After 50 years in business, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and director of philosophy Vincent Stanley have published a roadmap for the next half-century.
The Future of the Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 50 Years hit shelves last month.
The book is part follow-up to the 2012 text The Responsible Company, part critique of the profit-driven business model and part storytelling venture—highlighting the wins and losses that have defined Patagonia’s legacy as a company.
Critically, it also offers advice for business leaders looking to follow Patagonia’s example in valuing the planet’s health and its people as highly as it does profit.
Adweek spoke with Stanley, one of Patagonia’s original employees who served as head of marketing for many years, about the book’s lessons for marketing and advertising professionals. His insights are summarized below.
Ditch the vague claims
Over the past five decades, public understanding of the climate crisis and corporations’ responsibilities within it has changed drastically. And in many ways, consumers have become more skeptical of brand messaging on environmental issues—effectively raising the bar for green claims.
While regulations struggle to keep up with an evolving environmental marketing landscape, Stanley urged marketers to steer clear of “very vague claims about what they do or about being green.”
“When you describe things generally as ‘eco-friendly’ or as ‘sustainable’ without a lot of backup for it … if that’s not really intrinsic to your story, if that’s not really a large part of what you do, people will be skeptical,” he explained. “Especially if you change that story over time.”
Communicate constantly
In order to tell a good sustainability story that remains accurate over time, product and marketing teams have to build a constant communication loop into their way of working.
Stanley recounts when Patagonia was in the middle of product development, and the product turned out to be different than employees initially imagined due to performance standards or other constraints.
“This used to drive us crazy,” he said. “We also have this emphasis on quality, so people would be making changes at the last minute because they couldn’t get a part or they couldn’t perfect a process. I used to joke that Patagonia would be a perfect company if it didn’t have to make anything.”
To avoid ending up with messaging that’s inconsistent with the end product, communication needs to remain strong throughout all stages of development.
Be honest about failures
When things really don’t go according to plan—to the extent that an entire product gets canned or a commitment gets dropped—that requires a different kind of communication.
You can say, ‘net zero turned out to be bogus. But these are the initiatives we’re pursuing now.’
Vincent Stanley, Patagonia’s director of philosophy
When asked about how companies like Asos, Crocs and Nestlé should be handling the reality that they can’t meet the net zero or carbon neutrality goals they set, Stanley described it as an opportunity if handled correctly.
“If you learn the limitations of the net zero commitments and everybody else’s being [made] aware of it, you can find other ways to move toward those commitments,” he said. “That’s what we all need to do in the first place, and you can communicate that to the customer. You can say, ‘net zero turned out to be bogus. But these are the initiatives we’re pursuing now.'”
Patagonia’s made many commitments over the years, Stanley said, some of which it met ahead of time, some of which it met on time, and a few of which it had to drop completely. But as long as a company is moving in the right direction and sharing its journey clearly and with integrity, “people are forgiving,” he said.
Don’t fake authenticity
To build the kind of reputation that engenders forgiveness from people on failed or delayed sustainability commitments, though, there has to be an authentic connection to sustainability to begin with.
That means identifying the values and strengths of your company and building those into the business model.
“It’s a harder road than it looks, and authenticity is in short supply,” Stanley said. “The more you can connect on the basis of authenticity—without then having to retract and having to look inauthentic the next year—that’s a tremendous way to reach your customers and to connect with them.”
Building those values into your business model is hard, he acknowledged, but it also leads to more meaningful work for each person within the company. Fostering real connections to environmental work and social issues builds both employee satisfaction and brand affinity.
Think long term
Finally, companies must begin to think beyond the next quarter, factoring in the social and environmental impacts of business long after the next earnings call.
“Concentrating on short-term results is going to give you long-term problems,” Stanley said. “If you look at the interest of the company long-term and the interest of society, the interests of the planet long-term, they line up.”
When Patagonia switched to organic cotton, it had to develop new relationships with spinners, mills and assembly factories, Stanley recounted. Spinning organic cotton required a cooler temperature to avoid gumming up the machines—something they were able to determine working with a small factory in Bangkok that saw the opportunity in organic.
“It’s a combination of appealing to the better angels of our nature and coming up with a new product line or a new opportunity for product,” he said. While innovations like this aren’t quick wins, they represent possibilities that are often overlooked because they don’t offer short-term profit.
“Business can create an economically self-sustaining way to do this,” Stanley said. “It’s a missed opportunity. It’s a failure of imagination.”
