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Communication about sustainability in fashion is complex. While fashion businesses have increasingly sought to manage their sustainability practices, their understanding of how to communicate about sustainability persuasively remains limited. The authors argue that a key problem with a firm’s efforts in communicating about sustainability is that it is a psychologically distant issue for both businesses and stakeholders. This paper aims to apply construal level theory to explore managers’ construal level in shaping communication about sustainability.

The paper used a two-phase qualitative methodology. Phase one involved undertaking interviews with ten managers in fashion firms to address communications about sustainability in the UK. In phase two, 16 consumers interpreted and reflected on the persuasiveness of communications about sustainability encompassing both concrete and abstract forms of messaging.

The authors identify the factors driving different approaches to communication (concrete and abstract) depending on the construal levels of managers, managers’ perceptions of the construal level of target stakeholders and the perceived authenticity of the sustainability claim. The paper highlights the conditions under which the (mis)match with the brands’ sustainable practices works in crafting communication. The authors also highlight three main communication strategies in responding to the complexity of sustainability in fashion ecosystems: amplification, quiet activist and populist coupling.

As an in-depth qualitative study, the authors seek to expose an under-researched phenomenon, yet generalisations both within the fashion industry and beyond are limited by this focus.

Fashion managers need to be flexible and evaluate how their communications about sustainability affect stakeholders’ evaluations of their brands. As sustainability in fashion brands grows, concrete and specific sustainability messaging may be necessary to improve sustainable behaviours.

The prevailing literature encourages symbiosis between sustainability practices and communications; such relationships are rare, and studies outside the consumer perspective are also rare. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this exploratory study is the first to understand how managers’ construal level influences decisions around communications about sustainability in fashion and how these messages are perceived by consumers.

The clean beauty phenomenon is gaining momentum and beauty brands are getting creative with on-pack sustainability claims. With the increasing focus on sustainability from both brands and consumers, sustainability communication has the potential to raise the profile of sustainable production and consumption. Further attention is needed on the creative approach behind on-pack sustainability marketing communications as companies no longer focus on single eco labels but instead use a bundle of claims to advertise their commitment to sustainability which finds consumers confused and brands open to accusations of greenwashing. This chapter explores on-pack sustainability communications in the beauty industry through the lenses of creative marketing communications which need to be both original and appropriate. This study contributes to the longstanding debate on the role of sustainability claims in marketing communications and addresses the role of on-pack sustainability claims design and creativity.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze public relations management in a group of Ecuadorian organizations to propose recommendations that contribute to the advancement of their sustainability processes. This study is based on the contemporary theories of corporate social responsibility by Garriga and Melé (2004), the public relations models by Grunig and Hunt (2000), and the evolutionary vision of the collaboration continuum for sustainability by Austin (2005). Based on these approaches, the authors proposed four evolutionary contexts through which the organizations move based on their sustainability and communications endeavors. A questionnaire was created to identify the theoretical orientation of an organization’s sustainability processes and public relations model. The questionnaire was applied in 16 large-sized Ecuadorian organizations involved in different economic activities. It was observed that in some cases, sustainability and public relations activities converge in the same evolutionary context while in others they do not. Thus, four possible scenarios and recommendations are presented. The questionnaire can be applied in future research to propose new conclusions or recommendations. Communications professionals can access an instrument to diagnose the communications function within their organizations and receive guidance on how they can contribute to the advancement of the sustainability process.

In France, an application decree from February 2002 enumerates a series of operational indicators that companies must offer, including a number of accounting and financial items. The information expected notably includes working time organisation, gender equality, health and safety, disability policies, subcontractor arrangements, water, raw material and energy consumption and biodiversity efforts. The present study aims to account for the diversity of the social and environmental information that companies supply by focusing on three stakeholder categories: suppliers; customers; and employees. It also seeks to highlight possible variations among different sectors of activity; influence of three pillars of sustainability (economic, social and environmental); timeframe (short‐term, long‐term, analytical); and type of discourse (situational or action variables).

Based on 40 French companies as a qualitative approach, the purpose of the present communication is to offer a discussion of the structuring modes applied to the information found in sustainability reports targeting stakeholders for all the companies belonging to the CAC 40 index.

Mobilizing a structural contents analysis, its findings identify differentiated communications practices among the 40 companies in question. The study also unveils the existence of shorter‐term approaches to sustainability action, contrasting to more long‐term and/or analytical orientations. Finally, the reports in question all emphasized sustainability's “economic” dimension, with its “social” dimension being considered secondary and its “environmental” dimension coming last. This inquiry demonstrates that, in the French context, there is a far cry from corporate social responsibility (CSR) dimension and sustainable development (SD) vision.

The paper provides an in‐depth method to analyze CSR and SD reports through its structural discourse.

This research aims to analyze to what extent sustainability and its related core aspects are integrated in media and communication's curricula of higher education institutions in Europe.

A total of n = 1068 bachelor and master’s degree programs, as well as their related curricula/program specifications, from 28 European countries were analyzed by means of content analysis.

Results show that the level of curricular integration of sustainability aspects in the field of media and communication is low (14%) to very low (6%) on module level. In most cases, sustainability remains an abstract guiding principle that is not translated into a dedicated course offer. This can indicate the difficulty of operationalizing such a concept as sustainability, which is experienced by not only higher education institutions but also policy and society as a whole. In addition, the results leave space for a reflection on the social and educational responsibility of higher education institutions.

The authors are aware that not all teaching (content) is depicted in curricula. Especially where teaching is research-based, The authors assume that sustainability (communication) is more present as the curricula' analysis can represent it. In addition, the fact of solely investigating English language curricula can be seen as a further limitation.

This research is one of the few attempts to verify the actual integration level of sustainability aspects in the curricula of a specific sustainability-relevant discipline, which is neither conducted as a case study nor as a single-country analysis.

This paper aims to explore the current state of website environmental communications in Latin American universities through a benchmarking operational tool. The study considers how these universities communicate their environmental policies as an act of corporate social responsibility and to improve their public image.

A sample of 80 top-ranked Latin American universities was considered. Environmental websites were evaluated in terms of information quality, multimodal design and stakeholder engagement. The research method follows the theoretical foundations of critical discourse analysis, multimodal studies and ecolinguistics.

A total of 59% of the universities have opened environmental websites. However, many of them have poor content and interactivity. Latin American universities obtain low scores in several objective criteria which measure the efficiency of website environmental communications.

The findings can help university administrators to improve the quality and effectiveness of online environmental communications. Some practical recommendations are given and examples of good practice can be emulated.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that analyses the situation of website environmental communications in a large sample of Latin American universities. The development of an operational benchmarking tool invites further comparative studies, which may contribute to a wider picture of environmental communications.

For companies that intend to respond to the modern conscious consumers' needs, a great competitive advantage is played on the ability to incorporate sustainability messages in marketing communications. The aim of this paper is to address this important priority in the web context, building a semantic algorithm that allows content managers to evaluate the quality of sustainability web contents for search engines, considering the current semantic web development.

Following the Design Science (DS) methodological approach, the study develops the algorithm as an artefact capable of solving a practical problem and improving the operation of content managerial process.

The algorithm considers multiple factors of evaluation, grouped in three parameters: completeness, clarity and consistency. An applicability test of the algorithm was conducted on a sample of web pages of the Google blog on sustainability to highlight the correspondence between the established evaluation factors and those actually used by Google.

Studying content marketing for sustainability communication constitutes a new field of research that offers exciting opportunities. Writing sustainability contents in an effective way is a fundamental step to trigger stakeholder engagement mechanisms online. It could be a positive social engineering technique in the hands of marketers to make web users able to pursue sustainable development in their choices.

This is the first study that creates a theoretical connection between digital content marketing and sustainability communication focussing, especially, on the aspects of search engine optimization (SEO). The algorithm of “Sustainability-contents SEO” is the first operational software tool, with a regulatory nature, that is able to analyse the web contents, detecting the terms of the sustainability language and measuring the compliance to SEO requirements.

This research aims to compare consumer responses to pro-environmental communication and appeals to recycle packaging when these messages come from a high-familiarity versus a low-familiarity brand.

Two online between-subjects experimental studies evaluate consumer perceptions and the willingness to comply with recycling appeals in response to pro-environmental communications from a high-familiarity versus a low-familiarity brand. To test the hypotheses, the studies examine the moderating role of sustainability habits and the mediating role of shared environmental responsibility.

Findings show that communicating a brand’s adoption of sustainable packaging is more salient to consumers when the appeal comes from a low-familiarity rather than a high-familiarity brand, especially when sustainability habits are weaker. The mediating role of shared environmental responsibility partly explains consumers’ commitment to act pro-environmentally.

Sustainability officials and policymakers should consider the impact of pro-environmental interventions that encourage collective recycling between brands and consumers. Practitioners are encouraged to examine revised waste management schemes such as extended producer responsibility programs to elicit the collaboration of consumers in initiatives that boost recycling and stimulate pro-environmental behaviors.

Using the diagnosticity–accessibility framework and habit theory, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this research is among the first to empirically examine the role of sustainability habits in consumer responses to pro-environmental brand communications. It also highlights consumers’ willingness to comply with brands’ take-back programs in a shared effort to reduce plastic waste and encourage a circular economy.

The purpose of this research is to identify the sustainable practices of luxury fashion brands through their communications via official reporting documents to classify practices used for communicating sustainability performance.

This research uses the qualitative content analysis of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)-oriented sustainability reports to examine the sustainable practices of 31 companies within the top 100 global luxury brands.

The authors classify the sample into four clusters: sustainability driven, sustainability newcomers, sustainability potential and sustainability passive. Results indicate that companies in this sector are focused on the issue of sustainability even though there is a remarkable fragmentation in terms of practices.

The study contributes to a better understanding of sustainability reporting activities and approaches in the fashion luxury industry by describing best practices and the effect of sustainability in corporate communications.

The objective of this paper is to propose a taxonomy of sustainability communication (SC) topics that provide digital content managers with a guide for setting a sustainability content agenda and for fostering stakeholder engagement mechanisms on environmental, social and economic issues that increasingly characterize conversations on social media of all stakeholder groups.

Taxonomy is a conceptual and qualitative way used to classify and represent the corporate sustainability (CS) domain of knowledge. The taxonomy categories of SC topics are both theoretically and empirically derived, combining an in-depth literature review with a thematic content analysis of 300 web pages of the corporate websites of the top ten sustainable brands selected in “The 2019 GlobeScan-SustainAbility Leaders Survey.”

The analysis of the results led to the construction of a hierarchical dictionary of tags that categorizes all sustainability topics based on a new, four-dimensional conceptual structure: planet, people, profit and governance. Each dimension is organized in four groups of sustainability themes, which, in turn, group multiple topics, considered the smallest communication unit to develop the SC content.

The taxonomy provides a concise and immediate conceptual framework on all those topics of broader interest, which, suitably modulated, can act as touch points with several groups of stakeholders. Drawn upon the best practices of thematic organization of SCs via the web, the taxonomy represents a guide for programming an editorial plan based on environmental, social, economic and governance issues from a sustainability content marketing perspective. The taxonomy of sustainability topics also finds application as a framework for a content intelligent system, providing a dictionary of tags that can be used for the indexing and retrieval of SC web content.

The study represents the first attempt at reaching a taxonomic organization of the sustainability aspects from a communicational perspective, supporting a new way of thinking and managing SC in the digital realm. Moreover, the results highlight, for the first time, that the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) theory, applied to corporate communications, lacks the governance aspect, which is essential to pursue sustainability consistently and effectively.