Mission Impossible

Why sustainability marketing is the toughest comms gig going

There’s little that’s more important than playing our part in protecting the planet. But talking about (and actively communicating) sustainability is a really tricky business.

Trust (or rather lack of it), is the single biggest hurdle to landing any sustainability story… which means that earning customer and prospect confidence is now higher stakes than ever before.

Some brands have genuine sustainability stories to showcase. Others are having to firm up and communicate future intensions with conviction – knowing full-well that they will be taken on their world. Plenty are playing the ‘green’ card with shameless greenwashing of marketing messages in an attempt to curry customer favour. Whilst many others are burying heads in the sand, powerless to make their mark, either through genuine ignorance or steadfast avoidance of the urgency for all commerce to take their planetary responsibilities more seriously.

Here at The Unknown Creative, we’re fortunate to have worked with and on sustainable brands over the past 10 years+; and we’ve been lucky enough only to work with organisations who are coming from a position of genuine commitment to a lower carbon future.

Based on the work we’ve done, here are our five top tips for how to navigate sustainability communications with integrity and for impact:

1. Tackle mis-trust with absolute honesty and transparency. There are very few individuals or organisations that have halos to polish in this space. Our planet is in a critical condition and we can all do more to help. So be clear and own your commitment in a way that you can and will be happy to be judged against.
   
   
2. Engage with the benefit. Fear-mongering might make people sit up and listen, but is unlikely to inspire and motivate to make actual changes to the way they behave, act and buy. Sustainability story-telling has to drive to a place of positive benefit that makes change worthwhile and puts the idea of making a difference within reach.
   
   
3. Make it sufficiently simple to stick. Sustainability communications (like many others these days), are awash with statistics…many so big and scary as to be almost unimaginable. Most people are unable to picture what several million tonnes of CO2 might look like, let alone how many trees might need to be planted in order to stand any chance of offsetting it. So it makes sense to keep facts and figures small enough to be relateable.. to a real life person…. not a global mega corporation.
   
   
4. Make it matter by making it different. How many blue or green colourways, glassy-eyed, future-focused stock shot images or net-strangled sea-turtles* can sustainability communications feature? Our creative story telling has to work harder, be richer, pull fewer punches – if it is to cut through to the real business at hand: making change and making compelling arguments for people to change.
   
   
5. Make the method marry the message. Little point talking about clever customer products or solutions that weigh-in as carbon neutral, if the communications themselves are heavy-weight carbon-culprits. Challenging the need for printed communication, taking events on-line to cut carbon and running low or no-carbon websites are all now within reach for companies – and it is the agency’s role to offer carbon conscientious advice.

The pace of change in the sustainability space is intensifying, as more companies realise that green concerns are central, rather than peripheral to long-term commercial success. We’ve had the privilege of working hands-on with organisations who are in the process of building out their own sustainability strategies and commitments and understand the importance and need for extensive internal consultation and collaboration within organisations, well-ahead of taking messages out to the market.

Situations like these call for intelligent, collaborative, thoughtful engagement and a willingness to bring experience, expertise and creative ideas into the mix to stimulate discussion. Working iteratively with multiple stakeholders can gain the kind of consensus that builds confidence internally, to underpin external market messaging for the future.

If you’d like to know more about our tried and trusted processes to make sure that sustainability marketing never feels like mission impossible, we’d love to talk to you.

* No sea turtles were harmed in the creation of this article.

To see some of the work we’ve produced for clients in the sustainability space, click Sustain Ability