Step 2: Ask your target groups
To anticipate and leave the desired impressions on different target groups it is crucial to build a strategy that caters to the needs of your target audience. The term sustainability offers a wide range of criteria and different playing fields for you and your colleagues to deal with. The question is: what are the most relevant sustainability aspects in your specific case? Do your customers tend to reward enhanced production processes or do they favour a low price and convenience?
Maybe it is not your customers that you want to convince but rather existing staff and future employees. In that case it may still be a good idea to implement sustainability standards in your production lines. In other cases it could be more important to improve employees’ everyday worklife. Healthier work conditions, child care and a subsidized job ticket are contributing to a sustainable business model as well. These human centric factors have become increasingly relevant to workers and influence their career decisions.
The analysis of your target groups’ needs and expectations does not only serve the purpose of collecting valuable information. It has another very important side effect: Asking your business partners or staff for their personal perspectives shows them that you care. Unfortunately some employers hesitate to start such an initiative due to worries about unwelcome discussions and high expectations that can’t be fullfilled.
However, while these thoughts may be warranted in some cases, the chance is high that sustainability focused discussions and expectations already exist in the first place. Target groups might be thirsting to see a centralized effort of addressing glaring issues and important topics. Taking the lead in these types of conversations instead of avoiding and ignoring them offers the great chance to channel expectations and moderate between different opinion leaders and stakeholders. Many employees and customers will value the employers interest in them, even if their specific expectations are not met short term. Even better, by sharing their thoughts and preferences ideally some of the adressed individuums will start to identify with a communication strategy on a personal level and in some cases even start their own activities to add to contribute to culture of sustainability across the company. As such an inclusive approach is key to a successful sustainability communication strategy.
