"The top 10 hottest years on record have happened in the last 10 years, including 2024. This is climate breakdown — in real-time. We must exit this road to ruin — and we have no time to lose." Antonio Guterres, 2025 New Year Message.
Over the last two to three months, we’ve seen a noticeable movement of big tech and media companies away from previously ambitious “stretch” climate and DEI goals to somewhat more pared-down objectives.
Boards and the C-suite, having embraced sustainability amid the community-oriented, do-gooder atmosphere of COVID-19, are beginning to realise that achieving those goals requires multi-stakeholder commitments, multi-year planning, and sustained execution. It’s not a quick fix but a long-term commitment to making a genuine impact.
At the Baku Climate Change Conference in 2024, dubbed the Finance COP, outcomes fell short of the climate finance goal, increasing pressure on the private sector to fill the funding gap.
All in all, it feels as if sustainability as both a trend and a core value of the business, funder and political community has fallen out of favour, and this means that marketers, already consumed by competing priorities and unrelenting growth KPIs, will likely continue to struggle with making a compelling case for it.
But it's exactly at times like these that consumers look to brands to take the higher moral ground and maintain an unwavering stance — to inspire and enable.
In fact, consumers are more informed than ever about sustainability. Over half of the respondents of a recent global survey that we ran see sustainability as "one of the biggest challenges facing society today," (56%) and almost 60% claim that "the future of our world is strongly determined by how sustainably we choose to live."
However, while we know that people care about sustainability, and a large minority care very deeply (between 39% and 44% of survey respondents claimed that the state of the environment affected their quality of life and mental wellbeing), this has not translated at the cash register, particularly in Asia.
It is clear that sustainability needs to evolve: it must be practical, intuitive, and seamlessly integrated into daily life, offering new ways to work, live and thrive.
The New Sustainability: Meeting People Where They Are
Sustainability is no longer about lofty goals set in isolation. The new sustainability is about meeting people where they are.
It’s time to rethink our approach: connect with consumers, stimulate meaningful change, and make sustainability more relevant, actionable, and personal. Sustainability must become an interactive, habit-forming process that fits effortlessly into everyday life.
Models for engaging consumers around sustainability
1. Grassroots-Driven Sustainability
In a study of APAC consumers’ prioritization of sustainability issues done in 2022[1], it was found that consumers prioritized issues that were most pertinent to their personal lived experiences, communities and/or their geographical location.
Consumers want brands to foster local solutions that resonate with their immediate circumstances. They look for companies that support grassroots initiatives and work collaboratively to address specific local challenges.
Brands can meet these expectations by co-creating solutions with consumers and empowering communities with products and services that showcase their true brand purpose.
2. Adversity as Catalyst for Change
Consumers want brands to show resilience and leadership during crises. They value brands that use adversity as an opportunity to innovate and influence positive behaviour.
By leveraging challenging moments for transformative action, brands can develop campaigns that inspire change. Examples that come to mind are Nike's Colin Kaepernick ad (admittedly controversial), Patagonia's environmental activism (including their now infamous and still utterly relevant "Don't buy this jacket" Black Friday ad, part of their Common Threads initiative, which many consider a blueprint for sustainability marketing) and Ben & Jerry's longstanding alignment with social justice.
Another great campaign that successfully leveraged the trigger moment of Black Friday was Ikea — yet another great example of behavioural science-based marketing.
3. Scaling Innovation in Climate and Biodiversity
Consumers in APAC are now increasingly aware that sustainability goes beyond carbon neutrality and environmentally friendly products & services. They are now want brands to contribute towards nature-positive outcomes.
"76% of APAC marketers view sustainability as an opportunity to innovate." — Marketing a Better Future, 2023
More companies will now have to broaden their focus to include biodiversity, regenerative business models and alignment with planetary boundaries.
JDE Peet’s is one company that is setting a great example with its regenerative farming program in Vietnam. Having worked with over 7000 smallholders in the central highlands since 2016, they are continuing to help them reduce the negative environmental impacts of their farming, protect soil quality and restore biodiversity.
Building New Directions for Stronger Sustainability Connections: What brands can start doing now
A key mindset shift for brands is to think of how they can be facilitators and enablers of their customers’ sustainability ambitions; how they can help their customers fulfil their personal purpose. Across our network, we’ve helped brands create simple yet meaningful conduits for their customers’ to be conscious and ethical consumers. Here are some high-level methods:
- Create platforms for engagement that help customers build Interactive Habits: Consumers prefer sustainability to feel like an interactive journey, not just a set of instructions and ambitions. Our data-driven insights offer customised solutions to brands who want to be the driving force in behaviour change.
- Make sustainability personal and relevant: The sphere of “everyday experience” is how consumers experience sustainability. Far from limited to shopping choices, it includes cost of living, quality of life, health and well-being. There appears to be a gap between the very personal yet expansive ways in which consumers experience sustainability concerns and the more abstract and global ways in which brands address them, leading to a deficit of trust and a lack of brand connection. Starting with deeply knowing the customer, brands must develop tailored (and ideally personalized) approaches that cater to consumer lifestyle, making sustainability relatable and easy to incorporate. Read dentsu’s analysis of the modern sustainable consumer.
- Communicate and facilitate achievable, actionable steps: Consumers want clear and achievable steps to integrate sustainability into their lives. Brands can intentionally create those opportunities to contribute for consumers - actions that are integrated into the customer experience as frictionlessly as possible will help their customers make incremental yet meaningful changes.
Illuminating opportunities for growth within sustainable transformation
Businesses and brands have the responsibility and the ability to set us on a hopeful and effective course for the future, and to do this, sustainability has to be a whole-of- organisation effort. Too few C-suite leaders today realise the corporate value that cannot be gleaned from financial statements alone – but that could drive new growth, innovation and the opening up of new markets and revenue streams. This would require a review of the company’s purpose, strategies, activities, and KPIs across a comprehensive map of stakeholder groups, including employees, environment, and society.
At dentsu, some of the world’s biggest brands have leveraged our proprietary analyses that provide a lens to drive a shift in thinking that unlocks the potential of organizational purpose.
This has led to transformative new initiatives being rolled out that bridge the gap between corporate strategy and consumer expectations, creating a resonance that feeds back into business longevity and prosperity.
For marketers whose role is to be advocates for the consumer within their brands and organisations, regardless of where your organisation is on its sustainability transformation journey, meeting people where they are and inspiring them to join in will pave the way for a more connected, sustainable future – for your business and for the world.
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[1] Kantar Foundational Study on Sustainability, APAC, 2022
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