Role: You are the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at a brand of your choice. You ar
Role: You are the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at a brand of your choice. You are responsible for developing your brand’s strategic mission including corporate vision, driving change within the organization, and provoking commitment to strategic plans. As a CSO, you must institute solution-oriented strategies that will apply to people across the entire organization and possibly outside the organization. Currently, your goal is to make systemic improvements to your brand through an ESG framework. Depending on brand needs, your strategies will address a variety of topics, such as technology, product, supply chain, and/or stores.
Purpose and objectives: Faced with the demand for environmental traceability and ethics transparency, your objective is to develop an ESG initiative for a brand of your choosing. Your initiative should be realistic yet innovative. It will have a broad-reaching impact for the company. It may be based upon existing and/or emerging ESG practices and strategies.
Brief: The focus of your project will be the environmental and social pillars of ESG. Begin your strategy with a specific environmental goal that will be targeted, such as supply chain transparency, raw materials traceability, or micromaterial pollution (Standish, 2022). Address the specific resources, technology, or tools that you would utilize to achieve the specific strategic objectives of your initiative, impacting the brand’s ESG objective. Clearly identify the ESG objective you wish to achieve through the initiative and why it is relevant for your brand. Building on the environmental focus, integrate the social pillar of ESG by addressing the impact on the people involved in the initiative. Consider suppliers, employees, and the consumers. You must also address the estimated investment (financial and human resources), and the overarching benefit to the business.
Phases and procedure:
You are to develop an ESG initiative for a single brand. The brand may exist on its own as a mono-brand, such as True Religion, J Crew, Levi Strass, Calvin Klein, Louis Vuitton or Milk Makeup. Alternatively, it may be a brand within a retailer, such as AVA & VIV at Target, Treasure & Bond at Nordstrom, or Charter Club at Macy’s.
The brand that you select should be generally well-known. If you are applying for a named scholarship, it is suggested that you focus on that specific brand for your case study. It is suggested that you choose a company that is publicly traded so that information regarding the company is easily accessible.
Your brand/retailer may be pure-play or operate across channels (e.g., brick-and-mortar, ecommerce, or multichannel). The brand that you chose must be a fashion apparel, accessories, footwear, home, beauty, or health & wellness brand.
Your initiative should address environmental and social pillars of ESG. It may introduce a new process, technology, or tool that enables a business to track, share, or develop processes. It may introduce the brand into a new space that it has not previously entered. Within your ESG strategy, you must address existing strategies that the business utilizes.
Required sections:
Section 1: General Introduction Slides (2-3 Slides)
Must be the first page/slide of the deck. Include a title, your case study discipline, and one sentence summary of your ESG initiative. Do NOT include any identifying information (name, school, etc.).
Write an executive summary, covering all components of your case study. People reading your executive summary should get the essence of your case study without the fine details. The executive summary should be in paragraph format, no longer than 300 words. Be sure to briefly summarize your personal vision for your ESG initiative and how it resonates with the brand’s identity and consumers. Explain how the ESG initiative will allow the brand/retailer to continue to evolve.
Optional. Include a one-page table of contents outlining the subsequent sections of your case study.
Section 2: Current Environmental and Social Strategies (1-2 Slides)
Assess the company’s current strategies related to environmental and social practices. Address evolving environmental trends, social trends, and product trends that are important to your brand and influenced your ESG direction.
Include the strengths and recent successes of the brand relating to ESG. Address where the company is able to improve.
Depending on the selected brand, the brand’s strategy may vary. They may have a CSR strategy, a sustainability strategy, a ESG strategy, or insights on one pillar of ESG.
Your objective is not to collect and analyze specific performance data, but to evaluate the company’s current strategy at a high level. You should gain awareness of any specific tactics, actions, or publicly available content to support your case of strengths and weaknesses.
Section 3: Proposed ESG Initiative (4-5 Slides)
Provide an overview of your environmental and/or social initiative and why it is necessary for the brand goals, the intended users, and the marketplace/consumers.
Present the details of how your initiative would be integrated for the brand and with existing strategies and processes.
Your strategy should address brand actions and management of insights related to those actions.
Clearly present the benefits of this initiative for the business.
Identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your initiative.
In creating your ESG initiative, you should research and reference other companies (i.e., reference companies). These may be either direct competitors or market leaders which have exemplified best-in-class execution. You will want to evaluate the successes and opportunities presented by existing business cases.
If relevant, provide a comparison to reference company activities.
Provide a comparison of two different tools (e.g., resources, software, technologies) that are being considered for utilization within your environmental/social initiative.
For example, if you are proposing a traceability initiative, you may compare two digital tools that may enable you to track the garment through the production process and would enable you to measure specific metrics.
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each tool. Consider the appropriateness of the tools in the context of your overarching strategic goal. Identify which tool is most suitable for your strategy and explain why.
Create a ppt slides, and prepare a ppt note
