Challenge
Corporate sustainability communications are often uninspiring and rarely directly link to brands -meaning there are a lack of high quality, creative assets that address brand initiatives and challenges.
And here was the opportunity for Sony as sustainability communications in the consumer electronics category are largely limited to information about today’s product specifications and there is not much room for anything radical or innovative.
Sony’s sustainability initiatives sought to keep true to its ‘make believe’ brand message which states that whatever you believe you can make real. Following its success in 2011, Sony wanted to think about how to deeply engage a stakeholder audience while sharing the collaborative process with a broader community. To create a deeper, more meaningful relationship it needed to reframe the sustainability agenda as inclusive, interesting, real and engaging for its consumers, whilst remaining relevant to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other professional stakeholders.
Insight
Sony decided to start a debate focusing on the technological possibilities the future holds and how this could affect the way we live in 2050. The objectives to communicate were: 1) Sony’s engagement on sustainability beyond the immediate green audience, 2) To identify and re-define the lifestyles of the future and the real impact technology makes on our lives.
The brand partnered with leading NGO, ‘Forum for the Future,’ to use their expertise in scenario creation and future concept development. Out of this partnership came ‘FutureScapes,’ a collaborative project that brings together a range of Sony experts and external thinkers, designers, futurologists, writers and the general public across Europe to explore the opportunities and challenges of life in 2025. ‘FutureScapes’ focused on this year because it is close enough for feasibility, yet far away enough to give imaginations free rein.
Solution
‘Forum for the Future’ created a series of future scenarios in word and film, bringing to life four different views of 2025. ‘FutureScapes’ launched with workshops in London and Paris where a range of technology, lifestyle, design, and sustainability experts were brought together from across Europe. Groups worked to develop the scenarios and visualise different futures, develop specific concepts and share their own ideas and consumers from across Europe were invited to record their thoughts on what they thought 2025 would bring and the challenges society may face. Sony also teamed up with The Guardian and The Economist which saw budding writers along with leading thinkers around behaviour change and collaborative consumption share their views on what the future could hold. It also held a roundtable discussion with a group of technologists at Wired Magazine’s 2011 European Conference.
Results
‘FutureScapes’ was independently benchmarked as 2nd out of 30 good practice sustainability projects across the world.