After serving as business strategist for such heavy-hitters as Royal Dutch/Shell and Basell (a joint venture between Shell and BASF), Seetha Coleman-Kammula co-founded Simply Sustain, a management consulting firm that guides companies to be profitable by doing business in ways that benefit both the environment and society. We asked Seetha how sustainability leaders overcome organizational inertia and what's holding some companies back.

SLM: You sometimes hear claims that a particular product or service "practically sells itself." Is it possible to overstate the role of marketing and branding in business success?

Seetha: There are products that sell and then there are products that sell and sustain Earths resources and also nourish peoples health and psyche. Yes, there are very profitable products that practically sell themselves, but how many products do we have that sell on a large scale and sustain our eco-systems?

SLM: Branding is, at bottom, about positioning a business in society and community, and this is especially true of branding for sustainability. Not surprisingly, it's often difficult for companies to put the social/community aspect of branding into service of the bottom-line goal of making sales. Where do companies tend to run into trouble?

Seetha: Companies aiming to include social and environmental aspects into their products run into trouble on many fronts. Most businesses today work within the rules of a flawed economic system which demands relentless growth of shareholder value and share price this quarter or this year, not necessarily next year. Green products often take much longer to become profitable and grow enough to impact the bottom line. This means companies must maintain and resource existing (may be not so green) products and services while developing the new green products and brands. Doing both simultaneously puts tremendous strain on peoples time, on company resources such as capital and manufacturing assets etc. and often feeding existing business gets higher priority. Energy goes to the activities that get measured as indicators of whether people are delivering the expected results. Reward system follows measurement. If a company rewards financial success higher than brand success people will pay attention to financial success.

SLM: Let's talk a bit about organizational structure. Where does branding fit into the corporate hierarchy? Put another way, what's the ideal relationship between a company's top branding executives and its high-level strategists?

Seetha: Whether a company decides to brand its sustainability strategy and give it a name or not, it should be fully integrated into all functions of a business into manufacturing, marketing, sales, R&D and engineering so that sustainability becomes part of every conversation people have about product development, design, engineering etc. The best way to integrate it is to have sustainability leaders in side business units in line functions and NOT in a staff function or in a corporate group. Often people within business units see corporate people as disconnected from the realities in the trenches anyway, so keeping them separate creates an extra barrier to change. As to hierarchy the best way to give sustainability the right status is to make it a part of the job of an officer of the company so it gets into board room conversations and strategic decisions.

SLM: What role, if any, does the larger company culture play in branding and, more specifically, branding for sustainability? Isn't it just a matter of finding the right talent to staff that particular department?

Seetha: Culture is about beliefs and the unwritten rules that shape behavior and values in the whole company. Branding for sustainability requires that a company has a culture that values societal perceptions such as trust as much as scientific or financial facts. Branding requires a new literacy , to read and understand feelings and emotions of the human populace, its fears and aspirations. It is touchy feely and foreign particularly to companies that have strong analytical and numbers driven cultures. No, it is not simply a matter of hiring a few cultural anthropologists in to the sustainability group. It requires that people in all functions are sensitized to the need to develop and make trustworthy products not just competitive products.

SLM: As within any established organization, company employees often resist major changes in the way they work. How do you advise your clients to overcome this initial barrier?.

Seetha: Actually our experience shows that unlike past movements such as globalization which faced quite a bit of resistance, sustainability is engaging hearts and minds of employees. Many employees care about the environment, their kids future and their families or neighbors opinions about the company they work for. They have many insights about where waste can be reduced or products can be greened. So our advice is to engage employees in conversations about what sustainability means to them in the context of the work they do, take their insights and ideas as well as use a top down approach to this change.

SLM: How should a smart company go about encouraging its "change leaders" to keep up the good work?

Seetha: I want to say first what good work by a change leader looks like in this context. Work to change the dominant views held by most financial investors and analysts that the sole purpose of business is to provide short term returns to the shareholder has high leverage. Companies should encourage its change leaders by recognizing their courage in shaping these conversations. A company must be patient and forgiving if change for sustainability gets stuck, celebrate even small successes as nothing succeeds like success. Change leaders must get together with people working on sustainability from other companies and share stories of what worked and what did not work to learn and support each other.