For many, “greenblushing” – or the act of playing it safe by not making environmental claims at all – is no longer an option. Today, green products are in high demand. According to a recent study from McKinsey and NielsenIQ, products touted as sustainable experienced 28% cumulative growth over the last five years, compared to 20% for products without such claims. Increasingly savvy customers want to know about the green options that exist, and a vast majority also want to know what makes them “green.”  

This shifting trend, combined with the global anti-greenwashing regulatory crackdown spurred by the U.K., the EU, the U.S. and Canada, means that companies need to do more than simply provide vague sustainability claims – or add the word “carbon neutral” to a label. They need to be able to explain why a product is a wise environmental choice.  

When marketing initiatives are on point, they can drive brand credibility, brand trust and customer loyalty. When they aren’t, they run the risk of being slapped with increasingly–expensive, and brand-tarnishing, greenwashing infractions, which can negate many of the business advantages of doing sustainability work. 

With stakes this high, it’s far more beneficial to market sustainability in a truthful and transparent way. That said, conveying the less-than-picture-perfect truth can be challenging for many marketing departments. To make the job a little easier, it can be helpful to keep the following best practices in mind: 

Offer as much context as possible 

According to the not-for-profit Carbon Trust, to stay onside of evolving greenwashing regulations and communicate sustainability or ESG initiatives (where environmental, social and governance factors are considered) effectively, companies should make sure their associated marketing efforts are fact-driven (all claims are specific, evidence-based and backed by reliable sources), devoid of exaggerated claims (like being “first” or “saving the planet”), fact-checked and verified (ideally by a third party), truthful (they honestly reflect both what has been achieved and what hasn’t), easy to understand (and free from jargon) and accountable (that is, they take responsibility when errors arise). 

Including this amount of detail in a traditional advertisement or on a product package is next to impossible – which is why it’s important to integrate longer-form content into the mix (including blogs, thought-leadership articles and videos). This allows  companies to offer additional layers of context to back up high-level claims and break down complex concepts. 

In practice, this could look like a QR code on a product tag that links to a more detailed product description (citing information about the vendor as well as the product’s materials). The detailed product description, in turn, might link to a relevant sustainability article – say, a short profile about the vendor – which may then link to a more in-depth story about the company’s commitment to supporting business owners in developing countries. 

Strike the right tone 

To avoid the perception of greenwashing, sustainability communications can’t be rooted in spin. While marketers will want to highlight the positive things a company is doing in a specific area, it’s equally essential to acknowledge that the road to true sustainability is long and, at this stage, barriers are commonplace.  

This is new terrain for most marketing departments, whose jobs have traditionally been to tell promotional stories. Take this product page promoting H&M’s Re-Enchantment Story collection, for instance. Here, the marketing team plays up the clothing line’s use of recycled plastic bottles, celebrating it as an environmentally friendly choice, while omitting the practice’s imperfections. 

While it’s true that using recycled plastic bottles is better than producing virgin polyester or other fossil-fuel-derived synthetic textiles, the most sustainable use for plastic bottles, according to The Circular Laboratory, would be to recycle them into new bottles – “closing the loop” in the drinking bottle industry. Turning them into polyester not only comes with a greater carbon footprint; it limits their circular lifespan. Right now, the technology simply doesn’t exist to recycle polyester clothes into new clothes at scale. And recycled or not, synthetic fibres end up releasing microplastic particles into waterways when washed.  

A more transparent approach would be to address the shortcomings of this recycling method on the product page and link to an educational article like this one on Patagonia’s website. Here, the outerwear company explains its reasons for offering recycled polyester products and acknowledges the pros and cons of this business decision. It also explains its plans to become more circular in the future, as well as the steps it’s taking today to implement that plan. 

Part of the reason the Patagonia marketing team can offer a balanced view of the company’s sustainability initiatives is because it’s encouraged to “inspire and educate, rather than promote” and “earn credibility, rather than buy it.”  

When transparency around sustainability is prioritized across the organization, marketing teams have more leeway to ask tough questions of the product development teams, grasp the pros and cons of sustainability-related decisions, and ultimately decide how those pros and cons can be truthfully communicated. In many ways, they turn into greenwashing watchdogs. 

Good intentions are greenwashing’s kryptonite 

Whether you’re a consumer or a business, making planet-friendly decisions is tough. Not only are most options imperfect – requiring their fair share of trade-offs – but deciphering which ones are less–imperfect than others is a full-time job.  

And that’s where green marketing can actually help. That’s the market need it can fill. When a company has a deep-seated organizational commitment to reduce its environmental impact, green marketing can be a channel through which to share that knowledge.  

This allows companies to not only stay onside of greenwashing regulations, but earn customer trust, strengthen reputations and inspire collective environmental action.  

Vanessa Chris is a content strategist and the founder of h2h content. 

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If we have any chance of heeding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s repeated warnings and meaningfully reducing global CO2 emissions by 2030, the business community will have to get serious about the task at hand. 

This will require a momentous paradigm shift – a societal reshaping of our view of business. Somehow, we’ll have to collectively learn to see companies as more than one-trick ponies designed to generate financial profits, and instead as vehicles to enhance and support the greater good. 

This, inevitably, will involve some frank and open conversations. 

Before you can address a complex problem, you need to talk about it first. Just look at #MeToo, the reckoning on race after the murder of George Floyd, pronoun usage or body neutrality. Widespread conversations – at home and at work – are critical to exposing harmful societal behaviours. Discourse is the fuse that ignites paradigm shifts.

And yet, right now, this is a conversation most businesses aren’t having. At least not in a productive way.

While it’s true that sustainability reports and goals are now common practice for the world’s largest companies – with more than 2,000 businesses adopting science-based carbon targets and two-thirds of the world’s emissions covered by net-zero pledges – the communication around these new initiatives has been, in too many cases, vague, misleading and incomplete. 

Whether it’s because of a fear of legal ramifications (like the 2021 Dutch court ruling that ordered Shell to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030), public backlash or the fact that their efforts aren’t yet advanced enough to share, many companies are loath to talk about their sustainability initiatives. 

Before you can address a complex problem, you need to talk about it first.

Those that do are telling only part of the story: 40% of websites feature misleading environmental statements, while 50% lack sufficient information to allow readers to judge the accuracy of their green claims, according to two recent surveys by a British competition regulator and Sustainable Brand Index.

The silence and half-truths – commonly referred to as green blushing and greenwashing – are slowing climate progress. Consider that 30% of Nordic consumers say they simply don’t believe business sustainability claims – while 53% of consumers in the United States say the same. And only about one-third of investors, on average, believe that the quality of ESG (environmental, social and governance issues) reporting these days is adequate, according to a Canadian survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. 

This means human beings that want to do something positive for the planet with their money are finding it difficult to do so, because it’s nearly impossible to differentiate between the companies that are genuinely supporting real climate action and those that are pretending to be.

These statistics speak nothing of the impact poor sustainability communication has on business progress. Sustainability works only if everyone is along for the ride. We need a free exchange of information and ideas – and the communications infrastructure to connect complex systems and industries. We need to eradicate siloed thinking and start sharing sustainability best practices. 

And for that to happen, we need to start talking louder and more transparently about sustainability – and recognize that our individual actions have value only if viewed in the context of the greater whole.

Tell the full story

To “win” at the sustainability game – to leverage it to engage and attract employees, earn customer loyalty and trust, and convince green investors you’re the real deal – you need to demonstrate that your motives are genuine. And that you have your eye on the bigger prize: a habitable planet. That requires a different type of communications strategy.

For one thing, telling only the positive side of the story doesn’t work in this space. Consider Keurig Canada, which was recently slapped with a $3-million fine for false and misleading claims around the recyclability of its K-Cup pods. In this instance, the Competition Bureau determined that, while the pods were technically recyclable, they were widely recyclable only in Quebec – meaning the rest of their Canadian customers, who thought they were recycling their pods, were actually inadvertently tossing them in the trash.

Similarly, fashion brand H&M received serious public backlash and a slap on the wrist by Norway’s consumer watchdog in 2019 when its Conscious Collection of “sustainable” fashion was called into question. The watchdog said that the clothing company provided insufficient information about its “sustainable style” collection and that there was no way to know if a garment was made of 100% sustainable materials, or 5%. The company has rebranded the collection to Conscious Choice, and its website states that “at least 50% of each piece is made from more sustainable materials, like organic cotton or recycled polyester. The only exception is recycled cotton, which, for quality reasons, can only make up 20% of a product.”

In both of these scenarios, a little transparency could have gone a long way and curbed some of the resulting reputational damage. As of yet, no business is 100% sustainable, so instead of trying to convince stakeholders otherwise, companies have to find a way to emphasize progress over perfection, acknowledge missed benchmarks when they inevitably occur, and explain their plan for course-correction.

Lastly, companies that genuinely prioritize sustainability have a lot to win by sharing their progress with others – and creating more educated stakeholders. So rather than hiding behind the numbers in a chart or making vague claims, one way to win stakeholder trust is to tell ESG stories in a way that honestly outlines and dismantles an organization’s path to net-zero.

The silence and half-truths – commonly referred to as green blushing and greenwashing – are slowing climate progress.

Understandably, this can be challenging, particularly at this early stage, without a robust regulatory framework to guide the way. But, according to EcoVadis, many companies are finding success (and avoiding litigation) by setting a solid foundation in place, acquiring senior-management-level support, introducing meaningful policies and metrics, facing adverse impacts head-on, and substantiating all positive sustainability claims. 

The firm also recommends integrating ESG reporting processes into a “coherent, company-wide system of sustainability governance” and finding ways to extract insight and skills from all members of an organization to ensure reports offer real value to stakeholders.

Ultimately, to succeed at this exercise, organizations will have to zoom out, reconnect with that bigger mandate of reducing the world’s carbon emissions, and begin to view themselves as champions of a cause. This will be substantially easier if they’ve already clearly connected their purpose to their broader values and vision – and started to view sustainability communications as a form of advocacy, education and community-building.

This shift will make it possible to squeeze sustainability-speak into regularly scheduled content marketing – or bring corporate social responsibility and ESG stories to the foreground of company websites. This, in turn, will help differentiate the green businesses from the greenwashers, allow them to earn a reputation for sustainability leadership and, most importantly, bring people and businesses together to facilitate faster climate action.

Communication, on its own, can’t save the world. But saving the world without better communication will be downright impossible.

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