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Effective Sustainability Communications: A Best Practice Guide for Brands to Drive Trust and Purchase
Randi Kronthal-Sacco & Tensie Whelan
Randi & Tensie work for the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. Randi is a Senior Scholar. Tensie is the Founding Director of the NYU Stern CSB & a Clinical Professor.
American consumers are buying sustainability-marketed products in greater numbers each year: NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business (CSB) research on actual purchasing with Circana shows sustainability-marketed products growing twice as fast as conventional products. Yet, sustainability-marketed products still represent just 17 percent of the overall market, largely because category leaders aren’t communicating the benefits of sustainable products. Why? One reason is that there is a lack of data on how to communicate sustainability in order to motivate purchase.
CSB and Edelman worked with nine market leaders across industries including tech, food & beverage, apparel, and personal care to rigorously assess the performance of a variety of category and sustainability claims. We found:
Sustainability claims coupled with a core category claim (e.g. tastes good or cleans skin) operated as an amplifier significantly expanding a brand’s consumer base.
The best performing claims focused on impacting a consumer’s life, answering the question: “What’s in it for me?” This is consistent with the Edelman Trust Barometer’s finding that current climate change solutions seem to benefit society at large but not individuals. To convince consumers to buy sustainably, brands should develop messages that focus on:
Protecting consumers’ health (e.g. made without harmful ingredients)
Saving consumers money (e.g. helps reduce waste, saves money, or is durable)
Focusing on consumers' families (e.g. benefits future generations or animal welfare)
Helping consumers' communities (e.g. sourced sustainably or from local farmers)
These “personal” claims were the most compelling and worked across all demographic cohorts – old/young, blue state/red state, high income/low income.
Lower performing claims included science-based claims (e.g. greenhouse gases, carbon). But if the reason for the consumer to care was added to these claims, performance improved (e.g. biodegradable vs. biodegradable for safe drinking water).
Sustainability communications need to be based on authentic sustainability efforts. To build and retain trust with consumers, brands should use certifications to guard against greenwashing – but not rely on them as the sole point of information. Brands should leverage and amplify relevant sustainability messaging to make sustainability-marketed products more universal.
The Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: The Collapse of the Purchase Funnel, released in June, found that consumers are looking for ongoing engagement with brands after the point of purchase and their need for trust grows with feelings of vulnerability. Download the full report.
Percent who say teenagers and college-aged people
influence where and how they shop
2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: The Collapse of the Purchase Funnel. KID_INFLU. To what degree, if any, would you say that the following things about you and your behavior today have been influenced by teenagers and college-aged people? 5-point scale; codes 3-5, moderate or influence. Question asked of half the sample. General population, 14-mkt avg., and by age. Year-over-year changes were tested for significance using a t-test set at the 99%+ confidence level.
A Podcast from Edelman and Advertising Week
The TrustMakers is where listeners learn from global experts about what it takes to build trust in today’s society. Subscribe wherever you get you podcasts.
The TrustMakers recorded three interviews on the ground at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. In this episode, the first in the series, Edelman's Global Chief Brand Officer Jackie Cooper discusses findings from the recent Edelman Trust Barometer special report on brands with Grace Kao, the Global Head of Advertising Business Marketing at Spotify. Listen to the other episodes in the series with cultural expert Jess Weiner and Samsung Europe CMO Benjamin Braun.
