When you’re trying to build a brand, what are the key things that you imagined you’d be focused on? Most people might say they focused on making the brand’s image look good with smart graphic design for a cool logo, colour scheme and font on all promotional materials. You might look at your website, your market research, mission statement, company values, and so on.

That last one in the list is particularly important: company values. It includes your brand’s culture, guiding principles, and more. Another key element to strong brand and company values is sustainability. Far from being a meaningless buzzword pertaining to some esoteric social and environmental issues research, it’s a very real and powerful concern among many consumers and strongly informs their choices.

Here’s why sustainability should matter to you and your brand:

1. Your Customers Care About it A Great Deal

It’s a fact that modern consumers do care about how your product or service impacts the environment, climate change and other global issues. Being sustainable means you are on the side of consumers and share their concerns. It’s not enough to pay lip service, however, brands need to demonstrate very genuine care, and considerable and measurable action.

Gone are the days where businesses correctly guessed that in reality consumers cared more about price than about sustainability. More up-to-date information clearly demonstrates that consumers are willing to pay more if genuine sustainability is being practised.

2. It’ll Make Your Operation More Efficient

Sustainability for your company and brand means, for example, that you use eco-friendly lighting in your office space; that you build your facilities using sustainable materials; that you actively engage in reducing plastic and paper waste, and so on. All of these things are actually ways of making your own business more sustainable and efficient, and that means a healthier bottom line!

You don’t have to think of sustainability as being something that inevitably costs your business money. It’s something that can make your own business more sustainable commercially, too, meaning that it can operate for longer, with fewer financial risks, a more secure supply chain, and more durable facilities. Furthermore, it helps ensure a more engaged and productive workforce.

3. Sustainability Helps Attract Talent

In the last point of the previous section, we mentioned that staff are often happier in businesses that run themselves more sustainably. It follows, then, that more sustainable enterprises are ones that can attract better talent to work there, and once there they have a better chance of retaining them for longer. Bringing in the best personnel is yet another way, therefore, that sustainability helps the bottom line, and thus why sustainability should be treasured, not shunned.

4. It Creates New Business Opportunities

The need to become more sustainable creates new opportunities for companies to invest in and create new innovations that promote that same sustainability. Companies that have found ways to make their business greener while keeping profit growth high can sell such techniques and expertise to other companies who want it --- which would be virtually any company.

There are great opportunities, then, for the “early adopters” of sustainability to become thought leaders and authorities in this area, and create new revenue streams for their enterprises.

5. Sustainability Goes Far Beyond Just Being “Green”

As some of the above-mentioned points have touched upon, sustainability goes far beyond just making one’s business more eco-friendly. Sustainability is about being able to last in a changing business landscape. It’s about securing supply chains, building stronger business infrastructure, maintaining communication, and yes, being good to the environment around us along with the flora and fauna who dwell within it. When we can grasp this, we can start to see how truly valuable sustainability is to our future.