Cut the Bull**** – Straight Talking & Sustainability
I spent yesterday contributing to an draft of a client’s sustainability strategy. What was most impressive was the Herculean attempts to keep the usual corporate PR drivel out of the text. Typically, somebody would say:
“How about ‘we will endeavour to fulfil our moral obliga…’ oh that’s a steaming pile of meaningless management crap! How about ‘we will [do X]’?”
This plain speaking was so refreshing compared to my experience in one of my Green Executive interviews. The interviewee (I won’t say which one) gave a brilliantly candid interview, full of all sorts of perspectives which percolated through to the rest of the text.
Understandably, he did ask that I run the resulting text past the company’s corporate communications team to check he hadn’t dropped any clangers. Unfortunately they took it upon themselves to rewrite the piece into an incredibly bland, glossy press release, taking out all the good, meaty bits – in fact you could have changed the company name to any other and you wouldn’t have noticed any dissonance.
After some polite to-ing and fro-ing, I told them bluntly that, unless they pointed out anything in the original that was either factually incorrect or commercially sensitive, I would publish it as it was. They refused to co-operate, so I went ahead.
Here’s why we need to talk straight when it comes to sustainability:
- It starts us off in an honest frame of mind;
- It forces us to be absolutely clear about what we are trying to do;
- It makes our commitments and efforts more credible – stripping away any whiff of greenwash;
- It encourages transparency and openness;
- It helps colleagues, suppliers and customers buy into the sustainability and understand what the organisation is really trying to do;
- It allows all stakeholders to understand the commitments – and hold us to them.
So, I suppose this post is a bit of a plea. Let’s drop the all-too-prevalent tone of the professional copywriter and tell it how it is!
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