Tim Stübane Horizont
Sustainability communication is becoming increasingly important for companies - especially due to the EU's “Green Claims Directive, which aims to prevent greenwashing. Our Talking Head columnist Tim Stübane uses several negative examples to show how sustainability advertising does not work - and also has a best case up his sleeve.
A certain careless ease seems to have crept into sustainability communication. Perhaps because everyone is “doing something with sustainability”, marketing managers naturally don't want to miss the boat. Or perhaps because the pressure from consumers is becoming so great. You want or have to live up to expectations, even if there may not actually be a sufficiently substantial sustainability effort behind the communication.
While more and more companies, organizations and public institutions are quickly communicating their efforts and progress in the area of sustainability, society is also becoming increasingly sensitive to sustainability issues - both socially and ecologically. At the same time, more and more legal requirements are taking effect and new ones are emerging to create uniform rules for communication.
The result: more and more communicative fails. My thesis: Agencies and marketing departments that like to see themselves as trendsetters are lagging behind the rapid development and in some cases do not take into account all aspects that are necessary for success.
Here are some popular negative examples:
The sustainability campaign “Better M” by McDonald's uses disposable packaging to promote the company's recycling efforts. It suggests that it is sustainable to use disposable packaging. This is wrong, especially as McDonald's had only implemented a fraction of the recycling measures mentioned. There were rightly heated discussions.

The airline KLM advertised with the slogan “Fly responsibly”. This statement was misleading because flying with KLM is not sustainable. Too few measures taken by the airline reduce the negative aspects of flying. The company was rightly found guilty of greenwashing in the Netherlands.
KLM: Fly Responsibly
With the “True Prices” campaign, Penny tried to raise “more awareness of the environmental impact of food production”. To this end, the environmental impact costs were priced into nine products for a week. In itself honorable, if Penny were not otherwise known for massively reducing the costs of food production. The company's own behavior was therefore at odds with its communication. 46% of respondents ultimately also said that this was just marketing with no further impact.

We could charitably describe such examples as necessary attempts to sound out what is possible in terms of communication and what is not. However, these campaigns and their consequences are too risky for the respective companies. While KLM, for example, emerged from the court proceedings unpunished, the Gösser brewery had to have all its bottles relabeled with the statement “brewed CO2-neutral” because the statement was not tenable. Aldi and Katjes are also currently involved in legal proceedings due to the allegedly over-generous use of the term “climate neutral”.
And in collaboration with House of Change and Popular Packaging, we at THE GOODWINS recently revealed just how far marketing is currently from complying with the forthcoming EU-wide Green Claims Directive. Only 3 of the 163 packages examined complied with the regulations, all others were at least risky.
Obviously, the demands on agencies, marketing departments and their legal departments are increasing. As the person in charge, I can no longer develop easy-going and fun communication as I did a few years ago. I have to have a variety of aspects in mind and the right expertise at hand to develop marketable solutions.
Let's do sustainability communication by all means, but let's not take it lightly.
Tim Stübane
Communication - and therefore also the agency and marketing department - must use the right content in the right tone to strike a balance between an increasingly sensitive and critical society, legal requirements (“Directive on empowering consumers for ecological change”, “Green Claims Directive”), the ever-increasing media-economic challenges in the battle for attention and the desire for effectiveness within the company due to fewer resources and increased pressure to succeed.
We remember that the topic of “healthcare” became so demanding at some point that normal agencies were at a disadvantage with their skillset. Specialist agencies emerged that were able to lead brands in this area to success across all requirements.
It remains to be seen whether we will see a similar development in the area of sustainability in order to be able to continue to work successfully as agencies in this field. To make matters worse, the field of sustainability communication is not only a strategic and conceptual challenge, but also requires special expertise in the further process of green production, green and good media.
As a creative, I'm actually a fan of trial and error in order to achieve the best possible solution in a playful way. But with every misstep that brands make in the area of sustainability, they generate more and more reactions in society. This makes it even more difficult for a topic that is already widely viewed critically to move people.
However, this does not mean that we should avoid sustainability activities and communication altogether for fear of criticism (“greenhushing”). On the contrary! If a company is seriously moving in a sustainable direction, we should talk about it. The large field of sustainability is still a great opportunity to differentiate yourself and score positive points with your target group. At the same time, it motivates other companies to act and communicate in the same way.
There are also good examples of sustainability communication: with its “Against hate on the Internet” initiative, Deutsche Telekom, unlike most companies, is focusing its communication not primarily on ecological sustainability (#GreenMagenta), but on social sustainability (#GoodMagenta). This is clever because it differentiates the company in the market and is also absolutely credible, as the company has an obvious economic interest in allowing as many people as possible to participate in communication on its network. And in addition to the outstanding communication that has been produced on this topic for years, Deutsche Telekom also acts accordingly and is committed to combating hate and hate speech on the Internet. This initiative was therefore rightly awarded the Grand Effie recently.
My appeal: Let's do sustainability communication by all means, but let's not take it lightly. Yes, it should ultimately feel joyful and completely light-footed, but its development is not easy. Let's make sure that we approach this topic in a way that is appropriate to its relevance and explosive nature - not only in terms of the individual brands we support, but also in terms of society as a whole.