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.”