Sustainability Marketing Is Not a Values Problem. It’s a Positioning Problem.

Sustainability marketing fails most often not because the brand lacks genuine commitment, but because the commitment gets translated into communications that nobody asked for and few people believe. The product is real. The investment is real. But the marketing treats sustainability as a message to broadcast rather than a reason to buy, and those are very different things.

Done well, sustainability marketing connects environmental or social credentials to something the customer already cares about: quality, longevity, cost, trust, or status. Done poorly, it becomes a liability, inviting scrutiny the brand is rarely prepared to survive.

Why Most Sustainability Marketing Gets the Sequence Wrong

I spent a good part of my agency career working with clients who had genuinely strong sustainability stories and were getting almost nothing commercially useful out of them. The stories were buried in annual reports, translated into vague campaign lines, or handed to the PR team as a reputation management exercise. The marketing departments were producing content about values. They were not producing reasons to buy.

That sequence problem is widespread. The instinct in many organisations is to treat sustainability as a brand attribute to communicate, rather than a product or business truth to position. And the distinction matters enormously. When you communicate an attribute, you are asking the customer to care about something you care about. When you position a truth, you are connecting what you have built to something they already want.

A clothing brand that makes garments from recycled materials has a sustainability credential. But the customer who buys it because it lasts twice as long as fast fashion is buying quality, not conscience. The sustainability story supports that purchase rationale without requiring the customer to be a values-driven buyer. That is a much larger addressable audience, and it is one most sustainability marketing completely ignores.

If you want a broader view of how positioning decisions connect to growth strategy, the work we cover in Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy gives that commercial context. Sustainability marketing does not sit outside of go-to-market thinking. It is part of it, or it should be.

The Greenwashing Problem Is a Positioning Problem in Disguise

Greenwashing gets framed as an ethics issue, and it is. But it is also a positioning failure. When a brand makes claims that outrun its actual credentials, it is almost always because the marketing team was asked to build a campaign around a sustainability theme rather than a verified business truth. The pressure to say something impressive, combined with the absence of rigorous internal sign-off, produces claims that cannot be substantiated.

Regulators in the UK, EU, and US have all tightened their approach to environmental claims in recent years. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority published its Green Claims Code specifically because vague and unsubstantiated environmental marketing had become routine. The EU’s Green Claims Directive is moving in the same direction. This is not a fringe compliance issue anymore. It is a mainstream commercial risk.

I have sat in enough agency review meetings to know how this happens. A client wants to lead with sustainability in their next campaign. Someone pulls a statistic about consumer preference for sustainable brands. The brief goes out. The agency produces work that amplifies the sustainability angle as far as it will stretch. Nobody in that process is asking: can we actually prove this claim? What happens if a journalist or a regulator asks us to substantiate it?

The brands that do this well have legal, sustainability, and marketing teams working from the same brief. The claims are stress-tested before they go anywhere near a media plan. That is not just good governance. It is good positioning, because a claim you can defend is a claim you can build on.

What Sustainability Marketing Actually Needs to Do Commercially

There is a version of sustainability marketing that exists entirely to manage reputation and satisfy internal stakeholders. It produces content, generates some positive sentiment, and is very difficult to connect to revenue. I have seen marketing directors present this kind of work at board level with confidence, because the metrics look fine and nobody is asking the harder question: did this change anyone’s purchasing behaviour?

Effective sustainability marketing has to do at least one of three things commercially. It has to attract new customers who would not otherwise have considered the brand. It has to strengthen the case for purchase among people already in the market. Or it has to support premium pricing by adding a credible dimension of value. Ideally it does more than one. If it does none of them, it is a communications exercise, not a marketing one.

Earlier in my career, I was very focused on lower-funnel performance metrics. I thought that if we could measure it, we were managing it. What I came to understand over time is that a lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The customer had already decided. We were just present at the moment of conversion. Real growth, the kind that shows up in new customer acquisition and expanded market share, comes from reaching people who were not already looking for you. Sustainability positioning, done well, is one of the few credible ways a mature brand can do that.

Think about the clothes shop analogy. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy it than someone who walks past the window. Sustainability messaging that only reaches people already committed to sustainable purchasing is the equivalent of rearranging the window display. The real opportunity is getting people into the fitting room who would not have come in otherwise, and that requires positioning your sustainability credentials in terms they already care about.

The Audience Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Most sustainability marketing is targeted at the people most likely to already agree with it. Brands build campaigns that resonate with environmentally conscious consumers, measure positive response among that group, and declare success. What they are not measuring is how the messaging lands with the much larger group of consumers who are not particularly values-driven but who might still respond to a well-positioned sustainability story if it connected to something they cared about.

This is a reach problem as much as a messaging problem. Brands that want sustainability to drive growth need to think about audience expansion, not just audience reinforcement. That means understanding what adjacent audiences care about and finding the version of the sustainability story that is relevant to them. A sustainability credential that supports a durability claim reaches a different audience than one that supports a provenance claim. Both can be true simultaneously. The question is which one opens more doors commercially.

When I was running an agency and we were building out our go-to-market approach for clients, one of the most consistent mistakes I saw was brands assuming that their most engaged existing customers represented the full opportunity. They do not. They represent the people already convinced. Growth comes from the unconvinced, and reaching them requires a different kind of message, often one that does not lead with sustainability at all, but uses it as supporting evidence for a claim the customer already finds credible.

How to Build Sustainability Into Positioning Without Overreaching

The practical question is how you build sustainability credentials into your positioning in a way that is commercially useful, legally defensible, and actually distinctive. Here is how the brands that do it well tend to approach it.

Start With the Business Truth, Not the Campaign Theme

What has the business actually done? Not what it aspires to do, not what it is working toward, but what it has demonstrably achieved. That is your foundation. Everything built on top of it needs to stay connected to that foundation. If you have reduced your carbon footprint by a verified amount, that is a claim you can make. If you have committed to doing so by 2030, that is a different kind of claim, and it needs to be framed accordingly.

The temptation to get ahead of the business reality is where most greenwashing originates. Marketing teams are under pressure to say something interesting and forward-looking. The discipline is in resisting that pressure until the business has actually done the thing you want to say it has done.

Connect the Credential to a Purchase Rationale

Once you have the verified truth, the question is which customer benefit it most naturally connects to. Sustainability credentials can support quality claims, longevity claims, transparency claims, local economy claims, and health claims, depending on the category. The job of the positioning work is to find the connection that is both authentic and commercially relevant to the audience you are trying to reach.

This is where working with creators and community voices can add real credibility, because third-party endorsement of a sustainability claim carries more weight than the brand making it directly. Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market campaigns is worth looking at for how brands are using creator partnerships to make product truths more believable, which applies directly to sustainability positioning.

Stress-Test the Claim Before It Goes Live

Before any sustainability claim goes into a media plan, it should be reviewed by someone whose job is to challenge it. Not to kill it, but to identify where it is vulnerable. If a journalist or a regulator asked you to prove that claim, what would you show them? If the answer is “we would need to prepare something,” the claim is not ready. If the answer is “here is the third-party verified data,” it is.

This kind of internal rigour is not common in marketing teams, which are generally optimised for speed and creativity rather than substantiation. Building it in requires either a dedicated sustainability communications function or a very clear brief that includes legal and sustainability sign-off as a mandatory step before anything goes out.

Measure What Changes, Not Just What Gets Seen

Sustainability marketing campaigns tend to be measured on reach, sentiment, and share of voice. These are not useless metrics, but they are not commercial metrics either. If you cannot connect the campaign to something that moves in the business, whether that is trial, consideration among new audiences, or price premium maintenance, you are measuring communications activity, not marketing effectiveness.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, and one of the things that consistently separated the shortlisted work from the rest was the quality of the commercial measurement. Not just “did awareness go up” but “did the business grow, and can we connect the marketing to that growth?” Sustainability campaigns rarely make that case, which is part of why they often struggle to command serious budget internally.

When Sustainability Marketing Reveals a Deeper Problem

There is a version of this conversation that most agencies are reluctant to have with clients. Sometimes the sustainability marketing is not working because the marketing is wrong. But sometimes it is not working because the product or the business practice is wrong, and the marketing is being asked to cover for that.

I have always believed that if a company genuinely delighted customers at every point of contact, it would not need as much marketing as most companies think they do. Marketing is often a blunt instrument deployed to compensate for something more fundamental. A product that is not good enough. A price that does not represent value. A customer experience that does not deliver on the promise. Sustainability marketing can fall into exactly this trap: using communications to signal values the business has not yet earned the right to claim.

The honest version of that conversation is: before we build a campaign around your sustainability credentials, let us look at what those credentials actually are, whether they are commercially meaningful, and whether the business is set up to deliver on the story we tell. That conversation is less comfortable than briefing a campaign, but it is the one that produces work worth doing.

Understanding how GTM strategy connects to the broader commercial picture is something I write about regularly. If you want to explore how positioning decisions, including sustainability positioning, fit into a wider growth framework, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full commercial context.

The Brands Getting This Right

The brands that have built sustainability into their positioning in a way that drives commercial outcomes tend to share a few characteristics. They treat sustainability as a product truth rather than a campaign theme. They connect that truth to something the customer already values. They are specific rather than vague, which means they can defend every claim they make. And they measure outcomes in commercial terms, not just sentiment.

They also tend to be honest about what they have not yet achieved. Transparency about the gap between current performance and stated ambition, when it is framed credibly and accompanied by a clear plan, tends to build more trust than the kind of sweeping claims that collapse under scrutiny. Customers are more sophisticated about this than most brands give them credit for.

The brands getting it wrong are almost always doing one of two things. Either they are leading with values and hoping the customer follows, which is a communications strategy not a commercial one. Or they are making claims the business cannot yet substantiate, which is a legal and reputational risk that tends to surface at the worst possible moment.

The gap between those two positions is not as wide as it seems. It mostly comes down to doing the harder internal work before the campaign brief goes out, connecting sustainability credentials to commercial positioning rather than treating them as a separate communications track, and measuring the right things once the work is live.

For GTM teams thinking about how this connects to pipeline and revenue, Vidyard’s Future Revenue Report is a useful reference for how commercial teams are thinking about untapped opportunity, including the role of brand trust in reducing friction across the funnel. Sustainability positioning, when it is credible, reduces friction. When it is not credible, it creates it.

There is also a useful parallel in how pricing strategy and market positioning interact at scale. BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy and pricing makes the point that differentiation only holds commercially when it is connected to something the customer is actually willing to pay for. Sustainability credentials are no different. They support premium pricing when they are credible and relevant. When they are neither, they are just noise.

And for teams thinking about how to build growth loops around genuine product strengths rather than manufactured positioning, Hotjar’s thinking on growth loops is worth reviewing. The principle applies directly: sustainable growth comes from building something genuinely worth talking about, then creating the conditions for that conversation to spread. Sustainability marketing at its best does exactly that.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions