What brands need to do to create sustainable brand

With more and more brands introducing ethical practices into their manufacturing process, the competition and rivalry has become more apparent especially amongst streetwear culture. In the past year since the whole world has suffered a pandemic, the fashion industry and the brands within it have had to re-evaluate their status in terms of what they’re doing to be more environmentally friendly. The difficulty for current and established brands these days is that there is a lot more competition with emerging brands whose whole identity is based around protecting the planet we inhabit, the competition comes as businesses battle to establish a strong and convincing message about their attempts to being more sustainable, as a way of appealing to the future consumer known as the alpha consumer.

Brand stories at present are centred around building emotional connections with the consumer to engage them with the products they’re trying to sell, this is known as emotional branding. In order to create a sustainable brand message, you need to remember that you’re marketing to the future consumer who are quite frankly looking to reshape the future and are already doing so through their technology infused minds. The emerging group of consumers have ambition to save the planet and according to numerous reports, over one third of this generation will only buy from brands that are purpose driven and clear about what they’re doing to legislate change whether that be socially or environmentally. For example, to solve the current and reoccurring issues of gender stereotyping, the manufacturer of Barbie announced in 2019 that they would release a gender neutral doll, this will allow children to feel comfortable in their own skin as they grow up playing with toys that make them feel accepted. Despite the fact that the children of this generation are not active spenders due to their age, it shows that companies are taking them into consideration when making business strategy decisions, which is one step forward to making positive change.

The most important lesson you can learn from sustainable brands is that they are willing to ignore profit in the quest for a better reputation that represents that of positive environmental change. To put it simply, in order to create a sustainable brand message and be a brand that truly cares, the environment needs to be at the heart of everything you do from the manufacturing process to the brand values etc. Making a decent turnover isn’t going to heal global warming or climate change.

In order to market your sustainable brand strategy to the wider public, you need to understand your values as they are what your brand stands for, it’s not enough to simply state that you are sustainable or that your items are made from recyclable materials because how is anyone supposed to believe you, convincing your consumer that you are committed and passionate about what you stand for will be more effective than just stating it.

To conclude, brand stories need to be built on honesty and trust, the key values that the consumer will look for. The consumer wants to form a connection with the brand, but they need to trust that they’re reliable in what they say, ensure that you are aware of where your materials and fabrics are coming from and exactly what they’re made of before they are processed into designs. An idea for making your consumer believe that you are a sustainable brand could be using sustainable/recyclable packaging that the consumer will be able to view first hand when purchasing from that brand.

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