So let me ask the one question a marketer is allowed to ask, the rude one. What did it sell?

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Old. Uber Green launched in September 2020, alongside the company’s $800 million pledge to help drivers go electric, and by January 2021 it had been pushed out to more than 1,400 North American cities and towns. Comfort Electric, the posher Tesla-and-Polestar version, arrived in 2022. Lyft expanded its own Green mode in April 2023 and had it running at nearly forty North American airports by the start of 2024. So this button has been sitting in your pocket for six years, quietly waiting for you to feel virtuous.

In August 2026 both companies reported spectacular quarters. Uber’s gross bookings were up 22 percent year on year, past $58 billion, with free cash flow above $10 billion on a trailing basis. Lyft’s bookings rose around 23 percent to $5.5 billion, with profitability up 37 percent. Two of the most sophisticated pricing machines humanity has ever built, humming like a Swiss watch. Electric miles did not come up much on those calls. Electric miles live in the impact report, published separately, read by roughly nobody, and quoted at conferences by people like me.

Uber’s electrification update for the first quarter of 2025, checked by an outside auditor, counts around 231,000 drivers a month running zero-emission cars and more than 105 million zero-emission trips in a single quarter. Lyft’s annual filing says over 13 million riders took an EV ride in 2024, and that more than 23 percent of rides on the platform were hybrid or electric. Uber pays its drivers roughly a dollar extra on an EV trip. That is money, that is plumbing, that is hard operational work that nobody claps for.

Then you look at the consumer product they built on top of all that plumbing, and it is a placebo button.

The teardown

Score the green toggle the way you would score any other product you were about to put in front of a customer, and it takes about a minute.

Is it visible? Yes, and that is a real tick, because the fifth principle of storybounting is that people need to be able to see the choice they made. A leaf on the screen, a thing you can mention to the person sitting next to you. Green Works detergent died in a cupboard precisely because nobody ever saw it. The Prius sold because everybody did. So, point scored.

Is it optional? Yes, and this is where it starts sliding. Everything behavioural science has learned in many years says the same unglamorous thing: whatever you pre-select is what people take. In Germany, researchers found that putting households into a green electricity tariff by default, a more expensive one, multiplied uptake by up to ten times compared with asking them to opt in. Ten times. The default is the single most powerful lever in the entire building, and Uber and Lyft turned it into a preference setting three menus deep.

Does it cost the rider more? For four years the honest answer has been no, and that is a more interesting story than the one the sustainability trade press keeps telling. Uber Green launched in September 2020 with a one-dollar surcharge over UberX. Uber quietly killed the surcharge on Earth Day 2022, and since then Uber Green, rebranded Uber Electric in October 2025 when the tier went fully EV-only, has cost the same as UberX as the operating baseline. Same fare. Not cheaper. Occasionally a local promotion pushes it below UberX and somebody posts a screenshot on a travel blog. That is the exception. Parity is the rule. Lyft’s Green Mode is still running at about a dollar over standard as of the most recent public reporting. Comfort Electric, Uber’s posher electric tier with Tesla and Polestar cars, is worse, with trackers putting it somewhere between 25 and 40 percent above a normal UberX.

And here is where the third of my six Ps arrives to do the actual damage. Parity is not a payoff. Parity is a tie. Payoffs move behaviour. Ties do not. Uber and Lyft have built the most extraordinary dynamic pricing machines in the history of consumer commerce and pointed them at surge rather than at the electric option. The electric ride has been sitting at the same price as the petrol ride for four years, which is a technical achievement nobody claps for and a behavioural nothing. In a category where the machine can move a fare by dollars in seconds, choosing not to move it in the direction of the choice you want people to make is itself a choice, and the choice is: we would rather keep the margin than change the mix.

People move when the reward is personal and immediate, when it is about me and about now. So what does the green button actually hand me? A dollar off? No, it hands me the same price I would have paid anyway. A shorter wait? No, because Green only appears when an electric car happens to be nearby, so if anything I wait longer. Same price, longer wait, a warm feeling, and the person deciding is eleven minutes late for a meeting and standing in the rain. Effort up, reward flat, decision made. I said it many times: when the payoff is not visibly bigger than the effort, no amount of beautiful design saves you.

What kills me is that these two companies are world class at exactly the thing they refuse to do here. When Uber genuinely wants to change your behaviour it does not show you a values statement. It surges the price 2.4x on a Friday night and you cheerfully walk three blocks. It bundles you into Uber One and suddenly you are ordering dinner from the same app. It shows you a countdown, a price lock, a nudge that says you will save money if you walk to the corner. Their pricing models reprice millions of trips in seconds, city by city, rider by rider, reading the weather, the demand and, more or less, how impatient you are feeling.

That is the most effective behaviour-change engine ever built for ordinary consumers, and it is powered by exactly the kind of AI these companies love to talk about on stage. It could make the shared, off-peak, electric trip the cheapest and most obvious thing on your screen tomorrow morning. The code is already written. It is simply pointed at margin, and the sustainability team was handed the toggle as a consolation prize.

There is a second, quieter reason this matters, and it has nothing to do with batteries. American research found that cars cruising around empty between fares, the industry calls it deadheading, accounted for something like 41 percent of ride-hailing miles in one studied market, and that app rides added roughly 80 percent more car-miles than the journeys they replaced. In San Francisco, academics pinned about half the increase in traffic delay between 2010 and 2016 on Uber and Lyft. Electrifying a car that drives in circles empty is a small win. Filling that car, or pulling it out of the 6pm crush, is a very big one. And American transport modellers found that if you shave about a minute per mile off how long a shared ride feels, the chances of someone accepting it jump by a third. One minute. That is a pricing and matching problem, and pricing and matching is the one thing on earth these two companies do better than anybody.

The people who got this right

Look at who actually moved millions of humans:

IKEA, Black Friday week 2020: instead of discounting new furniture, they ran BuyBack Friday and offered you up to 50 percent of the original price, in store credit, for the stuff you already owned. 482,000 valuation quotes in a single week, around €2.1 million handed back in vouchers, and the scheme became permanent in many markets. IKEA paid you to behave well, and you took the money, and everyone went home happy.

Patagonia’s Worn Wear runs the same play from the other end: the repaired, second-hand jacket is the cheaper one, the cooler one, the one with a story. Half a million pieces of gear repaired, and a whole business built on not selling you something new.

Hong Kong’s MTR simply discounted train trips taken before 7am. MIT’s analysis found that 23 percent of those early travellers had genuinely shifted out of the peak, by an average of 42 minutes, and that one in ten started using rail because of the discount. A price cut moved a city’s clock. Good, right?

And a 2024 experiment on food delivery apps found that quietly changing the default dish and reordering the menu beat both carbon labels and a meat tax at getting people to pick the lower-carbon meal. An earlier restaurant study is blunter still: the carbon information on the wine list changed nothing at all, and people only switched when the greener bottles got cheaper.

Now the honest part, because I do not do sales pitches. Price is not a magic wand. Transport for London ran Off-Peak Friday fares in 2023 and 2024 and found essentially no shift in peak journeys; a ScotRail trial produced nothing convincing either. A temporary, narrow, one-day-a-week promotion does not beat the structure of people’s lives, their childcare, their office rules, their habits. The incentive has to be permanent, personal, and sitting inside the price at the exact moment of choice.

Of course the science is right, the curators are always sincere and the craft is extraordinary: the sound design, the projection, that moment when the water climbs to the level of your own chest and your body believes it before your brain does. All this move people, for real, but for 20 minutes, then most of them walked out and ordered a burger.

That gap — between the lump in my throat and the burger — is the most expensive gap in sustainability communication today, and we have quietly built an entire cultural industry inside it, complete with ticketing, sponsors and a gift shop.

So here is my thesis, and it will always annoy people I genuinely like: the immersive climate-collapse show is a ghost train. You pay to be frightened, you scream a little, you come out laughing nervously, and you buy a hot dog.

The studies, for what they are worth, say all the same thing in more careful language. Put people inside a virtual flood and they feel enormously: presence, emotion, alarm, all of it spikes. Then measure what they actually do afterwards — donate, change a meal, change anything — and the emotion does almost nothing. The only version that moved real behaviour was the version where the visitor got to make a choice inside the experience and watch it matter. Not the fear but the sense that you can do something. Which is, of course, precisely the ingredient the dark room leaves out.

The reality si that we got dramatically better at manufacturing horror at exactly the moment horror stopped working. Mila in Montreal built This Climate Does Not Exist, which floods your own street, your own address, on request. MIT has published models that generate photoreal satellite images of future floods. NVIDIA’s Earth-2 renders climate futures at a resolution that would have been a film budget five years ago and is now, more or less, a prompt.

And the more cinematic it gets, the worse it performs. Because the fast, lazy, instinctive part of my brain — Kahneman’s System 1, the one that actually runs my Tuesday — has seen this exact shot before, in Interstellar, in The Day After Tomorrow and it files it where it files all beautiful catastrophe: fiction. Spectacle. Not my problem, not my week. We have built infinite horror and almost no meaning.

Which is the same mistake we happily mock when advertising makes it. It is the Smart Car selling sustainability as penance on wheels. It is BP inventing your personal carbon footprint — tangibility, brilliantly executed, aimed at exactly the wrong target. The only difference is that museums are the good guys, so nobody ever audits the brief. Meanwhile the sponsor logo at the entrance quietly collects the halo of the drowned city without changing a single thing about its own product. Greenwashing by museum wall. Cheapest media buy on the market.

So let me redesign it, because “stop building dark rooms” is too easy and I have no patience for critics without blueprints. Same building, same budget, four rooms.

Room one: Positivity. Keep the flood — ninety seconds, not fifteen minutes. Fear opens the eyes, it never runs the legs. Then use exactly the same generative tech, the same address-level model, to render your street in 2040 done well: trees, shade, water where water belongs, the bakery still open, your kid cycling. Nobody has built the abundance version. It costs the same money.

Room two: Proof. No tonnes of CO₂. Show me a process I can check: this city did this, it took this long, here is what broke on the way. Progress travelled, not distance remaining.

Room three: Pop. Oatly-grade wit on the walls. If it needs a glossary, it needs a rewrite.

Room four: Payoff. Today the exit is a gift shop and a QR code to a petition, which is another way of saying nothing happens. Replace it with something you walk out holding: a repair desk that fixes the jacket you arrived in, a swap rail, a real voucher from a shop down the road, a booking confirmed on the spot. Patagonia’s Worn Wear tour understood this ten years ago. IKEA’s buy-back understood it. And above the door, one live counter — not carbon avoided, but garments repaired today, items swapped today, by people who were standing exactly where you are standing. Visible, countable, joinable in eleven seconds.

The dark room isn’t too radical. It’s too comfortable — for the curator, for the sponsor, and honestly for me too, because being moved is so much easier than being changed.

Make the exit door the exhibition.

I want to write here why I think that panic is the most useful thing that has happened to sustainable marketing in ten years.

But first, the scene that made me want to write this: few days ago I was looking for inspiration for the article and I found out that in May 2023, Wyke Farms — a good family dairy in Somerset, real farmers, real credentials launched what it announced as the UK’s first carbon-neutral butter, under the Ivy’s Reserve label. Certified. Verified. Neutral. Good right?.

Now picture the person standing in front of that cabinet. She has three seconds for the butter. Maybe four. And in those three seconds, a badge is asking her to care about a supply-chain accounting exercise she cannot see, cannot check, and will never, ever taste on her toast for a price that’s surely much higher than any other butter in the cabinet.

So I decided that was a good hook for this week article

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This weekend writing this article I realized nobody, in a hundred years of popular music, has written a chorus about an electric two-seat city car with excellent parking manoeuvrability and a very low fuel consumption.

The scene, right now

The International Energy Agency reports that SUVs made up 48% of global car sales in 2023 — a record — and that more than one in four cars on the road worldwide is now an SUV. The BBC, citing GlobalData, put the 2024 figure at 54%.

Meanwhile, in many cities around the world, a group called the Tyre Extinguishers crawls under those same vehicles and lets the air out of the tyres, with the ambition of making SUV ownership impossible in urban areas. Funny bunch of idealists

Two personas, same product category. One of them has 54% market share and rising. The other has a screwdriver and a lentil and they are hated by many.

The people under the wheel arch at 3am are not conceptually wrong: a heavier car burns more but a YouGov poll in the UK found that only 15% of Britons backed tyre deflation as a protest tactic, against 59% opposed: the least popular technique they tested. So it isn’t even working as persuasion. It’s a scream, and a scream by definition is not a strategy.

Why this happens? Because the car industry has spent a century selling freedom, height, safety, status, the family holiday, the dog in the boot, the version of yourself who goes camping. The movement has spent thirty years selling abstinence, guilt, and a bicycle in the rain.

One side is doing marketing. The other side is doing punishment.

The Smart Car and the Prius: the same decade, two different destinies

Look at the two most legible experiments in green motoring, both running at the same time.

The Smart Fortwo was a genuinely clever object, and it was sold as penance. Tiny footprint, city efficiency, environmental conscience, a car that apologised for existing. It peaked around 139,000 units globally in 2008 and then died; US sales went from roughly 24,000 in 2008 to under 1,300 by 2018, and Mercedes pulled the brand out of North America in 2019. Buyers didn’t reject small as many people think; they rejected compromises. As trade coverage noted at the time, the same money bought you a subcompact crossover with more space and a higher seat — that is, the same city practicality with none of the self-denial.

The Prius did the exact opposite. It sold millions, because it made virtue visible. CNW Marketing Research famously found that a majority of Prius buyers — 56% — said their main reason for buying was that the car “makes a statement about me,” versus 37% citing fuel economy. Griskevicius and colleagues showed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2010 that when people are primed with status motives, they’ll pick the green product over the more luxurious one — but mainly when the choice is public. They called it conspicuous conservation.

And now the funny part

The electric car is currently winning the argument the movement lost — by cheerfully refusing to make the argument at all.

In 2023, according to JATO Dynamics, the world’s best-selling car was the Tesla Model Y. A mid-size electric crossover. High-riding. Fast. The first pure EV ever to top the global chart. The most successful climate product in history is, physically speaking, an SUV.

Then look at how the metal actually gets moved. GMC brought back the Hummer as a 1,000-horsepower electric truck with a launch mode called Watts to Freedom — WTF — that does 0–60 in around three seconds; the first edition reservations went in about ten minutes and GM was sitting on more than 70,000 reservations by early 2021. Ford revealed the F-150 Lightning talking about torque, towing, the frunk, and powering your house in a blackout; over 44,500 reservations in three days, around 200,000 by December. BMW put Schwarzenegger as Zeus in an iX. Kia gave the EV6 a robot dog.

Zero guilt in those campaigns. Zero.

The emissions ride shotgun. They’re in the spec sheet, in the tax break, in the quiet satisfaction of gliding past a petrol station. Nobody had to be shamed into a Lightning. They wanted the truck, and the truck happened to be electric.

That’s Positivity (desire, not dread), Payoff (three seconds to sixty is an immediate, personal, entirely selfish reward), and Pop (a robot dog, a Norwegian joke, a launch mode called WTF — no prior knowledge required, no jargon, no homework). The sustainability is real. It just isn’t the pitch.

The takeaway

Stop trying to shame the SUV out of existence. It is 54% of the market and it is not embarrassed.

Beat it at its own game. Sell the electric one as the better SUV — quieter, faster, cheaper to run, more room because there’s no engine, powers your fridge when the storm knocks out the grid, and yes, you’ll look magnificent in it. Make the sustainable choice the most desirable object in the room and the planet will come along for the drive, in the passenger seat, saying nothing, exactly where it should be.

The SUV didn’t win because people are stupid. The SUV won because it had the better story: escape, with a roof rack.

Our job isn’t to puncture that story.

It’s to steal it.

In 1997, Weight Watchers took a rigorous, internationally standardised unit of measurement — the calorie — and replaced it with a made-up one. Points. A blend of calories, fat, and fibre, rounded into a small whole number, with a daily allowance you could hold in your head and spend like pocket money. No degree required. Just a budget and a running total.

The result was that Points changed what people put in their mouths.

I think about that swap constantly, because the industry I love is walking into exactly the same wall, at speed, with a compliance officer riding shotgun.

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The AI story is the loudest current example, but the pattern is not specific to tech. It is the same pattern I have watched play out in FMCG, in beauty, in food, in beverages, in apparel, and across almost every category I have worked in for the last thirty years. Products that have sustainability built in at the innovation stage almost never have to talk about it later. The product does the work of communication by itself. Products that have sustainability added at the marketing stage almost always have to talk about it constantly, because the marketing is the only place the sustainability actually lives. When those two positions meet the same category pressure, the first survives and the second walks back. This piece sets out the framework I use to decide which of the two we are actually building.

The two positions

Every innovation brief I have ever seen sits, whether the team knows it or not, in one of two positions on the sustainability question. In position one, the environmental performance of the product is a design input at the R&D stage. The energy consumption budget is written into the specification. The materials constraint is written into the specification. The end-of-life pathway is written into the specification. Whatever the sustainability outcome is going to be, it has to be delivered by the product itself, not communicated around it. Marketing later on will describe what the product does functionally, and the sustainability outcome will follow as a by-product of the description, without needing its own campaign.

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The numbers, unvarnished

Microsoft published its 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report on 9 July. Total greenhouse gas emissions across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 rose by 25% year over year, from 16.21 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent in fiscal 2024 to 20.29 million in fiscal 2025. Scope 2 emissions alone jumped from 258,000 metric tons to nearly 2.7 million metric tons. That is a 945% increase in one year. The company’s electricity consumption reached 37 million megawatt-hours, up 24%, enough to power 3.4 million US homes for a year. Microsoft consumes now roughly four times as much electricity as it did before the pandemic.

Google published its 2026 Environmental Report on 30 June. Total operational carbon emissions rose 18% year over year. Cumulative emissions are now 81% higher than the 2019 baseline against which the company had pledged to halve emissions by 2030. Google’s electricity consumption rose 37% in a single year, the steepest climb in the company’s history, and is now more than 250% higher than in 2019. Google’s data centres drew roughly 42 million megawatt-hours in 2025, comparable to the entire annual electricity consumption of New Zealand. Scope 3 emissions, which account for 80% of the total, rose 25% year over year.

Amazon’s report showed total emissions up 16% year over year. Together, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta account for roughly two thirds of the data centre power capacity among the top fifteen operators tracked by Jefferies. The International Energy Agency projected that global data centre electricity consumption will more than double from 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, more than Japan’s entire annual electricity consumption. Data centre electricity has been growing 12% per year since 2017, four times faster than overall global electricity growth. In the United States, data centres are expected to account for nearly half of all electricity demand growth between now and 2030.

The story the industry cannot square

So, the same companies that spent the last decade telling us AI would help humanity manage the climate crisis are now the largest single source of new electricity demand on the planet. Google’s own environmental report admits its AI infrastructure is expanding faster than the grid is decarbonising. Microsoft’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Melanie Nakagawa, told the accompanying briefing that emissions would continue to rise in the near term due to AI, even as the company signs more clean power deals. This is, unfortunately, the actual technical reality of running current AI at scale.

For readers of this newsletter, the pattern is familiar. Sustainability was positioned as a use case of the AI product. Look at all the wonderful things AI could do for the climate. What was never inside the AI product, at the design stage, was a constraint on how much energy the AI itself was allowed to consume. The environmental benefit was external and rhetorical. The environmental cost was internal and physical. When the two met on a balance sheet, the physical cost won. This is Green Don’t Sell in its purest form. The industry sold sustainability as a story about what AI could do, and never structured sustainability as a constraint inside what AI actually is.

The pivot to nuclear tells you what actually happened

The clearest evidence that the tech industry did not build sustainability into AI at the design stage is the pivot to nuclear power now underway. In eighteen months, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta have committed to roughly ten gigawatts of new nuclear capacity. Don’t take me wrong, nuclear is not the villain here. Restarting existing plants and building SMRs is probably a reasonable response to a real energy problem. What matters is what it tells us. The industry could not solve its AI energy problem by making AI itself more efficient. It has decided instead to find more electricity to run the AI as currently built. That is a rational business decision. It is also a public admission that AI as designed today cannot be made sustainable at scale through software or marketing alone. It needs more power from somewhere else. And the somewhere else is nuclear, gas, and whatever the grid can supply, which is exactly the outcome the AI for Sustainability narrative was supposed to prevent.

The CONCLUSION

The tech industry sold AI as sustainability’s greatest ally. Two years into the actual buildout, AI has become sustainability’s largest single new pressure point, and the industry’s answer is to build nuclear power stations. This is a clear design failure that the marketing was never structured to survive. If sustainability had been a design constraint on AI at the R&D stage, model architectures would look different, inference efficiency would be prioritised over parameter count, and the whole scaling strategy of the last five years might have proceeded on a different trajectory. That did not happen mainly because sustainability was not a design constraint, as it never was.

The wider lesson for anyone reading this from outside tech is that this pattern is not unique to AI. Almost every product I have worked on in the last thirty years has been offered the choice at some point between treating sustainability as a design input at the innovation stage or bolting it on afterwards as a marketing feature. The ones that treated it as a design input rarely need to talk about it later. The product speaks for itself. The ones that bolted it on afterwards are now, one by one, quietly rewriting the story. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are doing so in public this month, because they are too large to do it in private. Tomorrow’s paid piece sets out the four principles that separate the two approaches, and why only one of them scales.

This week (paid): Sustainability Is Not a Feature. It Is a Design Constraint. Four principles for putting sustainability inside the innovation brief rather than outside the marketing plan. With case studies from Apple silicon, Toyota, Signify, Interface, Nike Flyknit, IKEA, and Patagonia — and why the ones that got it right almost never need to talk about it.

Walter Susini is a marketing consultant, Professor of Practice at SDA Bocconi, and author of “Green Don’t Sell” (Bocconi University Press, April 2026).

If this resonated, subscribe. If it didn’t, tell me why. I’ve been wrong before, and I’ve always learned more from the people who disagreed.

The Conference Board numbers are the following: 84% of S&P 500 companies disclosed climate targets in 2025. But 58% of those with Scope 1 targets have flat or rising emissions since 2021. 62% for Scope 3. Only 24% of surveyed sustainability executives are fully confident their companies will meet their goals. 59% report mixed or low confidence. And the leading reason cited by executives for expected delays or adjustments to those targets was not political pressure or regulatory uncertainty. It was money: 55% named cost, capital allocation, or return on investment as the primary factor.

The visible case, and the pattern behind it

The case that made the retreat visible earlier this month was JBS. The world’s largest meatpacker published its 2025 sustainability report in early July and removed its 2040 net-zero commitment, its $100 million Scope 3 research pledge, and its Amazon zero-deforestation target. Its Chief Sustainability Officer told the Financial Times that the company wanted to focus on targets it could directly control and measure. Bloomberg and Inside Climate News confirmed the withdrawal. The Financial Times added, importantly, that PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Unilever have also softened elements of their climate commitments in recent years. JBS is the visible one this month. It will not be the last.

I am not here to attack JBS. The company is in a genuinely difficult structural position. Roughly 97% of its emissions sit in Scope 3, coming from livestock reared by suppliers the company does not directly control. Setting a net-zero target that covers those emissions was probably always going to be undeliverable, and pretending otherwise for years was probably always going to end in a quiet retreat. The interesting question is not why JBS pulled the target. The interesting question is why so many other companies, in structurally similar positions, set the same kind of target in the first place, and what the profession should learn from watching them all quietly walk it back at the same time.

The design flaw

When a large corporation sets a target that covers emissions in supply chains and biological systems it does not directly control, the target is structurally uncontrollable. When there is no revenue mechanism attached to hitting the target, there is no financial cost to missing it. When consumers do not pay a premium for the outcome, there is no market punishment. When investors do not discount the stock, there is no shareholder pressure. The target exists in the space between the sustainability report and the annual disclosure, and nowhere else. The first time the CFO needs the budget for something else, the target goes.

This is what Green Don’t Sell has been arguing for months. Sustainability that does not sell, that does not generate revenue, that does not attract consumers, and that does not protect margin is corporate poetry. And corporate poetry gets cut when the quarterly numbers get difficult. The professionals who structured these targets over the last fifteen years, and I include a version of myself among them, allowed sustainability to be positioned as a moral commitment separate from the business, rather than as a business proposition that happened to have environmental co-benefits. When the moral commitment stops paying for itself, it disappears. This is simply what happens when incentives and commitments point in opposite directions.

What could have been designed instead

For JBS specifically, and for any large corporation in a similar structural position, a different design would have produced a different outcome. The target should have been anchored in revenue-generating certification, where beef sold with Rainforest Alliance or Roundtable on Sustainable Beef verification commands premium prices in European foodservice and Japanese retail. This kind of target is measurable in dollars, protected by the CFO because it improves margin, and it progresses whether or not the industry-wide Scope 3 conversation resolves.

The target could also have been anchored in feed efficiency, where every improvement in feed conversion ratio reduces both operating costs and indirect emissions simultaneously. This is a target the CFO defends because it directly improves the profit and loss statement, and it produces genuine Scope 3 reductions as a by-product. The target could also have been anchored in portfolio shift toward value-added and alternative protein products. JBS already owns Planterra and Ozo in plant-based, and any commitment to grow revenue share of higher-margin, lower-intensity products would have been defensible in every quarterly meeting from the day it was announced.

Each of these approaches would have produced measurable, durable sustainability progress, tied to revenue mechanisms that survive quarterly pressure. None of them require the company to commit to reducing biological emissions from millions of animals it does not raise itself. This is what commercial sustainability looks like when it is structured as a business rather than as a promise, and the paid piece this week goes into detail about how to build targets that survive the CFO for any category, not only meat.

The verdict

The retreat we are watching is the predictable outcome of an ambition that was never structured to survive a difficult quarter. Sustainability targets that do not generate revenue, do not attract consumers, and do not protect margin will always be removed by the first CFO who needs the budget for something else. The lesson is not that companies are betraying the planet. The lesson is that we, as a profession, allowed sustainability to be structured as a promise instead of as a business. And promises get cut. Always.

What comes next is a redesign, and the profession has a choice about who does the redesigning. If we leave it to the sustainability teams alone, we will get more targets that read beautifully in the annual report and disappear at the next budget round. If we bring in marketing, commercial and finance from the beginning, we might, this time, produce commitments that survive the pressure. The retreat is not the end of the story. It is the moment when the design conversation should finally happen with the right people in the room.

This week (paid): How to Design Sustainability Targets That Survive the CFO. The Conference Board diagnosis unpacked, three design principles for durable commitments, three categories of targets that outlast quarterly pressure, and the framework applied to JBS, H&M, and the wider category of companies currently walking back promises they were never structured to keep.

Walter Susini is a marketing consultant, Professor of Practice at SDA Bocconi, and author of “Green Don’t Sell” (Bocconi University Press, April 2026).

If this resonated, subscribe. If it didn’t, tell me why. I’ve been wrong before, and I’ve always learned more from the people who disagreed.

A majority of the sustainability executives who committed to these targets already expect them to be adjusted or delayed for financial reasons. This is not a hypothesis. This represents the internal state of the S&P 500 sustainability function as of mid-2026. And it explains, more clearly than any political analysis, why the JBS retreat happened when it happened, and why more will follow.

Twenty-five years of watching commitments made and unmade have taught me a specific lesson. Sustainability targets that are structured outside the commercial logic of the business will always be revised when the commercial logic tightens. The only durable targets are the ones that are inside the commercial logic from the start. What follows is a framework for designing that kind of target, three principles that any commitment should pass, three categories of targets that survive quarterly pressure, and an application of the framework to JBS specifically and to three other categories where the same design flaw is currently visible.

Why the current generation of targets fails

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None of it is moving the perception. In consumer research and in the trade press coverage, H&M is still filed under fast fashion, still bracketed with Shein and Zara, still greeted with the same weary comment whenever a new report drops. Greenwashing. Not enough. Still part of the problem. The gap between what the company has actually done and what the consumer believes has become one of the widest disconnects in modern brand management. It is also the clearest evidence of a lesson this newsletter has been arguing since April. Sustainability without marketing is invisible. And marketing that arrives after the mental file has already closed is very difficult to change.

The mental file that will not update

The most useful framework for understanding what has happened to H&M comes from basic cognitive science. When consumers buy a brand, they place it into a mental file that shorthands a set of associations. Fast fashion comes loaded with associations around overproduction, disposability, cheap labour, plastic fibres, and rapid landfill destination. Once a brand is filed under fast fashion in a consumer’s head, new information does not open the file and rewrite it. New information gets filtered through the existing file. Data that supports the file is retained. Data that contradicts it is dismissed as marketing spin. This is confirmation bias, and it operates whether the consumer is conscious of it or not.

H&M is now living the consequences of this. Every new emissions report, every new CDP listing, every new advisory board is being read by consumers not as evidence of change but as evidence of a fast fashion brand trying harder to look less like a fast fashion brand. The interpretive frame is fixed. The data does not shift it. The company’s leadership, based on their recent interviews, seems to believe the gap is a communication problem that better messaging will solve. It is not. It is a positioning problem that emerged twenty years ago and has been reinforced by every subsequent piece of communication that failed to reset the file.

What the free piece from two weeks ago said, applied here

Two weeks ago I wrote that Aldi and Lidl are winning the sustainability battle at UK grocery not by abandoning sustainability communication but by abandoning the theatre of it. Certification, not story. Price, not premium. Product, not poem. H&M is the mirror image case. The company has abandoned neither the theatre nor the report. It has invested significantly in both. What it has not managed to do is build a fresh identity underneath the communication that gives the consumer permission to update the file.

This is not H&M’s fault in any simple sense. The company has been doing the operational work for years, and much of it is genuinely leading. But operational leadership without brand repositioning does not shift consumer perception. It only produces the frustration of watching the numbers improve and the reputation not follow. The consumer who bought a Conscious Collection dress in 2019 and later learned that Conscious Collection had been the subject of class action litigation for misleading sustainability claims is not going to be persuaded by a 41% Scope 1 and 2 reduction in 2026. The trust broke five years ago. The subsequent operational improvements are being read against the broken trust, not against a fresh page.

The product question, again

Underneath the perception debate sits the same product question I have been asking for weeks now. What does H&M actually offer the consumer beyond sustainable production? The answer, honestly, is a shopping trip that looks, feels and prices identically to a shopping trip at Zara or Shein. The store layout is the same. The refresh cycle is roughly the same. The garment quality, on most items, is comparable. The price point sits in the middle of the fast fashion band. From the consumer’s point of view, the choice between H&M and its direct competitors is essentially arbitrary at the moment of purchase, and sustainability, if it enters at all, enters as a small tiebreaker that most consumers will not sacrifice cost or trend for.

This is why the operational sustainability work, however good, cannot rescue the perception. The consumer is not being asked to prefer H&M for a specific product reason, but the sustainability underwrites. The consumer is being asked to prefer H&M because the company has better emissions numbers than Shein. That is not a purchase reason.

For the sustainability work to actually shift the perception, H&M would need to change what the shopping trip itself feels like. A repair guarantee on every garment. A visible in-store take-back that gives credit against the next purchase. A distinctive material story that the consumer can see and touch on the pack. A price point that quietly rewards the sustainable choice rather than sitting neutrally alongside the competition. None of this exists. What exists instead is a beautifully written annual report and a very good CDP rating, neither of which is available at the store counter.

The verdict

H&M is neither a villain nor a hero in this story. The company has done more genuine operational sustainability work than most of the industry combined. The reduction targets are real. The methodology is credible. The audits are honest. And none of it is going to shift the consumer perception in any meaningful timeframe, because the mental file was closed a decade ago and no amount of data will reopen it. This is not a communication problem H&M can outrun. It is a category problem H&M is trapped inside.

The wider lesson for the rest of the industry is more useful. Do the sustainability work seriously if you can, because eventually the regulatory environment and the shareholder environment will require it. But do not expect the sustainability work alone to change the brand. Consumer perception moves with product experience, price signal, and shopper interaction, not with reports and rankings. If the sustainability strategy is not backed by a product experience the consumer can feel, and by a positioning that gives the consumer permission to see the brand differently, the sustainability work will remain a private conversation between the company and its own investors.

H&M is currently having that private conversation. The consumer is not invited. The consumer already made up their mind, some time around 2019, and no report has yet arrived that will change it. That is the verdict, and it is uncomfortable for a profession that would like to believe that good work eventually wins recognition. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes the file stays shut, and the next generation of brands has to be built without inheriting the closed file. That is the harder work no one is talking about, and it is where the actual conversation should be.

Walter Susini is a marketing consultant, Professor of Practice at SDA Bocconi, and author of “Green Don’t Sell” (Bocconi University Press, April 2026).

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The H&M case, which I wrote about in this week’s free piece, is currently the most visible example of this problem in the sustainability space. Emissions down 41% Scope 1 and 2. Down 34.6% Scope 3. Two consecutive years of CDP double A-listing. First place in Fashion Revolution’s What Fuels Fashion. First place in Stand.Earth’s Fossil-Free Fashion Scorecard. And the consumer, when interviewed, still parks the brand next to Shein. The file is closed. This piece is about why it is closed, what the research actually says about opening files that have been closed for a long time, and about three brands that managed to do it. One of the three is a case nobody expects when the topic is sustainability. It is, I think, the most instructive of the three.

What the research says about closed files

The mental file is not a metaphor. It is a well-documented phenomenon in cognitive psychology, and it operates through three specific mechanisms that anyone doing brand work should understand better than most of us do.

The first mechanism is confirmation bias. Once the mind has assigned a category to a stimulus, subsequent information is filtered through the category rather than allowed to update it. Data that fits the file is retained. Data that contradicts the file is either dismissed as anomalous, discounted as marketing, or reinterpreted to fit the existing frame. This is not a cognitive weakness. It is a cognitive efficiency. If the mind had to re-evaluate every brand from scratch at every exposure, ordinary life would grind to a halt. So the mind uses shortcuts. Categories are shortcuts. And once a shortcut is established, it defends itself against contradiction.

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I want to say clearly that I have no criticism of the campaign itself, or of the agency, or of the outcome for the farmers involved. What I want to write about is the fact that the industry has chosen this, of all possible pieces of work, to hold up as the gold standard for what sustainability marketing should look like in 2026. Because it is a signal about how our profession is now defining the category, and the signal is, I think, the wrong one.

What the jury actually rewarded

Look at the other winners in the Sustainable Development Goals category this year. Silver went to “Three Words” by AXA France, a road safety intervention. Gold went to “The Māori Roll Call” for Whānau Ora in New Zealand, and to “The Period Uniform” by Somos Martina. Bronze went to campaigns from a Ukrainian armed forces awareness initiative, a Royal Society for Blind Children programme, a Paraguayan tourism board, a Thai health foundation, and a Bingo Group anti-child-labour campaign. Read the list. Every winner solves a discrete, local, morally clear social problem, usually in partnership with a nonprofit or a public institution.

This is admirable work. It is also, structurally, not sustainability marketing in the sense that matters commercially. It is closer to cause marketing, or to communications for social innovation projects. The prize goes to the campaign that identifies a social problem and creatively addresses it, ideally with measurable local outcomes. The prize does not go to the campaign that persuaded millions of ordinary consumers to switch to a more sustainable version of a mainstream product they were already buying. It never does. It has not for years.

Cannes Lions did something important this year. After last year’s scandal, in which entries containing AI-fabricated footage and fake news reports won prizes, the festival introduced Awards Integrity Standards. Every claim now requires proof of impact. Every entry must be personally endorsed by the CEO of the agency and the CMO of the brand. Sanctions include three-year bans. Maybe this is why total entries dropped 25.46% this year, from 26,900 to 20,050. The industry lost roughly a quarter of its entries because the newly required proof was not available. This is, on balance, a good outcome. The awards are more honest.

But look at what the new proof standard has produced when applied to sustainability. It has codified a particular kind of proof. The proof is the local, measurable social intervention. Farmers compensated. Roll calls conducted. Uniforms distributed. Antibiotics reimbursed. The proof is not, and cannot be, the kind of proof that would matter to a CMO of a global brand trying to build a sustainability business at scale. That kind of proof, which would show that a sustainable product line has taken share from a conventional one, or that a category has moved toward lower-carbon options because of a marketing intervention, does not fit the case-film format Cannes rewards. It is too slow. It is too diffuse. It is too commercial.

The problem this creates for the profession

Here is why this matters for anyone reading who is not in the business of winning Cannes Lions. The profession is trained, year after year, by what wins at Cannes. Every senior marketer under 45 has watched the SDG case films. Every CMO on their way up has been shown these examples in strategy sessions, in agency pitches, in leadership development programmes. The examples become the mental model of what good sustainability marketing looks like. Local. Emotional. Partnered with a nonprofit. Measured in stories rather than in units sold. Brilliant to look at. Almost impossible to apply inside a global FMCG company selling shampoo, or a supermarket chain trying to shift its milk purchase toward lower-impact suppliers, or a beverage business trying to move consumers toward smaller packaging.

The consequence, over fifteen years, is that the marketing profession has ended up with two entirely separate categories of practice. There is sustainability marketing as Cannes defines it, which is essentially social intervention communication for causes and nonprofits. And there is the actual commercial work of persuading a consumer to prefer the more sustainable version of a mainstream product, which almost never wins prizes, is rarely written up in case studies, and receives no visible recognition from the industry’s highest-status institutions. The first category has all the glamour. The second category is where almost all the environmental impact would actually come from.

The awards system is not neutral in this. It shapes what agencies pitch, what CMOs approve, what strategy directors reach for when they open a brief. If the only route to industry recognition on sustainability runs through the Too Good template, then the Too Good template is what the profession will keep producing, regardless of whether it works commercially at scale. And it does not, because it is not designed to. It is designed to solve a discrete social problem and win an award, both of which it does very well. What it is not designed to do is sell a Unilever detergent, and no amount of celebration will make it do so.

What a real SDG Grand Prix would look like

Imagine, for a moment, a Grand Prix in the Sustainable Development Goals category awarded not to a beautiful nonprofit-backed local intervention, but to a mainstream commercial campaign that measurably moved consumers toward the more sustainable choice at scale. Ariel’s cold-water washing work, when P&G ran it seriously, was probably the closest recent example. Michelin’s longevity claims are another, framed correctly. Renault’s Cars to Work programme, which won a Grand Prix in a different category last year, sits somewhere in between. What none of these are is the standard Cannes SDG format. They do not have a Kenyan smallholder, or a New Zealand roll call, or a Ukrainian defence force. They have a laundry basket, a tyre, a job seeker. They are ordinary commercial campaigns that happen to move the sustainability needle by moving the product.

The industry has yet to build a serious institutional space where this kind of work is recognised as sustainability marketing rather than as ordinary category advertising. Effie has come closer than most, and WARC has done useful work on effectiveness cases. But the prestige capital, the one that shapes what agencies pitch and what CMOs approve, still sits at Cannes. And Cannes, even with its new integrity standards, is still rewarding the wrong body of work.

The verdict

Paid Sick Leave for Cows is a fine campaign, and the farmers of Kenya are better off for it. My argument is not against the campaign. My argument is against the mental model the campaign now reinforces. If you are a marketer sitting in a briefing meeting next week trying to work out how to make your sustainability line grow, the Too Good case film will not help you. Not because it is bad, but because it is solving a completely different problem in a completely different market with a completely different structure. It is being held up as your reference case anyway, because it is what won the biggest sustainability prize in your industry this year. That is the confusion I want to name.

The industry has spent the last decade building an award ecosystem that celebrates the sustainability work that has almost nothing to do with the sustainability work most of us are actually paid to do. The 25% drop in entries this year, driven by the new integrity standards, is not the industry giving up on purpose. It is the industry cleaning up the fabrications. Good. But the underlying category is still miscalibrated. It is still asking the wrong question, still rewarding the wrong artefacts, still training the profession to reach for the wrong template when the brief lands. Until that changes, we will continue to have brilliant case films about cow antibiotics winning Grand Prix, and mainstream sustainability marketing continuing to fail to convert the mainstream consumer. Those two things, at Cannes at least, are still not the same conversation.

This week (paid): Not All Brands Need a Purpose. The line the industry was supposed to hold, the funeral we are now hosting for brand purpose, and why the wrong body is in the coffin.

Walter Susini is a marketing consultant, Professor of Practice at SDA Bocconi, and author of “Green Don’t Sell” (Bocconi University Press, April 2026).

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If you are reading this on a Substack called Green Don’t Sell you may be wondering why I am writing about brand purpose rather than sustainability. I thought about it before I did. The reason is that purpose and sustainability are the same conversation, in slightly different vocabulary, going through the same credibility crisis at the same historical moment. Whatever I say about purpose in this piece applies to sustainability, and whatever I have been saying about sustainability for the last three months applies to purpose. Both are marketing tools, both are misused more often than used well, both are currently being written off by the same people who fifteen years ago were writing them onto conference lanyards. The two conversations are one conversation, and there is no honest way to talk about one without addressing the other.

I am not writing this to argue with Mark Ritson, or Byron Sharp, or the two of them together on stage at Cannes last month.

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This is the cleanest case study of the year for a phenomenon I have been writing in my book. It is also, almost certainly, the first of many. The Starbucks story is the visible part of a deeper restructuring of how large companies are organising the sustainability function, and it has very little to do with their commitment to the planet.

The numbers behind the announcement

Some context for the decision. In 2020, Starbucks announced a plan called “Resource Positive Future,” with the commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and waste in half by 2030, against a 2019 baseline. The targets were codified with Science Based Targets initiative validation in March 2021. The first Chief Sustainability Officer, Michael Kobori, was hired in 2020 to operationalise the plan. He retired at the end of 2024 after five years in the role. McCauley Sine took over in November 2024. Six months later, the role is gone.

The data on actual progress against the 2030 target is the uncomfortable part. According to Starbucks’ own reporting, the company’s carbon footprint grew 3% between 2019 and 2024, the last year for which public data is available. The two biggest contributors are dairy milk and coffee, which between them account for the majority of Scope 3 emissions. Starbucks usually publishes its annual global impact report in April. As of late June 2026, no report for fiscal year 2025 has been released. Starbucks has not indicated when one is expected.

So the picture is this. A company that publicly committed to halving emissions by 2030 has, five years into the plan, increased its emissions by 3%. The company has not published its annual impact report on schedule. The role of Chief Sustainability Officer has been eliminated. The function has been merged into a department whose primary mandate is social impact, not climate. And the explanation offered by the company is that the two areas of work are essentially the same. They are not the same, as I’ve written in my book, the second is easier than the first

Why this matters more than a single layoff

The Starbucks story would be a marginal HR item if it were unique. It is not. Trellis, the publication that broke the story, quotes Charlotte Bande of the consulting firm Quantis observing that “sustainability in the food and beverage space is struggling,” and noting that major companies including Coca-Cola, Kraft and Nestlé have sustainability teams now having to readjust and rejustify their strategies under new leadership. The Starbucks announcement is, in this reading, the most visible expression of a pattern that is unfolding across the entire category.

The pattern has a specific shape. Sustainability functions, built up over the last decade at significant cost, are now being absorbed into adjacent functions: social impact, communications, public affairs, legal. The senior role is often eliminated. The remaining team members continue the technical work, but they report to leaders whose primary brief is something else. The public commitments remain on the website. The annual report continues to be produced, often quietly. But the position with the seniority and the air time to argue for sustainability investment at the executive table is gone.

In some companies this restructuring is being framed as integration. In others it is framed as efficiency. In a few it is framed as a refocusing on what consumers actually care about. The framing varies. The structural movement is the same. Sustainability is being demoted, in organisational terms, from a peer of finance and marketing to a sub-function of something else.

What the framing gets wrong

The official Starbucks explanation contains an interesting piece of corporate language worth pausing on. “Sustainability and social impact go hand in hand.” In one sense, this is true. The two domains overlap, share stakeholders, and are often communicated together. In another sense, it conceals what is actually happening.

Social impact and sustainability have different briefs. Social impact, traditionally, is about community investment, philanthropy, supplier relationships, and brand reputation. Sustainability, in the strict modern sense, is about climate, water, waste, and the operational decisions that determine the company’s environmental footprint. These are not the same job. They sit at different points in the value chain. They use different data. They are measured against different external standards. They produce different kinds of executive conversation. When a single leader is asked to do both, one of the two will, structurally, win the attention budget. In the vast majority of cases, it will not be the climate work.

This is not a hypothetical concern. It is exactly what the Stanford research I cited two weeks ago documented. The CSO role exists because a generalist leader cannot effectively make the business case for sustainability without specialist expertise. Folding the function back into a generalist department reverses the decade of professional specialisation that made the role possible in the first place. The skills do not transfer easily. The internal political weight does not transfer at all.

It is also worth noticing what does not change in this restructuring. The 2030 targets remain on the website. The Science Based Targets validation stays in place. The annual report, if and when it appears, will continue to discuss progress. The communication architecture remains intact. What disappears is the seat at the table where investment decisions get made. The brief continues to be written. The author has been moved to a different floor.

The product question nobody is asking

Here is the part of the Starbucks story that should interest a marketer most. The two biggest contributors to Starbucks emissions are dairy milk and coffee. Together they account for the overwhelming majority of the company’s carbon footprint. The interventions that would actually reduce those numbers at scale are, in marketing terms, product decisions. Encouraging more customers to switch to plant-based milk. Reformulating coffee sourcing toward lower-carbon origins. Reducing dairy intensity in popular drinks. Reframing the price differential between dairy and plant-based options. These are not sustainability initiatives. They are product and pricing initiatives.

And here is the awkward fact. Starbucks already charges a premium for plant-based milk in most markets, despite the fact that plant-based milk is cheaper for the company to source and has a lower footprint. The price signal pushes the customer toward the higher-footprint choice. The marketing budget continues to celebrate signature drinks built around dairy. The reusable cup programme, which McFarlane was running, was a visible attempt to address one of the smaller waste streams, while the larger emissions story remained untouched at the menu level. The job that was eliminated last month was the job that had no power over the menu in the first place.

If Starbucks were serious about hitting the 2030 targets, the work would have to happen inside the marketing and product teams, not inside a separate sustainability function. The plant-based milk surcharge would have to disappear. The dairy-heavy signature drinks would have to be quietly reformulated or repositioned. The price architecture of the menu would have to shift to make the lower-carbon option the default. None of this requires a Chief Sustainability Officer. It requires a CEO, a CFO, and a CMO who are aligned on the trade-off. The elimination of the CSO role, in this reading, is not the obstacle. It is the admission that the obstacle was always somewhere else.

What this looks like from the consumer side

Step back from the org chart for a moment and look at this from the consumer side. The person who walks into a Starbucks tomorrow morning will not know that the Chief Sustainability Officer has been eliminated. They will see the same store, with the same menu, at the same prices. The branded sustainability claims will still be visible on the cup, on the napkin, on the in-store poster. The mobile app will continue to push the daily promotion. The plant-based milk will still cost extra. From the consumer’s point of view, nothing has changed.

This is the deeper problem the Starbucks story exposes. The sustainability function inside the company has been restructured. The sustainability proposition at the point of purchase has not been touched, because it was never the responsibility of the CSO in the first place. It was the responsibility of marketing, and marketing has not been part of this conversation. The internal restructuring will be debated in trade press for a week, and the next consumer-facing decision will be made by people who have not read the trade press. The two halves of the company continue to operate in parallel. The Starbucks customer pays the surcharge on the plant-based milk regardless of who runs the sustainability department.

What other companies should learn now

If you are a senior leader inside a company that has a sustainability function, there are three observations from the Starbucks case worth taking seriously.

First, the seniority of your sustainability function is currently a leading indicator of its commercial relevance. If the function reports to legal, social impact, communications, or public affairs, the function is likely positioned for compliance and reputation management, not for product and pricing influence. This is not necessarily wrong. But it should be known and stated, so that the company is not pretending the function is doing one job while it is actually doing another.

Second, the public commitments your company has made do not depend on the org chart to remain valid. Starbucks’ 2030 targets did not disappear with the role. They still sit on the website. The risk, both reputational and increasingly legal under the EU EmpCo directive and equivalent regulations, is that targets remain on the books while the internal capacity to deliver them quietly disappears. The gap between stated commitment and operational reality is exactly the territory that consumer regulators and class-action lawyers are starting to explore.

Third, the work that would actually move the needle on climate impact in most categories sits in product and pricing, not in the sustainability function. This was true before the Starbucks restructuring and it will be true after. The companies that hit their 2030 targets will be the ones whose CMO, CFO, and product teams own those targets together with whoever is left of the sustainability team. The companies that miss the targets will be the ones where the sustainability team owned them alone, was reorganised, and now nobody at the executive table has a clear job to deliver them.

The honest verdict

My verdict on Starbucks is not the moral one. I am not going to argue that the company has abandoned the planet. The targets are still there, the SBTi validation is still there, the Greener Stores initiative continues, the work on coffee sourcing continues. The corporate brain has not changed its mind. It has rearranged its furniture.

My verdict is structural. Starbucks has just told the rest of us, with a single HR decision, that the sustainability function, as it has been designed for the last decade, was not strong enough to survive a turnaround. When the new CEO arrives and the cost-cutting calendar opens, the function gets absorbed. The function that gets absorbed in a downturn is, by definition, the function that was not core to the business in the first place. We can argue about whether that is right. We cannot argue that it is happening.

The lesson for the marketing profession is the one I have been writing about for months. If sustainability lives in a separate department, with its own vocabulary, its own KPIs, and no direct authority over the product the consumer actually buys, it will be the first thing reorganised when the financial weather turns. The only way to make sustainability commercially durable is to make it a property of the product itself, owned by the people whose job it is to sell the product. Anything else is a project waiting for its next reorganisation.

Starbucks has just shown us what the next reorganisation looks like. The companies that learn quickly will use this as the moment to redesign their own sustainability work around marketing, pricing, and product. The companies that miss the moment will, in the next 18 months, run their own version of the same announcement. “We are bringing sustainability and social impact under one leader.” They will mean what Starbucks meant. The function will be quietly demoted. The targets will quietly slip. And the consumer will keep paying the plant-based surcharge on the dairy latte they were going to order anyway.

This week (paid): The Briefs That Killed Sustainability. A long read on what is actually written into the briefs that produce the campaigns we keep complaining about, with examples from recent work, and the small number of changes that would make most of them work.

Walter Susini is a marketing consultant, Professor of Practice at SDA Bocconi, and author of “Green Don’t Sell” (Bocconi University Press, April 2026).

If this resonated, subscribe. If it didn’t, tell me why. I’ve been wrong before, and I’ve always learned more from the people who disagreed.

Eighty percent of marketers believe they write good briefs. Only ten percent of agencies agree. Seventy-eight percent of marketers think their briefs provide clear strategic direction. Only five percent of agencies agree. Eighty-three percent of marketers believe their briefs contain clear and concise language. Only seven percent of agencies agree. The aggregated finding from the study was that approximately one third of the global marketing budget is wasted on poor briefs and the misdirected work that follows from them. Global advertising spend in 2025 is projected at $1.07 trillion. The implied waste is, depending on how you count, somewhere between $250 and $350 billion a year.

This is the broader picture. Briefs are the most consequential document in the marketing process, and the single biggest source of failure. Now zoom in on the specific subset of briefs that concern us in this column: the briefs that produce sustainability campaigns. They are, in my experience, structurally worse than the average.

Why the sustainability brief is the worst kind of brief

The general brief crisis the BetterBriefs study documents is bad enough. The sustainability brief takes the underlying problem and makes it worse, in four specific ways.

First, the sustainability brief almost never has a single-minded proposition. The most quoted line in the entire BetterBriefs guide is David Ogilvy’s observation that creativity thrives on “the freedom of a tight brief.” A good brief commits to one idea. A sustainability brief, in the vast majority of cases I have seen, tries to commit to four or five at once. Climate. Water. Waste. Community. Supply chain. Each of these gets a paragraph. None of them gets the brief. The agency, faced with five propositions, picks the one with the easiest visual associations, which is almost always climate, because climate has the trees, the bears, the melting ice. The other four disappear into the deck.

Second, the sustainability brief is almost never anchored in a single insight about a single audience. The standard structure of a sustainability brief opens with a statement of corporate purpose, cites a global trend, references regulation, mentions the next earnings call, and only somewhere on page four arrives at a sentence about who the consumer is and what they need. By that point the strategic energy of the document is spent. The audience definition is generic. The insight is borrowed from a McKinsey report. The creative team is asked to build a campaign for “the conscious consumer,” a fictional character who has been featured in roughly every marketing presentation since 2008 and exists in the world in approximately the same numbers as unicorns.

Third, the sustainability brief is almost always written by the wrong person, or worse, by the wrong room. Standard marketing briefs are written by a brand manager and approved by a marketing director. The sustainability brief is typically written by a committee that includes sustainability, corporate affairs, communications, legal, and sometimes the CSO. As the BetterBriefs study found in a separate finding, the briefs that are “rewritten by committee” end up as what they call “Frankenstein briefs.” Stitched together from too many opinions, with each stakeholder having added their own objective or audience or jargon. Agencies describe these briefs, in BetterBriefs’ own words, as “unfocused, unclear and uninspiring.” The sustainability brief is the platonic form of the Frankenstein brief, because no single executive in the modern company owns the consumer side of sustainability, so the brief belongs to everyone and therefore to no one.

Fourth, the sustainability brief is almost never tied to a measurable business outcome. The standard brief, even at its weakest, will state a sales target, a market share goal, or a brand awareness uplift. The sustainability brief, in my experience, defaults to “awareness,” “engagement,” “sentiment,” or worse, “alignment with our purpose.” These are not outcomes. They are vibes. A campaign briefed against vibes will deliver vibes. The creative team has nothing to optimise against, because the metric is everything and therefore nothing. The CMO has nothing to defend at the next board meeting. The CFO has nothing to fund. The cycle repeats annually.

The standard sustainability brief, in the wild

Let me walk you through what the typical sustainability brief actually says. I have read perhaps a hundred of these in the last decade, written by Fortune 500 marketing teams, by mid-cap consumer goods companies, by retailers, by FMCG brands, by banks, by airlines. They share a structural similarity that is almost embarrassing once you see it. The opening paragraph reads something like this.

“In an era of unprecedented environmental challenge, our consumers are increasingly demanding that brands take meaningful action. Research shows that 73% of consumers are willing to change their consumption habits to reduce environmental impact. As a company committed to a better future, we must communicate our role in driving positive change while building deeper brand love among purpose-driven audiences.”

That paragraph is almost grammatical. It is also almost meaningless. It says: the consumer wants something. We want to tell them something. The campaign should build love. Every word in it is a generality. There is no product. There is no audience. There is no proposition. There is no outcome. The paragraph could be lifted from one brief and pasted into another, in a different category, in a different country, and nobody would notice. It often is.

Then the brief moves to objectives. The objectives section reads something like this. Build awareness of our sustainability commitment. Drive consideration among environmentally conscious consumers. Strengthen brand reputation for purpose. Increase positive sentiment across earned and owned channels. Generate cultural conversation around our environmental leadership.

Read those five objectives. None of them ends in a sale. None of them ends in a behaviour change. None of them ends in a category metric. They are all internal vanity targets, written for the brand team to feel comfortable presenting at the next quarterly review. The agency, faced with this list, has no choice but to produce a campaign that performs against these vanity targets, which means a campaign of generic earned-media moments with no commercial outcome and no measurable consumer effect.

Then comes the target audience. The standard sustainability brief target audience reads, with minor variations, like this. “Gen Z and millennials, urban, educated, with above-average disposable income, who care deeply about climate change and expect brands to take a stand.” This is not an audience. This is the front cover of a 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer. The Kantar 2026 Sustainability Sector Index, surveying 13,000 people across 12 markets, found that the willingness to engage with sustainable brands is broadly distributed across all demographic segments, not concentrated in this fictional young urban progressive. The audience definition in most sustainability briefs is roughly five years out of date with the actual research. The creative team is being asked to communicate to a consumer who, statistically, does not exist as the brief describes them.

Then the proposition. The proposition is usually a sentence that uses the verb “inspire” or the noun “movement.” “Inspire a generation to choose better.” “Lead the movement toward a more sustainable future.” “Help consumers make a difference, one choice at a time.” Whatever the specific wording, these are not propositions. They are corporate mantras. They contain no claim, no product, no benefit, no reason to choose. The creative team is being asked to dress up a slogan, which is exactly what most sustainability campaigns end up looking like.

Finally the mandatories. Every sustainability brief I have ever read contains a closing section called “mandatories” or “must-haves,” which lists between five and twelve things the campaign must include. Logo. Tagline. Stat about company emissions reduction. Visual reference to the sustainability report. Inclusion of our CEO’s recent op-ed. Reference to our latest target. The mandatories alone, in most briefs, exceed the conceptual capacity of any single campaign. The agency is being asked to produce a thirty-second advert that contains the contents of a fifty-page sustainability report. It cannot be done. Something has to give. What gives, every time, is the consumer.

The four lines that would change everything

Now to the constructive part. If most sustainability briefs are failing in the four structural ways I have described, what would a brief that actually works look like? In my experience, four specific lines, written with discipline at the start of the document, would transform the campaigns that follow. They are the lines that good general briefs already contain, and that sustainability briefs almost never do.

The first line. “The specific consumer benefit of choosing our sustainable option, in plain language, is X.” Not the planetary benefit. The personal benefit. Cheaper. Longer-lasting. Better tasting. Easier to use. More flexible. Faster. Quieter. Healthier. If this sentence cannot be completed, the campaign should not be commissioned. There is no point dressing up a product that has nothing to offer the consumer beyond the consumer’s own virtue. Most sustainability briefs cannot complete this line. The fix is to refuse to brief until it has been completed by the product team, by the pricing team, by the people who actually know what the consumer gets.

The second line. “The single consumer we are talking to in this campaign is Y, and the moment they will see this message is Z.” One consumer. Not a generation. Not a segment. One. The mother of two in a supermarket aisle on Saturday morning. The renter in his thirties browsing a comparison site on a Sunday evening. The retiree booking a flight on a Tuesday afternoon. The specificity is the work. Generic audience definitions produce generic campaigns. The Kantar data, the McKinsey data, the NielsenIQ data all show that the sustainable consumer is broadly distributed, which means the brief has to choose one slice of the broad distribution to talk to, not gesture at the whole.

The third line. “The single proposition this campaign communicates, in a sentence a child would understand, is W.” Single. Not multiple. Not climate plus water plus waste plus community plus supply chain. One thing. Pop, the principle in my book, applies hardest to the proposition. If the proposition takes more than one sentence, it will not survive the move from brief to creative to media to consumer. Five propositions become four propositions become three propositions, until what reaches the consumer is a slightly diluted slogan that fits any sustainability brand in any category. The single-minded proposition is the discipline that makes the campaign distinctive. It is also the discipline most often abandoned in the sustainability brief, because every stakeholder wants their priority in the proposition. The answer is to write five briefs, not one, with five different propositions, and run them sequentially over time. Not to write one brief with five propositions.

The fourth line. “The measurable commercial outcome we will judge this campaign against, six months from launch, is V.” A number. A sale. A trial. A switch from a competitor. A category penetration shift. A specific KPI tied to a specific revenue line. Not awareness. Not sentiment. Not alignment. The brief should commit, in writing, to a number that the marketing team will be measured against. If the team is not willing to commit to that number, the campaign is not ready to be briefed. Most sustainability briefs end without this line because the team writing the brief does not believe the campaign can deliver a commercial outcome. They are usually right. The way to fix this is to refuse to commission campaigns that cannot promise one.

What good looks like

To stop this becoming purely a litany of complaints, let me cite an example of what good looks like, briefed in the right way and resulting in a campaign with measurable outcome. Renault’s “Cars to Work” campaign won the Cannes Lions Sustainable Development Goals Grand Prix in 2024, and also won the Creative Commerce Grand Prix in the same week, which is rare. The brief, as far as it has been publicly reconstructed, was tight. The consumer was specific: an unemployed person living in a French “mobility desert,” meaning an area with little public transport, unable to reach a job interview. The proposition was specific: Renault would lend a car for free during the job-hunting phase, transitioning to affordable payments once the job was secured. The measurable outcome was specific: number of employment placements achieved, number of cars converted into paying customers.

The campaign was not about Renault’s sustainability. It was about Renault’s product solving a real problem for a real person, with a real commercial conversion at the end. The sustainability dimension, which was the alignment with UN Sustainable Development Goals 1, 8, 10 and 11 on poverty, decent work, reduced inequality, and sustainable cities, was the result of the brief, not the input. The brief was a normal marketing brief, written tightly, that happened to deliver against sustainability goals because the product itself was sustainable in its operation.

Compare that to the typical sustainability brief that starts with the goal and ends with a slogan. Renault started with the consumer and ended with a transaction. The campaign won Cannes for sustainability because the brief was not about sustainability. The brief was about a job, a car, and a person who needed both. That is the inversion the sustainability profession has not yet learned to make at scale.

The honest closing thought

The BetterBriefs project, in its most often quoted line, concluded that ninety percent of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively. Inside that ninety percent, my honest estimate, after a career of reading these documents, is that almost one hundred percent of sustainability briefs fail in the specific ways I have described above. The marketing industry has, collectively, agreed to brief sustainability worse than it briefs almost anything else. The pattern is so consistent across companies, categories and countries that it cannot be an accident. It is a habit. It is the way the profession has decided to handle a difficult topic, by treating it as a moral display rather than a marketing problem.

Every CMO reading this has signed off on at least one of these briefs in the last twelve months. Every agency reading this has received at least a dozen. The cycle continues because nobody pays a personal price for a bad sustainability brief. The campaign is loved internally. The awards are submitted. The earned-media report is circulated. The next year, the same brief is written again, with the date changed.

The four lines I have proposed above are not difficult to write. They require thinking, but not invention. They require courage, but not heroism. They require a marketing team that is willing to refuse to commission a campaign until those four lines are completed, and a CSO who is willing to participate in the briefing process not as a stakeholder adding requirements but as a collaborator providing product truths. They require, in other words, a different culture inside the marketing room. That culture is not impossible. It is just rare. The brands that build it will produce sustainability marketing that does not look like everyone else’s, and that, increasingly, will be the only kind of sustainability marketing that consumers, regulators and shareholders are willing to reward.

Until then, the briefs will keep killing the campaigns. The campaigns will keep failing the consumers. The consumers will keep ignoring the brands. And the entire profession will keep wondering why sustainability does not sell, when the answer is sitting in the document we wrote ourselves, the one nobody was honest enough to send back to be rewritten.

Walter Susini is a marketing consultant, Professor of Practice at SDA Bocconi, and author of “Green Don’t Sell” (Bocconi University Press, April 2026).

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This is the rhythm we have built. One day a year, the entire profession behaves as if sustainability mattered. The other three hundred and sixty-four are spent quietly explaining to the CFO why margins matter more. And every year, a small number of journalists wonder whether this is enough.

The purpose of this article is not to attack everyone who participated, as that would be lazy and inaccurate, but to examine closely what each brand actually did and to distinguish between the launches and the confessions. There is a difference, and it tells you almost everything you need to know about whether a sustainability campaign is real marketing or just theatre.

The launches

Some of the brands that took World Environment Day seriously used it the way it was meant to be used. As a moment to launch something real.

Mother Dairy, the Indian dairy giant, used 5 June 2026 to launch India’s first naturally soil-degradable milk pouch. Nearly two million packs a day rolled into Delhi NCR households starting that morning. The packaging was developed over multiple years and the press release was timed to the date. The film that Ogilvy made for the campaign showed a milk pouch breaking free from a garbage truck and gliding through the city before settling into the soil. It was beautifully made. It was also, crucially, true. The pouch in the film exists in the consumer’s fridge.

Zomato, the food delivery platform, used the same date to amplify a feature it had launched eighteen months earlier. The Plastic-Free Future Program now covers more than ten thousand restaurants across three hundred and fifty brands in over five hundred Indian cities, and has facilitated more than one hundred million orders identified as low-plastic. On 5 June, the brand ran a film featuring pet owners choosing safer toys for their dogs as a metaphor for choosing low-plastic packaging for their meals. The work had been done over the previous eighteen months, in agreements with restaurant partners, in product code, in delivery operations. The film was the marketing of work that already existed.

These are launches. The date matters because the moment matters, but the date is not the substance. Strip away the World Environment Day branding and Mother Dairy still has a degradable milk pouch; Zomato still has ten thousand restaurants using non-plastic packaging. The campaigns are doing what campaigns are supposed to do, which is to translate a real product change into a story the consumer can act on.

The confessions

Then there is the second category. The brands that used 5 June not as a launch moment but as a confession. A single annual ritual of declared virtue, after which everyone returns to their ordinary unredeemed life. The structure is recognisable across countries and categories. Plant a tree. Distribute a sapling. Clean a beach. Run a poster. Post a quote. The core business model continues unchanged on 6 June.

The pattern shows up in dozens of campaigns this year. A bank organised tree plantation drives and beach clean-ups while continuing to finance the same loan portfolio it financed the day before. A fashion retailer launched a three-day sapling distribution campaign in its stores, while the underlying garment production model remained the same. Multiple large advertisers ran topical posts featuring earth-themed creative for the day, with no announcement of any operational change behind them.

None of this is greenwashing in the legal sense. Nobody is lying. A tree is being planted. A sapling is being handed out. A beach is being cleaned. The problem is that the activity has no commercial intent and therefore no commercial discipline. It does not change the product, it does not change the price, it does not change the brief, it does not change the brand. It is communication without consequence. It is marketing without an offer.

From a marketer’s point of view, this is what makes the confession campaigns so frustrating. The budget spent on a one-day plantation drive could have been spent on a packaging change. The creative time spent on an earth-themed topical could have been spent on a product brief. The media spent on a one-day campaign could have been spent on a year-round position. The opportunity cost is enormous. And the audience, increasingly, is noticing.

The test that separates the two

Here is the test I propose to any brand team reading this newsletter, the next time you find yourself preparing a campaign for a sustainability calendar moment. Ask one question, before anything else.

If we strip out the date, does the campaign still have a product or a service or a price or a feature to communicate?

If the answer is yes, you have a launch. The date is the moment, but the substance is the offer. The consumer who sees the campaign on 5 June will still be able to buy the better milk pouch on 12 June, on 19 June, on 4 November. The brief is built around something that exists outside the day.

If the answer is no, you have a confession. The campaign is a one-day ritual. It will produce earned media, possibly an award entry and a moment of internal pride. It will produce no commercial outcome that lasts beyond the day. And, increasingly, it will produce scepticism from the consumer who has seen the same ritual repeated for fifteen years.

In my experience, somewhere around two thirds of sustainability calendar campaigns fail this test, including campaigns produced by brands I have admired and worked with. The temptation to treat 5 June, or 22 April, or 24 October, as a moment to be present rather than a moment to launch is enormous. The internal calendar demands a presence and the entire system produces, in unison, hundreds of campaigns that are about being there rather than about being useful.

Why the distinction matters now

This is the moment in which the distinction between launch and confession becomes commercially important, not just morally important.

The European Union’s new EmpCo directive, which entered into force across member states this spring, has tightened the rules on what brands can say about sustainability in marketing communications. Vague claims such as “eco-friendly”, “sustainable”, or “natural” without supporting evidence are now legally riskier than they have ever been. The Italian Competition Authority has already fined Shein one million euros for vague claims around its evoluSHEIN by Design collection. German courts have ordered Apple to stop claiming carbon neutrality on Apple Watch in that market, citing concerns about the offsetting project on which the claim was based. Dutch courts have ruled against KLM’s “Fly Responsibly” campaign. The legal exposure on confession-style campaigns is rising fast.

Confession campaigns, by their nature, often use the vaguest language. “Committed to a greener future.” “Supporting environmental causes.” “Every little action matters.” Each of these phrases is now legally vulnerable in a way it was not three years ago. The brand that runs them every year, without a specific product or service or change to point to, is exposing itself not just to consumer scepticism but to regulatory action.

Launches, by contrast, have the protection of substance. Mother Dairy is not at legal risk for its degradable milk pouch because the pouch exists, the testing exists, the supply chain exists. The campaign claim and the operational reality are aligned. This is the entire architecture of credible sustainability marketing, and it is now also the architecture of legally defensible sustainability marketing.

What to do next year

The next World Environment Day is 5 June 2027. The brief, if you are working in marketing or sustainability inside a company that takes the calendar seriously, will land in your inbox in February or March. Here is a small piece of advice, offered from the point of view of someone who has briefed many of these campaigns and watched many of them fail to land.

Decide early, ideally now, whether your 5 June 2027 will be a launch or a confession. If you cannot point to a real product change, a real pricing change, a real feature, or a real service improvement that you can announce that day, then do not run a campaign. Use the money on the product instead. Use the brief on a category review. Use the calendar moment on something that will still be true on 6 June, on 4 November, on the day someone reads your annual report two years later.

This is not a counsel of cynicism. It is the opposite. The brands that will win on sustainability in the next decade are the ones whose marketing is anchored in real product reality. The brands that will quietly lose are the ones whose marketing is anchored in calendar reality. The distinction is now visible, the regulatory pressure is real, and the consumer scepticism is documented. Kantar’s 2026 Sustainability Sector Index found that 57% of consumers globally have seen or heard misleading sustainability claims from brands. That number is not going to fall. It is going to rise, and the brands that produce the misleading claims will be the ones that ran the same confession every year and called it a campaign.

Use the calendar to launch. Use the rest of the year to produce the things worth launching. Skip the confession. The consumer has already heard it.

This week (paid): Why Every Sustainability Campaign Looks the Same. A long read on the visual template that has come to define the entire category, why it is exactly the same in every country and sector, and what it tells us about the underlying brief.

Walter Susini is a marketing consultant, Professor of Practice at SDA Bocconi, and author of “Green Don’t Sell” (Bocconi University Press, April 2026).

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A pair of hands, often white, often female, holding a small green shoot. The earth photographed from space, blue and serene, with a leaf or a tree superimposed somewhere. A lake surrounded by mountains and pine trees, with the camera moving slowly across the surface. A child running through a wildflower meadow with a bicycle. Wind turbines on a hill at golden hour. A close-up of a green leaf with a single drop of water. A flat-lay of a wooden table with reusable cups and a notebook. A pair of cupped hands holding soil with a seedling. A diverse group of young people smiling at a community garden. A sans-serif font in mint green or forest green or sage green over an out-of-focus natural background, with a verb in the present continuous tense. Caring. Protecting. Nurturing. Inspiring.

THE DATA BEHIND THE IMPRESSION.

Getty Images publishes a research stream called VisualGPS, which tracks how brand imagery evolves across the industry. Their analysis of conceptual environmental imagery, published in 2026, found that over the last ten years there has been a 340% increase in the presence of conceptual imagery revolving around environmental conservation. That is a striking number. But the more interesting data point sits one paragraph deeper. A full 43% of these visuals tend to use a small set of repeated symbols, primarily plants and the colour green. The growth in the category has been almost entirely vertical, not horizontal. Brands have produced more sustainable imagery. They have not produced more varied sustainability imagery.

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This week’s free piece is about what each got right, what each got wrong, and what neither has yet figured out.

Mud: the subscription that ate the jeans

Mud Jeans was founded in the Netherlands in 2012 by Bert van Son. The idea was simple. Instead of selling a pair of jeans, lease them. The customer pays a monthly fee, wears the jeans, and at the end of the lease period either keeps them, returns them, or swaps them for a new pair. Mud recycles the returned denim into new jeans. The model is structural. Sustainability is not a side programme. It is the product.

The numbers Mud publishes are striking. About 5,000 people are leasing jeans at any given time, which represents roughly half of their customer base. Each pair uses approximately 460 litres of water against an industry average closer to 7,000, a 93% reduction. CO2 emissions per pair are 74% lower than conventional production. Mud has reduced its own corporate carbon footprint by 42% year on year. The company is now seeking investment to grow from 43,000 pairs a year to 360,000 by 2030, and from 210 retail doors to 780.

That is the public story. Here is the part that interests me more.

The payoff Mud offers the consumer is not, in fact, sustainability. It is a service. The lease starts at around 9.95 euros a month for twelve months, which works out to roughly 119 euros for a year of jeans, including free repairs whenever they tear. At the end of the year you swap for a new pair, or keep them, or return them. What the customer is actually buying is flexibility, no long-term commitment, and the satisfaction of never having to deal with the slow death of a pair of jeans. The carbon savings are real but they are also, from the consumer’s point of view, a footnote. The reason people stay in the lease programme is that it solves a practical problem, not a moral one. The Mud customer is paying for convenience. Sustainability is the structure that delivers it.

This is what makes Mud interesting. It is not a sustainability brand pretending to be a service. It is a service that happens to be sustainable. The consumer gets a tangible, immediate, repeatable benefit, which is exactly the kind of payoff every marketer should be looking for. The fact that Mud is still tiny is not a problem with the model. It is a problem with the brand’s ability to scale awareness, distribution and price.

Levi’s: the resale shop that arrived too late

Levi’s SecondHand launched in October 2020, with Hailey Bieber on the campaign and Jennifer Sey, then CMO, on the press circuit. The pitch was elegant. You bring back your old Levi’s, you get a gift card worth between 15 and 35 dollars depending on the era and condition of the jeans, and Levi’s resells the cleaned-up pairs on a dedicated marketplace at prices between 30 and 100 dollars. For pairs too worn to resell, you get a five dollar credit and the denim goes into recycling.

The mathematics of the programme look right on paper. According to Levi’s, buying a used pair through SecondHand saves about 80% of the CO2 emissions and 700 grams of waste compared to buying a new pair. The brand positioned the programme as a serious sustainability commitment and a smart play for Gen Z, the generation that, by Levi’s own data at launch, shops second-hand at higher rates than any other.

Five years later, the numbers tell a different story. According to Levi Strauss & Co.’s own 2024 Sustainability Goals and Metrics Report, SecondHand reclaimed or extended approximately 21,000 units of clothing in 2024, resold 8,000 of them, and served about 5,000 consumers. In 2023 it had reclaimed 20,000, resold 10,000 and served 7,000. The programme is going backwards while the global second-hand market is booming. ThredUp’s 2025 Resale Report projects the global second-hand apparel market will reach 367 billion dollars by 2029. Depop, owned by eBay, has 7 million active buyers. Vinted is reshaping European fashion retail. Against that backdrop, Levi’s SecondHand served fewer consumers in a year than a single mid-size Depop seller serves in a quarter.

So what happened? Several things at once.

The first is that the resale market exists, but the place to play it is not on a brand-owned microsite. It is on the open platforms where Gen Z and millennials already live. A consumer hunting for vintage Levi’s has Depop, Vinted, eBay, ThredUp, Etsy and dozens of local thrift stores already optimised for that hunt. They have more selection, more sizes, more genuine vintage finds, and crucially, sharper prices. Levi’s SecondHand prices between 30 and 100 dollars often overlap with brand-new Levi’s on promotion. The headline of an industry analysis put it bluntly. A used pair of jeans should not cost what a new pair on sale costs. When it does, the second-hand buyer goes elsewhere.

The second is that the trade-in offer is unattractive to the people whose closets are full of recent Levi’s. The current scheme offers 5 to 15 dollars for jeans from the last ten years, which is most of what people actually own. To get the higher 30 to 35 dollar payments, you need premium collections or items older than 20 years. The Levi’s customer with a pair of 511s from 2019 has very little economic reason to bring them back, and the consumer with a genuine vintage pair from the 1980s has a much better selling channel on eBay, where the same jeans can fetch hundreds.

The third is what we might call the limits of capsule sustainability. SecondHand exists on a separate website, with separate fulfilment, separate returns, no in-store integration, no combined cart with the main Levi’s shop. Even Levi’s own help pages tell you that you cannot combine a SecondHand order with a regular Levi’s order, and you cannot return SecondHand items to a Levi’s retail store. The programme is parallel to the main business, not part of it. That is the structural choice that has limited its scale from the beginning.

To be fair to Levi’s, the brand has done a lot of sustainability work elsewhere. The Water<Less programme reduces water use in finishing by up to 96%. The Wellthread line uses recyclable fabrics and plant-based dyes. The brand has Science Based Targets verified by SBTi. SecondHand is not the totality of Levi’s sustainability effort. But it is the part the brand most loudly marketed to the consumer, and on the consumer side it is delivering very little impact in absolute terms.

The same diagnosis from two opposite ends

Mud Jeans and Levi’s SecondHand look like opposites. One is small and structural. The other is enormous and bolted on. But on the question that this newsletter has cared about for two months now, they share the same weakness, just expressed differently.

Mud offers a real payoff (a flexible jeans service at a fair price) to a small group of consumers who know about it. The model is sound. The reach is not.

Levi’s offers a weaker payoff (a discount on used jeans) to a vastly larger potential audience that has already found better, cheaper, broader alternatives elsewhere. The reach is theoretical. The payoff is not strong enough to bring the audience to the brand.

Both brands are evidence of the same point. The sustainability programmes that move the needle are the ones where the consumer gets a tangible, immediate, ordinary benefit from participating. Not a moral benefit. Not a future planetary benefit. An ordinary commercial benefit they would value even if they did not care about the environment. Mud has the right benefit but cannot scale it. Levi’s has the scale but has built the wrong benefit for the market it is trying to enter.

My book argues, simply, that sustainability works when it touches the consumer’s wallet in a positive way. Cheaper, more useful, longer-lasting, better designed, easier to live with. Both these case studies, read together, prove the same thing. Where the wallet wins, sustainability gets traction. Where it does not, programmes either stay tiny or fade quietly into the marketing department’s slide deck of good intentions.

What each one would need to do next

Mud has the harder challenge intellectually, the simpler one operationally. The benefit is right. The price needs to come down or the perception of value needs to go up. At 9.95 euros a month for twelve months, the maths is competitive against buying a new pair of conventional jeans, but only if the consumer accepts that they do not own them at the end. To scale beyond the early-adopter base, Mud probably needs a second, more accessible tier where the consumer owns the jeans outright and the sustainability is built into the product through fabric, repairability and a stronger trade-in guarantee, rather than around it through a lease structure.

Levi’s has the opposite challenge. The benefit is the problem. SecondHand as currently designed is asking the consumer to pay similar prices to new jeans, on a smaller selection, in a more cumbersome experience, for an ethical upside that the consumer can already get on Depop with five times the choice. The honest move for Levi’s is either to compete properly with the open second-hand platforms, which would mean lowering prices, integrating with stores, and dramatically expanding inventory, or to redirect the sustainability budget into the main business. A real repair-and-return guarantee on every new pair of Levi’s sold. A genuine durability claim with a number on the label. A meaningful trade-in value that makes financial sense to a customer who bought their jeans last year, not in 1989. The brand has the scale. It has not yet applied the scale to a sustainability proposition that the average Levi’s buyer would notice.

What we learn

Two jeans companies, two ways of approaching the same problem, both still searching for the version of the payoff that actually scales. Neither has it. But both are useful to study, because between them they show the entire arc of what sustainability marketing has yet to figure out.

The lesson is not about leasing versus resale, or small brands versus large ones, or Dutch ingenuity versus American marketing might. The lesson is the one this newsletter keeps coming back to. The sustainable choice wins when it is also the better choice on grounds the consumer cares about for reasons that have nothing to do with the planet. Cheaper. Easier. More flexible. Better looking. Longer lasting. Sustainability, sold properly, does not ask the consumer to sacrifice anything. It just happens to be the side effect of an offer they preferred anyway.

Mud is close to that, in miniature. Levi’s is far from it, at scale. The brand that figures out how to do both at once will not just sell jeans. It will redefine the category. And the day they do, the rest of us in this profession will quietly wonder why it took us a decade to notice that the answer was, all along, the same answer marketing has had for everything else. Give the consumer a reason to choose you that has nothing to do with guilt. Then let the planet thank you on the way out.

This week (paid): The Sustainability Manager Who Never Read a Marketing Book. Why the function that holds the green budget inside most large companies is almost never staffed with the people who could actually move the consumer needle, and what would need to change.

Walter Susini is a marketing consultant, Professor of Practice at SDA Bocconi, and author of “Green Don’t Sell” (Bocconi University Press, April 2026).

If this resonated, subscribe. If it didn’t, tell me why. I’ve been wrong before, and I’ve always learned more from the people who disagreed.

Basically Stanford, after extensive interviews with the people who hold the role, concluded that the role itself is structurally undertrained for the job it has been asked to do. The programme was built specifically because the CSO community, as it now exists, frequently cannot make the business case. And if you cannot make the business case, you certainly cannot make the consumer case, which is harder.

This matters for a reason that almost nobody connects. The business case is the entry ticket. The CFO is the easier audience. The CFO speaks numbers and the sustainability data, increasingly supports the numbers. The harder audience is the consumer, because the consumer does not speak numbers. The consumer speaks of desire, identity, convenience, value, and habit. Those are the languages of marketing. And the function that holds the sustainability budget has, by Stanford’s own diagnosis, often not been built to speak any of them.

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