Communicating sustainability credentials is increasingly vital for brands in all categories to work into their offering, whether through adjustments to their current offerings or as a value inherently baked into the company operations. And as with any value, the way that sustainability is communicated continues to shift as brands compete for both legitimacy and uniqueness in the market. Increasingly as well, consumers are savvy to brands making vague claims, and are looking for truly transparent behavior and information in the brands they patronize. It is not enough to claim to be ‘sustainable’, without being able to clearly back this up with facts, figures, and clear efforts for improving the impact of products and services.
Likewise, the visual claims to naturalness and sustainability have changed as consumers interrogate products and culture moves with shifting understandings of purpose. The rough paper textures (or pseudo representations of raw, untreated materials), burlap, twine, and nature imagery that have been used to suggest sustainability is no longer seen as authentic or honestly so. Instead, I’ve noticed recently that a specific type of minimalism increasingly is being adopted as shorthand for sustainability and brand transparency. Specifically, it is the use of type-based logos, with no illustration and minimal color palettes, which self-proclaimed sustainable brands are using both in social media (e.g. in their profile photos) and across digital and bricks-and-mortar touchpoints. Minimalism is nothing new, of course. In recent years the minimalist style has been prevalent as a way of communicating naturalness and ‘clean’ products, especially amongst clean beauty brands. However the use of this style to communicate eco-friendliness or ethical practices is a new way of understanding these visual cues. There is a logic to this style appearing for sustainable brands, though. Quite directly, the minimal use of color and imagery communicates a sustainable approach of ‘less is more’, whether that means reducing waste, reducing consumption, reducing impact, etc. Additionally, these brands are subtly claiming to be less about image, and more about an ethos, in which the real qualities of the product or service should come before elaborate packaging.
However, another cultural layer to this also emerges when we look further back historically. While recently reading the book Cultish, I was struck by a passage which drew parallels between text-based memes (“quotegrams”) popular on Instagram today, and old-fashioned needlepoint psalms you might associate Victorian-era women. The author points out that this
“goes back even further than that, to…the Protestant Reformation, when there was a big shift in focus away from religious imagery (stained glass, Last Supper frescoes) and onto text. ‘There was an increasing discomfort with the ambiguity you get from images,’ commented Dr. Marika Rose, a Durham University research fellow in digital theology in Grazia magazine. ‘So a Protestant valuing of the Bible made it a much more text-based religion.’ Ever since, our culture has looked to snack-sized proverbs for guidance and gospel, convinced that when it comes to written quotes, what you read is what you get.”*
In a time when greenwashing has increasingly become an issue – one that consumers will quickly call brands out on – and cues of sustainability and naturalness are being co-opted by products that may not have any true sustainability credentials, it seems that this trend of simplified text-based logos plays into a similar social and cultural need to cut through ambiguity. Particularly with brands such as Reformation, whose name makes a clear claim about the mission built into the products, relying on straightforward text draws on centuries of cultural practice, drawn originally from this religious history, to offer honest moral guidance. The use of minimalist text-only branding suggests that ‘what you read is what you get,’ ultimately falling in line with a deep rooted Protestant understanding of ‘goodness’ on an individual and societal level.
Ultimately, consumers are looking for honesty and real efforts towards sustainable practices, especially in tumultuous times with an endless amount of information available at all times. While the ways in which these values are communicated may change, it’s clear that brands who understand the deep cultural narratives surrounding their values - whether that is sustainability or something else - are best placed to present themselves as credible and authentic players regardless of the category. It’s clear that this trend not simply a matter of style or of saying ‘less is more’, but of clearly positioning a brand within a longstanding (dare I say sustainable) cultural narrative.
*Cultish by Amanda Montell, 2021. p 279
