Sustainable Life Media's SB Seminars Provide Executives With Sustainable Brand Strategy Training

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Sustainable Life Media's new Sustainable Brands Seminar Series is designed to give small groups a comprehensive study on sustainability theory and practical application, including "Building a Credible Sustainable Brand."  Jennifer Rice, principal at Fruitful Strategy, will teach participants that building a credible brand starts with laying the foundation: how customers experience your brand, and what they believe to be true about you as a company. By the end of the course, attendees will have gone through a structured process for leveraging sustainability for growth, learning from best-practices examples like Clorox, GE Ecomagination and InterfaceFLOR for each stage. Hands-on exercises will include the Five Stages Audit, Strategic Scope Mapping and Customer Experience Mapping.

Rice's course provides a structured methodology for developing market-facing sustainability strategy that is anchored on the Five Sustainable Brand Stages: Laggard, Trial, Emergent, Integrated and Transformative. This model aids businesses in building credible brand reputations, respecting their limits, and finding ways to leverage sustainability into competitive advantage and customer loyalty.

Six areas in brand gaps and opportunities in sustainability will be explored:  

• Scope of Sustainability Strategy: Are you focused simply on risk mitigation or transformation of your entire category?
• Sustainable Brand Strategy: How can sustainability be best integrated into your brand portfolio: through a sub-brand, line extension, ingredient brand, initiative brand or master brand?
• Sustainability Positioning: To what extent is sustainability represented in how you position your brand?
• Customer Journey: Can your customers experience you as a sustainable brand? How is sustainability integrated into all the ways a customer interacts with you?
• Communications: How visible and transparent is your sustainability story?
• Operational Integrity: How does your level of Operational Integrity limit or enhance your market-facing sustainability efforts?

In 2009, after 20 years in brand and customer experience strategy, Rice founded Fruitful Strategy to help companies successfully align sustainability with revenue and reputation. Fruitful Strategy focuses exclusively on helping companies build reputation and revenue from sustainability: leveraging products, services, experiences, new business models, and brand and marketing strategies. Rice's current and former clients include HP, Microsoft and UnitedHealth, Green Electronics Council, Sierra Club, Fairmont Hotels, NCR, Emaar Hospitality (Dubai), Alcatel, and Verizon.

Limited to just 30 attendees for each daily session in all locations, participants will create a close-knit and invaluable network with brand and corporate sustainability executives, including product, brand and supply chain managers and designers; marketing, communications and PR team members; as well as HR or technology professionals. The five-part series will provide level-the-playing-field business knowledge in key areas of sustainable brand building, marketing, communications, strategy and assessment, product design, supply chain management and impending impact measurement strategies and tools.

SB Seminars Curriculum

The five-part SB Seminar Series is designed to provide attendees a complete grounding in many of the complex principles and practices involved in building business and brand value through sustainable innovation.  Participants can attend one or more days to meet their needs, and the needs of their business. Hosted by SLM community member corporations Williams Sonoma, 3M, Johnson & Johnson and AMD, SB Seminars are scheduled for San Francisco CA in October, Minneapolis MN in November, New Brunswick, NJ in December and Austin, TX in January.

Monday: Building the Credible Sustainable Brand with Jennifer Rice of Fruitful Strategy

Tuesday: Designing Communications that Resonate with John Marshall Roberts of Worldview Learning

Wednesday: Sustainable Product Design: an LCA Approach with Jeremy Faludi, Associate Professor of Design at Stanford University.

Thursday: Making Supply Chains More Sustainable with Phil Berry of Sustainable Product Works

Friday: Managing Your Sustainable Brand Plan: Management Systems & Metrics for Driving Ideas to Reality with Ranier Ochsenkuehn, President, ROC One

About Sustainable Life Media

Sustainable Life Media (SLM) is the leading producer of sustainable business conferences and educational events, with additional products and services designed to inspire and equip businesses to profitably innovate for sustainability.  These include targeted e-newsletters, online learning programs, various community membership levels, the flagship Sustainable Brands conference, SB Seminars and research through SLM Insights.  SLM delivers information on the who, what and how of environmental and social innovation, and helps community members connect with thought leaders, peers, partners and solutions providers who can help them quickly reach their goals. For more information, please visit: http://www.sustainablelifemedia.com/about. To subscribe to SLM Newsletters for free, please visit http://www.sustainablelifemedia.com/newsletters.

SOURCE Sustainable Life Media