Sustainable branding focuses on integrating sustainability into a brand's identity, values and practices. It goes beyond the superficial use of eco-friendly imagery or slogans and requires a deep commitment to environmental, social and economic responsibility. A sustainable brand has the power to influence change, drive consumer loyalty and inspire positive action.

Now that we've established the importance of sustainable branding, it's time to explore how to create a sustainable – and successful - brand.

Here's MAp’s step-by-step guide to help you get started:

For every brand we create, we approach it holistically through the lens of the 4 Ps to determine how we can best portray a hotel’s Purpose, inspire and uplift its people, minimise its impact on the planet and economically benefit all of its stakeholders. When you enter into a (re-)branding process, we recommend to keep these 4 Ps close to you and ensure they are reflected in every aspect of your brand – from its visual identity to its verbal identity.

Not only are branding or rebranding exercises a big commitment (financial and otherwise), they necessitate the production of new marketing materials and the elimination of old ones (= more waste).

When you practice sustainable branding, you overcome this by creating a visual identity that is timeless and therefore avoids becoming quickly outdated - instead, it grows with your business across existing and future product lines, projects, subsidiaries and more.

Sourcing materials and services from responsible partners is essential – they should align with your sustainability values and meet your sustainability expectations. Beyond that, though, it’s important to give opportunities to small businesses, local ones, and those owned by women and people of colour when possible.

Also check if your partners have sustainability certifications in order to make sure that they walk the walk too!

Today, there are many options for choosing environmentally-friendly materials and packaging, from biodegradable paper to eco-friendly printer ink. For your marketing material, we suggest to research and find the best partners and products to make your sustainable brand happen.

The brand verbal identity and messaging we develop follow MAp’s 10 Principles of Sustainable Communication: transparency, inclusiveness, cultural sensitivity, clarity, responsibility, authenticity, progress, relevance, inspirational, ethical.

We also recommend to employ emotional storytelling techniques to connect and appeal to audiences – not just your guests, but also your employees, partners and local community members. By following these steps, you can create a sustainable brand that not only resonates with your stakeholders but also empowers positive change in the world, making your brand a force for good.

Marlene, thank you for taking the time to speak with us! As a start, can you please tell us a bit more about you? Where does your passion for sustainability and hospitality come from?

Like so many in my generation I came to a point where I could not accept that sustainability was something left to be cared for by others, I just wanted to make an impact myself!

For as long as I can remember I enjoyed travelling and discovering new destinations. With the feeling that a community of travellers with a conscious approach, such as myself, was increasing, I developed the idea of eco suites and just went through with it.

Can you tell our readers a bit more about eco suites? Why did you feel compelled to start the company and what’s your purpose?

ecosuites.travel is an online platform designed to present premium accommodations with a sustainable approach. We aim to support the eco conscious traveller in searching for a fitting hotel and shed light on accommodations that act sustainably. We carefully curate our collection of conscious hotels and are proud of presenting them to our community!

Personally, I aimed to take responsibility for contributing to a sustainable future. Once I had the idea for eco suites, I completely dove into it and wanted to bring it to life! I was convinced that luxury travel can be sustainable. Our purpose is to bring together the eco-conscious traveller with outstanding accommodations that share our approach and values.

eco suites has an impressive portfolio of hotels that are both stylish and sustainable. What makes your hotels “eco suites?”

We are proud to present hotels that are special in every way. Whether it is the design, the concept, the facilities or the team – our eco suites make luxury vacation dreams come true. The huge difference to many other hotels around the world is that they follow a highly sustainable approach and are committed to define modern travel. It is the combination of both aspects that makes them our “eco suites.”

To become an eco suite, what specific criteria and standards are you looking at? What is your process for selection?

We carefully choose every accommodation on ecosuites.travel. All accommodations featured on our platform meet at least five out of ten criteria that have been established as our eco suites standard. After careful consideration, our eco suites criteria have been adapted from internationally acknowledged standards for preserving the environment. It mattered greatly to us to also include criteria like “Female empowerment” or “Social impact”, to show the full range of what we believe sustainability implies.

At MAp, we too believe sustainability is the future. What are your hopes for the hospitality industry as it relates to sustainability in the short- and long-term?

My hopes for the foreseeable future are that the hospitality industry will continue to focus on implementing a wide range of eco-friendly measures, from saving resources to using clean energy. Many short-term solutions can be installed quickly and would have a huge impact on the environment. Speaking of long-term expectations, I hope that travel choices will be made carefully and will increase to focus on slow tourism, on getting to know the destination, its people and its culture.

As many of our readers are hoteliers: what are the 3 most important measures hotels should implement on the road to sustainability?

While every hotel and its guests are different, we do know what our community of responsible travellers is mostly looking for. In our experience, the measure with the highest direct impact on guests is the careful selection of food & drinks. Most exclusive travellers are keen on being offered local, seasonal and organic choices when it comes their catering. They are well informed and try to reduce their footprint with their shopping choices in their everyday lives and do expect the same from their accommodation.

Another measure that directly relates to the guest is the effort to reduce and carefully recycle waste. Many hotels are implementing recycling opportunities in each room or easily accessible in the common areas, and many guests are delighted to see the measures they are used to at home as an option in their hotel as well. Products without packaging are in high demand, and careful sourcing and recycling “behind the scenes” is mandatory.

We do strongly believe that happy employees are key to provide a unique and exceptional experience for their guests. A modern work environment needs to be implemented to include all aspects that sustainability contains. Fair working conditions, diverse perspectives and safety therefore should always be a priority. This is certainly the third measure I would recommend on the path to sustainability.

As always, our final MAp meets question is related to our core business, as we’re specialised in crafting innovative hotel concepts and brands: what makes a hotel experience a truly outstanding one for you personally?

A truly outstanding hotel experience for me comes with the people. Feeling at home away from home is what I am looking for, and that comes with attentive service. I love exploring innovative concepts, hotels that are brave enough to try something new and follow a unique path.

Thank you for speaking to us today! As a start, can you please tell us a bit more about you and your background? Have you always been passionate about sustainability and hospitality?

At least from high school onwards. Quite nerdly, I joined the environmental club in my school in Sweden. Part of my curriculum at university also included courses such as “Sustainable Development”, “Environmental Studies” and “Human Rights”. That I want to follow a career within the hospitality industry became clear to me, when I was looking for a job while finishing my Master’s Degree in Maastricht. I sat down and asked myself: “What do I want to do now? What am I passionate about?” The answers were: gastronomy, travelling, being a host, bringing people together, and designing memorable experiences. Thus, I moved to Berlin and worked in a hotel concept development company.

We recently discovered TUTAKA and love your approach to sustainability. Can you share with our readers a bit more about TUTAKA? How did you come up with the idea for it and what’s your purpose?

Thank you! We are also enthused about MAp and can’t wait to see how we join forces to bring more sustainability into our beloved industry.

TUTAKA makes sustainable procurement easy. How? By relieving buyers from the hotel, restaurant and event industry of the complex task of searching: On our digital marketplace, hundreds of audited products and services can be directly bought or enquired.

TUTAKA Island is our marketplace’s sister. As a consultancy, “the Island” supports hosts in the transformation towards more sustainability by taking an advisory role within the fields of strategy, communication and procurement. Overall, marketplace and agency alike, our mission is to make the hospitality industry more sustainable. 

Can you explain to us how you define a product as “sustainable?” What criteria are you looking at? How do you go about sourcing products?

Either we get in touch with a producer that we think might fit, we meet them at an event or fair, or the supplier contacts us. Then, we elaborate firstly whether the product(s) is suitable for the hospitality industry from a functionality, design and price perspective and whether the supplier can deliver large quantities within an attractive lead time.

After this basic check, we take a close look. First on a company level via a questionnaire, which asks questions such as “Tell us about your company's mission and product features and the social challenges you are tackling” or “Are you already a sustainability superstar? Or are you rather at the beginning of your journey? What are you particularly proud of? Where do you still have room for improvement?” And then we move on with our TUTAKA product assessment, which evaluates the entire life cycle of the product in terms of positive and negative social and ecological impacts. To be precise, we look at the design, end of life scenario, logistics, production, materials, and usage of the product. Then, we sort the offer into our impact scoring, develop an overview on the sustainability performance and also state transparently what needs further improvement in terms of sustainability.

At MAp, we too believe that the future of hospitality needs to be sustainable. How important is sustainability in the hospitality industry? And where do you envision the future of hospitality going as it relates to this?

Sustainability should be all our rationale. There is no hospitality industry without a “sustainable” in front of it. 

With sustainability becoming so important and trendy, there are, of course, some negative side effects to it. Talking about “greenwashing” – how do you define it and how do you feel about it?

Franziska, my Co-Founder, hosts a panel on HospitalityNet, where we tackled this question with other industry leaders. Have a look!

Greenwashing is amongst the biggest traps to fall into when communicating sustainability. A "let's save the world" claim and tacky towel policy stickers are superficial and unappealing. Greenwashers pretend that they have made efforts, however just for the sake of being perceived as green and thus trustable and a brand to stick with. Believing that solely a change from plastic straws to no straws is worth sending out messages across all channels and media, declaring a new ecoistic era, is too simple. So, what to do? As a first step, the sustainability activities of hospitality companies should be embedded in a wider sustainability agenda such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Secondly, sustainability should be driven by corporate culture and people, and not merely by checklists. Thirdly, and here I would like to quote Franziska: “Sustainability communication must leave behind the classic marketing practice of hiding products, services and people behind empty slogans and hoping they will resonate with current trends and lifestyle models. Sustainability communication should be about revealing, sharing and letting in.”

As many of our readers are hoteliers: can you share with us 3 easy tips on how they can become more sustainable?

Sure! First, sustainability is a journey. Take it step by step. Second, on-board your whole team and take them with you on this journey. Third, implement a long-term strategy with goals and measures. “Quick and dirty” does not work with sustainability.

As always, our final MAp meets question is related to our core business, as we’re specialised in crafting innovative hotel concepts and brands: what makes a hotel experience a truly outstanding one for you personally?

A hotel that is in true balance with the nature and “Umwelt”/ Environment surrounding it. A hotel that offers outstanding materialistic and non-materialistic experiences. One, where well-being is at the core. And one, where you can feel that all employees are being appreciated and participative.  Oh, how I look forward to travelling again!

Dear Ms. Kern Nyberg, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. Can you give our readers a brief glimpse of how the Sinn & Gewinn Hotels are doing in these extraordinarily difficult times?

We can perhaps paraphrase it this way: it is an up and down at a low level. The "up" stands for hope on the horizon. The lockdown hit us hard, from one day to the next we no longer had any guests and in the spring 2020 we were unfortunately forced to close our hotels until Pentecost. With the exception of two pensions, where we mainly accommodate long-term tenants. The following summer was passable and we were able to stay afloat with a lot of savings and good planning. Since the second wave, we've been in almost as bad of shape as we were in the first lockdown. What is helping us now to keep the hotels open are the long-stay concepts that we developed in the summer.

You mentioned the long-term guests in your pensions. We also know that the group is committed to non-profit business. Can you explain the concept of the Sinn & Gewinn Hotels to our readers in more detail?

The Sinn & Gewinn Hotels started 20 years ago with the original idea of creating jobs for women in difficult conditions. The LADYs FIRST Hotel in Seefeld in Zurich was the first to open and will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2021. Over time, other companies were taken over, always with the aim of enabling women with mental and cognitive impairments to return to the world of work. Since we were able to employ fewer women in the pensions, we integrated the social benefits for the residents: a third of the rooms are always reserved for women in emergency or transitional situations.

When we develop hotel concepts and brands at MAp, we always ask ourselves what the greater purpose is. Since last year, we have noticed that the question of meaning is emerging more and more and is also being discussed by a broader audience. How did you experience this development?

What I have seen in the past few years is that this is no longer just important for selling the product. For me, the fastest moving market is the human resources market, i.e. the employee market. I have the clear impression that it is easier for us as Sinn & Gewinn Hotels to find and keep employees, because we also have meaning and do not exist just for profit. And in general it is simply more humane to work for us than compared to other hotels.

Women play a central role in the Sinn & Gewinn Hotels concept. How have you perceived the change in the needs of your female guests in recent years?

I don't think that needs have fundamentally changed, but instead how we deal with our own demands has changed a lot. Today’s needs are expressed more freely and more clearly than before. And what we also see: there are many more women travelling alone, in the business as well as in the leisure sector.

What is the percentage of female guests in your hotels?

The LADYs FIRST Hotel is our only hotel in which only women were welcomed at the beginning. This has not been the case since 2002 - women and men are very welcome.

Sometimes we have even more men than women as guests. This can be explained by business travellers during the week, a travel segment where the male segment of the population still dominates. However, if you compare the proportion with other hotels in the same segment, we skim off a large proportion of female business travellers.

Not only is the business travel segment predominantly male-dominated, but also the hotel industry. Here, too, there have been major changes since last year. What can we all do to motivate (young) women to work in the hotel industry and to promote gender diversity?

That's a really big topic. As women, for example, we can start showing little girls what we can achieve. I am convinced that a lot has to do with the role models children see. I didn't notice many female hotel managers in the past, but I think that a lot has changed institutionally. That's why I'm happy to give interviews like this one - to show my face in general. I encourage every other woman to do the same!

We have finally left 2020. What are your hopes for this year, the future?

Regardless of how the pandemic develops now, my hope is that a cultured and fact-filled discourse will be conducted. That the “hobby virologists” don't take over and feed the public discourse even more with rumours, “fake news” and conspiracies. I wish for a victory of reason.

At MAp, we often say when "Shit happens, Shift happens." In our last blog posts we tried to show how many options there are in this time of crisis. What positive things did the Corona pandemic period bring you? What did you learn from it?

An unbelievable amount of commitment, flexibility, adaptability, forward thinking: what do we need now? Where do we have to start? We have done things, are still trying them and changing things again, none of that would have been imaginable for me a year ago. Personally, I can say that I am growing from this current situation.

At MAp, we are experts in concept and brand creation and often find that when everything is running smoothly, long-term issues such as strategy development, positioning, etc. are often pushed aside. We have a double question about this. On the one hand: How do you see this development in the market? And the second question: What is a good hotel concept for you personally?

The market is the place where demand and supply meet. The demand is at a low and this means that the providers have to work harder and position themselves. Those providers who look ahead with commitment and who don't bury their heads in the sand need positioning and a clear focus more than ever before. Hotels that see hope for themselves that they can get out of this crisis are now clinging to the concept and positioning.

And to answer the second question: For me, a good hotel concept is when the advertising statement on the website matches what I find when I go to the hotel. Furthermore, the employees should then also fit in with the whole and fully support the hotel philosophy. For me, a good hotel concept is when everything is from a single source and is well-rounded.

What other messages would you like our readers to take away from this interview?

“Those who fight, can win. Those who do not fight have already lost!” That's actually my saying and I think it fits quite well at the moment.

Dear Larissa, thank you so much for taking the time for this MA people meets. To begin with: can you please let us and our readers know what the driving purpose of Too Good To Go is and how it all started?

We dream of a planet with no food waste. Hence, our mission is to inspire and empower everyone to take action against food waste, together. Back in 2015, five students in Denmark founded Too Good To Go and saved their first meal in Copenhagen. Today, Too Good To Go is the world's number 1 app for fighting food waste and present in 14 European countries and soon in the USA. The adventure of Too Good To Go in Switzerland began in June 2018. As of June 30, 2020, the Too Good To Go app in Switzerland has accumulated more than twice as many registered users and companies as in the previous year. Together they saved over 1.3 million meals in Switzerland, cumulatively almost four times the number of the previous year.

Can you tell our readers a bit more about food waste? Any facts most people just don’t know about?

There is food lost or wasted all along the supply chain from farm to fork. And it’s not just the food itself that goes to waste, it’s all the resources that went into making it, from water to land and labour. When wasted, food has a harmful effect on the environment - it’s responsible for 8% of the global greenhouse gas emissions! We need to rediscover our respect for food, and the resources that went into producing it - the land, water, and labour.

The food waste that we deal with here at Too Good To Go is all the delicious, perfectly edible food that stores, hotels and restaurants have to throw out at the end of the day. This can range from bakeries that need to bake freshly everyday to supermarkets that have groceries that weren’t sold and hotels or restaurants that didn’t sell all the food they had catered for that day. Our job is to be sure that no food is wasted.

Many of our readers are hoteliers, working in hospitality businesses or for innovative brands: HOW can they make their contribution to reduce food waste? What are your main tips?

Hotels constantly face challenges in forecasting the often unpredictable demand. This can lead to massive amounts of food being wasted, when kitchens over-produce and buffets overfill. In general, we advise to avoid over-ordering and overstocking as well as over-preparation, overfilled buffets and incorrect and oversized portions.

Other than that it is advisable to prepare residues, repurpose ingredients and allow customers to take home their own leftovers. One answer can be to safely repurpose these leftovers near the end of the shift and generate revenue from new potential customers through the Too Good To Go app. Everyday the users of our app save delicious food from more than 1,300 hotels across Europe.

Besides Too Good To Go: are there any other businesses or organisations that can support our readers in becoming more sustainable and making a positive impact? 

Of course, there is more than one organisation using business as a force for good. Amongst other things, Too Good To Go is featured as a Europe-wide solution by “Zero Waste Europe”, a movement of communities, local leaders, businesses, experts, influencers and other “change agents” working towards the vision of eliminating waste in our society.

We at MA people are specialised in crafting innovative hotel concepts and brands: what makes a hotel experience a truly outstanding one for you personally? 

For me personally, it is extremely important that the hotel is authentic and offers a complete package. This means that the hotel concept is not only based on the needs of the guests, but also takes into account and respects sustainability and the environment in which the hotel is located. As a hotel guest it gives me the great feeling that the hotel is making an effort to contribute to a sustainable planet. For example an intelligent water and energy supply system, recycled raw materials or the consideration of local businesses for the purchase of food. This naturally includes fighting food waste.