Consumer brands have the power to create huge change, helping millions of customers lead better, more sustainable lives.

A growing number of big businesses are making sustainability a core part of their brand, (we’ve looked at the business reasons behind this in a previous piece) and this is hugely encouraging to anyone concerned with our planet’s future.

Generally speaking, consumers don’t particularly trust governments. You only need to flick through public opinion polls asking who people trust to see that politicians tend to do quite badly, and in the UK, in the wake of the expenses scandal, trust in politicians is probably at an all time low.  So, governments exhorting the general public to do their bit to save our ailing planet will only ever have limited success.

But, generally speaking, consumers do trust brands.  Whether we like it or not, there is often an emotional attachment to our favourite brands, although often at a sub-conscious level.  The power of that consumer/brand love-in is proved by the massive waves of disapproval when a brand gets things wrong, from using child labour in sweat shops (think back to Nike), to charging more for underwear for, ahem, the fuller figure (M&S has almost recovered from this blip in its otherwise savvy reading of its customers).

And the need to shift towards more sustainable patterns of consumption is urgent.  We are running perilously low on resources. We have to cut carbon out of our daily lives, and soon.  In order to meet the scale of the challenge, we need to muster every tactic possible to move from our high-carbon, resource-intensive lifestyles to low-carbon loveliness. Now is not the time to get precious about the morality of deploying business and brands to help provide the solutions to our current crisis.  

So, just how can the humble brand communicate the sustainability agenda in such a way that encourages more sustainable behaviours, from how a product is used, to what the consumer does with it at the end of its life? 

At this point it’s worth remembering that when it comes to green and sustainability issues, the average consumer is confused and disempowered.  He or she is also very clear that business needs to do its bit – there needs to be a clear compact between the brand and the consumer – based on ‘I will if you will’.  Finally, most people want simple actions, not a menu of complicated and often contradictory choices.

Which means that when it comes to communicating sustainability, brands must remember that labels have their limits.  It is estimated that most of us take an average 45 seconds to make choices when we’re buying our everyday necessities, and a proliferation of sustainability labels, be they fair trade, red tractors or carbon labels, may influence the purchase, but won’t lead to any changes in behaviour. 
Simple messages are needed to cut through the clamour of labels. The Ariel ‘Turn to 30oC’ is perhaps one of the most successful pieces of brand communication on this agenda – a very clear message encouraging the customer to do something very simple.  It won’t save the planet on its own – but millions of people turning to 30 oC just might help.

Motivating consumers as a group – convincing them that their own simple actions can make a difference - is a key to successful sustainability communications.  Unilever’s relatively new ‘Clean Planet Plan’, currently promoted here in the UK through its Persil brand, has the power of collective action at its heart, trumpeting the strapline, ‘lots of small actions = a big difference’.

Two final tips for effective consumer communications.  The first is something the green movement has got horribly wrong in the past, and might be one reason public support for green issues has taken so long to muster.  Make people feel good.  Urging consumers to do their bit by scaring them and painting a more sustainable world as the equivalent of living in a cave with a candle, weirdly enough, doesn’t tend to make people want to change.  You stand much more chance of success by showing the links between using less energy and saving money, or recycling products and saving beautiful countryside from being used as a waste dump.
 
Finally, tell your customers about the success of your efforts. In celebrating the successes of Plan A, M&S is able to share a whole range of facts, from the money it has been able to give to charities to the thousands and thousands of recycled coat hangers.  Generally, this all helps to show that the M&S/consumer compact is making a difference.

We live in interesting times, and brands are definitely getting better at helping the consumer do the right thing.  But, so far, only a small handful have dared enter the ultimate hard-core sustainability territory, where the penny has dropped that actually, sustainability might just being about selling less stuff.  Reducing impacts in the product use phase does make a difference, but not if the absolute numbers of people using those products keeps going up.

For now, innovation still has a big role to play in giving us truly sustainable products and services, but that is only part of the answer. The other part is quite straightforward -  we simply need to consume less stuff.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian Sustainable Business section.