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MARKETING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 303

measuring its own environmental footprint, learning the ins and outs of the LEED pro-
gram, etc.—was called for first.

THREE FUNDAMENTALS
Three fundamental “musts” helped us lay the groundwork for messaging that makes
it through the clutter. As with most successful marketing and public relations cam-
paigns, you’ll notice that it’s not just about catchy slogans and slick ad copy. We owe
every bit of our success to the fact that Melaver, Inc. is a mission-driven organization
with a clear commitment to sustainable development. Critical to our marketing suc-
cess are top down support for the project, alignment with the organization’s mission,
and authenticity and transparency. Let’s consider each factor separately.
Top-down support for the project. The management team at Melaver, Inc. has a
clearly defined mission that informs how every deal is brokered, developed, leased,
managed, and built. Support for green building initiatives starts in the boardroom at
Melaver and it’s apparent in every management and participatory decision the com-
pany makes. There is no confusion in messaging and execution—what the company
says is consistent with what it does. They’re walking their talk.
Consumers can see the difference between companies that simply talk the talk and
those that walk it. Sometimes it’s subtle—how the company talks about itself on its
website, how others talk about the company, how the receptionist answers the tele-
phone, how its offices are different. Those implicit cues cannot be faked—they are
either part of a company’s fundamentals and genetic makeup, or they’re not.
You’ll know you’ve achieved a level of consistency when you can think of your
company, your people, and your projects as one piece cast from the same material. If
the market were able to slice through the entire aggregation, the cross-section would
all be of a single consistency—a single color. And it darn well better be green.
Alignment with the organization’s mission. The shaping of deep alignment was
probably one of the single most critical outcomes of our Phase 1 work with Melaver,
Inc. That early work brought home to all of us how senior management’s perceptions
of alignment and actuality can indeed be rather skewed, even (perhaps especially) in
the context of a values-centric organization where there is a strong supposition of
value congruence. Our early Phase 1 work made it clear that you can never take that
alignment for granted, even in later iterations of a green company’s evolution.
Alignment is critical to effectively communicating the benefits of green building. It
is critical to have a communications team on board that is genuinely behind the effort
and not just mouthing lip service in the interest of a consultancy contract. It is critical
to have other partners—legal, HR, IT, general contractors, engineers, landscape and
building architects—aligned with the green effort as well. Perhaps the most critical
piece of early aligned partnering for Melaver was the U.S. Green Building Council
(USGBC) and its LEED program. The commitment to the LEED program as the gold
standard for development sets a clear mandate. This well-defined, well-executed,
mission-driven approach distinguishes companies like Melaver, Inc. in a market
where competitors may not be developing to the same standard or have the same mis-