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So how do we get people to buy seaweed, thick yak wool and soft brown sweaters? 'How to market' the things that we make in Good Growth? How do we get people to value things that come out of regenerating places? A lot of what we can make is relatively easy to explain (and sell) because it's just really, really lovely. Soft and warm yak wool travel wraps, camel wool rugs, top notch rice. But some of it's a bit unusual. At least to consumers brought up on a diet of fast fashion, bright colours, incessant new products, cheap finance and limitless stock. Some of our fibre products come from animals such as the wild guanaco - whose numbers have dwindled in Patagonia as sheep ranching has pushed them out. Creating economic value for guanaco hair (wild sheared at the beginning of summer) will stop them being treated as vermin (and stealthily turned into dog food by large European brands with zero-to-minimal morals). Others come from hair normally chucked away - like the long rough camel guard hair that gets shed every year and just lies around. (Every camel sheds around 5 to 10kg of hair every year - some of it is fine, much is coarse). We create value for this rough hair by making homewares with it - rugs, cushions, thick blankets. The more value we can create for each animal - by working with all the fibre - the less pressure the herder is under to increase animal numbers. (And can do more good things like stop the camels eating the young elm trees in the desert, which would help restore the water courses, which would rekindle a whole lot of biodiversity and life....) More from less. Fewer sheep and more guanacos in Patagonia. Fewer goats, more yaks in Mongolia. Each ecosystem is different, so the "ideal" mix is different in each place. But a key part of regenerating places is ensuring that the livestock in that place is both good for the place (encourages plant growth etc) as well as at a level that the place can support. We also have a struggle on eco-friendly colours for clothing. The multi-coloured world of Zara and Uniqlo has duped people into believing that (e.g.) cashmere can come in vivid reds and headache inducing bright blues. Vast quantities of chemicals are needed to dye clothing these vivid colours. Natural dyes and the natural fibre colours are much more muted - browns and greys. How to persuade people to ditch the electric red for a soft brown? And as we get into marine ecosystems we're beginning to work out how to create demand for seaweed products. Seaweed is kind of magic - it's brilliant for the sea (as long as it's the "right" seaweed species for the place) and full of good things and grows really fast. You can make human food, cattle food, cosmetics, and even bioplastics from seaweed. But....seaweed has an image problem. There are few (if any) good seaweed product brands out there. Partly because the whole category is a bit new, and partly to do with 'seaweed' as a category in itself. Persuading people to eat it on a day-to-day basis is a very tough call. (The name's an issue - "weed" really doesn't fly in a food context (same is true for "insects")). Buy-in not buying. Never turn sustainability into a product feature So here's the problem. How to market these products so that people buy into them for the good that they do? (Rather than just buy them). We find that at both ends of the chain - the communities who live in each place, and the "consumers" who buy stuff - the incentives are all a little screwed up and transactional. A depressingly large number of herding co-operatives exist not because there is some kind of widespread common interest in looking after a shared space, but because a co-operative is a pre-requisite for accessing various subsidies. And beyond the subsidy there's really very little enthusiasm from herders to do more in and with the co-operative. Two takes from this - firstly (and it's kind of obvious) a co-op is not the same as a community so, secondly, we should take care not to use co-ops as the base building block for each place brand. What we *actually* need are people who really do share a common interest in the health of the place. There's a similar kind of transactional trap at the 'market' end of the chain. So many brands seem to treat "sustainability" as merely a product feature. I hear big brands like Ikea and Unilever talk about their sustainable product ranges (and how fast they grow) - as if "sustainable" was merely an exciting market segment. But I don't think we should go down this product marketing route. Turning sustainability into a "reason to buy" just doesn't feel right. ' Natural dyes are better than colours that use napalm'. 'Seaweed's better than soya because it is wholly renewable and doesn't screw up land'. 'Yak's better than cashmere because goats eat everything and turn the place into a desert'. It's a cul-de-sac and it misses the bigger point - which is how to reconnect humans to nature. Maybe part of the problem is how we think about consumers and brands. Do consumers know what 'good' is? We met a big advisory business which was wrestling with what "good" actually means, and how their (mostly old school) clients should square new fangled ideas such as ESG with good old fashioned ideas such as making a profit. They have an idea which crystallises my discomfort. They want to get their clients to focus more on the realities of ESG by articulating what 'consumers really want from sustainability'. This idea - that there is somehow a consumer driven market for sustainable stuff - is superficially quite attractive. But it relies on three very dodgy assumptions brands somehow are just responsive to consumer demands consumers actually *know* a priori what they need and want somehow "consumers" have managed to navigate all the nuances and complexities and trade offs inherent to the whole "what is sustainable" question. I.e that they know what 'good' looks like and that they want it. None of this is true. Just look at the evolution of food retailing since the end of WW2 - we went from rationing and scarcity to superabundance and 3-for-2's in a couple of decades. All driven from the supply side. Check out Rustlers (impossibly cheap pre-packaged burgers and hotdogs). Did anyone, ever ask for them? Nope - it's a supply side innovation and the world and the human race are both poorer for it. Forget marketing products - we want a reawakening of values, a reconnection to nature Much of what we are doing in Good Growth is not radically new, it's radically old. We're drawing on a way of value creation that harks back to the pre-industrial era, before we all got swept away by globalised products and supply chains and efficiencies and economies of scale and product features and all the underlying elements of today's operating system that has so screwed up the planet. The issue we are grappling with, at root, is the disconnection of human beings from nature. We got dislocated. The eyes we look through no longer are sensitive or even cognisant of where things come from. The land, the time, the people who go into making our stuff. Product-ising sustainability completely fails to address this issue. It reinforces the basic problem of our dislocation from origin. Good Growth products are not (actually) the point of what we do (lovely as they are) - they are ways to create value for nature and specifically the regeneration of places. Nature-based stuff doesn't just happen. It grows, it gets made. It's slow. The time that nature takes to grow something is the very opposite of that Klarna "get it now, pay later" nadir that consumer-world seems to have reached. If we see nature at all, we no longer see nature for what it is, rather what we think it should be. Our mental picture of "good" nature is more Capability Brown than messy biodiversity. I was really struck in Georgia by how wonderfully messy and lovely and above all full of life the vineyards are. There are cover crops and bees and flowers everywhere. Nothing like the sterile Tuscan or French image of a vineyard that we have been fed for so long. We need to rekindle a different sense of time and place. A natural and wonderful and vivid world. To get people to be more connected to where stuff comes from means we must tell new stories - not just about how the stuff is made but the values which led to the stuff in the first place. Stories that articulate a different sense of time and place. An appeal to higher values. So sustainability marketing can never be product marketing. If you've never seen it take a look at this 6 minutes from Steve Jobs - brilliantly articulating why Apple needed to focus on values and beliefs rather than product features. What he says is the foundation of a pioneering brand. It's what made Apple great (sadly lost its way somewhat since for sure). If we're ever going to succeed at regeneration and sustainability we have to resist the urge to treat sustainability as just another product feature. What we need is to identify, amplify and reinforce a set of values that identify "nature" as a good thing, as a thing we want to be associated with, as a thing we believe we are part of. Regeneration as a set of values. That's the marketing challenge. Call it regenerative marketing. Now to find some people who can help us work out how to do it. #goodgrowth #regenerativebusiness #seaweed #apple #stevejobs #values #khunu #navygrey

Rewiring our economic system needs new "plus" not just new costs Many agree that we need a fundamental rethink of our economic system. But what do we actually mean? Some thinking out loud A lot of the debate is focused on input cost. The cost of things that are ignored by (every) economic system. This lovely diagram courtesy of Commonland is great at pointing out the uncounted costs. But this is only one side of the equation - the cost side. What about the "plus" side - the revenue and wealth creation? The problem with the current "plus" side is that is unmoored from planetary constraints - it's all about pulling ever more stuff out of the ground and "adding" value to it. The language of "raw materials" reflects this idea. We take something that has (within the logic of the system) no value and add value to it through an industrial process. But in reality that "raw" material is not some kind of valueless blob - it comes from a place and an environment and a community that really matter. (Wine gets this, cheese gets this, clothing doesn't get this). This extractive unconstrained mechanism is the same for technology - the energy and the metals that power the tech have to come from somewhere. AI is hoovering up both to an extent that in the US we'll need 7X the energy of NYC every year just to power the data centres. That's bad news. Unfettered volume growth is an unsustainable output. So how do we grow bottom lines whilst producing (extracting) a lot less? Monetising intangible value requires a combination of brand and sustainability strategy* Here are some ideas for a value system - a new kind of plus - that can create financial value that is absolutely not dependent on infinite volume growth. A new value system will - and should - be a combination of hard measurable science-y tangible things and slippery hard to measure heart warming things. Head and heart. And that's why the practice of value creation is where the two worlds of brand and sustainability come together. When worlds collide I'm fascinated by what happens when different worlds collide. Berlin in the 80s, Cyprus, the commercialisation of public services, the attempted purpose-ification of out-and-out commercial enterprises. The way in which these worlds come together matters. The outcome can be a lot of destruction or a lot of good. The work we have been doing in landscape restoration has given us an unfiltered view of the impact industrialised business has on our natural environment. We humans have extended industrial thinking and practice into landscapes with devastating effect. We industrialised the landscape. But what makes industry tick - doing one thing repetitively at massive scale and minimal cost - is the opposite of what makes environments healthy - diversity and adaptability and symbiotic growth. I'm struck by how similar the science-y world of environment and nature is to the techno-industrial world of business. It's all about metrics. And occasionally business and nature science come together in a metrics-fest, which is why there is so much enthusiasm around Nature-tech. But what business metrics have never been good at capturing is intangible value - the value that comes from connection, the magic that comes from impossible-to-measure stuff like beauty and soul. The stuff that actually matters. The stuff that brand strategists get (and 'business management consultants' don't). And equally what nature science misses - to its detriment - is the simplicity and value of the story of a place. Soil samples, satellite sensing, e-dna, NDVI etc might shed a lot of light on the health of a place but they won't build connection in the same way a story will. Telling the story of a regenerating place through the lens of the wildlife or the community that live there forges a powerful connection. The three pillars of a redefined value system Taking this notion of head and heart helps to point towards how our intuitive, instinctive sense of value might be extended into a revised economic system. We've been working on Mongolian rangelands (nomadic herders earning a living from animal fibres - cashmere (mostly)). Starting from that landscape perspective uncovers all sorts of opportunities for business to become regenerative. (Normally - and problematically - business only looks at natural environments through the lens of their own supply chains. It's hard to understate how impoverishing (in every sense) this practice is). Landscapes are rich places. There is value in nature, in origin and in the connection between 'buyer' and the regenerating place. Each of these three are related but also different. There's more depth on each of them in other articles but for now the is focus is on how they might work to generate economic value. Nature Asset: land stewardship - delivering on various aspects of nature uplift. Value mechanism: put nature uplift on the balance sheet. Treat it as a wealth creating activity. Fostering biodiversity and biomass, improving soil health etc. The indicators will vary by landscape (you can't standardise nature) but the class of "nature uplift" will become wealth creation. We could also bring in some kind of biodiversity or carbon products - but we think both need further development (and offsetting is not OK for us - offsetting isn't committing - and we need commitment). Origin Asset: the story. The story of the community, the story of the place, the story of the wildlife, the story of the living system. Mechanism: origin value reflected in commercial terms. Pricing for sure but crucially long term commitment. The value is created in and for the landscape. Brands commit to the landscape. Brands get attribution rights to the story of the landscape. There is further potential for story telling businesses (streamers) to co-invest in the right to the story (nature docos etc). Stories are powerful. The people living in these communities are in the front line of the climate and biodiversity crises. Their stories really matter. Identity Asset: kudos Mechanism: product sales; investment ROI. The value is created at the product brand level. Being associated with a demonstrably regenerating landscape with a ton of story value is something businesses increasingly want. The attribution rights to that association can only come through commitment, but those rights are worth a lot in the corporate stories they deliver. These associations amount to a tangible (re)connection between business and planet. Individuals also love that connection back to natural landscapes and get not just inner satisfaction from it but also reputation uplift. Being able to 'show off' about your connection to places is worthwhile. This could extend to Patreon style adoption of landscapes that enables privileged access to the stories and the place (kind of like exclusive eco tourism but done virtually and without the airmiles). What it all adds up to These value levers are clearly interrelated. Developing financial mechanisms around them is work we are now embarking on. There are numerous exciting opportunities: commercial organisations with a direct interest in the health of the landscape can invest into it (through bonds for example) land stewards are recognised as wealth creators (until now they only get paid when they extract) areas full of nature (e.g. much of Africa) will be able to put a $ number on their natural wealth In total what this larger concept of value adds up to is the opposite of an over optimised industrial process focused only on taking raw materials and churning out product. This is Regenerative Value Value that goes beyond the narrow metrics of volume, efficiency and scale. Value that recognises financially the instinctive sense of value that has no place in the current system. Distinct and different from the industrial model - but no less powerful. Regenerative is not about sourcing, it's a fundamental shift in strategy. Less stuff. More prosperity.. Diversity of activity. Diversity of income. Diversity of value creation. (Compare and contrast with industrial scale) Fundamentally collaborative. Collaborative investment organisations for landscapes. Multiple supply chain owners have a shared interest in the health of the ecological system on which they depend. Collaboration is essential for success. Picking up where Hickel gets to in the first part of his book, this is a shift away from a system built on taking, and a shift towards a system built on co-operation and replenishment. Crucially it is a system that generates prosperity without extraction. There is a long way to go in developing all these concepts. But we are now finding the right collaborators and experts to help us build working demonstrations of how this works. The path is created by walking it. Come for a walk. *plus some super smart non-orthodox financial and economics brains

The third pillar in a redefined value system that works for the planet How do we reconfigure our economic model to work for the planet? We make too much, take too much, waste too much, all in the name of 'growth'. But it's a twisted version of growth. All volume no value. The future belongs to businesses that combine brand and sustainability into a much smarter value system. Value built on connection, origin, and nature. The intuitive sense of value that we all have, but which orthodox economics does not. "Decarbonisation is dentist - we can't sell that" This is a line from this (well worth your time) video featuring Martin Stuchtey of SystemIQ (originally) and now Landbanking Group. His point is that the prevailing narrative on climate has been about what needs to be given up, what needs to be lost, to address the burgeoning problems of an overheating planet. It's an unappealing story that underlines how terrible Sustainability Inc is at grappling with value - no wonder we've made so little progress in that direction. Whilst carbon world has been spinning its wheels, nature and biodiversity have been slowly but surely raising their profile. For years I didn't even realise there was a "Biodiversity" COP, so all consuming was the noise around Climate COP. But now, and not before time, nature and biodiversity are getting the attention they deserve. Great news because they are definitely not dentist. Nature is lovely, nature is wealth There's an unbridled joy we get from seeing nature thrive. Whether it's orchids growing wild, red kites feeding, a blanket of bluebells, snow leopards in the Altai mountains...... ....and there is value in being instrumental in restoration of nature. The smart thing that Stuchtey is proposing is to recognise stewardship - doing good for nature - as an asset class. He argues that our industrial economic system has robbed us of the wealth of nature. It extracts. Nature depletes. We all get poorer. Instead of trying to put a price on "nature services" why not recognise it as wealth in and of itself? Put it in the balance sheet, not the P&L. What's fabulous about this approach is that it works for the millions of land stewards who don't own the land. It works for the commons. Business - invest in landscapes, invest in wealth Could businesses get attribution rights to effective stewardship leading to nature uplift? Could businesses invest in landscape restoration, and then see that investment recognised on the balance sheet? This is a reversal of the current situation where we only put a value on nature by ripping it down or out. If 'nature uplift' is recognised as wealth creation then many good things start happening. Entire continents can get richer - overnight. Farmers can realise additional income streams in line with doing good for the land. Businesses can invest in landscape restoration as a wealth building activity. Which means that even the ones with mega problematic supply chains can - as a precursor to, or in parallel with supply chain rethinking - get on with landscape improvement. Developments such as TNFD are shifting business towards not just recognising dependencies and risks from nature - but crucially also opportunities. This is really important because small financial investments can deliver big landscape returns. Utilising non-commercial sheep wool to stimulate plant growth - less waste, more plants. Rekindling the skills around combing and then using horsehair to make amazing fabrics - enabling herders to earn more from fewer animals. I am convinced that the most effective thing any business can do right now to get perspective on their role in restoring nature (and addressing climate) is to get out into the landscapes, really get to know what's going on, and look back at their business through the landscape lens. Leaders' Quest for Nature. Regenerative Agriculture -> Regenerative Business The more I get to look at business from the landscape perspective, the clearer the path to 'regenerative' becomes. Only by building fully regenerative businesses will we reach a point where the world of commerce and the world of nature can once again co-exist. It can't just be about farmers. One thing that has worried me is seeing a number of businesses (mostly textile) believe that all that is needed is for 'farmers to become regenerative'. Brand X (I won't name them) claimed that "all the cotton we source is regenerative" but then couldn't say where they got their cotton from because they hadn't decided for that year. It was enough to insist. Regenerative agriculture is great. But on its own it is not a magic solution. And if it's coupled to a business-as-usual industrial and extractive sourcing system then it can't be sustained. Over years we have industrialised our landscapes. Cranked up volumes, maximised yields, installed ruthless efficiency. And in doing so we've created monocultures that are both destructive and - irony of ironies - inefficient. The thing that makes industry successful is repetition and scale. Do one thing well, repeat. Mechanisation. What make nature successful is the opposite of industrial. Nature is diverse. Nature is adaptable. The shift to regenerative agriculture is basically de-industrialising the landscapes. Reinstating diversity and adaptability. Working with the land, not exploiting it. Letting nature do its stuff - not trying to fight it. (When I was at school we were taught that "de-industrialisation" was a bad thing. Now I'm not so sure.) To build a regenerative business we need to take the opposite approach - landscap-ise the business. Build in adaptability, diversity, responsiveness to nature. And above all collaborate. If there is one thing the last four years has taught me it's that any shift to regenerative is intrinsically collaborative. No business on its own can achieve regeneration. To achieve a regenerative effect across an entire landscape necessitates collaboration in and cross sector. Diversity, not monocultures. Change the metrics One way to shift perspective is to shift the way we measure success. Non-regenerative agriculture loves to focus on yield - how much can we squeeze out of that patch of land. But yields go down the more industrially we treat the landscape. If there are too many goats in Mongolia and not enough food, many will die every time there is a harsh winter and animal welfare will suffer. If we put too many stimulants into the soil to drive up yields the soil will suffer. Volume costs money. More and more input cost. Volume drives down quality. Volume screws up nature. Regenerative means less volume, but also less input. Let nature do its stuff. Adapt and respect diversity. This is a formula for more profit from less. Less waste, less volume, less damage, more money. As a design direction for regenerative business you couldn't get any better.

Further exploration of what might go into an economic model that's actually good for the planet. This is thinking out loud - using our direct experience of working in landscapes to put some shape on what an alternative, better, planet friendly, business system might look like. This topic - identity as value - is especially intangible and a very long way from widgets and production lines. It's all about how we feel. And especially about how we feel when we're connected to something, when we feel part of something. It's not so far away from the magic that makes brands like Apple so financially strong. Apple doesn't spend tons winning people over, it already has a fan base. Apple doesn't need to discount and compete on price. The fan base is already bought in. Apple generates fanatical loyalty. (There's a different discussion on whether Apple as it is currently is sustainable - in every sense of sustainable - I happen to think it is not. But that's not for here). Previously on 'redefining value'..... The planet's in trouble. A big part of the problem is our economic system and the fetishisation of 'growth' - we make too much stuff. Our system of growth is all about volume and not about value - volume that is unsustainable in every sense. How can we make less stuff and still thrive? Could there be a different version of 'growth' that recognises a broader sense of 'value'? Is this the issue where brand strategy and sustainability might usefully come together? Sustainability as a value platform. Brand x sustainability I've done time in both these worlds. They need each other. Put simply, brand world doesn't get sustainability (is useless at it) and sustainability world doesn't get value. Partly it's because sustainability world is very logical, weirdly similar to economics - all numbers and statistics and metrics. Yet there is widespread recognition that what's needed in sustainability world is more story telling. Brand world is all about story telling and intangible value. Sparing use of metrics and numbers - and then only to substantiate the story. The art of value creation. To reintegrate business and planet we need both worlds to come together. Business that's good for the planet We need a bigger idea of value that goes beyond metrics. Our intuitive, messy, complex sense of value isn't recognised in our over simplified and over industrialised economic reality. What if it could be? What if "growth" didn't just mean "more stuff" but meant "more prosperity without making more stuff". Could we integrate a bigger idea of value into our business systems? Move from an extractive model to a regenerative? To shift business from taking too much to putting back. A different kind of growth. Uncoupled from volume, focused on value. Three interrelated concepts could form this redefinition of value: origin, nature and identity. These three combine the 'sciency' approach of sustainability world with the story/value approach of brand world. Over the next 3 years my focus is on working to solidify each into a better form of growth. Reintegrated, reconnected - a different kind of plus Our systems are bad for the planet because they are disconnected. We treat nature as a giant magic warehouse that never runs out. But the truth is that since 1970 we've been taking more than we should. Overshooting what's sustainable. Our systems are disconnected because we humans have become disconnected. From the planet. And increasingly from each other. We lost touch. We lost our souls. We take too much, we make too much, we waste too much. Time to put back. Time to reconnect. What I love about this concept is that it runs in the opposite direction from the doomsayers who make up much of Sustainability Inc. (If conferences and white papers could save the planet eh?). That expanding industry loves to dwell on what needs to be stopped. What we need to lose to fix things. Their story is unappealing. Sacrifice. Loss. As Martin Stuchtey says - "decarbonisation is dentist". We can't sell that. So redefining value is about what we gain, not what we lose. A different kind of plus, a different kind of value. Value that is instinctive, intuitive. And the joy of connecting to regeneration of places is that 'making nature and livelihoods better' is a very clear "plus" story. More nature is a good thing. Happier people is a good thing. What's not to love? Identity value The Germans have a word that the rest of us need. Gemütlichkeit doesn't have a direct translation. It's a feeling of wellbeing, of warmth, of belonging, of oneness. Calm and belonging. What's interesting about Gemütlichkeit is that a) all Germans recognise it as something good and b) it's not something that can be bought - it comes about through connection. In a world blighted by economics, where we are all defined by what we produce and what we consume, Gemütlichkeit is a powerful reminder that we have an instinctive, intuitive sense of value that economics doesn't recognise. Connection, identity, oneness, a sense of belonging is a powerful form of value that is going to be fundamental to the businesses that are going to shape the next century. Identity value is that feeling that comes with getting back to what really matters. The sense of self that comes from being connected to "good". Often the sense of self that comes from being connected to a landscape. The sense of self that comes from being out in nature. The sense that what really matters goes beyond our petty rules and systems. Like these, my favourite dogs in Tbilisi. They seem sorted. Doing what matters. Can identity value translate into money? Brand strategists - the good ones - know that "connection" is a powerful force. A sense of belonging. The strongest brands aren't (despite the tsunami of bullshit peddled in marketing circles) simply sales mechanisms. The strongest brands elicit powerful senses of identity. And more than that. The financial strength of those brands springs out of that identity strength. Look at Apple. I think there are two ways to create financial uplift from identity: buying stuff not buying stuff - association. Buying stuff You buy something that comes from somewhere special - a bottle of wine, a piece of clothing - and you get an inner feeling of "good" that comes from that connection, as well as kudos and stories to tell (what Simon Robinson calls "pub ammo"). Imagine that your purchase was an active part of the regeneration of that place. By buying that bar of soap or that bottle of wine there was a direct and zero bullshit connection with measurable regeneration of that place. That would make you feel good. The work that is going on now to integrate landscapes to value chains does exactly that. Provides a direct link (no third party certification required) from buyer to origin. And provides chapter and verse on the origin. This is tiptoeing towards a distinctly better relationship between buyers and originators. We've seen how people respond when they get their Khunu Yak wool knit from Mongolia. They tell us they love the smell from the box, the smell of Mongolian rangelands. If we can bring through the purchase not just that place connection, but also the feeling that you are doing good for the place because of the purchase, then we're getting somewhere closer to identity. This connection to "doing good" is the opposite of extractive luxury. And could be the basis of a complete redefinition of 'luxury'. A disintermediation of the relationship between buyer and origin. Luxury as connection. Not buying stuff - association A criticism routinely made of systems such as Good Growth is that we are overly reliant on "consumption" as a means to generate value. Good challenge. We shouldn't be. A broader definition of value should go way beyond simply "buying stuff". Association with "good" things is in and of itself valuable. Think for example of what's happened in music - we went to see Gary Numan in Bristol last week. He's got a loyal fan base that have a much more direct relationship with him than before. The internet enables interplay between artist and fan that both value. I think people can associate with landscapes - adopt a landscape - in the same way they might associate with a musician. We already build these kinds of associations. You or I might have a particular beach or camping site that we regard as "ours". We are emotionally invested in it. We get to know the place. We put time and effort and money into the place. We care about the health of the place. We feel connected to the place. We show off about the place. But we don't own the place. It's value through association. I think we are seeing signs of this shift in how brands relate to places. Beyond their chains. In the work we are doing with and through the Regenerative Fund for Nature we see rapidly emerging concept of brands investing into landscapes, even if they aren't part of their supply chain. Movements such as TNFD (why is sustainability world so fearful of vowels?) and innovations such as the Landbanking Group seek to establish the opportunity to generate nature wealth. A big fashion brand might have supply chains that run to 100s of 1000s of tons every year. There is no way to integrate regenerating landscapes into the chains as they are. Too big. How they make less stuff is an urgent question for fashion world which is only just beginning to be addressed. Chains are geared to current volumes. The only way to reduce volume is first to find a different form of value. So..... ....they absolutely can invest into new models and invest into regenerating landscapes. Because that way they get to work out a new business model, not screw up millions of livelihoods dependent on the existing chain and at the same time do some good for nature. There are multiple benefits to such an association and investment. Wealth creation through nature uplift (more on this another time); ringside seat in regenerative systems - using regenerating landscapes as labs to design 'regenerative business'; stories to tell. I think that over the next few years progressive businesses will 'adopt' a portfolio of landscapes/places. With a long term view and a long term interest in the regeneration of those places. And maybe - in the long run - integrating those places into their chains, but for the next few years simply taking a close interest and making a commitment to regeneration of those places. Without owning them. Collaborating with and enabling the communities that steward them. Economics that doesn't depend on buying and fencing off big areas (rewilding without treating the land as the asset). Redefining metrics - make less, make more money A final thought. One of the unlocking parts of 'regenerative agriculture' is changing the metrics. For example shifting the focus away from "yield" to say "profit per hectare". Regenerative systems might produce less. But they waste less. And they need fewer inputs. Less cost. Less stuff. Make less, make more money. The formula for regenerative business is shaping up to follow the same logic. Change the metrics, focus on what really matters, make less stuff, do good for the planet, less cost, less waste, more money. Part of redefining value comes from rethinking the metrics. Later this year we will start working with partners on designing 'regenerative business' using the regenerating landscapes as a lab. That design work will cover nuts and bolts such as supply chain design, but also slippery concepts like these around a greater sense of value. I'm not sure exactly where we are going to end up but it feels like the right direction. As ever please get in touch if you think this kind of work and thinking is relevant for you.

Our economy is intrinsicially extractive. Every year we make more stuff, we consume more energy, the planet gets sicker. For my entire life "growth" has meant "more". More volume, more market, more share. The route to business success was to produce more. Daring to question this fundamental was heresy. Consumer led is a myth, volume is all production push I know first hand the stress of a volume obsessed organisation. For a few years I was responsible for the sales numbers at a big car company. That car company wanted to be "Number One" (aka bigger than Toyota). Every year we would set a target based on a heady cocktail of analysis, ambition and wishful thinking. That target drove production numbers. Except it didn't. The relationship between market forecast and production was the other way round. The market was a function of production numbers. It worked like this. We'd all guess what the market was going to be. Generally "last year + X%". Then we'd decide what market share we were going to take. Generally "last year + Y%". Then we'd end up with a production number and voila. The cars would get produced. And what gets produced gets sold. Always. Somehow. That's the market. The sale might not be a "good" sale in the sense that we had to pull some tricks to get the vehicles accepted by the buyer. Occasionally the sale wasn't a "sale" at all. More an internal stock movement for the sake of numbers. December was always very busy (looking right at you Tesla. I wrote that playbook) The difference between a good year and a bad year was how much we had to push in order to make the numbers. We're writing cheques the planet can't cash As I got into brand world and then sustainability world I realised that production push is at the heart of how we are screwing up the planet. "More" has become the only way to grow. And since 1970 we've been taking more out of the planet than can be sustained. Our material footprint is larger than ever. We don't see this because "materials" don't feature in our numbers. In the past 6 years we've consumed more resources than we did in the entire 20th Century. Every year since 2012 we've consumed more in 12 months than we did since the dawn of humanity to 1950. 'More' is addictive For anyone in business right now "more" is the only game in town. Nobody ever asks "how do we make and sell less stuff?". It's the Voldemort of topics. But it's a discussion that needs to be had by every business on the planet. And the good news is that - in reality - "less" might actually be not just better for the planet, but also better for business. If we're going to fix the planet we need to define a new game. And that means redefining value in order to unhook ourselves from volume. 'More' is a waste of resources, it's bad business We make too many things. More things than people need. Most cars stand idle 95% of the time. When they are moving, they mostly have only one person in them. Much of the time that they are on the move they are circling around looking for somewhere to park. We say we have a housing shortage in the UK yet 1m homes stand empty. Our new housing targets don't recognise retrofitting offices as homes. We are wasting carbon we've already put into the built environment. Clothing companies make double the amount per person compared to the 1970s. 16KGs of new clothes for every man, woman and child on the planet, every year. 110 billion items. Most of it isn't worn. Tonnes of it goes to landfill. Which is a shame because all of that growth, every bit of it, was in synthetic fibres. (More on this here "Clothing's opioid problem") We make 23 billion pairs of trainers every year. And send 22 billion to landfill. Even music suffers with this non-useful consumption. Of the 185 million tracks on streaming services 46 million have never been listened to, by anyone, ever. Something is very wrong. We're making more than people can consume. We're wasting vast amounts of materials and energy making all the stuff. And then we're spending precious time and resources in businesses trying to push the stuff out. The planet suffers. Business suffers. And people suffer - it is stressful being inside a company pushing volume. And nobody is ever, ever happy, even when all the targets are hit. We make too much. But we don't have any playbook for making less. So how do we get off this addiction? The clothing example highlights one of the big problems we've got ourselves into. If we were to maintain volumes but switch out of synthetics the effect would be to put even more massive and destructive pressure on nature. From our work in Mongolia we see first hand what happens when single commodity, volume unconstrained supply chains penetrate the landscape. Too many animals (50m too many), overgrazing, desertification. As Textile Exchange says in the Future of Synthetics : "....a total shift away from synthetics to land-based raw materials – particularly at current production rates – could lead to an overreliance on and depletion of natural ecosystems." (my italics) So the first step in fixing clothing is reducing volume. Probably back to 8KGs per head or less. So a 50% across the board reduction in volume. Until that happens the clothing sector hasn't got a prayer in meeting its environmental ambitions. But even talking about volume reduction is a no-no. Everyone knows it's the problem but nobody says it. (Out loud). It's really hard. It would involve an upending of supply chains and a transition that would take at least 3 years. But it's got to happen. My hunch is that the small but growing number of eco-aware brands that are more of the pioneers in this space will grasp this mantle pretty soon. This is the trap we are in. Every supply chain in every sector is geared to current volumes. Halving clothing production or halving car production overnight would wreak havoc on workforces and livelihoods. Conversely swapping all the volume for "green" volume would wreak havoc on ecosystems - whether it's lithium or natural fibres. We can't reduce volumes without screwing up people, we can't keep the volumes without screwing up the planet. So the transition has to be planned and managed. At the heart of it is a new way to create value. Once that's in place then volume reduction becomes possible. The revolution is coming. It may already be here. A new value system. There is a fundamental change coming to every business, everywhere, in how wealth is created and how value gets assessed. Over the next 4 to 5 years there will be ever more focus on the relationship between all organisations and the planet, driven in part by ground-breaking initiatives such as the Taskforce for Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and Science Based Targets for Nature. The upshot of this shift will be a redefining of what a business does and how it does it. There will be much more emphasis (and opportunity) at the originating end. Competitive edge will shift from the market end to the producer end. Some of this will be slow, some will be fast. But already there is a growing cohort of brands that are pioneers of the new way of doing things. At the heart of the shift is a fundamental change in how businesses create value. Out go business models built on extraction, in come business models built on planet friendly value creation. This is overturning centuries of orthodoxy on how to grow. Wine - lots to like It's hard to find any sector that has contracted. But one has and it's thriving. Wine is a product that clearly is dependent on agriculture as well as consumption. Overproduction destroys margins. Underproduction drives up prices. Overall hectares have decreased (mostly driven by EU action) and overall volumes have decreased. Wine is very useful glimpse into a different kind of value model. In wine there is more or less an inverse relationship between volume growth and profit growth. Attempts to introduce commodity, economy of scale practices to wine have tended to produce high volumes, low prices, big distribution costs, and massive volatility and flaky profits. Essentially there are two markets - a volume/commodity one which is cutthroat, and a storied, explorer one which is where all the margins are. Commodity wine is 70% of the volume (and the cost) but only 30% of the revenue; story wine is 30% of the volume for 70% of the revenue. The better you are at being in synch with nature and the land, the more likely your wine will be valued. Of course there are still massive distribution challenges but the 'value' of wine is decoupled from volume maximisation in a way that points to a different form of value for business. So what does a new value creation system look like? I've been working on this shift in some form or another for the past few years. At its heart is an alignment between our instinctive, intuitive sense of value and how we think about and measure economic value. Economics doesn't like intangible, context specific concept. But this new system is all about recognising and amplifying new forms of wealth. Some of the key learnings from my journey: Nature wealth 1 At Good Growth we've worked with herder groups on shifting their volumes of livestock to be in synch with nature. The income uplift from this comes initially from two sources - one off livestock sales, and over time multi-fibre revenue streams. Basically at present only cashmere is valued by brands - and even then only selectively. So all the other animals (that are critical for the diversity of the system) get ignored. The sheep, the camels, the horses etc. In total only 5% of the fibre weight generates 95% of their income right now. It's early days but this year one group reduced numbers by 40% and at the same time doubled their income. We may not be able to replicate that everywhere but "more from less" is a really exciting path to pursue. Nature wealth 2 The Landbanking Group are working on a plan to turn nature (more specifically nature uplift) into a fiduciary grade asset class that can be recognised on the balance sheet. This is much needed as currently our system only recognises natural value by ripping it out. There is a good (hour long) video of Martin Stuchtey discussing this. Worth your time. Nature wealth 3 If Nature can be on the balance sheet then actions and investments for nature could yield very high returns on investment. Here are two examples: Regenerative sheep wool - South Gobi sheep wool is so cheap it has scarcely any financial value. Moving it around costs much more than the value of the wool as seen through conventional supply chains. But....seen through the landscape lens there's a different story. It hasn't rained in the Gobi for 2 years or more. Food is scarce. Any weather events (and there are many) mean that additional fodder needs to be shipped in from elsewhere. Sheep wool is an excellent moisture retainer (and natural fertiliser) and can be used to stimulate grass growth in the area. Harvesting all the sheep wool and putting it in bags doesn't cost much at all - maybe $10k, maybe less - but the ecosystem payoff is huge. If tiny landscape investments like this could be recognised as generating "nature uplift" then we have something that begins to mirror and work with nature and diversity. Horsehair - Mongolian horses are not pets. They roam the rangeland and have very strong opinions. The herders love them and they occupy a special place in the culture. For years horse tail fibre has been used to make the iconic Mongolian horsehair fiddle which you'll see in traditional form as well as "let's rock" form with people like the Hu. (Volume up, headbanging mode engaged). Horsehair as a fabric (horsehair canvas is used to make high end men's suits - it's the inner lining) more or less became a China monopoly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chinese horsehair is gathered not from live horses but as a slaughterhouse by-product. Gathering horsehair tail from live and feisty horses is no easy feat. But each horse is worth three goats so the income is pivotal in enabling livestock reduction. Furthermore a luxury suit made from live and loved horses is a lot better story than a luxury suit made from synthetics. $80k buys enough horsehair for 12,000 Italian men's suits. (There's other stuff that goes into the suit). So relatively speaking a tiny financial outlay generates a huge nature return (not to mention the cultural payoff). Origin value - the thing that makes wine work is origin value. Cheese is similar. Knowing where it comes from, and knowing some of the story, adds to the value of the product. I saw this first hand when we did the strategy for Teliani Valley. That clothing doesn't celebrate and amplify origin value is a mystery to me. There's a lot about the factory but nothing about the fibre. This is a missed opportunity on a grand scale. But it's not just clothing. It turns out that materials that we take for granted, like sand and glass, also have massive origin value potential. A long time ago factories helped to disconnect us further from nature and places. Origin stories and origin value can help reconnect us. (But an origin value supply chain looks very different from a volume maximisation one). Connection/Identity Value - this is where brand strategy has largely failed. Brands build strong connections between people and things - landscapes, places, products, other people. It feels good and reaffirming to make a choice that connects us more. That connection value has an economic value - but it is context specific and can't be easily measured. But it's there. But requires left field thinking to recognise it. In Real Estate the new developer Biograpi shunned the orthodoxies of Tbilisi's apartment market with its focus solely on $ per square meter to speak more directly to the communities and stories that for Georgians are at the heart of home. Instead of a purely space maximisation approach each development is built around an origin story and designed to foster connection. The company put the soul back into development - and the one thing Georgians love is soul. The company - a new entrant - gained a massive advantage in a very undifferentiated market. A collaborative endeavour It is not the fault of people who work in companies that we are in this mess. The prevailing and powerful economic system that has done so much for us has run out of steam and needs rewiring. It's a system issue. But they absolutely can help in working with us to define new ways to create value. If we can make more money whilst making less stuff we will have made the breakthrough that the planet needs.

Most brand strategy doesn't do anything for the planet. Just as sustainability world doesn't do value and opportunity, brand world is rubbish at sustainability. It doesn't get it. For most brand shops sustainability is a product feature. Just another reason to buy. Weep. It's a big shame because at the heart of brand, from the time before the big brand shops relegated their own discipline to a subdivision of sales, there is a world-saving concept that we need right now. A deeper, broader concept of value built on origin. Why a different concept of value? Key to success in fixing the planet - but very hard to do - is producing much, much less stuff. (We are hopelessly overproducing, and unless we reverse course we're going to keep screwing up the planet). To do that we need to generate much more value from much less stuff. Which means we have to redefine (and broaden) how we think about value and build a better economic model. Too much stuff There's a longer discussion on all this here - More Money, Less Stuff We make too much. Of everything. We dig up too much stuff. So much stuff that we're using up too much planet. Since 1970 we've been overshooting and it's getting worse. We don't count the stuff we dig up because, well, because it doesn't count. So our material flow footprint doesn't measure the waste we dig up (for example the 20 tonnes of rock required to get enough gold for one wedding ring). Our GDP stats don't measure inputs because we only care about finished goods. What gets wasted on the way is out of the stats book and out of mind. And (whisper it quietly) now we find it ever harder to sell all that stuff. I've lost count of the number of people who say the job they used to love has become a ceaseless treadmill of stress. Trying to find ways to push out all the stuff we can't stop ourselves making. Whether it's clothes or cars or music we make too much. How do we stop? We can't just stop making so much stuff overnight The dilemma is perfectly illustrated by the mess that apparel is in. Far too many clothes are produced (110 bn or so items every year). Tonnes gets sent to landfill every year. A lot of them are made from synthetic materials. Simply stopping the synthetics but keeping the volume would put massive pressure on "natural" fibres and destroy much more of our natural environment. Simply halving the volume (realistically what needs to happen) would devastate millions of livelihoods entwined in global supply systems geared to those high volumes. Reducing volumes (by a lot) is a necessity to fix our relationship with the environment. But reducing volumes would be devastating for livelihoods. Not to mention drive a wedge through a load of "pile em high, sell em cheap" business models. keep destroying the planet, or screw millions of people to save the planet Much too scary to contemplate. But we have to find a way to tackle it. Value first, then volume There is a route through this. Redefine value first, then fix the volume problem. If we can reframe business success to recognise that "value" uplift is not dependent on volume then we have a starting point. At present our economic version is very narrow - all about prices and costs. But we are all well aware that as humans we treasure other forms of value. We have an instinctive, intuitive sense value that goes way beyond prices and costs. What if we could translate that deeper sense of value into a new economic model? And this is where brand strategy might just have a big contribution to make. The trinity of value redefinition These less tangible concepts of value are what could form the basis of a much healthier economic model. Value that is intrinsic. Value that is not dependent on hoovering up ever more materials. The things that are hard to measure but priceless. Three distinct but connected concepts are emerging: Nature uplift is all about the positive impacts of restoring and stewarding nature. Soil health, biodiversity, water, productivity. More on this another time but the idea is that "nature wealth" should be seen as a fiduciary grade asset class and sit on the balance sheet. Identity value is the slipperiest yet probably the most powerful concept. It's the value that comes from a sense of connection. Something that makes "me" feel good about myself. It's the symbiotic relationship between me and the planet. If that relationship can be amplified through brand associations then I will value that brand even more. More on this another time. Origin value is where brands started. A symbol of where something came from. The value of origin reinforced and amplified through a system. People and place. This is basically how wine works - it's all about where (and when) it comes from. (If you've ever seen "Sideways" you'll know). Value redefined is where these three come together to form a powerful reset for how we think about economic value in an enterprise, and if done right can bring the enterprise to a point where it's earning more from less, earning more by being more in synch with the planet. Origin Value - where brands started We spend a lot of time in Mongolia, working with herder communities to instigate regeneration across large landscapes that they steward. This country has a long history of using branding symbols to serve as marks of origin. There are branding symbols here that go back hundreds of years, which signify not just where something comes from, but also how it was looked after. These symbols are much more than just geo-tags - they are marks of quality, shorthand for "you can trust". Symbols of origin. Origin matters but many sectors ignore it Increasingly food plays on origin value. Cheese especially. Wine couldn't function without it. Origin value is at the heart of how wine works. The wine market (crudely) splits into two very distinct chunks - a big volume driven chunk that spans 70% of the bottles but only 30% of the revenue, and a story chunk through independent stores that is 30% of the volume but 70% of the revenue. The cost of making a bottle of wine is about the same however you make it. But the margins in the volume chunk are either negative or minimal. Wine sold through the story channel is many, many times more profitable than wine sold through the volume channel. Provided the origin has strength - a good story, good people, good place, good practice. Clothing should pay attention to origin value, but it's part of the tragedy of apparel that it doesn't. Hardly any brands have 'sourcing' chains that enable them any kind of proximity to where materials come from. This is baked in to how most of the sector thinks. Talk about origin and - mostly - all you get is blank stares and "well that would never work here". Ironic - because it's probably the most strategically powerful transformation tool clothing has. Sand and steel have origin value Without sand there'd be no internet. No EVs. No drones. No phones. Sand matters. Sand is the base stuff from which we make semi-conductors. I suspect you didn't know (I didn't) that there is only one place which can produce quartz that is pure enough to make the crucibles to melt the polysilicon to make computer chips. Spruce Pine, a small town in North Carolina is absolutely critical to the world's semiconductor industry. Quartz from anywhere else won't do it. Not all steel is the same. At all. In fact there is so little "low background" (uncontaminated by radiation) steel available (essential for medical equipment and Geiger counters) that the only place to get it is from ships wrecked before Enola Gay dropped its payload. In fact it turns out that most of the things we have dismissed as interchangeable commodities are not. The properties of materials are shaped by where, and when, they come from. Origin. Turning origin into economic value Price. Obviously origin can translate into price. We're happy to pay a bit more for something that comes from somewhere. Sometimes we'd be happy to pay a much higher price. Think of the Spruce Pine Quartz, without which the world as we know it stops. Chains. But there's more than just price. There is something I'm going to call 'chain effectiveness'. A key bit of wine is the design of the chain. It's all about preserving and amplifying that origin story. Small batches, kept separate, sold with story. It is the polar opposite of a volume maximisation chain and it works. What you lose in economy of scale you gain in story value. But the chains can be efficient as well as effective. Collaboration can lead to aggregation effects that mimic economy of scale. A basic example might be several small producers sharing logistics (one full container costs the same as one mostly empty one). The example of the Teliani Collection is great. The "big" winemaker, Teliani Valley, lends its distribution muscle to multiple curated artisanal but low volume winemakers (Georgia is a land of wine makers). The result is that everyone wins. Customers get to try rare wines they'd never normally come across, restaurants get something unusual to put on their lists, Teliani Valley gets some kudos and reputation uplift for acting as the facilitator, and the artisan winemakers get access to international markets they could never reach on their own. Conversely, back to clothing, turns out the hyper globalised chains are pretty inefficient. Huge plants utilised 25% of the time. Making too much stuff on an artificial seasonality is highly inefficient. Monopoly/monopsony effects And lastly origin doesn't just mean story. It also means strong reciprocal relationships at the originating end of the chain. This really matters because the impact of more sustainable business (as driven by powerful forces like TNFD) will be to reshape supply chains to be much more integrated, much less transactional and much more relationship based. So good, integrated relationships with the people who are stewarding the bits of nature upon which your chain is dependent will become a key competitive strength. In fact the shift of focus to the non-market end of the chain will shift competition to that end too. Most brands haven't twigged this yet - but it's a fundamental change and it's coming soon. Paul Worthington has written about how brand mimics monopoly effects in categories where there is no monopoly. This shift to the other end of the chain is going to drive monopsony effects where strong relationships with originators grants exclusive access to world leading places of origin. (Think about how many people would love exclusive access to the Spruce Pine quartz). Brand strategy won't save the planet - but it can help If we're going to fix the planet we have to redefine value first, and use that to climb down from dangerously extractive volume production. Key to redefining value is to translate less tangible but intuitive concepts of value into an economic model. Brand strategists get these forms of value. It's what they work with every day. But thus far they shy away from challenging conventional "more volume" economics. If brand strategy is going to have a hand in saving the planet I think this is one area where it has a big role to play. Not using brand to flog more stuff but using it to map out and define planet-friendly forms of value. Thanks for reading. I know there's a lot more to this problem not least the language we use to describe business, but this feels like a good place to start. Really happy to hear from people who like this direction of travel. *No. But it might help

We make too many clothes. All the volume growth in clothing is synthetic We dig up way too much stuff. It's 50 years + since humanity first started overshooting and since then it's got worse every year. Unfortunately we don't count all the stuff we dig up because both GDP and Material Flow statistics don't pay any attention to all the waste. So the 20 tonnes of rock that gets dug up to get enough gold for your wedding ring does not count. Anywhere.* Clothing companies are overproducing like crazy In 1975 clothing companies used to make just under 8kgs of new stuff for every man, woman and child on the planet. In 2025 they are due to make 16kgs of new stuff per head. These numbers take into account none of the other stuff that has to be used making all these clothes - the water, the energy, all the 'raw' waste. The total amount has quadrupled in the time the global population has doubled. 16KGs is a lot of clothes. A big chunky knit might be 0.5KGs. So someone, somewhere is buying a heck of a lot. Or are they? People aren't wearing more layers of clothing - so if these numbers are right then the total amount that is being stuffed into wardrobes is massively up. And/or being thrown away. Or both. Clothing companies are obsessed with volumes I've spent a lot of my life looking at growth in different sectors. Clothing has a volume growth addiction like I have never, ever seen. It's a collective obsession. As if the only route to success is by producing more and more stuff. Production push - what gets produced gets sold This is not a demand led phenomenon. The volume per head inflation is a specific peculiarity of clothing. But it does bear the same hallmarks as the automotive industry at its most volume obsessed. Nobody wanted to lose market share. Everyone agreed that next year's market would be "this year's + X%". And so planned production to meet that number. What gets produced gets sold. Somehow. Always. I know - I was the guy who had to make all the sales before year end by hook or by crook. Sometimes that meant recording "sales" even when really they weren't bought. Sometimes it meant a mad scramble in the last week of December to shunt unsold stock to special channels where it could be recorded as sales. December was always a great month. For numbers. Polyester When you unpack the numbers all of the per capita growth in clothing, all of it since 1970 has been in polyester and other synthetics. "Natural" fibres have remained steady at 5KGs+ per head whilst synthetics have rocketed to just under 12KGs. Volume vs "sustainable materials" Nobody needs 16KGs of new clothing every year. But there is no discussion in clothing world about stepping back from the volume brink. Every forecast I've ever seen for apparel only goes in one direction. Which, in the context of the climate and biodiversity challenges, is pretty amazing. Instead there is a heated debate about whether material X or material Y is better for the planet. And in the extremely odd maths that is used to answer that question polyester ends up being "better" than "wool". By a lot. What this diagram communicates is that wool produces 34X the amount of GHG emissions for every 1 tonne. Whereas polyester produces only 2.6X. Ergo every tonne of polyester is "better" than every tonne of wool. The danger of simplistic numbers There are at least two issues with this. The maths seems not to count all sorts of vital stuff such as impact on environment and impact at end of life. And - perhaps most obviously - a material simply cannot have a linear footprint relationship. The idea that XYZ material per se is or isn't "sustainable" is nonsense. Unless we're looking at landscapes you can't tell. It depends - always. Depends on the place. Depends on the farming system. Depends on intensity. An intensive farm using tonnes of chemicals is going to have a much higher GHG footprint than say our Mongolian South Gobi herders whose footprint is negligible (or maybe even less than negligible - we're on the hunt for emissions). Context matters. I know that behind these numbers there is a strenuous attempt at context - but in this telling polyester looks "better" than wool. Clothing has become so massively fragmented and globalised that at the brand level all that can be seen are materials. Context is lost. Landscape context is lost. Volume is the key problem The debate about Material X vs Material Y is not the point. I can't get involved (except to point out that natural fibres are getting a raw deal on the analysis). The key issue. The big problem. Is that there's just too much stuff being produced. None of us need all that stuff. The inflation in clothing volume is entirely driven by synthetics. So weaning us off synthetics at such high volumes is a fundamental part of the answer. But it's complicated. Textile Exchange have produced a report on the Future of Synthetics that points out that simply switching the same volume from synthetics to natural fibres would be devastating (my italics): "....a total shift away from synthetics to land-based raw materials – particularly at current production rates – could lead to an overreliance on and depletion of natural ecosystems." So climbing down from the production rate is the necessary first step to avoid yet more damage. Weaning us off synthetics is much, much harder than getting us hooked. Production led markets are all about push. This market is all about the growth of synthetics. It's easy to get hooked on synthetics - every history of every synthetic has the same trajectory. The original excitement (all that performance, none of that cost), the exponential growth (cheap stuff!), and then the hangover and the realisation that maybe it wasn't such a great idea for human and planetary health. But by then it's too late. Fentanyl has taken off like widlfire, single use plastic is the norm, 50% of all clothes are synthetic. Maybe a 8KG world is better for everyone There is a way out of all this. But it's not going to come from mainstream clothing companies who are as much a victim of this economic trap as anyone else. Instead it will be a few pioneering folk reimagining value systems and demonstrating a new paradigm. A better system for everyone, creating more integrated value, and operating at volumes that meet the constraints of the planet. More on that new paradigm here. But in the meantime let's end with this thought. It looks to me as if the whole industry was more stable, more profitable, and less 'rollercoaster' when only producing 8KGs per person. Revenues may be up but a production push model only introduces extreme volatility. Unsold stock (and there will be a lot of it) is the prime determinant of whether you thrive or suffer. Which is why everyone who works in clothing seems to be very stressed. All the time. Maybe the people who suffer most from the push are the brands themselves. #apparel #synthetics #opioids #goodgrowth #textileexchange #materialworld *read "Material World" by Ed Conway. Amazing.

The NHS is amazing - but it's not at all normal I've worked a lot on healthcare over the years. The strategic challenges are complex and meaningful. How to de-stigmatise mental disorders? (Both in the public sphere and within healthcare profession). How to encourage medical students to join the less sexy branches (i.e. not become a surgeon)? How to introduce patient choice into a system where the doctor has always been head honcho. The role of 'brand' in healthcare is both fascinating and wide ranging. Public discourse on health is shifting all the time, not least because we are all living a lot longer. The pressures on the system are vastly different from those of say 70 years ago - when the health service was pretty much a "stop people dying" service. Polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, diptheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella - and many more - were rife. It is surely a major achievement that for most of us these diseases are no longer a major worry. Brands in health systems are crucial for shaping how people think not just about their health, but the health of the entire population. With an ageing population expenditure on healthcare has to go up steadily in order to maintain even some kind of status quo in provision. And of course brands also play a crucial role - or should - on how the people who work in health systems feel about the profession. This - more than most - is a calling not just any job. That vocational pull means staff are inclined to work inhuman hours, often for little money, because they feel it's important. But now something has broken in the system. We have strikes amongst people who really never want to strike - nurses, ambulance drivers - the people in the frontline. This isn't just about pay and conditions, it's about whether we value this free-at-the-point-of-delivery health system enough to see the value in continual investment to keep pace with the plethora of new "living longer but necessarily well" health needs. Healthcare as a business I spent a lot of 2022 in Georgia working on healthcare. Georgia is interesting in itself given the shadow cast by the Ukraine war, but in a health context you couldn't get further from the NHS model. It is a different world. We have no idea how lucky we are in the UK to have such a thing as the NHS. At first contact you would find all the fears that most Brits have about the business-ification of health realised. Dropdown menus and productisation are rife. Everything costs money and you don't get to see anyone until you've paid. Dig a little deeper and the picture gets even more interesting. Too many doctors, not enough nurses. First up, there are loads of doctors. Way, way too many doctors. In a country which should need maybe 12,000 doctors the system was planned around 45,000. This is a legacy of the Soviet era, during which it was assumed that Georgia would be a hotspot should there ever be a conflict with Nato. So the capacity uplift was built for a war that - so far - didn't come. As a result there are many pretty large scale hospitals dotted around, with low occupancy, and doctors actually competing for patients. That's right - doctors are kind of celebrities (some are anyway) and have their own media profiles. A big hitter doctor can bring a lot of patients with him (normally him) so hospitals compete to attract these 'superstars' as they bring revenue. There are hardly any nurses. And the profession is so badly paid (not to mention undervalued generally in society) most capable women (normally women) head off to become nannies abroad. (This causes its own social ills - a lot of kids being not-very-well brought up by the husband who stays at home (if they are lucky) whilst their mother is abroad). Zero trust One impact of hospitals competing for patients is that there is a lot of advertising of different doctors and services, including (which I still can't get my head around) certain procedures "on discount" for this month only. When the health system is after you for your money, Georgians (never the most trusting of institutions in the first place) are rightly suspicious. This has two consequences - one is that nobody goes to the doctor until it is an absolute necessity (i.e. you are near death) and second that for the most part you go to someone you know or who your family knows - your cousin. In a country where there are way too many doctors, everyone knows a doctor. Georgians aren't healthy This exacerbates the problem that - for the most part - Georgians aren't very health conscious. Tbilisi has astounding traffic, nobody walks anywhere and I haven't seen anyone on a bike, ever. There is a lot of heart disease and also - unsurprising in an economy with no social safety nets at all - a lot of hypertension. There is no culture of "check up". You don't go to the doctor until you absolutely have to. There's really no functioning primary care system aside from the polyclinics that are a legacy of Soviet times, themselves a business. It's an unintegrated, highly fragmented, completely opaque, lottery. It is the spectre of such a commodified health system that lies at the heart of the UK strikes. The vision of what could be. And yet - barring a couple of specific Georgian idiosyncrasies - health as a business is the norm Business is fundamental to health (in most places) Most countries don't have an NHS, and could never afford one if they started now. In Georgia at least, and in most other places where the state provision is non existent or inadequate, the only game in town are health businesses. My client was the biggest health business in Georgia, maybe 20-25% of the totality. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union healthcare was disorganised for a couple of decades before some semblance of state support came in through insurance schemes in the early 2010s. But these schemes were not universal and funding for them has been frozen since 2013, so in reality state funding of healthcare - such as it is - has been in real terms decline more or less ever since it started. Which means all of the legwork for developing the system, all of the educational provision, all of the training, all of the infrastructure, all the long term planning falls on the shoulders of the businesses. This is really uncomfortable. The first thing that the first hospital director I met said to me was: "I have never got used to the idea that healthcare can be a business" For the vast majority of vocational, purpose driven, people working in healthcare the idea that it is a "business" is disquieting. Sometimes the influences of "business" insinuate the fundamentals of "health" - when "patients" become "customers" something is wrong. But.....there is no way that the health system in Georgia is going to improve unless business gets sufficiently organised to invest in its future. Business - the profits from business - are fundamental to the future of healthcare. This was the heart of the brand shift that was needed - an inversion of the normal fear about business in health. Instead of thinking about the health system being squeezed for profits, thinking that a healthy commercial enterprise was critical to investing in healthcare. Subordinating business to health and for health, not subordinating health to business. Purpose: the power of business in healthcare There's no doubt that in the Georgian system there are a bunch of people operating who are in it only for the money. But as the sector evolves there is a consolidation towards a small number of significant players whose interests align with those of the population. This was demonstrated in no small degree by the Covid response that was driven by the business. Only they had the resources, the speed, the sense of purpose and the 'togetherness' to mobilise a response to the pandemic that spanned the country. Only a business in healthcare had the ability to act universally and for the social good. This was a demonstration of a way of working that really was the power of business in healthcare - not for profiteering but for getting good things done, fast. It has had a profound impact on the identity of the organisation - it has shown them who they really are. The trick that's needed to do that for the long term is embedding that universal purpose into the organisation in such a way that the business side and the care side feel integrated and symbiotic. That requires crystal clarity on the difference between customers and patients, and also the ability to develop revenue streams that "pay for" the general provision. What's fascinating, and why I love healthcare as a strategic challenge, is that the world of "healthcare" offers lots of opportunities to develop revenue streams (cosmetic surgery for example) which can fund "disease fighting" and "disease prevention" provision. The new business will emerge during 2023. The whole experience has changed some of what I think about healthcare in the UK. We're incredibly lucky to have an NHS, but maybe we shouldn't be so scared about "business in healthcare", after all. That said, give the flipping nurses the pay rise they deserve. #brandstrategy #healthcare #georgia #NHS

The end of unfettered growth? So we do live in a finite world after all. But our economic system and its offspring, the branding and marketing orthodoxy of the past 30 odd years, has operated as if we don't. We have fetishised economic growth with no concern about extraction. And like the faithful hound that it is, brand and marketing world followed the growth fetish, contorting itself into the weird shape it is today - obsessed with a battle for consumers and paying no attention to the other end of the chain. Which is weird when you take a step back. Read any history of either marketing or branding and you'll see that it is always described as having a critical role throughout the value chain - shaping not just how stuff gets sold, but crucially what gets made in the first place and how. Brand was always rooted in origin. A brand was literally a sign of provenance. Good brands came from good places and good people who did good things in good ways. So what happened to shunt branding and marketing into a subdivision of sales? From ration cards to strawberries at Christmas I was a kid in the 80s. Heady times when everything was possible, and we were told that we should all demand and expect everything. Big phones, red braces, fast cars, Brummies on yachts, strawberries whenever we wanted. Greed was good. It was horrible. How did we get there? From scarcity to superabundance Rewind 7 or 8 decades. Post WW2 people were still used to scarcity - there was hardly enough of anything so people planned and shopped according to what was available. Gradually, through the 60s and 70s more choice entered the market, and shops started competing for customers, mostly through expanded ranges and on the basis of choice. Check out this from Safeway in 1983 - when "choosing your own fruit" was a new thing. Then in the 80s everything went mad. Suddenly we could all have whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. Avocados on Christmas Day. Asparagus all year round. Tomatoes in every possible shape and size. But this superabundance wasn't because nature had suddenly got a touch of the Wonkas, and was producing more and more stuff. It was because we had perfected the industrialisation of global supply chains. Hyper efficient procurement duped us into believing in superabundance and permanently shifted our expectations. We all lost track of seasons and scarcity. We got disconnected. We deserved everything we wanted. Give me it. Now. And marketing - from that moment on - became all about consumption and consumers. Bigger, cheaper, faster. The game was market share and share of wallet. Get as many people to buy as much as possible from you. Woo them with abundance, choice and low, low prices. Drive down costs by ruthlessly fragmenting supply chains into transactional units. Here comes the real cost An economic system that fetishises growth whilst disregarding natural constraints was always going to have an unhappy ending. Now we can see it. The cost to nature is enormous. Crop production has increased 3x since 1970 23% of the global terrestrial area has reduced productivity 75% of the land surface is significantly altered 85% of the wetlands area has been lost 66% of the ocean is experiencing change Sea levels are up 16-21cm since 1900 At least 20% of native species are already lost in each biome 1 million species currently face extinction From what we can see in our work in Good Growth all of these extractive trends are accelerating, especially in the past 4 to 5 years. Where barely 4 years ago there were trees there are now sand dunes 20 m tall. Yes, we have no tomatoes Now there are signs all around us that we've reached the end of superabundance. That a system that relentlessly drives down costs, industrially sweats landscapes for raw materials and constructs its chains on purely lowest-cost transactional terms won't cut it anymore. Sometimes it's difficult to see the change clearly until something in the day to day shifts. I think that just happened. In recent winter weeks Brits have been struggling to get hold of their out of season fruit and veg - which they have grown so used to having. Suddenly there were not enough lettuces, tomatoes, strawberries on the supermarket shelves. Many things were blamed - not enough immigrants, too many immigrants, not enough Brexit, too much Brexit, the French, Putin, and of course the weather in Spain. Soon enough social and mass media was awash with images of Dutch and German shoppers laden down with huge quantities of tomatoes. The EU was swimming in fruit but the UK was not. Clearly a Brexit issue then......but no....not Brexit. No it turns out that UK supermarkets simply don't pay producers very much for lettuces. About half what the Spanish pay. So when there is a lettuce shortage in February the producers are loyal to the people who are loyal to them. You don't pay, you don't get So now a quarter of the 7000 NHS staff who last year applied for posts in other countries are heading to Australia. And there's a massive queue behind them. Australia now has 4 beds per 1000 head of population. The UK has 2.5 beds per head, down from 6 in the mid 80s. But the UK still pays health staff roughly 30% less than the Australians do. So the exodus continues. This is not a blip There's a lot of moaning about food inflation - but food prices have been way too low for too long. Given what we now know about the damage industrial supply chains wreak on the planet, not to say the stupidity of shipping out of season asparagus around the world for a few people who don't mind their veg tasting of cardboard, we ought to be rethinking not just the nature of consumption (when it's disconnected from nature) but also what is going to be a winning competitive strategy for the next 50 years. Loyalty to landscapes, loyalty to producers - the new competitive arena The thing that got lost in the greed-is-good frenzy was any kind of relationship with the origin of the chains - the producers. If there aren't enough doctors, and you don't pay doctors a competitive wage, then you'll be short of doctors. If there isn't enough lettuce, and you pay 70 pence per lettuce vs the Spanish paying €1.50 - don't be surprised when you don't get any lettuce. This points to a correction - maybe a reversion - in what we mean by brand and marketing. Instead of myopic focus on selling stuff the role of "marketing" in a fundamentally constrained world is shifted to run through the entire chain. And specifically to foster connection between origin and buyer, to establish and reinforce "identity" between buyer, producer and (let's really hope) the landscape and nature from whence that product comes. And competitive edge will no longer be about how much you can beat up and impoverish your producers, it will be about the long term reciprocity of relationship between you and them. There will be more on the mechanics of this new kind of relationship soon over in Good Growth. It changes the role of brand building and marketing. A return to valuing and appreciating scarcity. Not just communicating value but creating value. Not just how value gets articulated through the chain but also in how innovation works. It means there is - again? - a fundamental role for marketing in product range and design. Innovation driven by natural constraint not by market preference. But at present none of marketing and brand world functions or even thinks like this. From the way brands are managed within business (just sell stuff) to the structure and business models of agencies to the mix of skills needed. So we're going to build it. I am excited because this feels like a return to genuine value. The value of craft. The value of identity. The value of slow and seasonal. The value of nature. #branding #marketing #degrowth #goodgrowth

A sustainability-lens on brands helps redefine what we mean by "value" Brands - and branding people - are having a miserable time with sustainability. What should be a gift has become a missed opportunity. Instead we get diversionary tactics ("recyclable coffee on airlines!"), 'sustainable' production nonsense ("carbon neutral coffee!") and an obsession with risk management in the booming ESG industry (meaning managing the financial risk of doing something good). No value creation. No North Star. No impact. A bunch of violin-playing tactics adding up to sweet FA whilst vast swathes of the world are on fire. But rethinking business - and especially brands - through a landscape lens highlights just how vast much of a reset opportunity 'sustainability' really could be. Maybe brand world doesn't really understand "value"? Brand strategists strive to link their strategies to some kind of measurable outcome. 99 times out of 100 that will be a financial or a growth metric. Read a strategic case study from any major brand shop and there will be a scattering of soul destroying statistics thrown in which say "we helped this brand to grow" - sell more stuff, get more customers. There are numerous proxy metrics for this kind of 'result' - from the abject ('online mentions') to the lazy ('30% growth'*) to the indefensible (all the brand valuation nonsense). Whether it's portfolio extension or retaining market leadership or redefining categories for brand world "winning in the market" has become the sine qua non of brand strategy. (*"since 2000") This does a massive disservice to "value" because it subordinates brands to the narrow definition of "value" in the economic sense. "Value" meaning Financial Value. And nothing more. Value that can be measured. As if only value that can be measured counts. There is a ferocious debate triggered by all this - essentially that "growth" as defined by narrow financial value metrics is a *bad thing* because it drives extraction (which is true) and that therefore "de growth" is a *good thing* (which depends on what the hell you mean by "degrowth"). I'd much rather we stopped abusing language and rescued the word "growth" from meaning just "economic growth". It used to mean so much more, and still should. What does the world need from you? As I get deeper into 'how business can do good' I feel just how diminishing and small that metric version of "value" really is. For brand world to have become so fixated on "value" only insofar as it affects business metrics is to throw away the very thing that makes brands so very special in the first place. My favourite bit of kit from Wolff Olins was a simple question intended to get to the heart of the relationship between a brand and the world. "What does the world need from you?" is a disarmingly simple question. And if you really try to answer it fully (as in what does the "world" need from you) then you open up all sorts of possibilities. But inevitably most of the time brand strategists don't get to that big question - defaulting instead to a very small concept of 'world' as 'customer' or more often than not 'justification of business model' leading to embarrassing self serving nonsense ("a world where healthcare has no limits" WTF?) Humans have lost touch with what is really valuable I've been working in environment/sustainability for a few years. It's a massive area - complex, frustrating, fragmented. Climate change and biodiversity loss are such vast challenges that it's all too easy to feel overwhelmed by them. Getting over the 'awesomeness of the problem' and into what we, specifically, can do about them is in itself a massive journey. At the heart of it all is the disconnection of humankind from nature - the "othering" of nature and the planet by humankind. Since the beginning of human time we have deemed ourselves to be above, different from, superior to, "have dominion over" all living things. (maybe the fear of AI is no more than a fear of getting knocked off our self appointed perch as apex species). Our economic system is a product of this fundamental belief in our superiority - that the world is there for us, and that we are somehow above it. Hence our limitless extractive behaviour. And then our recasting of ourselves as economic beings. Cogs in the machine. Humans as valuable only insofar as we consume or we produce. And then industrialisation is what really severed the link between us and planet. We left our communities to go into factories. We lost touch with the communities and the places we came from. We lost touch with nature. We forgot what matters. We lost our soul. We forgot what value really means. Sustainability is an opportunity for brands to recapture what value really means Take the strategy question - what does the world need from you? - and really try to answer it from the planetary perspective. An endless set of value creating opportunities are revealed. Instead of looking at a brand from a customer perspective, look at it from the landscapes where that brand has impact. Like this place.... This place is Bayan Ovoo in the South Gobi - specifically some of the 50,000 odd hectares of pasture used by the Shurkhan Zalaa herder group. The landscape has deteriorated significantly over the past 30 years - a combination of climate change (unpredictable rain, terrible winters) and overgrazing caused by excessive animal numbers driven ever higher by the demand for ever higher volumes of cashmere. Good Growth is working with herders and brands to reverse these effects. (You can get more of a picture of the place here). Brands have got used to treating sustainability as a challenge, as a problem to be solved, as a risk to be managed. But it's so, so much more than that. These landscapes are where the unvarnished impact of supply chains on nature can be seen. And the opportunities. Starting at this end - at where your brand hits the planet - is where small changes in how brands interact with landscapes can shift them from extractors to catalysts for regeneration. It's a huge opportunity for brands to do something really good. Redefining value Sustainability - impact on landscape and especially biodiversity - provides us the opportunity to recapture our souls. The chance to escape our benighted existence as consumer-bots and producer-bots. To rediscover a much bigger - and better - notion of value. The intrinsic value of place. The value of beauty. The value of wonder. The value of origin. The value of story. The value of oneness with the world around us. Part of the world, part of nature, not distinct from it. Identity value. Value that cannot be measured. I believe this is a completely new playbook for brands Sustainability as value creation platform. Value beyond - way beyond - the financial. Story of origin as a means to connect to places Human connection to the world. (Not the market). I love this idea. The practice of brand building as the practice of reconnecting to what really matters. Brand building that rekindles a healthy relationship to the planet. Brand building that takes us out of our confected existence as economic beings and reinstalls us where we belong - as part of something much bigger and much more wonderful. And it shifts brands from wrestling with sustainability as a problem and instead treating it as an opportunity to create real value. More soon. #brandstrategy #sustainability #branding #goodgrowth

As humans we find it hard to relate to the planet at large but we are really attracted by places. Places give us a sense of belonging, of shared interest, of community. Brands that negate or disregard place of origin miss all of that. The sad thing is that for many brands they really don't know where their materials originate from - so they talk about factories and process and manufacturing but they can't talk about origin. Yet the things we love come from somewhere, not from anywhere. (I'm a big fan of wine and cheese as an analogy for how to build a value chain that preserves and amplifies origin value). Origin is an amazingly deep well of value. One of my very favourite brands to work on from recent times was the residential development brand "Biograpi". It's all too easy to treat real estate as a soulless money making exercise. Packing people in. Flogging boxes. But the Biograpi team wanted something different from the outset. They had a sense that something had been lost. A connection to the past, a connection to culture, above all a sense of places to live as places to LIVE. Biograpi is Georgian. If you are lucky enough to visit Georgia you will find a people that thrive on community, on connection, on sharing and above all on stories. (Some say the loudest noise in the world is a Georgian on the phone). Georgians aren't happy living in boxes. They are at their happiest gathered around makeshift tables, swapping stories. The culture is shaped by centuries of story telling. All their heroes are poets. And much more than that, every Georgian is specifically shaped by their specific place of origin - the food they love, their names, the way they talk, the colours they love, the sounds and sights that resonate - for a Georgian the region they come from, the village they come from, is at the core of their identity. Designing spaces for Georgians means embracing this noisy story telling culture. It means creating spaces for community to grow and thrive. Spaces where people from different regions can come together, share their stories and build new ones together. In economic terms it means sacrificing space for community. Avoiding the temptation to sweat every cubic millimetre of the asset and instead embracing the space that people and nature need to come together. A place bound by stories. All of which creates value that matters, but value that cannot be measured. #biograpi

Heaven knows we're all miserable now One of the most joyous sights and sounds of a fabulous Glastonbury was Rick Astley and Blossoms giving a whole lot of love to some Smiths songs. Would have been fabulous to be there (we live so close it's almost a crime that we weren't there) but this year the BBC did an amazing job of covering the whole thing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0ft6w7z/glastonbury-rick-astley-blossoms-perform-the-smiths A bit of simple joy is what we all need nowadays, but heaven knows it is hard to find. Burn Down the Disco. Sustainability world is full of relentless misery. I've written before about how Brand world has comprehensively failed to get to grips with sustainability It's a real shame because when brand world does get to grips with something it can be a powerful force for good, fashioning galvanising narratives that stimulate big movements in how we all think and act. There's another world which is - I think - disappearing down a needless pit of misery. It's what others and I tend to call Sustainability Inc. If Brand World is Dopey then Sustainability Inc really is Grumpy. (Sidebar - Brand World is supposed to be all about long term strategy but suffers from attention deficit disorder on an industrial scale. Having failed to grapple with climate and biodiversity Brand World is right now in the throes of an wheel spinning obsession with AI. All noise no insight.) For those unfamiliar with Sustainability Inc it is essentially the advisory arm of Sustainability World. There are commentators and advisors and convenors and platforms and (yet more pointless) frameworks galore. It is all very connected, the same people crop up persistently, and it is NOT HAPPY. Take a peek at Sustainability Inc and you will come across a narrative that is obsessed with 'polycrises'. It does a good job in calling out greenwash and inadequate legislation, but with a few noble exceptions is way too deferential to corporate sustainability strategies (corporates providing most of the funding for Sustainability Inc hence shy to bite the hand that feeds etc). The result is pretty miserable and (this has got worse in recent times) unattractively finger wagging. There's something very off about lots of (smart? privileged?) people telling other people what they should do. (This spills over into deep cultural schisms as well - google up decolonisation+sustainability for a glimpse of sustainability world's own "Hang the DJ" moment) For most 'the music they constantly play says nothing to me about my life'. The whole thing makes Morrissey look like a bundle of laughs. (Noble exception - Roger Atkins on EVs. His relentless optimism looks and feels very different from the rest of Sustainability Inc because it is). There is a light that never goes out - true value The big opportunity is for these two worlds, brand and sustainability, to get together and to start being properly useful by lighting the way to a bigger better understanding of the value of sustainability. There's way too much shade and not nearly enough light. And the reason for that is that both worlds have forgotten what "value" really means. They default to the narrow and miserable version of value as defined by economists. And that has meant that sustainability is constantly pitched as a trade off between economics and environment. With several misguided assumptions being steadily baked in: economies have to make sacrifices in order to do good things for the planet companies have to do the same and so do individuals The narrative is all about what we have to lose. But that's bullshit. Reconnect to value and we have much, much more to gain. Stop me if you think you've heard this one before Sustainability is the platform to reconnect to a much greater concept of value. Specifically - because I really care about it - restoration of nature and biodiversity can become the galvanising force for our times. "The overriding purpose of our time is to work out how to reintegrate ourselves frictionlessly back into the miracle of nature" (Ben Goldsmith in God is an Octopus) What does that mean? Rediscovering what really matters. Value can't be measured. Real value. The value of waking up with a purpose. The value of feeling at one with the world. The value of being part of something magical and wonderful. The value of being close to and part of the natural world. The intrinsic value of nature. The value of landscape. The value of origin. The value of story. The value of community. Our economic system has hollowed us all out. Made us into consumer and producer bots. Reduced the notion of "value" to a number. We've forgotten who we are. We have a chance, right now, to revert to a much more enduring, much more fulfilling concept of value. Value that can't be taken away with an interest rate hike. Value that endures. What I call 'identity value' but others may have different names. This is the stuff that glues organisations together (the magic that make people want to work together). This is the stuff that makes organisations endure. This is the stuff that makes us happy. It's a much bigger, better, more resilient version of value. And it can't come too soon because the vessels of economic value are failing us. Whether it's reserve currency or stockmarkets or house prices or GDP or savings or bottom lines or tech valuations or any other kind of metric that is a proxy for "economy". The industrial system we have all grown up in has hit its limits and gone way beyond what the planet can sustain - there's no way to extract more without wreaking real damage. So we have to forget about that narrow "give me more" version of value that industrial economics demanded and rediscover what really matters. And that's where the worlds of brands and sustainability can usefully come together. In recognising and articulating the value of living sustainably, at one, with the planet. And then turning that value into a value system beyond economics, a value system that is a guiding light for not just their corporate clients but for us all. For many of us the Smiths had become hard to listen to. We still loved the music but the misery and the baggage was all getting a bit too much. Rick rescued the music from the misery. I want brand and sustainability world to do the same for 'value' Let's all be more Rick. #rickastley #smiths #value #brandstrategy #sustainability #goodgrowth #glastonbury #bengoldsmith