Credit Manager Magazine 9/2021

65 CREDIT MANAGER MAGAZINE WRZESIEŃ / SEPTEMBER 2021 FECMA Erik Elvingsson Hedén Is the founder and Managing Director of SB Insight and Sustainable Brand Index™, Europe’s largest brand study on sustainability. This means he has worked with sustainability for over a decade and he has insights into more than 1 000 brands across industries and countries. Erik lectures on how sustainability affects brands, commu- nication and business development. Erik is a passionate speaker, who loves interaction and humour on stage. He is alsoateacheratBerghsSchoolofCom- munication, one of the world’s leading schools in communication. Berghs has been awarded “School of the Year” for multiple consecutive years in AKQA’s Future Lions in Cannes. These results shows how important the way we talk and communicate about our impact and sustainability work is. Confusing climate communication Some might feel that brands deliberately want to lie or deceive, but greenwashing is often related to well-intended communica- tion that is unclear and hard to understand. Especially around climate communication, the consumer is having a hard time making sense of all the messages out there. Wherev- er consumers look nowadays they see words like; “climate”, ”CO2”, ”carbon” and com- panies are widely committing to ambitious goals like; “climate neutrality”, “climate pos- itivity” or “net-zero emissions”. Even though these climate commitments by companies are crucial, it is an area in which consumers still need to be educated and in which clar- ifying communication is key. To give an ex- ample, more than 60% of Nordic consumers do not know what “carbon neutrality” means (Sustainable Brand Index™ 2021). Commu- nicating about such a target without help- ing consumers understand what it means in terms of our actual impact and actions is unproductive. The future of climate labelling With the rise of climate labelling, it becomes even more important for brands to be clear and informative in how we communicate about our environmental impact. Calcula- tions and the quantification of climate im- pact are intensifying and the next step for most brands is to put a climate label on their product packaging. A great development, that is fortunately spreading from just small- er companies to the big giants on the mar- ket. Unilever has for example also recently pledged to put a climate score on all its 70 000 products globally. It shows how climate labelling will develop quickly over the next years and across almost all industries. From food, to fashion, to electronics. It has been a long time coming and projects on how to measure climate impact accurately are rapid- ly developing. Much like the terms above, the challenges here will be how to measure im- pact, how to compare impact, but also how to present it to stakeholders. If climate labelling is meant to help consumers make informed decisions, it should not create more confu- sion in the jungle of sustainability labels. Moving forward in the jungle In conclusion, the huge amount of generic sustainability messages we have seen in re- cent years has led to a crisis of confidence in sustainability communication and increased consumer confusion. Is the solution to stop communicating about sustainability? No. Communication is a tool and we need to use it well. However, we need to focus on quality rather than quantity. Quality sus- tainability communication is grounded in prioritising relevant materiality areas, a com- mitment to science-based targets and an un- derstanding of who we are communicating with and why. The bar for sustainability com- mitments has been raised and consumers are now looking for more and more action and fact-based sustainability communication.