Not only is sustainability one of the defining issues of our time, businesses and particularly the advertising sector have come under fire for their collective contribution to the problem.

UN Secretary General António Guterres famously slammed both fossil fuel industries and the associated advertising sector, describing “mad men fuelling the madness“, and half of respondent’s in this year’s damning IPCC report predict the world will reach 3 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels (with disastrous consequences for humanity).

Anyone aware knows how pressing the issue is. And all good businesses want to be on the right side of the story. But co-founder and sustainability lead at strategic consultancy Forge, Simon Garnett argues that brands should steer clear of simply giving an understanding nod to the issue and instead make sustainability run throughout the marketing process.

Why brands should stop trying to market sustainability

Do you remember back in 2015 when Mark Ritson said that ‘digital marketing’ is redundant because all marketing is now digital? I believe we can now say something similar about ‘sustainability marketing’. Why? Addressing climate change is the defining challenge of our time.

But brands need to take a new, more consumer-focused and more effective approach to marketing if their sustainability efforts are to be viable.

There is scarcely a brand that hasn’t made sustainability commitments, and many are on the path to become true Net Zero operations. As part of these commitments, products, packaging and processes have been re-engineered to include more sustainable ingredients and components. But the (endangered) elephant in the room is that all of this costs money and, in most organisations, the CFO wants to know where that money is coming from.

There is a tension between the public commitments that brands have made to environmentally responsible behaviour and the commercial realities of producing and selling sustainable products. Businesses, like people, need to balance costs and benefits and no business can continue to invest in sustainability forever without realising a financial return. As a result, at The Forge, we are increasingly seeing brands asking, “how do we get people to buy our green solution?”

This isn’t the right question. Brands need to stop assuming that just because they are selling sustainabilty, people should want to buy it. This is a self-centred and short-sighted assumption – more ego than eco marketing.

Research shows that although most people believe that climate change is happening and think that it will be beneficial to take action, 69% are not engaged with the topic and don’t think it’s a priority.  So it’s not surprising that despite people saying they would spend more to buy from sustainable brands, only a minority actually do so. Most people buy based on what they do prioritise, be that value for money, quality, taste, experience or other benefit.

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How can brands sell the benefits of sustainability?

I believe that the time for ‘sustainability marketing’ has gone. In the same way that the term ‘digital marketing’ no longer makes sense because all marketing is conducted in a digital world, I would argue that all marketing now takes place in a sustainability world. Rather than focus on green credentials and expect people to buy products for that reason, brands need to make a link between the sustainable elements of the product and the traditional benefits that people care about.

This campaign by Walkers is a great example of how to do so. It shows sustainably grown potatoes but links the green credentials to a motivating and desirable benefit – the great taste and crunch that people love. Walkers are not selling sustainability; they are selling delicious crisps. But the sustainably grown potatoes are the reason to believe that the crisps taste great. Similarly, this collaboration between eBay and Love Island was all about the clothes and the look; the link to the circular economy and combatting fast fashion was subordinate to the benefit of great style and the execution was all about the Islanders working with a celebrity stylist to look great.

In some categories, it’s easy to make the link between the green features of the product and the benefits to the customer. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that organic milk and regenerative farming are the ingredients behind Yeo Valley’s claim of deliciousness. Green and Black’s gorgeous Made of Nature campaign from a few years ago also makes a clear direct link between the taste and quality of the chocolate and its environmental credentials. Lurpak sells plant-based by tapping into core category drivers of taste, pleasure, quality and enjoyment. And Costa’s ads that promote their oat milk latte as ‘oatrageously creamy’ are focusing on a core benefit of a latte – creaminess – that just happens to come from sustainable ingredient.

‘Sometimes there just isn’t a user benefit from sustainability’

In other categories, making the link is harder. For example, in tech, the things that make devices or brands more sustainable, such as including recycled components or ethically sourced materials, don’t really show up as user benefits. However, there are some creative examples such as Nokia’s G22, which offers ‘quick fix repairability’, and Fairphone’s repairable headphones which tap into real human issues with electronics and offered an alternative to the frustrating cycle of purchase, damage, replace.

But sometimes there just isn’t a user benefit from sustainability and in those cases, brands need to focus not on gaining short-term results from their sustainable efforts but on longer-term brand building.

Being a sustainable organisation is no longer a differentiator – it’s table stakes – and marketing needs to communicate sustainability as just another part of brand personality and brand equity.

KitKat’s 2023“Recycle a classic” advert is a really creative and fun way to get the recycling message across using their incredibly distinctive brand assets and messages.

So should brands stop marketing their sustainable credentials? Or forget about the need to get a return on their investment in sustainability? Of course not – but forget about expecting consumers to buy sustainability for its own sake. Sustainability marketing is redundant because all marketing now happens in a sustainability world.