Your company has a sustainability story to tell, but is everyone in your company telling the same story? In this SLM interview, branding expert Cheryl Heller highlights the dangers of a department-by-department approach to green communications and - offers tips for getting employees on the same page. (To listen to our conversation with Cheryl, click here.)

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SLM: Cheryl, your branding firm, Heller Communication Design, takes an architectural or design-oriented approach to corporate communications, building a company's various programs and messages into a single, integrated brand strategy. That sounds pretty daunting – how do you go about it?

Cheryl: As we became more involved and passionate about sustainability we started thinking about how the principles of sustainability can be applied to communications as well as operations. We start by looking at all of a company’s communications as one single system, not unlike an ecosystem in nature. This allows us to see the redundancies and inefficiencies, and demonstrate how people within the organization can actually be working at cross purposes within the same organization. It also allows us to distill all the complexity into a simple, truthful statement about what the company does, how it’s different and what it stands for. That’s the only way to inspire the kinds of alignment of goals and shared purpose that lead to innovation and sustainable growth.

For example, we're currently working with one of the largest corporations in Central America, helping them integrate sixteen different business units around a common brand promise, to align their behavior, inform their decisions and help them grow.  We're helping these formerly separate companies, in different countries in many cases, agree on the most important aspects of what they offer, their common values, and shared commitments to environmental stewardship. It's our job to distill all a company does and all that it stands for into a single brand promise, and then articulate that - through words, images and programs - in a way that gets everyone excited enough to make it even more true.

SLM: Is that a common problem - various departments or business units all spinning their company's values and sustainability efforts in different ways?

Cheryl: It is. That's not to imply that there's an effort to misrepresent the truth; it's just what happens when people working in silos have different agendas because their success is measured on different metrics and different results. Everybody tells a slightly different story. In addition, ironically, many corporate sustainability initiatives remain under the radar because they’re limited to a single department, business unit, or the company’s Foundation. A lot of times you'll find that corporations are doing really great things but they lack the ability to communicate because nobody knows how to tell the story simply and powerfully. They can’t see themselves clearly anymore, don’t know how they are really unique from their competitors, and have not made sense of all the activities, strengths, values, metrics, vision, etc.  Most often, they have also lost the ability to communicate in a meaningful way to their own employees. That, in the transparent world in which we live, is the key to it all.

SLM: Is it ever a good thing to tailor your message depending on whom you’re targeting? What about the old saw "consider the audience"?

Cheryl: The core truth is the brand promise - how a company is different, and what it is committed to delivering to all of its stakeholders. When done well, the brand promise is inclusive enough to be relevant to every audience, and specific and inspiring enough to garner their support. For example, Ritz Carlton's brand promise is "Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentleman." I love that because it tells you everything - what the company’s values are, who its customers are, and what’s unique about how business gets done between them. That's the constant. To the financial community and shareholders that brand promise says that the Ritz serves a well-heeled, affluent consumer. To potential employees, it says what will be expected of them, and how they can expect to be treated. To guests, it implies a particular kind of experience based on civility and a certain level of taste. Same brand promise, but each audience can see their own needs in it.. It's not putting a spin on the message so much as delivering it in a relevant way.

The key to successful communications, in the end, is telling the truth. We believe that corporations have much to learn from the natural world, specifically natural selection. In nature, there is no faking it. There is no hiding or ignoring dysfunctional behavior. There is no energy to spare, and every bit of an ecosystem has to work seamlessly together, or it doesn’t work at all. Companies need to know that. We use communication to help them get there.

To learn more about Cheryl’s design-oriented approach to sustainability communications, register now for Sustainable Brands ’08!