Ioana David-Narby - Community, culture, and the living SDGs of the Carpathians

We are currently navigating a highly challenging political and cultural landscape for sustainability communications. In the face of media pressure and evolving regulations, many corporate marketing teams have concluded that staying completely quiet is an easier operational tactic than speaking out.

During an episode of the Sustainability Marketing Survival Conversations podcast, host Simon Badman and climate comedian Stuart Goldsmith explored how leaning into human imperfection, rather than hiding it, is the ultimate way to dissolve audience scepticism and build authentic trust.

In corporate boardrooms and sustainability departments, climate communication frequently suffers from a fundamental design flaw: it reads like a health and safety briefing.

The global business community is currently weathering a complex commercial season. Driven by tightening regulatory frameworks, geopolitical pressures, and intense public scrutiny, an atmospheric shift has taken place. We have entered what industry observers call a "sustainability recession", a period defined by a pronounced say-do gap where companies are actively doing the work behind the scenes but keeping entirely quiet about it. This corporate silence is known as greenhushing , and it stems from a profound fear of reputational risk. Terrified of a single bad headline that could dismantle years of work, brand leaders are choosing to say nothing at all. "Greenhushing frustrates me almost as much as greenwashing," sustainability and marketing strategist Ioana David-Narby observes. "It comes from the same place: a lack of bravery. Brands are so scared of being called out that they'd rather say nothing than risk saying the wrong thing. But when the brands doing genuine work stop talking, the only stories left are the bad or inauthentic ones. That actively degrades consumer trust across the entire industry." The Death of Reactive Marketing This pervasive fear has completely transformed how internal teams function. Historically, great marketing relied on speed and situational relevance—a quick, reactive social media post responding to a cultural moment. Today, that agility is stalled by compliance bottlenecks. Because sustainability and legal departments have implemented exhaustive, multi-layered risk assessment guidance, public copy has become strangled. Ioana recalls trying to craft a case study title for a major corporate client: "It had been edited down to two lines of completely sterile text. I had to tell them we needed to take a step back because it said absolutely nothing. It was vague and uninteresting, yet it was masking a wonderful, deeply impactful story. The answer isn't less communication, it's better communication. It’s knowing exactly what you can say, being precise, and learning how to land the message without hiding behind scientific jargon." The Rise of the Competitor Audit For large multinational corporations, blatant greenwashing is largely a solved problem due to rigorous internal playbooks; however, for medium-to-small enterprises (SMEs) that lack the capital for crisis PR or complete corporate rebrands, a single misaligned claim can serve as a total company killer. Interestingly, the biggest threat to brands today isn't just regulatory bodies like the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which now uses sophisticated AI systems to uses AI to proactively scan tens of millions of ads a year for problem claims (like green claims) annually. The primary driver of recent enforcement actions is actually direct competitor challenges . This creates a fascinating competitive paradox. Giant corporations like Nestlé communicate cautiously to protect themselves from scrutiny, preferring to focus on internal, action-driven communications. But by greenhushing, they leave an open narrative register. Agile challenger brands immediately sense that conversational vacuum, step into the space, and aggressively try to peel away market share by shouting about their own impact. However, if those challengers overstep and fall out of line with their green words, the established giants are waiting with a regulatory audit. Driving Internal Culture Change Moving an established organisation through this minefield requires treating sustainability messaging like any other specialised technical discipline. "It's a language like any other," Ioana notes. "For some, learning Java code is the hurdle. For others, it's mastering regulatory compliance or Gen Z TikTok lingo. It takes time, but it is an entirely learnable skill." Internal advocates can drive this change by moving their teams past the what and straight to the so what. To build momentum inside a busy corporate culture, you have to frame sustainability around three core organisational incentives:  The Urgent Challenge : What are the operational, financial, and regulatory risks of inaction? (e.g., Shifting investor demands, like when institutional shareholders publicly pressured Nestlé to shift its product portfolio toward healthier, lower-sugar options). The Positive Opportunity : What does the business or the individual gain by participating? The Reputational Cost : What market share do we concede to competitors if we choose to stay completely silent? By translating technical frameworks into distinct, relatable commercial outcomes, sustainability transitions from a top-down compliance chore into a shared organisational victory.

We live in an era obsessed with metrics, data points, and rational proof. In corporate boardrooms, the prevailing assumption is that if you present a mathematically sound, scientifically verified value proposition, your audience will automatically believe it and act. One plus one equals two; therefore, the strategy should sell itself. But human belief has never been entirely rational. Consider why a luxury heritage brand commands profound trust before a consumer has even touched the physical product, or why the diamond industry successfully constructed an entire cultural perception of timeless value out of raw carbon. These are the psychological threads that fascinated sustainability and marketing strategist, Ioana David-Narby , long before she began helping organisations decode their climate strategies. Growing up in Romania and later studying sociology at Goldsmiths in London, Ioana realised a critical reality that many modern sustainability teams miss: you can have all the data and genuine impact in the world, but you will still fail to be believed if your story and your proof do not move together. The Failure of Pure Mathematics The primary hurdle when working with data-forward teams is the assumption that facts speak for themselves. To an analyst or an engineer, a carbon reduction metric feels clear and undeniable. But out in the wider world, the human brain doesn't process abstract metrics the way it processes a narrative. To understand why pure data fails to inspire action, we have to look at the scale of the message itself. During a climate study trip to Iceland, Ioana met Andri Snær Magnason, an author and activist who famously wrote an obituary for the first glacier Iceland lost to climate change, Okjökull glacier in 2019 . Magnason’s work is a case study in abandoning traditional datasets in favour of human storytelling. His central argument is that the sheer scale of the climate crisis has become so mathematically overwhelming that facts alone now create psychological paralysis or nihilism. When a scientific report states that the planet is on track to warm by 2 degrees Celsius, the average person might think that sounds like a pleasant summer. The catastrophic reality of that metric is lost because a temperature variant feels abstract. A funeral for a glacier, however, creates immediate emotional resonance. Good communication doesn't dilute the science; it translates what an analyst puts on a slide into a message that answers the fundamental human question: Why does this matter to me? The Operational Sequence: "Do, Then Say" Once you have the human story, how do you make it credible? As green claims regulations tighten globally and consumers grow increasingly cynical, the era of using clever marketing to paper over a lack of substance is officially over. To build authentic trust, organisations must follow a strict, non-negotiable sequence: do, then say . "You earn the right to communicate by acting first," Ioana explains. "The story has to be built on real, verifiable action, not aspiration dressed up as achievement." Consider Patagonia. For decades, the brand has prioritised concrete action over marketing rhetoric; funding environmental litigation, building massive garment repair programmes, and transferring company ownership to a climate trust. Because their operational foundation is solid, their messaging is fundamentally credible. When they ran their famous " Don't Buy This Jacket " campaign, it succeeded because they had spent thirty years earning the cultural legitimacy required to deliver it. Earning this alignment also means companies must stop supporting arbitrary causes that have zero connection to their actual identity. True alignment happens when an organisation backs a cause that reflects its unique character. A prime example is the luxury jewellery house, Cartier . The panther has been the central aesthetic symbol of Cartier's brand identity for over a century. So when the dedicated biodiversity fund Cartier for Nature backs big-cat conservation, funding the protection of snow leopards and their habitats, the narrative connection is instantaneous for the consumer. The brand is simply living its own identity out in the real world. 

In the final part of our series with award-winning strategist Wim Vermeulen , we move away from abstract marketing theories and look directly at the hard, financial data. For years, sceptical chief executives have viewed corporate responsibility as a moral duty, a cost centre to be managed rather than a driver of top-line growth. But Bubka's latest Responsible Business Index research reveals that responsibility has officially become a primary engine of commercial reputation and sales. If your brand ignores this shift, the market data shows it will actively cost you customers. The Brand Disconnect: The Case of Nike and Tesla Every single company operating today possesses a "responsibility reputation." Whether you choose to communicate it or not, consumers have already assigned a score to your brand, and no one scores neutral. You are either building equity or burning it. Wim points to traditional reputation models versus responsibility indexes to highlight massive corporate blind spots. Take a brand like Nike . In conventional reputation rankings, Nike consistently scores among the top global brands due to product innovation and cultural dominance. However, when you isolate the metric of responsibility, their score plummets. Consumers instantly cross-reference the brand against underlying anxieties regarding supply chain ethics, labour conditions, and plastic waste. An even more extreme example is Tesla . Historically viewed as the poster child for sustainable innovation, Tesla has recently become the worst-scoring brand on the entire Responsibility Index in Belgium, registering a staggering minus 55. This precipitous drop has absolutely nothing to do with the engineering of the cars; it is a direct reflection of public perception surrounding Elon Musk’s political actions and governance. Because responsibility is holistic, a CEO's personal brand can completely erase the environmental credentials of the product. And the data shows this reputation dip is now actively depressing Tesla's sales. The 0.91 Correlation: Responsibility Equals Revenue On the opposite end of the spectrum sits Too Good To Go , an app dedicated to reducing retail food waste. On a benchmark where the average corporate score is 41, Too Good To Go registers an astonishing plus 93 . What makes this truly revolutionary for boardrooms is the mathematical correlation discovered by Wim's research team. When they mapped Responsibility Index Scores against a company's Net Promoter Score (NPS), they found a correlation coefficient of 0.91 for top-performing responsible brands. In data science, a 0.91 correlation is incredibly powerful. It proves that an investment in perceived corporate responsibility directly drives consumer recommendation, brand preference, and immediate sales. It removes ideology from the conversation and turns responsibility into a cold, hard fiduciary requirement. De-risking the Narrative with the Responsible Growth Model Because the stakes are so high, companies can no longer afford to rely on gut instinct when designing their narratives. "In sustainability communication, gut instinct is wrong most of the time," Wim notes. "The subject is simply too complex, and emotional projection from executives usually alienates the consumer." To fix this, Bubka and the University of Ghent utilise the Responsible Growth Model . Rather than launching unvalidated creative campaigns, they present structured, unformatted claims and arguments to consumer testing panels to objectively measure credibility, honesty, and urgency before a single advertising penny is spent. For instance, a utility company might automatically assume its best headline is "Investing millions in offshore wind." But testing might reveal that consumers find that narrative distant and corporate. By pivoting the core narrative to focus on local economic stability, grid resilience, and long-term price security, whilst keeping net-zero targets as the supporting proof point rather than the headline, the brand instantly unlocks consumer engagement. Action Inspires Hope To motivate a population currently frozen by economic anxiety, corporate narratives must abandon the dark, data-heavy warnings of the scientific community and embrace structured, verified hope. Wim points to Bubka's cinematic project, We The Hopeful , which tested two futuristic scenarios with audiences. The film, focusing on a dark, failed future, lost viewer engagement within ten seconds. The version rooted in a hopeful, triumphant future drove unprecedented consumer action. "Action inspires hope, and hope inspires action," Wim concludes. "It is a full circle. Business leaders can no longer allow personal political views or legal timidity to dictate their communication strategy. The transition is happening, the world is rewriting its rules, and the winners will be the brands brave enough to speak the truth, back it with data, and lead their consumers forward."

In Part 1 , strategist Wim Vermeulen explained why the traditional marketing playbook of exaggerating benefits completely backfires when applied to sustainability. Now, we address one of the most pervasive myths circulating in boardrooms: the idea that the public has developed "climate fatigue" and simply wants brands to stop talking about environmental issues. According to Wim's ongoing data collection with the University of Ghent, this assumption is completely wrong. Consumers have not tuned out. In fact, corporate silence is actively making them anxious. The Reality of Climate Anxiety "There is no climate fatigue," Wim states bluntly. "People are highly concerned, and their stress levels are rising as the physical impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss become part of daily life. What marketers misinterpret as fatigue is actually a profound sense of isolation and disappointment." The data shows that everyday citizens feel completely alone in tackling the transition. They recognise the sheer scale of the crisis and look to policymakers and businesses to lead the way. However, public trust in politicians to execute this transition is disastrously low, hovering around just 9% in certain regions of Europe. Naturally, consumers look to the next most powerful institutions: corporations. Trust in businesses to drive meaningful change can reach as high as 83%. Yet, precisely when consumers are looking for corporate leadership, boardrooms have gone completely dark. The Trap of Greenhushing Terrified of strict green claims regulations and desperate to avoid public accusations of greenwashing, corporate legal departments have enforced a policy of "greenhushing", quietly continuing sustainability investments behind the scenes while scrubbing all mention of them from public marketing materials. Wim warns that this silence carries an incredibly high commercial cost. When consumers see a political class they do not trust and a business community that has gone completely silent, they are left with a terrifying question: Has the problem been solved, or is nobody capable of solving it? This vacuum creates profound anxiety, which quickly morphs into deep distrust of silent brands. Conversely, it creates an unprecedented commercial opportunity. The businesses willing to step into the light and communicate openly will capture a massive wave of consumer support. But to do that safely, they must design their messaging around the six indicators of credibility. The Six Drivers of Sustainability Credibility Through rigorous testing, Wim’s research identified six specific levers that determine whether a sustainable narrative will be accepted or rejected by the public: Honesty: The undisputed heavyweight. Is the claim transparent, admitting limitations rather than pretending to be flawless? Commitment: Is this a core, long-term business transformation, or a superficial, short-term marketing campaign? Urgency: Does the brand demonstrate that it understands the immediate timeline of the climate transition? Shared Value: Is it clear what is in it for the individual consumer (such as affordability or quality) and what is in it for wider society? Clarity of Proof Points: Are the facts accessible, easy to digest, and verifiable? Relevance: Is the message tied to immediate, tangible human needs, rather than abstract, corporate net-zero targets? The old paradigm of screaming "We will be net zero by 2042!" across a billboard is dead. Consumers do not understand abstract carbon metrics, and they reject narratives built around scarcity and sacrifice. To move the market forward, brands must learn how to construct validated, audience-centric storylines. In Part 3, we will explore the Responsible Growth Model, examine why Tesla’s reputation is cratering, and look at the hard correlation between audited responsibility and direct sales impact.

In conventional advertising, exaggeration is practically part of the job description. For decades, agencies have operated under a script perfected in the 1950s and 60s by industry pioneers like David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach: dramatise the benefit. Take a product attribute, magnify it, and turn it into a compelling narrative. Think of a standard toothpaste commercial. The voiceover confidently promises that your teeth will be crystal clear within two weeks. As consumers, we have spent a lifetime learning to decode this language. No one literally expects their teeth to replicate a diamond, and nobody returns a tube of toothpaste demanding a refund when they do not. We understand the unwritten rule: the benefit has simply been dramatised. But when you apply that same 1950s advertising script to sustainability, the system completely breaks down. I recently spoke with Wim Vermeulen , an award-winning strategist, author, and partner at the sustainable communication agency Bubka . Wim’s career began in traditional advertising, but six years ago, as the first wave of massive corporate sustainability campaigns began hitting the market, his gut told him something was fundamentally wrong. To figure out what, he teamed up with the University of Ghent to run a massive scientific study, testing 100 sustainability campaigns for effectiveness. What they discovered exposes the fatal flaw in modern green marketing. The Only Metric That Matters When Wim and the academic researchers crunched the data from those 100 campaigns, they expected to find a variety of creative factors driving success. Instead, they found that effectiveness was almost entirely dictated by a single, monolithic variable: credibility. Unlike conventional advertising, where consumers willingly tolerate exaggeration, sustainability communication operates under a zero-tolerance policy. Because sustainability campaigns are dealing with systemic, real-world crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, using the old "dramatised benefit" script triggers immediate scepticism. If a brand overpromises or wraps its message in corporate hyperbole, the audience does not read between the lines; they simply stop believing. In sustainability, you are either credible or you are greenwashing. There is no grey area. Introducing the Net Credibility Score (NCS) To help brands navigate this high-stakes landscape, Wim and the University of Ghent developed a framework called the Net Credibility Score (NCS) . Operating on a similar logic to the traditional Net Promoter Score, the NCS provides an objective benchmark for trust. You measure the exact percentage of consumers who genuinely believe a campaign's narrative, subtract the percentage who do not, and the resulting figure gives you your benchmark. The results across different European markets reveal a highly sceptical public. In Belgium, the average baseline benchmark sits at roughly 30. In the hyper-critical market of the Netherlands, the benchmark drops to just 15. If a sustainability campaign cannot score above these baseline numbers, it is not just wasting ad spend; it is actively damaging the brand's reputation. Perceived Honesty vs Internal Intent The core takeaway from Wim’s initial research is a brutal pill for marketers to swallow: honesty is not defined by your internal intentions; it is defined by consumer perception. It does not matter if a sustainability team spent three years meticulously crafting a carbon-reduction initiative with the best intentions. If the final marketing campaign feels dishonest, exaggerated, or vague to the average consumer on the street, it is functionally dishonest. In Part 2, we will look at why the corporate panic known as "greenhushing" is fueling consumer anxiety, and examine the six core indicators that determine whether the public will actually buy into your sustainability story.

 In the final part of our series with food brand consultant Mia Hartwell, we look beyond carbon metrics. While calculating greenhouse gases is vital, the food industry possesses unique social, agricultural, and cultural complexities that require a much broader lens of accountability. We also look at the real-world success stories: the brands successfully transforming sustainability from a corporate metric into a premium consumer desire. Escaping "Carbon Myopia" in Food In many sectors, sustainability reporting has fallen victim to "carbon tunnel vision." But in the food system, carbon is only one piece of an incredibly intricate puzzle. "As soon as you try to calculate Scope 3 emissions in food manufacturing, you hit a massive, opaque web of global suppliers," Mia notes. "It gets incredibly complicated, very fast." Because food is deeply social, its sustainability footprint naturally expands into biodiversity, soil health, community resilience, and food waste. Mia highlights a shocking statistic to illustrate the low-hanging fruit available to everyday consumers and brands alike: In the UK, the average person wastes the equivalent of three full meals every single week. By tackling food waste through industry redistribution initiatives, brands are not just cutting carbon; they are actively addressing social issues like regional hunger and supply chain inequity. Sustainability in food cannot be reduced to a single data point on a spreadsheet, it is inherently holistic. Three Rockstar Brands Making Sustainability Aspirational When embedding these deep values into a brand, Mia emphasises that sustainability must never feel like a compromise. It cannot be something a marketing team "sorts out later." It must supercharge the commercial proposition. Here are three brands Mia highlights as masterclasses in making sustainability highly desirable: 1. Hotel Chocolat: Premiumising the Indulgence Chocolate is an indulgent, premium purchase. Hotel Chocolat brilliantly utilises its packaging to elevate that experience rather than detract from it. While you enjoy the product, their on-pack messaging clearly communicates their ethical cacao sourcing, ingredient upcycling programmes, and compostable materials. It alleviates consumer guilt and reinforces the premium, crafted perception of the brand, allowing it to command a clear market premium. 2. Bold Bean Co: Making the "Boring" Aspirational Historically, heirloom beans might have been viewed as a dry, unexciting pantry staple. However, Bold Bean Co took a naturally sustainable, low-carbon, healthy food and turned it into a cult-status culinary object. They focus heavily on provenance, clean sourcing, and soil health, but they ladder it all directly up to one thing: unmatched taste . They made sustainability cool, beautiful, and delicious. 3. Wildfarmed: The Rockstar Farmers Fixing soil health through regenerative agriculture sounds like a dry, academic subject. Wildfarmed completely flipped the script by creating a literal "rockstar brand" around regenerative flour. With bold, counter-cultural visuals, celebrity backing, and an energetic, disruptive narrative, they made soil restoration feel exciting, relevant, and revolutionary. Every Job is a Climate Job Ultimately, Mia’s mission is to empower the individuals sitting inside these corporate structures. Through her consulting work and her role as a leader of She is Sustainable , a volunteer-run Community Interest Company supporting women working across the green sector, she emphasises that real change requires human confidence. "Every job is a climate job," Mia says. "But if you are working in food, you have the leverage to make more of an impact than almost any other industry on Earth. If you can bake sustainability directly into the heart of your commercial positioning, show how it drives sales, and give your team permission to care, that is where you win." This concludes our series on the sustainable food revolution. To ensure your marketing strategy is resilient enough to survive the changing climate, keep your eyes on the soil, your messaging transparent, and your brand rooted in trust.