Just One-Fifth of Consumers Believe Brands’ Sustainability Claims
Meghan Hall
6 min read
Consumers have a strong interest in making more climate-friendly purchases, but lack confidence in brands’ advertising around sustainability.
That’s according to new data from supply chain management platform Blue Yonder, which shows that more than three-quarters of consumers said they consider sustainability when choosing to make a purchase; in the U.S. that sentiment is down slightly. In 2024, 78 percent of consumers said sustainability mattered for purchases, and in 2025, 74 percent said the same.
Saskia van Gendt, chief sustainability officer for Blue Yonder, said the at-large decline in U.S. consumers’ sentiment around considering sustainability doesn’t alarm her.
“It didn’t jump out to me as being a drastic reduction in the U.S., given that approximately three-fourths of consumers still are feeling that connection between sustainability and purchase decisions,” she said.
But though a majority of consumers said they consider sustainability when shopping, they don’t necessarily feel inclined to pay more for sustainable products; Blue Yonder’s data shows that 47 percent of consumers—less than half—said they would pay an additional 5 to 10 percent for a sustainable product. When asked about spending an additional 10 to 20 percent, just 14 percent of consumers said they would open their wallets wider. In the U.S., 22 percent of consumers said they would spend an additional 10 to 20 percent in 2024, but this year just 12 percent of consumers said the same.
Van Gendt said part of the way forward on that front is through education—both on the consumer front and on the brand end.
“There is still a broader misperception that sustainability costs more. There’s obviously very many examples where we do see that sustainability comes at a premium, especially for either consumers or brands that are early adopters [of] new innovation,” she said. “Things like recycled materials used to come with a huge premium, and now we’re seeing those costs become more neutralized…so I think there’s an underlying awareness piece that needs to be strengthened, both for brands that are interested in investing in sustainability, as well as consumers that are evaluating what is the premium they’re willing to spend.”
Consumers’ interest in spending also varies by category. Just less than half of consumers would pay more for food and beverage items, while 37 percent said the same about cleaning products and three in 10 consumers indicated a willingness to pay more for personal care and beauty items. In fourth place, just over one in four consumers said they would pay more for clothing and footwear items.
Part of persuading consumers to spend on sustainable products comes from carefully planned and executed advertising and marketing campaigns. But, right now, consumers lack trust in those efforts
Blue Yonder’s data shows that just one in five consumers said they believe brands’ sustainability-based claims in marketing and ads are accurate. Despite that, trust has increased by 6 percentage points year on year in the U.S., from 17 percent to 23 percent.
However, one-quarter of consumers said they don’t trust brands’ sustainability claims, while 55 percent noted that they feel they can ‘sometimes’ trust what brands say about their climate work, contingent on a variety of factors.
Part of that distrust could be coming from the fact that more than six in 10 consumers reported that they have noticed at least a slight bump in the number of sustainability ads or marketing campaigns they have seen.
Still, van Gendt said, those campaigns could be helping to bring sustainability to the forefront of the conversation. She noted that the fact that brands and retailers continue to discuss their climate-related progress is promising, even in the face of scrutiny from consumers and greenwashing-related lawsuits.
“We need brands to be able to accurately report what they’re doing, but they shouldn’t not communicate it. Otherwise, we can’t see the progress that is being made, and we can’t see how brands are differentiating from each other,” she explained.
Now, brands and retailers may have a new sustainability question to disclose information about: artificial intelligence.
One in three consumers indicated that they believe AI could bring about stronger outcomes for sustainability programs, but the same proportion of consumers said they don’t understand how AI could benefit sustainable outcomes. What’s more, 22 percent of consumers said they worry that AI and data centers could negatively impact the environment, and 12 percent of consumers don’t believe AI will positively impact sustainability.
Van Gendt said brands and retailers leveraging the technology may have to further explain how it benefits their operations and sustainability outcomes, while still being honest about its risks, to win favor with uncertain or undecided consumers.
She also noted that Blue Yonder has started to see its customers reaping the benefits of agentic AI systems, which can automate some repetitive and specific processes on behalf of a human.
“We know that our customers’ sustainability teams are spending so much time just gathering data, trying to get reporting ready, trying to empower different teams throughout the organization to act in a positive way towards their corporate sustainability goals,” she said. “If you think about agentic AI being a tool for sustainability leaders to further embed sustainability throughout the organization, and giving those tools to different teams so that they can act in a positive way, that is super exciting, to supercharge the sustainability teams.”
As industries continue to shift and work on myriad priorities, consumers are split on who should bear the responsibility for mandating forward movement on sustainability.
Some consumers expect brands and retailers to grab the reins completely when it comes to working toward a more sustainable future; one-third of those surveyed said companies should take primary responsibility for such efforts. That figure was higher in the U.S., where 41 percent of respondents indicated they felt this way.
Meanwhile, fewer than three in 10 respondents said governments and policymakers should take charge on sustainability. That figure, which globally stood at 33 percent, came in much lower in the U.S. at 19 percent.
Van Gendt said that’s likely indicative of the U.S.’s inability—or disinterest in—putting federal regulation in place to force companies’ hands on sustainability in a way that brings about noticeable changes.
Meanwhile, the EU and other jurisdictions have begun putting an onus on climate legislation, which may explain why respondents in companies like Germany and France came in markedly higher than U.S. respondents, at 39 percent and 29 percent of respondents respectively saying government should be primarily responsible for shepherding sustainability efforts forward.
“To me, [this] was a recognition that the U.S. government…is not going to provide that regulatory structure for what companies can or cannot say, but that there is much more of a competitive marketplace through brands and corporations bearing that responsibility and seeing that competitive landscape, evaluating what consumers want to hear and what brands want to say—so leaving it up to the competition, versus making those regulatory requirements,” she said.
