Sustainability:

Your next big innovation opportunity?

Confidential. © Seymour Powell Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.

Why ‘design’ for sustainabilityIn the past, innovation and design has been part of the problem – generating more ‘stuff’ to fuel ‘use-and-chuck’ lifestyles. But today, innovators and designers are increasingly part of the solution. They see that far from constraining design, sustainability offers a fantastic new set of creative levers – allowing us to think up entirely new ways of going about our lives, doing business, and of producing and consuming.

But how do you successfully innovate in this way ensuring you win from sustainability? We think it will increasingly be about great design. We lay out below three ways Seymourpowell is going about sustainable innovation, plus explain what you can get from doing so:

1. Sustainability in existing product and pack designIn work with clients we regularly have to manage and balance complex factors as part of a brief. That can be cost, aesthetics, new technology, manufacturability, and now add to that sustainability issues. Long-term sustainability targets to reduce carbon emissions and material use mean we literally have to add sustainability improvements to everything we design going forward.

Luckily this can make for better products or packaging design. Our Vaseline packaging redesign for Unilever delivered better functionality to consumers, clearer brand alignment across the range, plus a 3% material reduction and a move to a mono-material - saving carbon emissions, waste, costs and making it

With increasing pressure on the world’s resources – through a complex bundle of sustainability issues such as climate change, material scarcity, toxic pollution, population growth, and increased consumption - the need for new thinking and creative approaches is clearer than ever. CHRIS SHERWINHead of Sustainability at Seymourpowell

The good news is that businesses and brands are waking up to sustainability risks and opportunities, and increasingly starting to lead. Whereas such ‘sustainable business’ used to be driven by legal compliance, reducing risks, managing reputation or at best, cost reductions; sustainable business is now about innovation, entrepreneurship, growth and opportunity. And whereas companies previously used their quality or supply chain managers, legal, communications or PR departments, now they turn to their innovators.

Confidential. © Seymour Powell Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.

easier to recycle. These kinds of good design interventions, if implemented across a whole EU ‘circular’ economy could save an estimated $630bn in material costs by 2025, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

2. Build sustainability through brands“Sustainability builds brands” is what companies’ feedback as the main business benefit. BT famously calculated that 25% of customers purchasing drivers – plus the resultant brand value - were linked to its sustainability performance. It shows brands care, positioning them as modern, human, and in touch. This gives brands a higher purpose, which customers often relate to emotionally.

Brands can help sustainability too, with their ability to normalise new technology and behaviour. They can make sustainability ideas aspirational and meaningful, creating social movements. The M&S and Oxfam ‘Shwopping’ partnership to promote clothes recycling has saved an incredible 10 million garments from landfill since 2008. Coke recently launched ‘Ekocycle’, its sub-brand to promote recycling and increased take-up among young people. Put simply, brands can make new sustainable stuff cool, and the sustainability movement desperately needs a sprinkling of ‘brand stardust’ to move beyond doom-mongery and finger-wagging.

3. New and breakthrough innovation through sustainability Toyota’s pioneering Prius hybrid recently became the third best selling car in the world. Drink’s brand Innocent smoothies has captured 75% UK market share with a proposition based around health and sustainability. The Dyson air blade, the low-impact alternative to paper towel drying reported sales up 70% in its second year. There is strong evidence of the opportunities that completely new-to-the-world sustainable products and services present and this is one of the richest areas for innovators and designers.

Sales of ethical products in the UK have continued to grow at 8% over the past two years, even during the recession, and stand at a whopping £45bn. The Lifestyles Of Health

and Sustainability (LOHAS) segment in the US is estimated to feature over 40 million consumers. In Western Europe it makes up 15-25% of various countries population. Business spend on sustainable product development is growing at almost 20% annually while growth in clean and green technology investment is reported at 5% in a recessionary 2011.

Successful AND sustainableNeed any more convincing? Sustainability makes money AND sense. Yet it does take a mindset change and different set of skills to spot and act on this – and that’s about innovation and design. And even if the design community is not yet where sustainability leadership currently resides, it’s where it needs to be. It’s my own view that sustainability presents some of the biggest opportunities for innovation and great design the 21st century has to offer.

It falls to this generation of creative thinkers, innovators and designers to imagine a future world that we’d all like to live in – and then build it to last. Sustainability features what I believe are

It falls to this generation of creative thinkers, innovators and designers to imagine a future world that we’d all like to live in...

To find out more please contact Tim Duncan - tim.duncan@seymourpowell.com