Creating value: Inside sustainability communications

Bladonmore’s David Willans uncovers the value of sustainability communications with Laura Tamayo Laris from Bayer, a leading global healthcare and agriculture business. Laura is responsible for its reputation and license to operate in Mexico where she leads government affairs, internal and external communications, industry engagement and sustainability.  

Thanks for making the time Laura, so how do sustainability communications create value for businesses in general? 

Finding the value in sustainability is easy in the long run, it is harder in the short run. If your business only looks short term, sustainability is going to be a cost and a hassle. If you are thinking long-term, it is an investment. Communications can bridge the gap by realizing some of the value in the short term.  

Communications can unlock this short-term value because sustainability is close to home for people. It is personal because it is relevant to your life, for your kids and for your community. It connects emotionally and can be inspiring when done well. On many other business topics, like innovation, you have to work harder to create an emotional connection.  

To realize that value, we focus internally and on both sides of the value chain because we need suppliers to work with us to innovate and reduce impact, and we need customers to understand how – through our sustainability work – we can add value to them.

What does Bayer risk if it doesn’t communicate on sustainability? 

If we don’t communicate, we lose the value sustainability brings to our reputation, our sales and our employees, it’s as simple as that.  

We’re in agriculture so it doesn’t make sense to separate sustainability from the business conversation. We sell services that only exist to make food producers more sustainable. It’s a material driver of commercial success. Sustainability is now a business, in a good way.  

Has the role changed over time? 

Internal communications have become much more important, and we’ve become more specific and clearer there. It used to be about the basics – what sustainability is and why we’re doing it. Now, it’s about people’s jobs and how sustainability fits into that, so a person producing aspirin knows what they have to do and can feel good at playing their part in making a positive impact.  

With the increasing politicization and greenwash regulations, communicating sustainability has never been harder, how do you manage it?  

As a communicator, and a company, we have a responsibility to think outside the current political moment. The private sector is the one thinking long term. It is up to us to drive that conversation. If we don’t, we’ll just swing from one side to the other and never move forward.  

When it comes to greenwash scrutiny, we welcome it. 

Why do you welcome greenwash scrutiny? 

People get excited about the impact on sustainability they can make, but when they get into it, they realise how complicated it is. I know because I’ve done it.  

I got really excited about the potential of carbon sequestration. A lot of our customers grow food on trees, and those trees also sequester carbon. What if we could give our customers, many of them small farms in developing countries, an additional revenue stream from that sequestered carbon? That would be great.  

We knew we needed to do the math to prove the amount of carbon from the inputs was lower than the level sequestered. I underestimated how complex the math is. Three years on and we’re still working on it.  

We will get there though, especially because now there’s much more awareness around climate. We have producers (our customers) suggesting the idea to us. But we absolutely cannot make any claims or commitments without the math. 

Not everyone is like this. Some companies started talking before running the numbers. So, for us, the increased scrutiny over green claims is good. For those that started talking too early, the only approach is honesty. They’ve got to say, ‘we tried, these are the problems we ran into, this is what we’re doing about them, and this is where we hope to get to by this date.’ 

That’s the narrative we need to start hearing more often.  

You mentioned narratives, a key tool of our trade. What does ‘narrative’ mean to you? 

The narrative is how you tell the story; it’s how you persuade people. For sustainability narratives, because of how complicated the topics are, they need to be based on the numbers. By themselves, the numbers aren’t enough. To persuade, numbers need a narrative.  

The facts create the guidelines in which you can tell the story. This is how you avoid greenwashing. At the moment in my field, you hear a lot about regenerative agriculture. It’s a super complicated concept. We’ve done a huge amount of work to define it before we started talking about it – many others haven’t. They’re running the risk of greenwashing, and that may come back to haunt them.  

Looking forward, what do you see coming? 

Sustainability communications have become too complicated for two reasons. First, is measurement complexity. Knowing whether something is actually making a good contribution to sustainability is really complicated to work out. Second, everyone is looking for a differentiator in their narratives, so they make it more complicated than it needs to be.  

I don’t think differentiation is helpful. There are other ways to get value from messaging and, when it comes to sustainability, consistent messaging can create a multiplier effect. If we’re all saying the same thing, we will move the market faster which will make sustainability action more important commercially. We will still compete on the same things we always have done but we will also be meeting our own targets and solving the problems we all want solved.  

 If you’d like help communicating your sustainability, please get in touch.