Promoting sustainability through corporate branding

Sustainability is now on the agenda of most companies and organisations in Sweden. The growing interest in corporate sustainability has led to that both the academic field and the business industry have taken initiatives to define, quantify and measure sustainability (Artiach et al., 2010). An increasingly popular method of doing so is by creating sustainability indices, described as systems that measures different organisations’ sustainability performance, ultimately creating sustainability rankings between them (Fowler and Hope, 2007). However, ‘conventional’ sustainability indices (such as Dow Jones sustainability Index) investigate and analyse firms internally, and therefore ignore an important area of analysis – the perception of the consumers (Hanss and Bohm, 2011). However, a new form of sustainability indices has recently been introduced, in this study referred to as Consumer Sustainability Indices (CSI). What separates CSIs from the more conventional sustainability indices is that instead of placing the unit of analysis at a company level, the ratings are instead based solely on how sustainable the consumers consider the brand behind companies to be (SB Index, 2017). A fairly large CSI has already been developed in the Nordic Region: The Sustainable Brand Index (SB Index). The SB Index annually ranks around 900 brands, with the help of 30 000 consumer interviews and surveys, and additionally provides services within sustainability branding (ibid.). Although CSIs, such as SB Index, may provide several insights to corporate sustainability and branding, the reality that this is a new form of corporate sustainability measurement creates several problems. Firstly, neither the scientific community nor the business industries have closely studied them. The understanding of how CSIs can help companies integrate sustainability into their corporate branding, and how this contributes to corporate sustainability, is still small (ibid.). The aim of this study was to investigate the role of a CSIs to promote more sustainable corporate branding, and how this contributes to improved corporate sustainability within the Swedish market. To reach this aim, a single case study was conducted on the Sustainable Brand Index. The study was conducted using a flexible qualitative method, in which empirical data was collected through semi-structured interviews and observations of the case company. The conclusions of this study suggest that CSIs can have an important role in promoting more sustainable corporate branding, and can have an impact on the corporate sustainability in Sweden. The main findings showed that CSIs can help organisations to place sustainability as an integrated part of its corporate brand and serves as a strategic tool for sustainability branding. Furthermore, CSIs can serve as signals for sustainability attributes, and can help solve the information failure that sustainability-oriented consumers experience. Although, CSIs mainly have a positive impact on corporate sustainability in Sweden, this study also suggests that they may lead to an increased risk of greenwashing among companies.