Marketing

concepts

Paper windmills embedded in a cardboard landscape.

Sustainability stories sussed.

Sustainability stories are slippery. Caught between greenwashing and greenhushing, human feeling and hard fact, costs and care, they’re tough to get right. Working in an agile team with members from PIA UDG and Bosch Home Appliances, we developed a framework for marketers around the world to create sustainability narratives that clearly belong to the Bosch story world but still have a local flavour.

Chapter and verse – how we did it.

  • To start with, we reviewed existing research, collected hypothesised consumer needs and grouped them according to the stages of the customer journey. Next, we tested them in a MaxDiff survey of 10,000 participants (1,000 per country x 10 countries). The results allowed us to rank sustainability needs at each stage of the customer journey.

  • The Bosch country marketers can now consult these needs and select those that best match the point in the customer journey that their communications measures are intended to support. They are also the cornerstone of the playbook we created, which outlines the brand’s sustainability positioning, focal topics, reasons to believe, dos and don’ts and much more.

  • Together with a growing content library of sample communications on sustainability, the survey and playbook provide marketers with the tools – and the freedom – to confidently create measures that highlight how Bosch appliances help customers tread more lightly on the planet.

  • As a final step, we held mini workshops where we introduced our findings and framework to local marketers in regions around the world.