Communication

SMK promotes more sustainable production and consumption by developing various sustainability instruments. These include certification schemes for various quality marks and programs, sustainability standards, and benchmarks. These can be used to determine the relative sustainability of products and services. Communication is of great importance in this respect in order to make our instruments known and attractive. We distinguish this communication into 3 parts: corporate communication, B-to-B communication, and consumer communication.

We offer the knowledge, support, and tools to make sustainability of companies or products concrete and tangible, to provide a certificate to demonstrate sustainability, and to add value in economic terms.

Corporate

SMK primarily focuses on corporate communication about SMK in the broad sense, about all SMK programmes and aims at corporate target groups. These are administrators, decision-makers and experts in the field of sustainability. The aim of this communication is to position SMK as a valuable discussion partner for sustainability and to obtain a top position among target groups who are orienting themselves towards the development of sustainability programmes or systems.

B-to-B

B-to-B communication focuses on business target groups such as (potential) certificate holders, chain parties, research institutions, policy bodies, certifying bodies, purchasers, etc. SMK uses B-to-B communication to promote the application of the quality labels, their performance and to increase market interest in the quality labels.

Consumumer

SMK supports trademark holders and chain parties in providing general information to consumers so that this is seen as coming from an independent and reliable source. The communication tools that SMK uses for this purpose include websites, social media, and news and press releases.

SMK also provides frameworks and guidelines around communication, supports where possible, and promotes to stakeholders the use of communication to generate sufficient awareness. Monitoring communication about the quality labels is an important point of attention for SMK.

SMK does not focus on consumer communication; that is primarily the task of certificate holders. SMK lacks the resources and budgets for mass media communication activities aimed at the consumer target group.