Brand Strategy When Your Audience Assumes You Are Lying
A decade of eco-friendly, natural and sustainable has produced a default setting of disbelief. What we think actually works now, and why perfection reads as suspicious.
The consumer scepticism everyone describes is not apathy. It is exhaustion.
People have watched oil companies position themselves as climate champions and fast fashion launch conscious collections while raising volumes. The reasonable response to that is disbelief, and disbelief is now the starting position.
Perfection is the tell
The instinct is to communicate harder — a better story, a cleaner narrative. We would argue that makes it worse.
A brand claiming to have solved a problem that everybody knows is unsolved is, to a sceptical reader, evidence of dishonesty rather than progress. The polish is the giveaway.
What seems to work instead
The brands we have watched hold up publish the parts that are not finished. Packaging that is eighty per cent recyclable, and a plain explanation of why the last twenty per cent has no solution at scale yet. The carbon cost of their logistics, stated rather than omitted.
This works, we think, because it validates the reader's scepticism instead of arguing with it. It moves the brand from preaching to reporting, and reporting is a much easier position to defend.
Adjectives out, nouns and numbers in
The practical version of this is unglamorous. Better for the planet is not a claim; it is a mood. Forty per cent less water than our previous process is a claim, and it can be checked.
Every adjective you replace with a figure and a baseline reduces the surface area someone can attack. It also, in our experience, makes the copy better.
The risk in this argument
There is a version of transparency that becomes its own performance — the confessional sustainability report that lists small failures to distract from a large one. We have seen that too, and readers detect it about as fast as they detect the original problem.
We also do not know how far this generalises. Most of our evidence is from categories where the consumer already cares. In a category where nobody is asking, publishing your failures may just be handing critics material.
Where we have got to
The brands we would bet on are the ones that have stopped trying to sound finished.
If you are rewriting a narrative that has started to feel defensive, we would be interested to see it — that particular problem is one we enjoy.
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