All over the world, stakeholders are trying to make informed choices and decisions to reduce the impact of climate change. To reflect that, most businesses are already ramping up their sustainability efforts. In Europe, sustainable finance has made inroads into investment trends. In 2022, banks and financial institutions stepped up their sustainability plans to align with the EU’s goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.
Thus, it has become crucial to communicate about sustainable practices that are being implemented in financial institutions. However, since being seen as ethical drives profitability today, people have started suspecting that companies are greenwashing their products, which means they’re putting a facade of sustainability. At the same time, they continue engaging in activities that cause more waste or greenhouse gas emissions.
This has led to stakeholders suspecting sustainability coming from companies. While greenwashing tends to be a blanket term with a potentially negative impact, sometimes it’s also about miscommunication and not articulating the correct perception of products.
Positively influence perception
Here’s how businesses can tweak this perception positively so that their sustainable financial products are received more favorably:
- Bring facts to the table– Businesses can convey information about their sustainable financial products with more credibility if they focus on the message and ensure that it includes hard and accurate facts about how they are making sustainability a part of their products. Show investors and other stakeholders that sustainability is not just a buzzword for you. Please give them a glimpse into what goes behind the scenes. Make them a part of the process.
- Making sustainability accessible– Many people want to make more ethical choices in their investments but often don’t know how or where. Communicating about climate positivity in financial products ensures that people are aware that this is another aspect where they can make sustainable choices that impact the planet. The EU also has new banking and finance benchmark labels which have made investing in climate-positive opportunities more accessible.
- Publicise the value to society– Climate-positive investments bring real value to the community as it impacts the world at large. Apart from calculating risks and returns, when people learn that they can make a real-world impact through their investments, it adds to their feel-good factor and makes them realize that they are making the world a better place, even with their investments.
When enterprises implement real sustainability in their products, there’s increased social visibility because modern consumers are willing to spend more on ethical development, and climate-positive investments are deemed more attractive and valuable. Packaging all this without misleading the consumer can get tricky, but with the right communication tools and a committed PR advisory to help you, this can be easily accomplished.