Marketing & Communications

Playful Good Deeds:
GRAMMA's Recipe for Effective Sustainability Marketing

By following GRAMMA's recipe, brands can avoid greenwashing and transform marketing into a force for good — for the planet, for brand value, and for people seeking agency and meaning in the face of the climate crisis.

Brand Provided | By Adomas Pūras | Published 1 day ago | About a 4 minute read

Image: Nescafé

2024 may be remembered as the year regulators began intensifying their crackdown on unsubstantiated ‘green’ claims made by brands. But did anyone notice? Communication in which companies uncritically praise their own sustainability initiatives was ignored long before it was legally scrutinized. Greenwashing is often as dull as it is misleading.

Luckily, there's a new strategy available for brands. Instead of misinforming people about stuff they don't care about, brand communication can bring a sense of purpose and playfulness to their audience’s lives. If applied correctly, it can create sustainable value while elevating brand value. I call this strategy GRAMMA, an acronym derived from its three principles: Gatekeeper Role, Actionable Magic and Marketing Autonomy.

Gatekeeper Role

Brands are omnipresent as lenses through which the world is experienced. This allows creatives to reposition branded products as gateways between the mundane world of consumption and the world of sustainable living.

For example, in a stroke of strategic brilliance, Hellmann's multi-year "Make Taste, Not Waste" campaign has transformed mayonnaise into a powerful and fun-to-use tool in the fight against food waste by helping consumers "transform all that nothing into a delicious something."

In its 2024 "Secondhand Box" campaign, Italian pasta brand Barilla partnered with organizing consultant Marie Kondo to show how pasta boxes can be repurposed as packs for pre-loved clothing — turning an empty Barilla box from a piece of trash into a gateway to sustainable impact.

A forgotten scholarly word captures this phenomenon — a word brand strategists should learn. That word is Hierophany (from Greek hiero-, “sacred,” and phainein, “to show”), which roughly means an everyday object through which something sacred is manifested.

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a renowned history professor from the University of Chicago, coined it to explain the importance of certain objects in ancient societies that were thought of as magical gateways between sacred and mundane worlds. Everyday objects including trees, stones or dolls were seen as hierophanies through which people could receive 'sacred' guidance on values and behavior.

Brands can perform a similar gatekeeping role and create modern hierophanies — guiding people on sustainable behaviors by encouraging playful good deeds through everyday products.

Ask yourself this: Is your product something more than meets the eye?

Actionable Magic

It's one thing to show how a product can be used to help the environment. It's another to get people thrilled about doing so. The second principle of the GRAMMA strategy encourages brands to give people agency in a fun, practical and 'magical' way — by connecting small acts to significant outcomes.

In 2023, Japanese sportswear brand Asics partnered with One Tree Planted to link tree planting to running milestones. Asics pledged to plant a tree for every 5k run recorded on the brand's app. In the Native American Kachina tradition, Zuni and Hopi tribespeople use masks, costumes and dolls to perform climate-altering rituals. Like masked Kachina dancers, Asics-wearing runners can also foster natural regeneration by moving their bodies.

Nescafé's 2024 "80°C" campaign playfully teaches us a more energy-efficient way to make coffee. The magic trick is turning the kettle off earlier because "Nescafé is perfect at 80°C."

Or consider Renault's 2022 "Plug Inn" campaign — which increases the number of accessible charging stations with a map of privately owned EV chargers throughout rural France, so that the Renault EV tribe can travel to more remote locations with ease. People in ancient India would use sacred fire altars to magically transform alien territories into part of their cultural world. Is electricity the new fire? Renault empowers consumers to advance France's electric transition through the everyday magic of sharing and enjoying the countryside.

Marketing Autonomy

Marketing usually takes the blame for preachy, boring and sometimes misleading sustainability-related messaging. In reality, these ads result from companies looking inward and misusing marketing to report (or spin) the findings and projections of sustainability teams and other departments.

It may seem counterintuitive — but to create impactful campaigns, companies need to set aside their internal sustainability efforts (real or imagined). Leaders should resist the internal pressure to use marketing as a mere corporate sustainability mouthpiece. Instead, let marketing get wild in creating sustainable value autonomously.

Campaigns such as those above are impactful because creatives weren't forced to put a positive spin on internal company matters. Instead, they took finished consumer products and transformed them into inspirational hierophanies — revealing their hidden, sustainable powers that anyone can play with.

Corporate sustainability will always matter much more for the planet. But with sufficient autonomy, marketing can also drive real change.

By following GRAMMA's recipe, brands can avoid greenwashing and transform marketing into a force for good — for the planet, for themselves, and for people seeking agency and meaning in the face of the climate crisis.