Steve Kokes, Coates Kokes
Steve Kokes by Celeste LeCompte - 3.10.08
On the event of our fifth anniversary, Sustainable Industries decided to catch up with 10 subscribers who have been with us from the very first issue and get their perspective on how things have changed since 2002.
A testament to the magazine’s Northwest roots, 9 of the 10 are Portlanders, with a lone Seattle representative in the bunch. Like the rest of our readers, though, the early subscribers profiled in the following pages and online are leaders in a diverse range of industries from green building and law to food processing and investment.
The positive impact of public concerns about climate change, reflections on the growth of greenwashing and a conviction that sustainability will need to tackle social equity issues were common themes among many of the interviews. We hope these interviews provide a moment of reflection on where we’ve been and where we’re headed as part of the green business community.
Read more profiles and join the conversation by clicking here.
In 2001, Steve Kokes, partner at Portland-based marketing firm Coates Kokes, told the Portland Business Journal the firm was starting a new “niche in sustainability” because the partners had recognized the sector as a business opportunity. “As communicators, our job is to help the clients who are making changes to leverage these sustainable actions to kick butt on their competitors,” he said. “It's something that's going to happen anyway. We can just make it happen faster.”
In January 2008, Kokes looked back 5 years to when Coates Kokes was “more than beginning the journey, but the journey was still in its infancy.” Back then, he recalls “it felt like we were pushing uphill.” Clients with energy efficiency, green building or other “sustainability” campaigns made up about 33 percent of the company’s business, in terms of both client numbers and revenue. Today, he says, sustainability makes up about 60 percent of the company’s accounts and nearly 75 percent of revenue. “It’s become a better part of the financial equation for us,” he says. “If our green clients went away, we’d go away. Which definitely wasn’t the case 5 years ago.”
“The movement has started pushing up from a lot of places. There was a little bit of an awakening 18 months to two years ago. Before, the challenge was just getting people to talk, to consider their operations and whether they might have a sustainable story to tell. That isn’t the challenge anymore. Now, everybody wants to talk green; we have to hold them back a little bit and say, ‘Do you have enough of a story to really begin to talk about green or sustainability?’ The bar for communications is getting higher.”
Kokes says that’s good for businesses – and for communications firms such as his. “Companies, because of the greenwashing backlash and higher fluency level, are going to need to talk more specifically, and they’re going to need to do that in a way that doesn’t lose people in the details. That will bode well for companies like ours because companies are going to need help around communicating these issues. The public is going to be getting smarter and smarter.”
For companies wanting to launch a green marketing campaign, Kokes says it’s important to really be doing something worth talking about: “If you are engaging in some sort of greenwashing, it’s harmful to the brand. It’s best to go a little bit slow.”
In the years ahead, Kokes says he thinks the public will begin to develop an awareness that many issues are connected, from the environment to social equity and foreign policy. “All these issues are interconnected and I think that that is starting to get woven into the dialogue of sustainable industries in general: this piece connects to that piece.”
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