6 Wild Ways To Reform Brand ROI
Business Return-On-Investment (ROI) models can learn several valuable lessons from nature. Here are six wild ways brands can reform the way they think about their ROI:
1. Efficiency and Optimization: Nature is highly efficient and coherent, which results in energy, time, and resource savings for organisms and processes. A business can create an ROI model to reflect nature's proficiency and self-regulating circularity, by ensuring its corporate operations, production cycles, waste generation, elimination, and emission instances are all modulated by feedback loops. A company that is receptive to assimilating, recapturing, and making the best use of all its available resources is sure to achieve maximum return on investment.
2. Adaptability and resilience: Nature has evolved to adapt to changing externalities and ensure the most genetically and biologically diverse and consequently resilient organisms endure through challenging conditions. Nature bolsters the survival rates of these organisms by augmenting contextual factors and processes, supporting the roles played within the whole as well as the whole that makes the roles possible. Business ROI models must competently reconcile dependencies between content with context, to build the greatest number of connections between the role it plays and the whole it occupies and makes possible. Brands need to learn to be more adaptable and tenacious by both anticipating and being elastic enough to respond effectively and relevantly to market changes, unforeseen variables, and disruptions.
3. Interconnectedness and collaboration: Nature's fabric encompasses a multiplicity of forms that occupy functional niches holistically. The biosphere's inimitable living network cannot be dissected apart without compromising the integrity of the whole. This makes the role occupied by each organism indispensable to all that it connects to and collaborates with. Businesses need to foster a similar interwoven web, abundant roles that are each distinctly vital to the optimal expression of the whole. Such an integrated culture would not only make employees feel deeply valued but also make the functions they fulfill an act of self-determination. ROI models would reap the win-win-win benefits of such organizational cohesion, as collaborations, partnerships, and ecosystem thinking would enhance profitability and positive outcomes for all stakeholders, not for just the brand.
4. Sustainability and long-term thinking: Nature operates in ways that ensure its longevity, its systems are self-regulated, self-healing, and thus self-sustaining. Preservation is not accomplished through hoarding and depleting but rather through distributing and regenerating resources for the long-term survival of the entire web of life. Business ROI models often end up being segmented and self-serving, pursuing short-term gains from a scarcity mindset that benefits their shareholders at the cost of their own future. Instead, if brands were to look to the well-being of their whole landscape, by considering the company's environmental and social impacts, and embracing sustainable practices that nourished both the communities and the ecological contexts they were reliant upon while focusing on the long-term profitability of all their stakeholders, they would create a legacy of abundance.
5. Innovation and diversity: Nature thrives on diversity, as the sheer variety of species that come together as the sphere of life, planet Earth, with no two species doing the same thing in the same place, ensuring that such redundancies are eliminated through competition and co-evolution. Diversity coexists with unity, giving every organism its respective, optimal space to flourish as part of one pulsating tapestry of breath. Every being has the opportunity to both give and receive within its context, acting as checks and balances for other species and processes. When there is overlap, there isn't compromise rather there is constant innovation to create more abundance. Business ROI models can only recreate such prolific productivity when they actively diversify their people, competencies, activities, impact outcomes, ideas, perspectives, investments, and stakeholders while ensuring that all this diversity serves a unified purpose that benefits all involved. By continuously pursuing comprehensive approaches to creating dimensional ROI a brand could do so much more than generate profits, it could create a self-contained, circular, highly enriching ecosystem of abundance. From uplifting consumers, protecting cultures, resulting in acts of goodwill, committing to regenerative practices, and ensuring sustainable value chains, to meaningfully engaging communities, taking critical climate actions, and effecting environmental restoration, a business could reframe ROI as prosperously as nature.
6. Feedback loops, and continuous improvement: Nature has built-in feedback mechanisms that enable continuous learning and improvement. Business ROI models need to be iterative to be adaptive. By incorporating data-driven feedback loops and seeding a culture of objectivity and acceptance that advocates for continuous improvement, brands can refine and enhance not just their financial outcomes but also their brand equity and credibility. Companies need to remain osmotic and receptive to the world at large, assimilating instead of othering dissenting opinions and differences, as doing so would expand their role in the whole, as nature always does, instead of contracting their expression to be exclusionary, which only further divorces their relevance from current reality.
In striving to be more like nature, brands could be positive contributing members of society and the biosphere, instead of parasitic entities that denude both. Perhaps the time has come to stop coining hashtags for every hypocritical, non-committal measure made to be socially just and environmentally considerate, and to enthusiastically double down on doing the right thing. Be wholesome, instead of partly present.
Contact me for workshop modules and talks, happy to work with any organization committed to emulating nature so seamlessly that preserving it becomes an extension of your brand's effortless expression.
