SUSTAINABILITY AS A MARKETING TOOL

          I recently attended a conference hosted by Sustainable Waterloo( www.sustainablewaterloo.org), a not for profit organization dedicated to helping local companies implement carbon dioxide reduction strategies.  The guest speaker at the conference was Lori Duvall, Director of Eco Responsibility for Sun Microsystems,  a company based in Silicon Valley that designs and  manufacturers computer servers and employs over 35,000 people.  For me, the most revealing part of her talk was how her department and its achievements have morphed from a side show at Sun to a mainstream event(part of the corporation's DNA as she put it) that is now impacting the sales and marketing of their products worldwide.  Among her achievements, Lori has spearheaded efforts to reduce corporate energy consumption including "Open Work"(telecommuting) that allows almost half of Sun's employees to work remotely which has enabled Sun to close 2 of their Campus' and save $70,000,000 in real estate costs in 2007.  Sun's new line of low energy servers uses 25% less power than their older technology and have been very successful in the marketplace.  Their Data Centers have gone to water based cooling systems and the water used in their semiconductor fab plants is now purified without chemicals.  Corporate air travel has been reduced by the use of teleconferencing and Sun has committed to reducing their Carbon Footprint by 20% in the next 5 years.

        What has all this got to do with Marketing and Sales?  Here's an example from Lori's talk.  The Europeans as we all know are light years ahead of North America in their approach to environmental business practices.  In the European market for example, Sun was required by EU regulations to find two Disassembly Contractors to recycle Sun's obsolete servers returned from customers.  As well, when European companies issue Request for Quotations for new servers there is now routinely a detailed environmental reporting document that is required as a key part of these quotations.  These requests get sent to Lori's group who help their sales department with the environmental data that is needed.  Obviously, the eco initiatives that Sun is implementing become key points in any sales presentations made to their European customer base.  This European customer base is keenly interested in Sun's business operating procedures vis-à-vis their environmental footprint and use this information to choose compatible suppliers.

         Finally, Lori noted that eventually Sun's corporate strategy of Asian contract manufacturing using a supply chain of 1000's of companies could be adversely impacted by the new regulations and trading markets related to CO 2 emissions that are being created by governments and the private sector.  Compared to a local supply chain, Lori pointed out that its difficult if not impossible to track and reduce the carbon footprint of a complex, offshore supply chain.  What all this means is that Sustainability is transforming from an eco buzzword to a key driver of future Corporate financial and marketing success.