Sustainability in Your Marketing Strategy (1/7)
Practically every day, a company announces a new sustainability commitment. A new campaign. A new promise. And practically every day, the gap between what companies claim and what customers believe quietly widens.
In one recent survey, 65% of consumers said they want to buy from brands that advocate sustainability. Only 26% actually do. That gap — between stated intent and real behaviour — is not a communication problem. It is a measurement problem. Companies have no shortage of sustainability narratives. What most of them lack is a sustainability score.
This series exists to change that.
Why sustainability marketing is broken
The problem is not that companies are cynical about sustainability. Most are not. The problem is that sustainability has been treated as a communications exercise rather than a strategic diagnostic. Companies invest in campaigns. They redesign packaging. They publish ESG reports. And then they measure the response through awareness surveys and social sentiment — both of which measure what people say, not what they do.
Four years of Harvard Business Review research on sustainability strategy converge on a single finding: the companies that win on sustainability are not the ones with the best narratives. They are the ones with the most concrete, measurable, evidenced commitments — tracked over time, embedded in the business model, and anchored to customer behaviour change. Sustainability, in other words, is a megatrend that rewards the same discipline any other business transformation requires: vision plus execution, measured against clear targets.
Most companies currently have the vision without the measurement system.
What this series introduces
Over six articles, we will walk through a framework built on four years of research synthesis and rooted in the Marketing Canvas Method. It gives you two things current sustainability approaches lack.
First, a two-dimensional diagnostic. Every company has a Commercial Score (CS) — how effectively it manages its core marketing dimensions — and a Sustainability Score (SS), which measures how deeply sustainability is embedded across its marketing strategy. These are independent. A company can be commercially strong and sustainability-weak. It can be genuinely sustainability-committed but commercially fragile. The two-axis framework, which we call the MCM Sustainability Compass, makes both visible simultaneously.
Second, a set of 19 concrete, evidenced questions. Not "do you have a sustainability strategy?" but "is the core reason customers hire your product or service genuinely compatible with sustainability?" Not "do you communicate about sustainability?" but "are your stories truthful — and do they actually communicate about sustainability, rather than just referencing it?" The framework maps these 19 questions across every dimension of your marketing strategy, from customer understanding to brand to value proposition to conversation.
The result is not a certificate. It is a diagnostic that shows where your sustainability marketing is genuine, where it is aspirational, and where it is — however unintentionally — misleading.
The six articles
Article 1 — The intention-action gap: why your sustainability marketing isn't landing Behavioural science has documented the gap between what consumers say and what they buy. This article explains what it means for how you design and measure your sustainability strategy — and why social media metrics, survey data, and awareness scores are the wrong measures entirely.
Article 2 — The two axes: separating what you do from what you claim An introduction to the MCM Sustainability Compass. Why commercial marketing performance and sustainability marketing performance need to be measured independently — and what each axis actually captures.
Article 3 — The 19 questions: what to assess across your marketing strategy A walkthrough of the Sustainability Score (SS) — the 19 evidenced questions that map sustainability integration across all six actionable marketing meta-dimensions, from customer understanding to influencer strategy.
Article 4 — Which quadrant are you in — and what it means for your strategy The four Compass positions — Winners, Dreamers, Defenders, Losers — and what each one implies for the strategic conversation you need to have. With the four-stage sustainability maturity model mapped to the FIX/ALIGN/SCALE cycle.
Article 5 — Purchase versus participation: the two modes of sustainable marketing The most important strategic distinction in sustainability marketing. Some companies improve their offer and ask customers only to buy. Others ask customers to change their behaviour. The strategies — and the scoring criteria — are completely different.
Article 6 — The integrity check: scoring your sustainability with evidence, not aspiration Why participation-mode scores are the most inflated in the framework, and how to apply the Greenwashing Integrity Check. The two-directional gap — over-claiming and under-reporting — and what to do about both.
Who this series is for
Each article is published in two versions: one for marketing and strategy leaders making framework-level decisions, one for earlier-career marketers building their strategic vocabulary. The framework is the same. The language and the angle differ
If you want to see where your company stands before reading further, the Quick Assessment gives you a starting position in under ten minutes.
Want to explore this in the context of your company's strategy? Book a session →
This series draws on the MCM Sustainability Dimension framework (v1.4), synthesising research from Giola (Solvay Brussels School, 2023), Visnjic, Monteiro & Tushman (HBR, 2025), Challagalla & Dalsace (HBR, 2022), White, Hardisty & Habib (HBR, 2019), and Lubin & Esty (HBR, 2010).
