Don’t deny it.
Perhaps just once, but the thought did cross your mind that someone should just sell you a brand of chocolate because it tastes great and not try to insert a grand cause into it?
Yes, it is paradoxical but true. In this day and age, where we are reading about the effects of climate change in every medium every day (and we all know that we need to be more responsible consumers), even the most converted can sometimes feel like they have seen one sad picture too many.
What happens when the very messages meant to inspire compassion start to wear us down? At what point did we stop looking at the photos meant to tug at our heartstrings, showing the ill, the displaced, and the famished? Like most other things today, it has a label – Poverty Porn. As the recent Guardian article points out, we’ve now hit Poverty Porn 2.01 where AI-generated images of extreme poverty, children and sexual violence survivors are flooding stock photo sites, and who’s at the receiving end of it? The same consumers that you and I are trying to reach.
Admittedly, this is an extreme case. A milder version is the brands that promise more livelihoods, and saving the artisan – the old man focussed behind the potter’s wheel, or the age-lined face of a lady from Uttarakhand. Also directed at the same values-conscious consumer.
Perhaps we need to stop and take a breath. Is there another way to generate the consumer response we seek? Think about the overload on the trying-to-do-their-best consumer. There is already so much jargon surrounding them that it is exhausting trying to arrive at the best garbage bags to buy or even that outfit for a wedding they are invited to. Every purchase a consumer makes involves many more decisions than they had planned for – Do I need to buy or should I refuse, should I buy fair-trade or buy locally? Is the packaging fully recyclable or only partially recyclable? Conscientious consumers are already consumed by eco-guilt. Is our messaging overburdening this consumer and laying the grounds for compassion fatigue?
Compassion fatigue is precisely that state of emotional exhaustion which reduces our capacity to empathize or feel compassion for others, often from prolonged exposure to distressing or emotionally demanding situations. Extrapolating this to the context of sustainability branding, there is a risk that consumers may become overwhelmed or desensitized by constant exposure to emotionally charged messages about social and environmental issues, leading to disengagement or skepticism toward cause-related marketing and sustainable brands. There is high workload (the equivalent of the practical difficulties of acting sustainably), emotional demands (the guilt, and the fact that the conscientious consumer is always held to a higher standard), and lack of support (very little social support for the pains one has to undertake).
Cause-related marketing already has to deal with the fear of skepticism owing to the surfeit of brands that have cropped up overnight that are eco-friendly, cage-free, compostable, fair-wage, or bio-degradable. While consumers with limited environmental knowledge or insufficient understanding of green marketing claims tend to be more skeptical, as they may distrust companies’ intent or question the veracity of the advertised benefits (El Nemar et al., 2022; Thai and Alang, 2024), the last thing value-driven consumers need is overly moralistic or guilt-based communication.
Is there anything more tiring than a patronising brand? Consumers do not want to be judged, and they certainly do not want advertisers to tell them how to behave. Identify how involved your customer base is and fine-tune your messaging accordingly. Purpose can be subtle. If a consumer has made a choice to come to your brand, respect the fact that they know what they are doing. Sustainable brands need to consider all the elements of their identity that they can share with consumers, evaluate how nuanced their sustainability identity is, and explore the space between moralizing and empowering. That will generate much more loyalty than pushing emotionally charged missives their way.
A 2023 joint study by McKinsey and NielsenIQ2 that examined sales growth for products that claim to be environmentally and socially responsible, in fact, found that companies will probably have a greater ESG impact and a better chance of achieving outsized growth if they incorporate high-impact ESG-related claims across multiple categories and products. The report goes on to find that no single ESG-related product claim outperformed others—but less-common claims tended to be associated with larger effects.
The responsibility now falls on communicators: how can we showcase genuine community development efforts and learn to tell our stories more creatively, more effectively?
Paraphrasing Ogilvy, may the heavens forgive me, “The customer is not a moron, he/she is your significant other, who has frankly heard it all before!”.
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