Smarter marketing at IBM: Big Blue's latest green consulting launch

Pardon me for talking about IBM yet again, but the company continues to impress me with its ability to ride the green wave with intelligent and high-potential offerings. The latest example is last week's announcement of a new Sustainable Procurement consulting offer. 

According to IBM, the offer is designed to help companies set cost, efficiency, and sustainability goals and metrics for their entire set of procurement activities, including "all supplies, materials, ingredients, components, finished goods and services they purchase to run their operations and to develop, manufacture and deliver their own products or services." 

The potential scale of this is enormous, covering just about every aspect of the world's supply chain. And IBM is certainly thinking big, outlining coverage of six main Corporate Social Responsibility aspects of supply chain management:

• Environment -- reducing energy and water usage, minimizing waste and the use of potentially hazardous chemicals and materials, increasing recycling and recyclability, and improving efficiency;
• Community -- ensuring suppliers support and contribute to the communities they operate in;
• Health and safety -- promoting safe workplace practices as well as ensuring safety in products and services;
• Ethics and financial accountability -- ensuring suppliers practice appropriate business ethics and adhere to applicable standards for financial accounting and transparency;
• Diversity -- encouraging diversity and inclusiveness throughout the supply chain;
• Labor practices -- ensuring suppliers adhere to local, national and internationals laws, rules and standards for labor practices.

To back up the offer, IBM points to its own efforts developing Supplier Conduct Principles for its own supply chain, which includes some 30,000 supplier locations in 60 countries. 

If the practice grows, and I'm certainly hoping it does, the benefits for companies, communities, workers, and the environment can be enormous.

Marketing Lessons

At the same time, the initiative points to a powerful reminder for B2B marketers in today's challenging economy. At a time when so many companies and marketers are obsessing over which tactics are most likely to deliver short-term revenue, broader strategy remains absolutely essential. My own takeaways from the IBM launch including the following:

• Now is the time to identify new sources of revenue that leverage existing capabilities and assets
• Tap into the green wave; it's big and getting bigger
• Always reinforce the larger corporate brand and story
• Always back up the offer with credible proof points

In these ways, IBM's new offering reflects the best of strategic marketing -- focused on how to drive growth for the company in responsible and intelligent ways, with great potential for short- and longer term success. I'll be curious to follow the tactical side of the initiative, as well as the results, of course, but this is already another good example of how "big M" Marketing can and should the foundation for corporate direction.

Do you agree?

 

*For more on IBM's new offering, check out these resources:

• IBM podcast on the new offering
• IBM consulting and thought leadership resources on green and Corporate Social Responsibility
• The Challenges and Opportunities of Sustainable Procurement 
• Heather Clancy at ZDNet

Comments

[dell gx620]

In fact IBM is growing bigger and it should be as their products are marketable plus reliable too, above all their services are superb.

[cheap computers]

I give you that intro as a backdrop to a recent BusinessWeek article on 401ks at IBM, which recently dropped its pension line to create a supercharged 401k for its employees: