenario tools to identify key uncertainties in the business environment, develop rapid fire scenarios, and then explore implications for sustainable brands in the coming decade.
Brand New World: Using your brand to create your future.
Einstein's belief that " The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we used when we created them" - is well known, but not well integrated into most businesses.
Creating a sustainable future will require new thinking and new ideas. This workshop combines key elements of the creative process with brand strategy, and demonstrates how companies can use their core strengths, ethics, character and current brand equity to build a bridge that will drive the behavior required to create a viable future.
Traditional definitions of brands constrain behavior and stultify innovation. The brands that flourish in the future will be co-created with everyone in the organization, and they will expand potential rather than diminish it. We will discuss a process and principles that will help you co-create your brand with your internal audience - inspiring the innovation necessary to deliver on its full potential.
We live in a world where traditional competitive advantages are no longer sustainable. Superior quality, lower price, faster to market, newer technologies, better service and distribution are benefits that competitors can mimic and leapfrog faster than ever, and alone, they are simply not reason enough for your brand to matter to customers in the long run.
This workshop is a first in using the creative process, the principles of sustainability and corporate citizenship to influence brand value and brand differentiation.
In this session we will explore:
o Using Brand Archeology to identify your core strengths and uniqueness
o How to write a brand promise that is relevant now and in the future
o How to create a unique brand promise by embedding corporate citizenship
o How to master the steps in the creative process and apply it to your brand strategy
o How to use your brand promise to inspire the behavior necessary to deliver on it
However you think about your brand now, you will leave this workshop thinking about its power and potential in a new way - one that will lead to a Brand New World.
Measuring Your Social Footprint
This workshop will begin with a brief summary of corporate sustainability management (CSM), measurement and reporting - what it is, and leading concepts, tools, and measurement methods. It will then introduce the Social Footprint Method, a compelling new approach to CSM that arguably takes sustainability reporting to the next level and operationalizes the triple bottom line.
- By the end of the workshop, attendees will learn:
- How to clearly differentiate between the concepts of 'green', 'eco-efficiency', and true 'sustainability'
- How leading sustainability measurement and reporting schemes compare and contrast with one another, including the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), carbon footprinting, and the Ecological Footprint
- How to raise the quality and rigor of sustainability measurement and reporting as a strategy for competitive (and marketing) advantage
- How to measure and report the social sustainability performance of an organization using the Social Footprint Method.
New Media for Sustainability
Supporting the theory of exploding consumer adoption of social media, research shows an astounding 93 percent of Americans who use social media expect their favorite brands to have a presence, too. However, creating a Facebook page or adding a widget is not going to cut it among today's tech-savvy consumers, or satisfy the skeptical stance of sustainability marketing efforts. Like any other communications efforts, a social media presence must have the right mix of strategy, messaging and audience in order to be a success. In this session, we'll explore the findings of the 2008 Business in Social Media Study, explain how the successful use of social media is firmly rooted in sound business objectives and marketing communication strategy and share highlights from successful environmentally-focused social media campaigns.
Detangling Environmental Attributes, Specifications and Certifications for Green Product Design and Branding
This workshop kids off with getting to know your consumer segment, guiding participant through answering the following questions:
- Who is your green customer?
- What are they looking for?
- What do different segments want?
- How you manage differing needs
This module is followed by helping you to understand your key impacts:
- What are the key environmental issues
- What are the relevant environmental impacts of your products
- How do different attributes deliver environmental benefits
- How do Lifecycle Assessments (LCA) help you make better environmental decisions
- What are the limitations of LCA?
Next you'll move into understanding attributes, specifications and certifications:
- Exploring attributes in detail
- Deciding if an attribute is relevant to your products
- Major purchasing specifications by B2! customer segment
- Major growth areas by consumer segment
Followed by modules on defining a certification strategy, green messaging, and finally implementation.
The NextPlays Lab: Designing Your Sustainable Business Strategy for the Short and Long Term
There are sound commercial reasons why businesses shouldn't just leave it to the "big boys" to behave in environmentally and socially responsible ways. Every company needs to differentiate itself from its competitors, and sustainability offers opportunities to do just that in new and exciting ways. It's not just about doing the right thing. It's also about stimulating innovation and using that to access previously unavailable market spaces. Sustainability is a real business opportunity, and leveraged correctly it can help you achieve real top line gains, reduce risks and increase vital intangibles such as reputation and brand.
Moxie Design Group, the leading Innovation Design consultancy in New Zealand who counts Coca-cola as one of its core clients, has developed a strategy game called NextPlays which uses a series of scenario cards to help companies think widely about the possibilities before them and work out where they're going. Managing sustainable business change boils down to a simple equation: the right action, at the right place, gets the best result. In this hands on workshop you'll "play" NextPlays and come away inspired and equipped with new ideas for growing your own sustainable business future.
Best Leadership Practices in Cross-sector Partnering
The purpose of this session is to explore experientially personal and interpersonal learning processes that enable collective leadership development in the context of cross-sector partnering. It will be primarily based on my experience in designing and co-leading programs to enhance true partnering and collective leadership capacity across sectors in developing and industrialized countries. Multi-sector collaboration offers unique challenges and opportunities for leaders to accelerate their own development, while contributing to societal learning and addressing some of the world's most intractable problems‚ such as hunger, poverty, and healthcare for all, and depletion of natural resources. Both presented materials and notes will be shared with the participants and the whole community.
