Over 80% of consumers now make purchase decisions with purpose in mind. If sustainability is a core part of your business, you’ll likely want to market yourself as such. Becoming a Pure Air Zone can boost your marketing efforts as a sustainable brand in several ways – read on to find out how.
Embarking on a sustainability strategy is a big job and one that needs to involve cooperation from every stakeholder in the business, from employees to customers. Marketing is not excluded.
Good news: sustainability marketing has a strategic role in raising awareness, which is the first step to then drive actions against climate change.
Bad news: while marketing yourself as a sustainable brand can have great benefits, which we’ll come onto, it also carries a couple of things that businesses should be wary of.
But air quality management is here to help. If you know that over 99% of the population is breathing unsafe air, becoming a Pure Air Zone could be the answer for your business. And along with keeping your people safe and reducing the overall global impact of air pollution, it can boost your brand as sustainable, too.
The Challenges of Sustainability Marketing
Making big changes to your business invites some risk, but understanding the common pitfalls will help you prepare. Here are 5 things you should look out for when making sustainability the focus of your marketing campaigns.
ALIGNMENT: Incorporating a sustainability, ESG or CSR strategy involves a lot of work, with changes to processes, business models, values. So, it’s important for businesses to make sure green projects are in line with your brand’s set of values, purpose and proposition. If they don’t, the strength of your branding could suffer, along with the trust of your consumers.
SUBSTANCE: If you’re making the push to become a sustainable business, make sure you really do it. Some businesses don’t, which is why we’ve seen a spate of greenwashing campaigns. This has caused heightened scrutiny of businesses who are claiming to be sustainable.
FOCUS: Pair this with the sheer number of brands that are saturating the market with sustainability messaging, adding to the collective noise, and not only have consumers become slightly less trusting of this type of messaging but they have also become desensitised to it. Hence, don’t make everything green and have a distinctive focus.
MEASURABILITY: Many sustainability initiatives are weak because they can not be proved. Measuring impact is really hard. But technology can help. Whatever the project, transparency and measurability give strength to any sustainability effort.
VISIBILITY: Often sustainability efforts and investments are watered down in the sustainability budget lines. Sustainability is a communication challenge. Brands have the opportunity to raise collective awareness. So make sure your projects reach the general public.
Luckily, there are companies that understand these concerns and will consider these risks when you’re partnering with them. They should have the tools and the collateral in place to ease the transition and quash any chance of the risks taking place.
How Becoming A Pure Air Zone Can Help Your Marketing Strategy
Qualifying as a Pure Air Zone is exciting – as a business, you’ll be making an immediate impact on one of the climate’s most pressing issues, while helping those around you live better lives.
But what can becoming a Pure Air Zone do for your marketing efforts?
1. It adds a service to your offering
The world of business is all about USPs. What are you offering to people that no one else is? The more USPs you have, the easier it is to market your company, especially in sustainability.
Offering your visitors clean air could be the USP you need to attract people through your doors.
2. It adds a purpose to your brand
These days, people don’t want to just buy a product. They want to buy an experience, a goal, a journey that they can follow. Campaigns that relay this are much more hard hitting.
No matter what you sell, or the setting you’re in, becoming a Pure Air Zone contributes to a wider mission of making clean air a human right for all. Feeding this mission into campaigns, showing how it forms part of your wider strategy can connect your business with a new audience and strengthen its relationship with your existing audience.
3. It contributes to your ESG strategy
The air within a Pure Air Zone is monitored 24/7. Pure Air Zones therefore always have up-to-date information on their air quality, which can be added straight into an ESG report or shared with their stakeholders.
This data, along with the global data of combined Pure Air Zones, can be used in marketing campaigns to avoid greenwashing claims, as it comes straight from the system.
The Pure Air Zone concept also aligns with six of the UN’s SDG goals, so it supports a wide range of projects for businesses’ sustainability strategies.
4. It boosts your visibility
When your business becomes a Pure Air Zone, it automatically becomes part of a global community of businesses that are working to make clean air a human right.
As part of this, your business gets its own profile on the Pure Air Zone App, so anyone who downloads this will be able to find your business on the map.
Having a dedicated space on these platforms puts your business in front of fresh eyes who might not have known about you before, but can now learn about your sustainable contributions and choose to do business with you as a result.
5. It attracts talent
A recent study by Gallup found that 71% of workers look at a company’s environmental record when looking for a new job. That’s high.
Today’s graduates and young workers are much more conscious. Becoming a Pure Air Zone not only shows new talent that you care about their wellbeing by providing clean air, but that you also care about the planet, which will likely align with their values.
6. It’s super easy
During the onboarding process, Pure Air Zones are given all the assets and tools they need to make this exciting step known to the world. These can be slotted straight into social media calendars, newsletters, on bulletin boards and in all hands meetings so you can start spreading this important mission quickly while saving on resources.
A Sustainability Tool That Makes Sense
If you’re starting your sustainability journey as a brand, looking at all the different initiatives, certificates and tools can be overwhelming. Not only is becoming a Pure Air Zone easy, but the impact is immediate and the communication can be, too.
Your commitment to this cause will most likely attract all kinds of new people to your business, while helping the planet on a wider scale, and that’s invaluable.
If you're interested in learning more about Pure Air Zones, you can submit your case to our team. Or, if you would like to learn more about how pure air can benefit your business, check out this white paper:
Comments