“People might ask what they can say instead of ‘ethically made’, and I say talk about living wages, but then they’re not paying living wages. So when you take away this generalized term, it reveals that some brands aren’t doing enough,” she says.
Remove the ego and center the consumer
When a brand starts to talk less about sustainability promises and more about product and performance, the customer comes into view, with the focus shifting to how they will experience a product. Centering the consumer and offering a value proposition is essential to communicating sustainability successfully, says Solitaire Townsend, sustainability expert and co-founder of change agency Futerra.
“[Previously] the vast majority of sustainability campaigns were ego marketing, where the company was trying to get more credit for what it’s done with no proposition to the consumer,” she says. When Futerra reviewed award-winning sustainability campaigns from 2024, less than 20% communicated any functional, emotional, or social benefit to the consumer, according to Townsend. Rather than the brand acting the hero, they should be making the consumer feel like the hero for buying their product, she continues, even if sustainability isn’t their primary motivation for buying it.
“Consumers care about whether the product is healthy, whether they can feel good about the product, and whether the product is cheaper. They care about whether it’s easy to use… whether they can travel with it,” she says. Sustainability must support — and be attached to — these desires.
Working to comply with the European Commission, Zalando wanted to know what sustainability information its customers were seeking, collating the results in its 2025 It Takes Many report. “Customers are much more keen to know what’s in it for them. They want to know more about the quality, the durability, how they can better take care of their product. They want to know more about the resale value of their product, too,” says Brun. With these personal catalysts in mind, the retailer ran a “Closet Care” series on social media in 2025 to provide its customers with practical advice on how to mend, customize, care for, and prolong the life of their garments.
Choose your audiences wisely
Not all brand communication is purely consumer-focused, and brands can maximize the impact of their communications by targeting multiple audiences at once through different mediums. Townsend suggests a tiered hierarchy: Tier 1 is the value proposition, which should be communicated across the board, from social media posts to product descriptions; Tier 2 provides more room for information via mediums such as infographics or short films that will live on brand websites and be peppered across social media.
Evans’s client Groundtruth exemplifies this approach. It markets its bags as durable, ready-for-anything, and tested by famous adventurers. The recycled and vegan materials come next. Its documentary-making sister company Groundtruth Productions, which seeks to inspire climate action through storytelling, has a separate website and content is sparingly cross-posted to the main brand’s social media feed. Its latest film, Kuleana, uses sport as the gateway into the plastic pollution crisis. At the brand level, it uses sturdy bags as the gateway into discovering climate stories.
