Let’s tell your brand’s sustainability story.

You care about your brand’s impact on the planet, and as a business leader, you’re making choices that mindfully and intentionally center that impact. 

You know that no one can do everything to mitigate climate change, but everyone can do something. And you also know that your team, your customers, and the wider community your business operates in want to see and hear about your sustainability commitments. Consider that: 

• 78% of consumers say that living a sustainable lifestyle is important to them, and as many as 75% consider sustainability when making a purchase.

• Two-thirds say today’s major companies are doing too little to help the planet.

• Meanwhile, 77% of companies with sustainability initiatives have seen increased customer loyalty, and 63% have seen a revenue uptick.

• Sustainability matters to workers, too; 71% of job seekers want to work for an environmentally sustainable company.

It’s clear: Both your internal and external stakeholders are eager to learn about the efforts your business is making to be kind to our planet. But the way you talk about that work matters too.

Mountain Laurel Digital will work with you to craft branded sustainability messaging that authentically tells the story of your brand’s environmental stewardship, connecting that message back to who your business is at its core.

Our Process

Oftentimes, a sustainability initiative doesn’t sit within one single arm or function of a business. As a strategic company priority, it’s something many of your teams and leaders likely play a part in. 

That’s why, as the first step in our sustainability messaging work, we’ll conduct in-depth, multi-stage interviews with your employees and key stakeholders to understand the ins and outs of your sustainability practices, what makes them important to the company, and what role they play in its future. 

Then, we’ll help you distill your “why” — which wider company values are fed and supported by your sustainability efforts, and how do those efforts align with the company’s overall mission and future direction? 

Finally, as we define, refine, and integrate the results into a new, brand-sensitive sustainability messaging framework for your business, we’ll cross-compare everything with current green marketing best practices. That includes auditing your relevant web pages and materials for unintentionally vague or unsubstantiated language that could make your brand appear to be greenwashing. What do we mean by that? Let’s take a look at a couple examples:

• “Eco-friendly”: If you’re using a term like this that’s open to interpretation — and, too easily, misinterpretation — are you pairing it with a clear, detailed definition of what this means at your business?

• “Carbon-neutral by 2030”: Let’s say your business has set an aggressive goal to become more sustainable by a certain year. When referencing that goal in marketing, are you also linking to a detailed roadmap showing how you plan to reach your goal? How about including data around the progress you’ve made since setting it?

Together, we’ll identify opportunities for strengthened precision, clarity, and accuracy when discussing your sustainability efforts, and we’ll embed all of that into your new messaging framework.

What We’ll Deliver

After getting into the weeds with you and completing our own research, Mountain Laurel Digital will present you with a custom sustainability messaging guide that spells out your sustainability initiatives’ “why” and their connection to your brand identity while providing cohesive, comprehensive, and brand-specific messaging that you can leverage across channels and platforms. 

See our work in action: 

When Clayton Homes came to us for help fine-tuning their sustainability messaging and showcasing their strategic partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation, they’d been taking steps to incorporate sustainable home-building practices across multiple aspects of their organization for almost a decade. But while their sustainability action plan was clearly formed, the way they talked about that work was a bit more nebulous. 

They wanted a clear, actionable brand guide that would standardize their sustainability messaging and help them prove out their work’s impact on the planet, complete with vetted examples and data points. 

In our work with Clayton, we helped them: 

• Create core sustainability brand pillars and clearly define the logistics, impact, purpose, and mission behind their initiatives. 

• Clarify and standardize Clayton’s sustainability story and its connection to the wider brand, improving their internal understanding of this work across departments.

• Define easy-to-execute guidelines and provide templated copy for externally discussing Clayton’s sustainability work in content marketing, on the website, on social media, in advertising, and across other channels. 

• Craft a partnership mission, vision, promise, and voice for their work with the Arbor Day Foundation to replenish degraded ecosystems and plant 2x the number of trees Clayton used on homebuilding in 2021.

The end result? A comprehensive Sustainability Brand Messaging Guide and supporting partnership-specific guide that helped Clayton cut through the clutter and talk about their sustainability impacts in a cohesive, consistent, brand-sensitive, and substantiated way, with actionable recommendations for common use cases as well as plug-and-play copy.