Be a “cost-of-living” realist in sustainability communications
The sustainable fashion world is leaving consumers behind. And it shows most likely shows in your sustainability communications.
People are stressed. Climate change is one part of a wider polycrisis—economic precarity, political instability, social fragmentation. The phrase “save the world,” paired with overwhelming technical “environmental” jargon, doesn’t activate people—it pushes them away.
Compliance and regulation will also be limited in impact without wide-scale engagement with the initiatives birthed from the sustainable policy world;
You say: “We’re saving the planet—here’s our strategy.”
They hear: “I don’t understand this, I don’t belong here.”
Let’s be honest: many of us got into sustainability because we wanted to “save the world.” For some, that was genuine. For others, it was a saviour complex. A trauma response. That’s not your audience’s burden. Deal with it in therapy. Don’t pass it on to your customers, communities, or stakeholders.
Stop trauma-bonding through urgency. Start building trust through translation.
What is “Give-and-Take” sustainable communication?
Scaling your sustainability initiatives and the key to unlocking the business case for sustainability means the “disillusioned’ and the “apathetic” audiences must in engaged.
To put it simply, the issue is sustainability has sat in the realm of activist communities, science communities, policy-makers and business professionals. The issue is there are a lot of people that were never truly engaged but are now expected to “fall in line”. It’s a salient political risk—and it sits just beneath the surface of every sustainability initiative today.
As regulations roll-outs are seeing its day, it is critical that focused equity-based strategies are developed to get under-engaged demographics onboard. Or else, all sustainability is lumped into is a “carbon tax” that adds additional stress to the cost-of-living crisis.
Buy-in from those already engaged in sustainability is not enough, despite it being totally acceptable to speak to specific closed stakeholders before.
When sustainability strategies are out-of-step with the economic realities of the majority, they lose legitimacy for under-engaged stakeholders. Sustainability initiatives risks becoming a cost with legitimacy loss.
“Give-and-take” sustainable communication is the art of bargaining with audiences we know to be historically under-engaged in sustainability communications
It does several key tasks:
1) Acknowledges past failures in engagement: It “builds-in” that this audience has been neglected in the development of sustainability policy and action.
2) Building equity through intersectionality: It creates equity for these audiences’ core concerns and offers opportunities to develop sustainability strategies that help to alleviate, not add to the stresses of daily lives.
3) Takes a conversational approach to impact: It embraces the power of conversation in scaling impact. Meeting people where they are at and taps into diverse networks where sustainability initiatives can be translated to previously under-engaged audiences.