why most sustainability communication fails — and what to do instead.

There is a pattern I have noticed over twenty years of working with brands that want to be taken seriously on environmental and social issues. It goes like this.

The organisation does something genuinely good. Something real — a change in supply chain, a commitment to a standard, a measurable reduction in harm. The communications team, rightly proud, wants to tell the world. And in the telling, something happens. The rough edges get smoothed. The trade-offs get left out. The caveats get cut in the edit. What arrives in the world is a story that is technically true but experientially misleading.

The problem is not that the organisation lied. The problem is that the story is too clean. And audiences — especially the ones you most want to reach — can smell clean from a mile away.

why the truth is more interesting than the story

The organisations I have seen build the most durable trust are the ones who have learned to communicate the gap between where they are and where they want to be, with the same confidence they bring to communicating their achievements. Patagonia does this. Interface has done it. Oatly, at their best, does it.

What these organisations understand is that the gap is not a vulnerability. The gap is the story. The gap is what makes you credible. Because the gap is honest, and honesty is extraordinarily rare in corporate communication.

The most powerful thing a brand can do is tell the truth about what it is, what it’s changing, and what it still needs to fix.

But the reward for doing it is something that no campaign can manufacture: genuine credibility. The kind that accumulates over years and survives the inevitable stumbles that come when you are genuinely try

the three traps

In my experience, most sustainability communication falls into one of three traps.

The first trap is premature declaration. An organisation announces a commitment before the operational reality exists to back it up. Net zero by 2040. The dates feel distant enough to be aspirational without being dishonest. But the gap between declaration and practice is where trust erodes.

The second trap is metric substitution. The communications focus on what is measurable rather than what is meaningful. Percentage reductions in packaging weight. Trees planted. Carbon offsets purchased. These numbers may be real, but they displace a harder conversation about the fundamental nature of the business model.

The third trap is audience flattery. The impulse to tell the audience that by choosing your product they are making a difference — when the actual difference is partial, contingent, and embedded in a supply chain they cannot see.

what to do instead

The alternative is not self-flagellation. It is not the endless caveated disclaimer. It is structured honesty — a communication practice that builds your audience’s understanding of the real complexity of what you are attempting, at the same time as it gives them something to believe in.

This means talking about what you have stopped doing, not just what you have started. It means publishing the metrics that are going the wrong way alongside the ones that are improving. It means giving your critics a platform sometimes, because the conversation they start is more valuable than the silence you preserve by excluding them.

It means, above all, treating your audience as intelligent adults who are capable of holding complexity — and who will reward you, over time, for trusting them with it.