While consumers clearly care about the sustainability of the brands whose products they buy, some brands have a tricky time communicating their sustainability credentials.
Fears around overstating their sustainability and being called out for greenwashing mean that some brands choose not to mention sustainability in their ad messaging. In other cases brands, aware that they’re still only part way through their sustainability journeys, worry that speaking honestly about the progress they’ve made will only highlight how far they still have left to go.
But French broadcaster M6 says that a lack of messaging around corporate responsibility means brands are underselling themselves. And through its ‘Responsible Behaviour’ ad offering, M6 is encouraging more brands to shout about their green products and practices.
Reducing the fear factor
Research released by M6 on Friday, ‘Le Temps des Marques Responsables’ (The Time of Responsible Brands) demonstrated the impact of a lack of messaging around corporate responsibility.
According to M6’s survey, 44 percent of consumers couldn’t name a brand they’d describe as responsible off the top of their head, up 9 percentage points from 2019. And M6 said that this trend was most apparent in sectors where brands have slowed their investment in CSR (corporate and social responsibility) messaging on TV, such as retail and food.
The broadcaster’s Responsible Behaviour ad format seeks to remedy this.
The ad format, available on M6’s linear channels, as well as radio channels sold by M6 Publicité, is reserved for ads which promote one of eight sustainable consumer behaviours, chosen in partnership with French sustainable agency ADEME: bulk purchasing, buying refurbished products, buying second-hand products, renting rather than buying, fighting against food waste, repairability, recycling, and reducing energy consumption. These ads are bookended by a jingle, and by screens displaying a message highlighting the theme of the ad.
The first brand to use the spot is Refashion, a business which supports collection, repair, and reuse of clothes and textiles.
But while Refashion, a brand with sustainability at its core, will likely have few concerns about greenwashing accusations, M6’s format is designed to enable more brands to run sustainability-themed ads with less risk of blowback.
The offering is distinct from ‘6green’, a format dedicated to promoting sustainable products. The point of the ads isn’t to demonstrate that a brand itself is sustainable, but to encourage more sustainable consumer behaviours.
That’s not to say that Responsible Brands is designed to let brands position themselves as sustainable regardless of their own business practices. And brands calling for consumers to cut down on energy wastage while being highly pollutant themselves would still obviously be open to blowback.
But in discussions around sustainability messaging at VideoWeek events over the past few years, a common theme has been that brands shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Where brands have something to add to the conversation, and are able to talk from a position of authority (i.e, it’s an area where they’ve made genuine progress themselves), they shouldn’t be overly timid around CSR messaging. And the Responsible Brands formats looks designed to cater to this middle ground.
