What is creative sustainability?

In society, sustainability is “the avoidance of depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance.” (Oxford Languages) Similarly, creative sustainability is the avoidance of using more resources, time, and budget on marketing materials than absolutely necessary to create a harmonious balance between your brand, your budget, and making it all look beautiful.

Simply put, you can think of creative sustainability as the intentional repurposing of existing, professionally designed marketing materials. Your initial materials should be so well designed and thought out so they can serve as a structurally sound backbone to future marketing.
 

What are the benefits?

By repurposing and updating existing materials, your marketing partner will spend less time reinventing creative and instead using previously developed and approved work as a template in various instances. This in turn keeps turnaround times faster, creating a more efficient experience which gets your messaging to your audiences as quickly as possible. Additionally, your brand recognition will naturally increase with the publication of consistent marketing. A Facebook study of 15,000 consumers found that consistency is one of the five main qualities they look for in brands to increase their loyalty. 
 

Where does it apply in our work?

Creative sustainability can be applied to all areas of print and web. Newsletters, whitepapers, emails, display ads, stationery, and everything in-between can benefit from having existing, branded templates to reuse and build upon. No two materials are the same, but they should appear relatively similar (think fraternal twins) in structure in order to effectively present brand to the public. In fact, consistent brand presentation increases revenue by an average of 23%. (brandgility). 

Your marketing as a whole can be thought of as a family – materials should look related, but each piece and platform can (and should) have its own voice, personality, and style. For example, a template built for display ads would not lend themselves well to work for email marketing, but they should have a few things in common. Your logo, brand colors, fonts, and textures should all be present in both templates, but the hierarchy of content will vary.

How do you keep things interesting?

Creativity is not lost, even when keeping sustainability top of mind. When repurposing templates, only the supportive structural elements are kept the same. Templates aren't “one size fits all”, but give you the flexibility to start each project with the legwork already completed. To keep your marketing interesting, we update copy with compelling messaging, from events to promotions, and refresh the visuals. Templates can also be tweaked to best fit the new content or messaging as needed. 

Think of your sustainable templates as you would a meal – you can prepare noodles to make a variety of pasta dishes - the base of each dish may be the same, but the toppings (or customizable content) are what make each dish unique. Each marketing material should start with a consistent base, or template, and be topped with fresh content and a sprinkle of graphics so your consumers fully understand what to expect when they see your brand, and more importantly, stay satisfied.

If your brand could benefit from assistance building a new menu of marketing templates for your brand, reach out to our team! We love helping growing brands develop the best possible creative, successful, sustainable solutions.