The New Truth in Sustainability Marketing

Consumers love to tell researchers that sustainability matters to them. In category after category – snacks, beverages, grocery – roughly 70% say they will make the sustainable choice when it’s offered to them. But when we track actual purchase behaviour, the figures collapse. Only 12% of consumers make sustainable beverage choices; 8% make sustainable snack choices; 7% make sustainable grocery choices*. This gap between what people say and what they do is so consistent that there’s a name for it: the Say-Do Gap.

The Say-Do Gap widens even further when money is involved. 84% of air travellers claim they’ll happily pay to offset the CO₂ emissions of their flights. But what happens at the checkout when they’re asked to pay a few extra dollars? Only 3% ever click the box ‡. Intentions are cheap; behaviour is expensive.

The lesson for marketers is that it’s extremely difficult to get customers to reward you for being sustainable.

But you will be punished the moment the public suspects you have fallen short or  exaggerated your sustainability credentials. Deutsche Bank’s asset-management arm saw its share price drop 25% after regulators ruled its ESG claims “did not correspond to reality”.

Nestlé lost $6.6 billion in revenue globally after coordinated boycotts over broken palm-oil promises. And perhaps most famously of all, Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal saw it suffer a 7% sales drop in the US, as well as nearly $40 billion in fines and settlements worldwide.

Clearly, it’s non-negotiable for businesses both to make and live up to meaningful sustainability commitments. Regulators, investors, employees and (when aroused) consumers all demand genuine progress on emissions, deforestation, water use, packaging and supply-chain ethics. Brands must act and should keep investing in measurable improvement. The mistake is believing that simply doing the right thing will translate into customer preference.

Why are most campaigns focussing on sustainability ignored? Consumers are exposed to ten thousand marketing messages a day. Almost all are filtered out instantly by a network of neurons in the brainstem called the reticular activating system (RAS). The RAS is ruthlessly efficient: it ignores anything familiar and only lets novel stimuli reach conscious awareness. In plain language, if your sustainability message feels like something we’ve heard before (“net zero by 2050,” “100% recyclable,” “carbon neutral”), the brain discards it before the sentence is finished.

Even if something novel slips through the RAS filter, there’s another brain barrier standing in the way of your message: the amygdala. Its job is to detect falsehood and insincerity. The moment it senses exaggeration, greenwashing or corporate virtue-signalling, it triggers instant rejection. The viewer doesn’t think “that claim seems overstated”; they feel a visceral “yuck” and scroll on.

This is why so many sustainability campaigns, despite huge budgets and beautiful production, become case studies in wasted energy. They’re not new enough to be noticed and/or not true enough to be believed.

There is a way through though. And it is mercifully simple. Every piece of sustainability communication should be stress-tested against two words:

New. True.

New, because only novelty makes it through the RAS to conscious awareness. True, because only sincerity gets past the amygdala. When both conditions are met, even a technically mundane topic (a new fibre tray, a supplier audit, a 4% emissions drop) can become emotionally compelling.

The work does not get easier, but it gets clearer. Keep making your operations and products genuinely more sustainable because the penalties for doing otherwise are real and growing. But when you talk about it, stop broadcasting worthy intentions and start hunting for the new and the true: the angle no one has expressed before, rooted so firmly in verifiable reality that it’s undeniable.

That’s the New Truth in sustainability marketing.

Richard Ralphsmith
Co-founder
DPR&Co

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* Source: BCG climate and sustainability consumer survey, June 2022.
‡ Source: 2022 Transportation Research survey