Consumers demand sustainability

5 December 2019

While there will always be some who resist the climate science, it seems the overwhelming majority now at least acknowledge we are living unsustainably and potentially terminally damaging our planet in the process.

What precisely we propose to do about this varies wildly from those who believe in a complete overhaul of our economic and social systems to those who say “relax” while suggesting technology will come to humanity’s rescue and avert the climate crisis which confronts us.

One thing everyone (everyone sensible at least) appears to have agreed on, is that living more sustainably is the only way we stand a chance of preventing disaster. Even big businesses, so often the worst offenders, appear to be waking up to the need to radically change their ways.

Some would say “what’s new?”. The concept of “greenwashing”, when companies re-brand and re-market themselves in order to present a false eco-friendly image, has been around for decades.

Perhaps most famously, in the mid-1980s oil giant Chevron commissioned a hugely expensive advertising campaign to convince a sceptical public of its environmental credentials. The campaign showed Chevron employees protecting bears, butterflies, sea turtles and all manner of cute and cuddly animals. The award-winning campaign worked and almost simultaneously became both a case study at Harvard Business school, while also being held up by environmental campaigners as the gold standard of corporate hoodwinking.

So we must be wary when profit-hungry companies make bold claims about their ethical and green credentials, and it is only right to challenge them. We at Planted, whose stated mission is “to deliver cleaner and greener cities”, are only too aware that if we make claims we don’t live by, we will be rightly held to account.

But something more substantive than spin and PR does seem to be afoot.  As consumers eyes are opened to the clear and present threat confronting us, retailers, brands, manufacturers, transport firms – indeed, all businesses that factor into the retail ecosystem – are under growing pressure to transform the way they operate in order to become greener and more ethical, and provide greater transparency. In some cases, the market is dictating change.

In November 2019 a report from Retail Week, in association with IBM, entitled “Doing Good is Good for Business”, showed 45 per cent of consumers were more concerned about the environment in 2018 than they had been just 12 months earlier. More and more consumers are changing their shopping habits as a direct response to a growing understanding and awareness of the environmental issues facing our planet.  That trend is most pronounced among millennials and
Generation Z.

One transnational goods company – who we have chosen not to name – reported last year its Sustainable Living brands were growing 69 per cent faster than its wider portfolio, delivering 75 per cent of the company’s overall growth. As businesses begin to realise there is profit to be made in sustainability, just maybe the tide may begin to turn in the environment’s favour.

We are right to be cynical. Greenwashing is a real thing and many companies spend more money on spin and PR than they do on affecting positive change.

But it feels as if the business world, driven largely by ever rising consumer demand, is reaching an epiphany. Whether it reaches it soon enough is the burning question.

Written by Sam Peters, founding partner at Planted