Vi försökte det gick bajs, men vi lovar att bli bättre - En studie om hållbarhetskommunikation och konsumentpåverkan

Abstract

This report will describe and analyse how companies should communicate about their work with issues connected to sustainability in their organisation. Furthermore, also how widely they should talk about their goals and successes but also how they should handle the setbacks and possible fears that comes along the journey. The gist of it is to conclude how a company reaches their consumers in the most effective way. This report also hopes to find an answer to if, and in that case why, companies do not communicate about their sustainability work and what the reason is to why they choose to act the way they do. Through a qualitative method consisting of thorough interviews with respondents, answers were sought. On the foundation of the SBI-report about consumer’s perception of brands, relevant respondents were selected. Further, the same data was used in the interviews to learn if any conclusion about why their ranking have changed during the years, could be drawn. The core of the analysis are three different areas which all can be applied to the concept of communication and sustainability. They touchdown on the topics of how to match your communication with the activities you perform, how consumers respond to those activities and last but not least the fear of failure existing within corporations regarding their sustainability activities. The result of the interviews shows that it is hard to identify a simple reason for the changes in the SBIdata. The causality for the consumer perception of brands is too complex. All the respondents agreed upon that there is some kind of fear of failure when it comes to the field of sustainability. The study shows that it is easy to be judged if you make a mistake. The solution of the fear as well as the openness in companies sustainability work seems to be the same: Increased communication. Communication build trust from consumers and will also minimize the negative response to mistakes if the company earlier managed to anchor a sustainable approach as a long term strategy that saturate the whole organisation. It does not seem to matter how you communicate about your work, only that the communication is frequent and that the actions are perceived as beneficial for not just the surroundings, but also the company itself. Proposal for further research within the same field could take different approaches. One is to study how profitable it is to implement the findings in the field of communication.