Communicating Sustainability to Skeptical Consumers

Ninety-one percent of consumers worldwide believe at least some brands are lying to them about sustainability. That is close to consensus now. It is close to consensus, and it means that the default posture a customer brings to any environmental claim is doubt first, evaluation second.

Green claims as a liability for many brands

Sustainability messaging used to be a differentiator. Somewhere in the last three years it flipped into a source of risk, and the numbers show exactly when. Concern about greenwashing jumped from 8% of consumers in 2022 to 43% in 2025, a rise sharp enough that it now ranks among the leading barriers to purchase. A YouGov survey puts the skepticism figure at 55% of consumers globally who say they doubt brands' sustainability claims.

Putting those together makes the picture not subtle. A brand putting out a vague green claim today is speaking into a room that already assumes it's being misled. It's speaking into a room that already assumes it's being misled, and that assumption changes what kind of message can even land. Broad, feel-good language, the sort that used to work fine on a shampoo bottle or a shipping box, now reads as a tell rather than a reassurance.

Trust in eco-labels and certifications eroding alongside trust in brands

The obvious fix, in theory, is third-party proof. Get a label, get a certification, let an outside body vouch for the claim instead of the brand vouching for itself. Except that fix is wearing thin too. Research finds that fewer than half of consumers in the US and UK fully trust sustainability claims unless they're independently verified, which sounds like an argument for more certification, until you notice the second half of the finding: even independent verification is losing its automatic authority.

Terms like "carbon neutral," "responsibly sourced," and "eco-friendly" no longer carry weight on their own. Without a named third party standing behind them, consumers don't give the claim the benefit of the doubt, they question it. And there's a real supply-side reason for that reflex. Euromonitor data shows that 40% of sustainable SKUs globally carried no external verification at all in the fourth quarter of 2025, the claim was self-declared, the label was chosen by the brand that benefits from it. Pet care is 63% unverified, and tissue and hygiene products are 58% unverified. Consumers scanning a shelf in either aisle have roughly even odds of encountering a claim nobody outside the company has checked.

Greenhushing: what happens when brands go quiet instead of getting specific

Faced with that level of scrutiny, plenty of brands have chosen the quiet option. Greenhushing is the term for it: a strategic pullback in how visibly a company talks about its sustainability work, done to avoid drawing scrutiny rather than because the underlying ambition has shrunk. It's a communication choice, not a strategy retreat, and the two get confused constantly.

The data separates them cleanly. Eighty-seven percent of companies say they're maintaining or increasing their ESG investments, yet close to a third are deliberately communicating less about that work. Available research consistently finds that companies are maintaining or expanding their sustainability programs at rates far higher than they are publicly communicating those efforts. The gap between those two figures is the whole story: what looks like retreat from the outside is, in a lot of cases, greenhushing taking root. Consumers are noticing the silence regardless of the reasoning behind it. Consumers are increasingly reporting that sustainability messaging from brands feels harder to find or trust.

Going quiet just removes the brand from a conversation that consumers are still having, with or without them. It just removes the brand from a conversation that consumers are still having, with or without them.

The intent gap that makes specificity commercially necessary

Silence is the wrong call commercially, not just ethically. Consumers have not stopped caring. Sixty-one percent of people globally say they still care about climate change and try to act on it in some way. But only 51% believe their individual choices actually drive meaningful change. That eleven-point gap isn't apathy setting in, it's expectation getting redirected: people who doubt their own leverage start looking for someone else to exercise it, and the obvious candidate is the brand selling them the product.

Forty-four percent of consumers say they want to make eco-friendly choices but feel they don't have enough information to know whether their purchases actually help. That's not a knowledge problem consumers can fix on their own; it's a disclosure gap brands are sitting on. The generational data sharpens the stakes further. Around 64% of Gen Z consumers and 63% of Millennials say they'd pay more for sustainable products, Deloitte found, and Harvard Business Review found Gen Z is 27% more likely to buy from a sustainable brand than older generations are.

Stated willingness to pay is not the same as a completed purchase, though, and the gap between the two is well documented: plenty of "I'd pay more" answers don't survive contact with an actual price tag at checkout. What does hold up is the demand for brands to do the heavy lifting. Eighty-one percent of Millennials and 79% of Gen Z say brands should do more to help them make sustainable choices. The demand is for brands to do the heavy lifting. It's on the brand to make the case in a form the consumer can actually check.

The EU EmpCo Directive's legal floor

Regulation has now caught up to the skepticism, at least in the EU. Directive (EU) 2024/825, known as EmpCo (the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive), becomes enforceable on 27 September 2026. There's no transition period built in, meaning brands cannot delay compliance for existing product lines.

The directive bans three things. Generic environmental claims, words like "green," "eco-friendly," or "climate friendly," are prohibited unless the brand can show proof of recognized, excellent environmental performance behind them. Claims of neutral, reduced, or positive climate impact based on offsetting greenhouse gas emissions are banned entirely, which takes the whole "carbon neutral via offsets" category off the table as a legal claim in the EU. And brands can no longer invent their own seals or symbols implying sustainability unless those symbols are backed by objective, third-party certification criteria.

What survives is narrow but real: labels backed by public authorities, or by certification schemes that involve genuine independent, third-party verification. Penalties for violating EmpCo run up to 4% of a company's annual turnover in the relevant member state, which is not a fine most finance departments will treat as a rounding error.

"Concrete and verifiable" in practice across message types

Euromonitor's framing compresses the whole shift into one instruction: design for quality and performance first, then use proof suited to the specific customer segment, simple labels, clear savings, verified sourcing, to make the greener choice easy and worth the money. Measure what matters and say it.

In practice that means retiring a set of phrases that used to do a lot of work with very little behind them. Rather than "eco-friendly," name the certification body, name the standard, and say what that standard actually required the product to meet. Instead of "carbon neutral via offsets," a claim now illegal under EmpCo, describe the operational change that actually happened: a different material, a different energy source powering the factory, a shorter or cleaner logistics route. Instead of "sustainably sourced," show the place, the supplier, and the standard applied, because plot-level traceability is the direction regulation is heading.

Euromonitor's segmentation work points to how proof needs to be tailored to different buyers. For the group it calls "Naturalists," a QR code on the packaging that tells the actual sourcing story does more than a leaf logo ever could; pairing a plain-language label with a specific number, "30% lower impact than conventional options," works better than either alone, because it gives the shopper something to verify rather than something to believe. For "Low-impact Livers," the better lever is translating environmental impact into cash and kilowatts: how much money saved, how much energy avoided. The clearer and more tangible the number, the more likely that segment actually switches.

Building a sustained communication posture rather than a one-time fix

Brands are being squeezed from two directions at once. Greenhushing pressure and political risk push toward saying less. EmpCo and rising consumer expectation push toward saying more, but with more precision and more proof behind it. Those two pressures don't cancel out into "stay quiet and hope." Earning the right to speak requires making sure the operational reality behind the claim can survive being checked.

Appetite for the conversation itself hasn't gone anywhere: Research consistently shows that a substantial majority of consumers globally say they remain interested in hearing from companies about their environmental efforts. What collapsed was appetite for unsubstantiated claims specifically, not for the topic. And the cost of getting caught overstating remains steep in one direction only. NielsenIQ found that 77% of consumers would stop buying from a company caught greenwashing. A single credible, checkable piece of evidence now does more for a brand than an entire campaign built on vague commitments, and the reverse is just as true: one exposed exaggeration can undo years of accumulated goodwill.

What does a sustained posture actually involve? A useful anchor here is the principle that the safest sustainability claims now come from operations, not from marketing. That means grounding the claim in what actually happened on the factory floor or in the supply chain before a single word of copy gets written, not after. It means treating third-party certification as something to build the communication around. It means reporting progress with the same level of specificity used in the original claim, since a narrative update that gestures at direction without attaching numbers invites exactly the skepticism a brand is trying to avoid, and structured data is what both regulators and automated verification tools are increasingly built to prioritize anyway.

It also means the message can't be one-size-fits-all. Euromonitor's five consumer profiles each want a different kind of proof: a "Green Spender" respond to detail about supply-chain ethics, while a "Low-impact Liver" responds to a number on a utility bill. The same certified claim, delivered the same way to both, will underperform with at least one of them. Treating greenwashing exposure as a live reputational risk, not a legal compliance checkbox, means environmental perception has become a measurable driver of reputational standing for leading companies, closer to a balance-sheet item than a communications footnote.