Sustainability has a marketing problem.
Why climate solutions get boring campaigns and the status quo gets all the creative talent.
It's not sexy.
I don’t mean sexy in a lurid way, more that it’s not as cool or on-trend as other products and services sold. Instead, the core messages often feel a bit... boring. "Care about palm oil before all the orangutans are gone", or "save money with solar panels."
Don't get me wrong — in some cases, this works. A cute animal and financial savings can be great emotional lures to bring the issue into someone's mind. But what happens when there is no cute animal?
This is where the marketing problem lies. If you walk through any shopping district or spend time on social media, you'll see compelling creative from FMCG brands everywhere. But where's the equally persuasive marketing for regenerative agriculture or circular economy solutions?
Part of the answer lies in B2B versus B2C marketing practices, but ultimately, we are all consumers invested in keeping our one planet thriving. So why aren’t we applying this same creativity and vibes to sustainability?
This isn’t an accident; there's undoubtedly significant interest in keeping sustainability issues quieter. But that's a political conversation for another day. When examining marketing's role in selling sustainability, the problem stems from a mix of financial constraints, skills gaps, and language issues that keep it stuck in a beige corner while the status quo attracts all the best creative talent.
The Money
Sustainability often doesn't pay well, and when life is expensive — mortgage, school fees, education debt — you may have to choose the paycheck first. No shame there; sustainability won’t happen if you can’t sustain yourself.
Meanwhile, genuine compliance is an expensive operational endeavour that eats into already tight budgets. Making matters worse, traditional funding still flows to traditional business models — according to recent data, approximately 8.3% of venture capital goes to climate-tech startups.1 And that's not even touching on the disparities between funding for male versus female founders.
Since businesses rarely have unlimited budgets, brands must choose: invest in the product or service, compliance, marketing, or other operational needs. Marketing often loses this battle.
The Skills
Beyond financial constraints, there's also a fundamental skills mismatch. Marketing and comms courses teach marketing and comms skills; they don't teach supply chains and legal regulations. Fair enough.
But at the same time, marketing kind of has a bad reputation in business right now. Between Mad Men and Meta, its crucial role in building business was diminished as performance marketing and easy numerical ROI became the focus. This made it easy to silo marketing away, discouraging understanding of what the brand does across its business. Why do you need to understand what the Product team is working on? Just focus on boosting your ROAS! (What happened to the 4 Ps 😭)
ESG became a thing for the finance and legal teams, but many brands don't invest in upskilling their marketing teams to understand why ESG issues matter — or how to communicate them authentically.
Positively, it does feel like this is shifting as businesses rediscover the immense power of brand strategy. Brand is your vibe — it is what a customer thinks of when they hear your name. In business parlance, it’s the additional benefit a consumer associates with your brand.
This means the brand is not just a marketing slogan; it’s your customer service interactions, your packaging, your onboarding process for new staff, and yes, your ESG initiatives. Successful marketing in this context means marketing has to come out of the shadows and work closely with the Product and HR teams.
The Language
Even if funding and skills align, sustainability has a language problem — something the ACCC has been catching on to with its recent greenwashing cases. See here, here and here. These greenwashing cases drive home an important business truth: sustainability initiatives should never originate with the marketing department. They must start at the C-suite and flow through the whole business with appropriate funding to ensure they are actually lived out.
Merriam-Webster defines sustainability as “(a) of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged; (b) of or relating to a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods.” But that clinical definition doesn't exactly make hearts race, does it?
More importantly, that definition doesn’t touch on how the word is used in common vernacular, where there is no clear definition. For example, if a clothing brand says it’s sustainable, what does that even mean? Organic cotton? FSC-certified packaging? Living wages in the supply chain? It is all so vague.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, sustainability language has been co-opted by compliance teams and policymakers, leaving us with precise, jargon-heavy messaging that feels more like a lecture than an invitation.
Consider how dramatically different these two messages sound:
"Pursuant to the GHG Protocol, we've reduced our Scope 3 emissions by 25% year-on-year compared to our 2023 baseline, covering categories 1-8 as verified by [third party]."
versus
"We teamed up with our suppliers, logistics partners, and everyone in between to slash our carbon footprint by 25% since 2023. (Yes, we had experts double-check our math.)"
Admittedly, one should be sitting in a technical report and the other is in marketing… but how many copywriters could translate that first sentence honestly?
The Result
These three barriers, operating as one or in tandem, keep sustainability marketing un-cool. While there are always exceptions, in general, businesses that can afford to hire skilled marketers, designers, and copywriters are typically invested in maintaining the status quo. Meanwhile, sustainability companies — often operating on tighter budgets — struggle to compete for top creative talent.
See, for example, SKIMS with its rampant greenwashing, shadowy supply chain, and very, very slick marketing messages. Or Glencore’s “Advancing Everyday Life” campaign that brilliantly greenwashes its mining impacts with emotions 👇
As a disclaimer, one of the powers of the human brain is to hold contradictory thoughts. I can think fossil fuels need to go for a viable future, but I can also recognise that it isn't going to change overnight. Our infrastructure is built around old systems, and new energy infrastructure won't pop up overnight to ensure I can have Spotify playing in the background all day.
The Path Forward
As marketers, we must rethink our role in all this.
Marketing is essential for all businesses. While the business strategy may define the audience, product, and financial goals, it’s your brand strategy and ongoing marketing tactics that bring them to life. It's our job to investigate the emotional needs of our audience and discover the best ways and places to communicate so our company can reach its goals. It's our job to understand how the product or service can better serve all audiences.
For some of us, this means we need to become translators who take complex environmental and social impact data and transform it into compelling narratives that drive behaviour change. This means investing in education, demanding transparency from our organisations, and refusing to accept "boring" as the default for sustainability communication.
If all that sounds too hard, then at a bare minimum, we need to get curious and under the hood of how our company works and what it needs to deliver its promise. Who Gives a Crap is a brilliant example of this in action. Operationally, the TP must come individually wrapped and in large cardboard boxes. The simplest solution is to just tell customers to bin or recycle, but instead, the marketing team creates internal and external influencer content showcasing how to upcycle both the paper and the boxes in creative ways (see here, and here). Does this result in an instant click and sell? Probably not when the campaign starts, but long term, it's built their brand's credibility in the sector and helped with sales and growth. It also lives up to their sustainability promises by considering customer use and end of life.
We have a choice: stay isolated in execution, never questioning the campaign strategy or creative choices; or speak up like the brilliant Polina Zabrodskaya did against AMV BBDO when she publicly resigned over their Shell campaign.
Making Sustainability Sexy
Here's what needs to happen:
For individual marketers: Learn the fundamentals of sustainability and climate science. Understand your company's actual impact, not just its marketing claims. Push for transparency and authentic messaging, even when it's uncomfortable.
For marketing teams: Collaborate closely with sustainability, product, and operations teams. Create campaigns that showcase solutions, not just problems. Invest in long-term brand building, not just performance metrics.
For leadership: Recognise that sustainability communication is a strategic advantage, not a compliance burden. Allocate proper budgets and talent to sustainability marketing. Make it a priority, not an afterthought.
Ultimately, if we want to sell our audience on renewable energy, coral regeneration projects, or circular business models, we need to make them as desirable as the destructive alternatives. That means bringing the same creative firepower, strategic thinking, and emotional intelligence to sustainability that we currently reserve for selling more stuff.
The question isn't whether sustainability can be sexy — it's whether we're brave enough to make it so. The planet's future may depend on our answer.
Cover photo from Rhythmic Photography
1 https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/esg/climate-tech-investment-adaptation-ai.html