What Happens When the Right Brands Compare Notes

In the summer of 2026, the Anti-Greenwash Charter brought together nine purpose-led brands for a ninety-minute facilitated discussion on sustainability communications. The brands spanned food, drink, household goods, personal care, and grocery. Several are certified B Corporations. All are widely regarded as taking sustainability seriously and doing the work well.

What the Anti-Greenwash Charter wanted to understand was what the leading brands are learning.

What does responsible sustainability communication actually look like in practice? What are the disciplines that make it credible? And what does the evidence say about its commercial value?

The resulting report, Trusted Communications for Purpose-Led Brands, published in August 2026, provides some answers.

Gareth Brown and Andy Last

Gareth Brown is a marketing director with over fifteen years of experience growing market-leading brands in the UK and globally, including as Global Marketing Communications Director at Duni Group. He facilitated the roundtable and advises both truMRK and the Anti-Greenwash Charter.

Andy Last co-founded salt communications, one of the UK’s first B Corps, scaling it from start-up to a multinational business before its sale to Interpublic Group.

He is the author of Business on a Mission: How to Build a Sustainable Brand and advises the Anti-Greenwash Charter on sustainability leadership and communications.

Sustainability Is a Lever of Trust

The report’s most commercially significant finding concerns the relationship between sustainability communication and brand confidence.

Organisations at the top of their field have recognised something that goes beyond regulatory compliance. A credible sustainability record, communicated with precision and evidence, does not only protect a brand from scrutiny. It builds the kind of trust that drives customer loyalty, retail advocacy, and long-term brand preference.

“Sustainability is a lever of trust,” Andy said. “And that is only as strong as the last piece of communications you’ve made.”

The report identifies five cross-cutting findings. One of the most valuable is that a strong track record of responsible practice protects a brand when challenges arise. An organisation that has consistently communicated with evidence, honesty, and precision can respond to a limited issue, correct it transparently, and preserve customer confidence. That protection is built through cumulative credibility, not through any single claim.

“Trust is built across different parts of the business. If a limited issue arises, a strong record can help us put it right transparently and maintain confidence.”

Precision as Competitive Advantage

The roundtable found that the most effective sustainability communicators lead with precise, product-level claims that are fully substantiated and genuinely differentiating. A specific figure tied to a defined product and boundary can remain accurate under competitive or regulatory scrutiny in a way that sweeping claims cannot.

This is a competitive advantage, not a constraint. While less rigorous competitors make broad claims that do not withstand scrutiny, a brand with a fully evidenced, specific claim occupies a position that is genuinely defensible.

“Many competitors cannot make this specific claim. But we can state it with confidence because it is true and evidence-based.”

The report finds that the most advanced organisations are treating the incoming regulatory environment, including the EU’s Empowering Consumers Directive, which will come into force on 27 September 2026, as an accelerant rather than a problem. Brands with their evidence base, claims policy, and governance already in place are ahead of the curve.

The Discipline That Protects Every Claim a Brand Makes

The roundtable’s deepest finding connects sustainability communication to the health of the whole brand.

A brand caught out on a sustainability claim does not only lose that claim. It teaches its customers to doubt the next one, about nutrition, about quality, about anything. Credibility does not compartmentalise. This is why the discipline the report describes matters beyond sustainability: precision, substantiation, honesty about limitations, and ownership of every channel are the same disciplines that protect everything else a brand says.

Sustainability is the subject. Trust is the asset.

The report identifies the internal handoff from sustainability teams to marketing as the point of greatest vulnerability. When qualifications and context are stripped in the edit, accuracy is compromised before the claim reaches the customer. The practical solution the group converged on is a living claims policy, a single record of approved claims with their scope and substantiation, reviewed by compliance before marketing refines the language.

One participant described opening up about known gaps in its own supply chain, alongside the remediation underway. Rather than damaging credibility, it built it.

“Transparency builds understanding first, and it’s that understanding that makes trust meaningful, rather than blind trust.”

What the Charter and truMRK Make Possible

The roundtable’s magic wand answers were unanimous.

Gareth’s: a market in which third-party verification of sustainability claims becomes the expected standard. When customers begin to favour independently verified claims over unverified ones, the commercial advantage flows to brands that have invested in getting it right.

“If we reach the tipping point where customers turn away from brands that aren’t verified, suddenly a lot of organisations who are maybe trying to wing it slightly will start taking sustainable communications more seriously.”

Andy’s: an independent mark, simple and credible, that sits on a piece of communication and tells the audience that what is being claimed about sustainability has been independently checked as true.

“Simpler, better communication about an area that increasingly matters to all consumers. The end of lawyer words on pack.”

The Anti-Greenwash Charter and truMRK are built precisely for this moment. The Charter certifies organisations whose Green Claims Policy has been independently reviewed, providing visible evidence of their commitment to responsible communication. truMRK goes further, reviewing individual sustainability claims before publication and issuing a mark that signals independent verification to every audience that encounters the communication.

Together they offer what the roundtable identified as the missing piece: not just the discipline to communicate responsibly, but the independent evidence that the discipline is in place.

The brands in the room are already investing in this. The question is who joins them next.

Edelman Makes the Case. The Interest Is Worth Noting.

A May 2026 Fortune article by Jonathan Jordan, Edelman’s U.S. Head of Corporate Reputation, argues that trust has become one of the most important assets a company holds, but sits unowned across most organisations. Responsibility, the article contends, is fragmented across communications, legal, compliance, HR, government affairs, and security, each operating with different incentives and time horizons. The result, in Jordan’s framing, is inconsistency between what companies say, what they do, and how stakeholders experience them.

The proposed solution is a Chief Trust Officer: a dedicated C-suite executive whose sole mandate is earning and protecting stakeholder confidence.

The article is persuasive and its evidence is grounded in Edelman’s own research. It is also written by a senior figure at a firm whose commercial model depends on selling trust-related services to corporations. That context does not invalidate the argument. It is worth holding in mind.

Matt Bourn read it when it first appeared in late May. His reaction was immediate, then revised on reflection.

Thirty Years Communicating for an Industry That Runs on Credibility

Matt Bourn is Director of Communications at the Advertising Association, where he leads the public narrative for the UK’s fifty billion pound advertising industry. He co-authored Trusted Advertising and Sustainable Advertising, both published by Kogan Page, and has spent thirty years working across public policy, commercial economics, and reputation management. He also works closely with the UK advertising industry’s think-tank, Credos, which tracks public trust in advertising on an ongoing basis for the Advertising Association.

His position inside this debate is specific: he has been building the evidence base for trust as a commercial driver, and he has been measuring the gap between what the industry claims and what it delivers.

The Distinction Jordan Gets Right: Reputation Is Not Trust

The Fortune article draws a distinction that Matt considers one of its most valuable contributions. Reputation, Jordan argues, is how a crowd feels about you at a given moment. Trust looks forward. It reflects confidence in how a company will behave tomorrow. It is the reason someone takes a chance, stays, and recommends.

Matt endorses this framing without reservation. “There’s a huge difference between being liked and being trusted.”

His own research has found that most companies, when asked whether trust matters, say yes without hesitation. When asked how they measure it, they point to brand awareness, saliency, share of voice, favourability. None of those metrics capture forward-looking confidence. The closest proxy Matt has encountered is the Net Promoter Score: the likelihood of a customer recommending the business to someone they care about.

That act of recommendation, he argues, is a genuine expression of trust rather than merely of satisfaction.

His working example is giffgaff, the mobile provider, which refers to its customers as members and derives one in five new business leads from friend and family referrals. That twenty percent figure represents trust converted directly into commercial growth.

Where the Article Gets the Problem Right and the Solution Wrong

The Fortune article’s structural diagnosis is, in Matt’s reading, largely accurate. The Edelman Trust Barometer research it cites suggests that sixty-one percent of people globally now hold a grievance mindset, believing institutions serve narrow interests while making their lives harder. Seven in ten people worldwide are described by Edelman researchers as having an insular trust mindset, reluctant to extend confidence to those outside their immediate circle. Among multinationals, the research identifies a thirty-one point gap in Canada, twenty-nine points in Germany, and twenty-nine in Japan between trust in domestic companies versus foreign ones.

These findings, if they hold, describe a structural problem, not a communications one. Trust is fragmenting. The localisation of confidence creates specific exposure for any organisation operating across geographies.

Where Matt diverges is on the proposed remedy. Creating a Chief Trust Officer concentrates accountability for trust in a single executive. His counter-argument is that this misunderstands the nature of the problem.

“I would push back on the reality of it. The leadership team has a collective responsibility to make sure it’s the most trusted business in its sector. And that’s across everything that it does.”

Trust that sits in a dedicated role is trust that the rest of the C-suite has been relieved of managing. The very diffusion Jordan identifies as the problem, responsibility spread across multiple functions, is not solved by adding a new function. It may simply give each existing function a reason to defer.

From the Attention Economy to the Trust Economy

The broader argument Matt draws from his own research and the Trusted Advertising book is about a structural economic shift. The attention economy, as he describes it, was built on acquiring attention at the lowest possible cost per acquisition. The trust economy, which he argues is emerging to replace it, is built on winning customers through the confidence they have in a brand relative to its competitors.

“Get trust on the plan. When you’re thinking about your next advertising campaign, trust should be in the brief. We want to be trusted for this. That’s the promise we’re making.”

The practical implication is that trust is not a function to be owned by one executive. It is a discipline to be embedded in every commercial decision. The giffgaff example is, in his framing, what the trust economy looks like in operation: a brand so trusted by its members that acquisition becomes self-sustaining.

Self-Regulation Over a New Title

Matt’s magic wand answer is, characteristically, structural rather than personal. He would not create a new C-suite role. He would invest in the strongest possible self-regulatory framework the advertising and communications industry can build.

“I would encourage everyone to really understand and support and invest in the strongest self-regulation that we could find. Not just the ASA, but setting the standards. Because governments have so many problems to deal with that we as an industry should be capable of delivering brilliant, responsible advertising ourselves.”

The argument connects to the Fortune article’s third claim: that staying silent on societal issues is, according to Edelman research, interpreted by fifty-three percent of consumers as concealment, and that seventy-three percent say a brand reflecting the culture around it builds more trust than one that ignores culture.

Matt’s version of that insight is more focused. An industry that self-regulates effectively demonstrates trust through its structure, not through its communications. A Chief Trust Officer cannot substitute for the credibility that comes from a sector holding itself to account.

The episode’s open question, left without resolution, is whether self-regulation is sufficient in an environment where Edelman’s own research suggests institutional trust is in structural decline.

What Five Hundred CMOs Said, and What They Are Actually Doing

A global study of more than five hundred marketing leaders, conducted by Lippincott in partnership with Bloomberg Media, finds a gap that is remarkable in its consistency.

CMOs believe long-term brand building is critical for sustainable growth. They are systematically deprioritising it anyway.

The mechanism is not mysterious. CMOs have earned greater organisational influence by becoming fluent in the language of the C-suite: performance metrics, quarterly targets, demonstrable commercial outcomes. The cost of that fluency is time and budget taken from brand building, customer experience investment, and cultural relevance work. Seventy-nine percent of respondents say bureaucracy getting in the way of decision-making is common. Only forty-eight percent believe marketing gets sufficient credit for its contribution to business growth. Only forty-three percent think marketing metrics are understood or valued outside the marketing function.

The data paints a function under significant pressure. Dr Leeya Hendricks’ reading of it is characteristically direct.

Three CMO Roles, a PhD, and a Book That Arrived at the Right Moment

Dr Leeya Hendricks has held CMO roles at Prytek, Delta Capita and Rimm, and senior marketing leadership roles at Oracle, IBM, Accenture and Gartner, among others. She is now Managing Director and Founder of Hark Consultants, a strategic growth advisory firm. She is a Non-Executive Director on the CIM Board, an adjunct professor at Management Center Innsbruck, and the author of The Platform Playbook, published by Palgrave Macmillan in January 2026. Her PhD, completed at Antwerp Management School and MCI Innsbruck, focused on B2B platform ecosystems and value co-creation.

She arrived at sustainability marketing through a specific angle: the question of how organisations create value that persists rather than value that reports well in the next quarter.

That question sits at the centre of the Lippincott study and at the centre of the episode.

Flip the Frame: This Is Not Something Being Done to CMOs

Leeya’s first intervention is a reframe. The study’s headline finding, that CMOs are being pushed into short-term thinking by boards and executive pressure, is real. Her response is to resist the passive framing.

“It shouldn’t be a case of us being forced into a space. It’s the job of the CMO to really have those strategic long-term discussions, saying this is the value that we bring.”

Her argument is that the short-term drift is partly a failure of the marketing function to make its strategic case with sufficient rigour. CMOs who allow quarterly metrics to define the terms of their engagement with the C-suite have, in effect, accepted a narrower mandate than their role requires.

The Lippincott finding that only forty-eight percent of CMOs believe marketing gets sufficient credit for its contribution is read by Leeya not as a structural injustice but as a demonstration that the case is not being made well enough.

That is a demanding position. It is also an empowering one.

The AI Trap Nobody Is Naming

The Lippincott study surfaces a specific and underreported problem. CMOs are racing to invest in AI tools and technology. Simultaneously, many are cutting budgets for the digital foundations AI depends on: web experience, content architecture, data quality, thought leadership. The infrastructure that determines how AI understands, surfaces, and represents a brand is being defunded to pay for the AI implementation it is supposed to support.

Leeya’s response to this is pointed. “AI is no longer the headline act. It’s becoming the operating environment.”

The question, she argues, is not whether to adopt AI. It is whether organisations understand what AI adoption actually requires. A brand that neglects its content architecture and digital foundations while investing heavily in AI tools is building on sand.

She draws an analogy to the legal sector. Firms like Harvey are not disrupting law because they have AI.

“They’ve fundamentally rethought how value is created.”

The technology is instrumental. The strategic redesign is the work. “That’s a strategy conversation, not a technology conversation.”

Whether Boards Are Ready Is the Harder Question

Leeya’s deepest challenge to the Lippincott findings is not about CMOs at all. It is about boards.

“The question isn’t simply whether marketers should be in the boardroom. It’s whether boards have the capabilities needed to lead organisations in an AI-enabled economy.”

If marketing is being squeezed into short-term thinking by board-level pressure for quarterly performance, and if boards lack the capability to evaluate what AI-enabled long-term strategy requires, then the problem is not a marketing problem. It is a governance problem.

The CMO trade-off described by the Lippincott study is a symptom of something upstream.

Only fourteen percent of CMOs in the study say they are confident their organisation is prepared for impending challenges. That number sits alongside the eighty-three percent who describe their company’s growth trajectory as positive. The gap between those two figures is where the real risk lives.

Responsible Growth Is Not About Sacrifice

Leeya’s magic wand answer returns to the foundational question the episode orbits. She would change how organisations define and measure value, moving beyond quarterly performance to a model that captures long-term outcomes across customers, employees, partners, society, and shareholders.

“Responsible growth isn’t about sacrificing commercial performance. It’s about creating businesses that can sustain it.”

The Lippincott data suggests the gap between that aspiration and operational reality is widening. CMOs know what long-term value requires. The conditions in which they operate are pulling in the opposite direction. Whether those conditions change, or whether marketing leaders find ways to change the terms of the conversation, is the question the episode leaves intact.