How do you take your coffee? Black, white … or green?

A com­pa­ny, as rule, sits at the cen­tre of its own uni­verse. It’s not that the firm’s exter­nal stake­hold­ers don’t mat­ter, but it does tend to hold them at a dis­tance, like plan­ets orbit­ing a sun. Yet, when it comes to sus­tain­abil­i­ty, the cor­po­rate solar sys­tem is much small­er and inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed. When busi­ness A sneezes, com­mu­ni­ty B catch­es a cold, sup­pli­er C trips up and riv­er D cops it. 

Clos­ing the arti­fi­cial space that busi­ness­es have placed between them­selves and all oth­er inter­ests is vital for the future of both cap­i­tal­ism and the plan­et. So says Mas­si­m­il­iano Pogliani, CEO of Ital­ian cof­fee brand Illy­caf­fè. 

As he puts it: “We must reduce this war between com­pa­nies and us, because we are all liv­ing in the same sit­u­a­tion.”

Consumer connections

In brand-speak, “us” trans­lates to all con­sumers. It’s no sur­prise that such a view should come from some­one who’s steeped in mar­ket­ing. Pogliani was chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer and then CEO at both lux­u­ry phone brand Ver­tu and Nestlé Super Pre­mi­um before tak­ing the helm at Illy in 2016. 

Pogliani is high­ly attuned to glob­al con­sumer trends and knows very well that pub­lic atti­tudes are chang­ing, espe­cial­ly when it comes to the impact of com­merce on the envi­ron­ment. Fur­ther­more, he’s observed that younger con­sumers in par­tic­u­lar are becom­ing increas­ing­ly pre­pared to change their own behav­iour to pro­tect the plan­et. 

“They are not only look­ing at what com­pa­nies are doing; they are also look­ing at them­selves,” he says. 

This grow­ing con­sumer inter­est in cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty prac­tices is impor­tant for at least two rea­sons. The first is that pro­tect­ing threat­ened forestry, say, or mon­i­tor­ing sup­pli­ers’ envi­ron­men­tal stan­dards (two ele­ments of Illy’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty pro­gramme) come at a cost – one that’s typ­i­cal­ly passed on to con­sumers.

Pogliani doesn’t put it quite that blunt­ly. He knows that, while some shop­pers might pay the so-called green pre­mi­um, most will not. Instead, he prefers to wrap Illy’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty com­mit­ments around a wider qual­i­ty propo­si­tion. 

“We talk about qual­i­ty in the broad­est sense here,” Pogliani explains. “We refer to the qual­i­ty of our prod­uct in terms of its taste, of course, but we also embed its social and envi­ron­men­tal attrib­ut­es.”

The sec­ond rea­son why con­sumers’ inter­est in sus­tain­abil­i­ty is impor­tant is that the suc­cess of a firm’s work in this field depends on the extent to which it engages them. That’s because the so-called use phase is where a brand leaves much of its envi­ron­men­tal foot­print. 

Take Illy, for instance. The com­pa­ny plans to become car­bon neu­tral in time for its cen­te­nary in 2033, which will require it to adopt sev­er­al ener­gy-effi­cien­cy mea­sures. Yet, if mil­lions of its cus­tomers were still in the habit of boil­ing a full ket­tle to make a sin­gle cup of cof­fee at that point, that would ren­der Illy’s efforts large­ly mean­ing­less. 

With this risk in mind, the brand recent­ly start­ed a con­sumer-focused mar­ket­ing cam­paign called ‘One makes the dif­fer­ence’. The idea this con­veys is that any­one can advance the sus­tain­abil­i­ty cause, whether they’re the head of a mul­ti­mil­lion-euro busi­ness – Illy turned over near­ly €447m (£379m) last year – or an espres­so-lov­ing home­work­er in Turin.

‘Story-doing’

But the task of per­suad­ing con­sumers to get on board and help a brand become more sus­tain­able is not easy, as Pogliani read­i­ly admits. For one thing, scep­ti­cism is rife, as not all brands are sin­cere about their ambi­tions. As pub­lic inter­est in envi­ron­men­tal issues has shot up, so too have inci­dents of green­wash­ing. 

It’s there­fore vital for brands to not only keep their sus­tain­abil­i­ty promis­es but also pro­vide sol­id evi­dence that they have done so. Pogliani’s term for this is “sto­ry-doing. What’s impor­tant is that every­thing you say and do is authen­tic – and that you can prove this to con­sumers.” 

He points to the sus­tain­abil­i­ty efforts that Illy made and pub­li­cised long before the term was “fash­ion­able”. As far back as 1999, it was exper­i­ment­ing with more water-effi­cient cul­ti­va­tion and pro­cess­ing tech­niques. More recent­ly, it suc­cess­ful­ly applied to become a B Cor­po­ra­tion. 

To achieve B Corp sta­tus – the wide­ly respect­ed mark of a pro­gres­sive busi­ness – Illy had to let its man­age­ment prac­tices be “scru­ti­nised under a mag­ni­fy­ing glass”, accord­ing to Pogliani. He advis­es oth­er brands not to wait until they have attained a qual­i­ty stan­dard before engag­ing with con­sumers on sus­tain­abil­i­ty issues, per­haps for fear of appear­ing hyp­o­crit­i­cal. The best time to start is now, he argues. 

For its part, Illy pub­lish­es updates about its activ­i­ties on its web­site and pro­vides sim­i­lar infor­ma­tion on pack­ag­ing and in its print and broad­cast adver­tis­ing. Despite the company’s efforts to be trans­par­ent, Pogliani rue­ful­ly notes the pub­lic reac­tion to its attain­ment of B Corp sta­tus in April. 

“Many con­sumers got in touch not only to con­grat­u­late us but also to say: ‘Oh, we nev­er knew you were doing this,’” he says.

Two-way dialogue

This high­lights the impor­tance of per­spec­tive. A com­pa­ny-cen­tric view makes an inac­cu­rate assump­tion that a brand’s path towards sus­tain­abil­i­ty is lin­ear and that every con­sumer is equal­ly inter­est­ed in its progress. Illy saw a 39% increase in online sales dur­ing 2020. As wel­come as this growth was, it inevitably intro­duced a large num­ber of new cus­tomers who would have known next to noth­ing about the firm’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty efforts. 

An accep­tance that your brand is but one part of a com­plex, inter­con­nect­ed ecosys­tem will influ­ence how you com­mu­ni­cate with con­sumers. For one thing, your inter­ac­tions will become more of a two-way dia­logue. Social media has played an instru­men­tal role in this trend. Pogliani reports that Illy has made a con­cert­ed effort in recent years to be more respon­sive on net­works such as Twit­ter and Insta­gram.

This takes “a lot of work”, he says. “We’re try­ing to inter­act with peo­ple not only in our lan­guage, but also in Eng­lish, French, Ger­man and Span­ish. It requires con­sid­er­able co-ordi­na­tion across bor­ders.”  

Ensur­ing that cus­tomer-fac­ing employ­ees on the front line are also pre­pared to engage effec­tive­ly is sim­i­lar­ly impor­tant. This can be a tall order for a firm that relies heav­i­ly on cafés, restau­rants and oth­er inter­me­di­aries, admits Pogliani, who adds that Illy must keep giv­ing them the right infor­ma­tion about its prod­uct to pass on to their cus­tomers. 

This illus­trates that one brand can­not spread its sus­tain­abil­i­ty mes­sage effec­tive­ly in a vac­u­um – close col­lab­o­ra­tion between busi­ness­es on this issue makes sense. The corol­lary is that con­sumers need to be encour­aged to con­sid­er their wider con­tri­bu­tion to sus­tain­abil­i­ty, not just the envi­ron­men­tal foot­print of their morn­ing mac­chi­atos. 

Pogliani is opti­mistic that this will hap­pen. The increas­ing con­cern among con­sumers for sus­tain­abil­i­ty issues is “very pos­i­tive”, he says. “We have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to ampli­fy this and become part of a grow­ing move­ment.”