Industry-wide and Individual Brand Sustainability Scoring: What you don’t know can hurt you.

Individual brands carry their equity around — some like championship belts, others like anchors — but what about the “equity” that an entire industry can acquire? What does industry brand-equity mean for the success of the individual brands that comprise it?

Well, for starters, the multi-colored lenses that consumers view industries through can be utilized for benefit — or they can create problems. Take some of the statistics from our MapChange 2010 study, where the difference between actual and perceived sustainability scores in the airline industry, for example, is very large. The average perceived score for the airline sector is a moderate 54, while the actual sustainability average of the industry is a very poor 29. This is by far one of the largest gaps in the study.

Compare those averages with the consumer shipping sector, which has an average perceived score of 53 (moderate) and an average actual score of 62 (moderately high). In the case of consumer shipping, the industry as a whole is in fact more sustainable than it’s perceived to be. For the airline industry, it’s the opposite. Yet, they’re both perceived to be nearly the same (54 and 53, respectively.)

So what’s going on here? One answer might be industry-brand equity.

It could be that since “transportation” is a major component of the shipping sector and it is the core offering of the airline business, that consumers “transfer” perceptions and perceive both sectors as similar in terms of sustainability. In this example, the shipping industry is being “hurt” by this “association”.

Which leads me to the most relevant question: How can brands break away from negative industry-brand equity? The answer: innovation and communication.

According to the Harvard Business Review, sustainability will be the key driver of innovation in the near-future. That means now is the time to integrate sustainability into your business models, products and services. If your industry is making great strides toward sustainability, you need to make sure your individual brand leverages that momentum by innovating within that space and communicating your successes loudly, succinctly, in a relevant manner. If your industry is not making strides toward sustainability, yet you are, you need to make sure your individual brand distinguishes itself by loudly and proudly communicating its sustainability to your target markets.

This sort of proactive strategy can inspire entire industries to move toward sustainability for long-term growth and profit. And eventually, with the right perspective, improving industry-brand equity can be treated as an opportunity to innovate toward even more sustainable solutions — instead of a dead weight to lug around.

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