Sustainability Branding: Challenges with Building and Maintaining Stakeholder Trust

Abstract

Trust-based stakeholder relations are critical to corporate success. However, macro-level contextual influences and ever-changing, divergent stakeholder expectations make it challenging for corporates to build and maintain stakeholder trust. In addition, tensions arise due to different approaches of trust-building within corporates activities such between branding and sustainability. For example, corporate branding typically relies heavily on communication with stakeholders, but over-communication can lead to accusations of greenwashing. We build our theorizing on the notion of stakeholder trust as the key to resolving observed tensions in corporate sustainability branding. Acknowledging the compound nature of trust, we illustrate how sustainability influences all three dimensions of trust (affective, cognitive, and behavioral) and how trust-building processes change once sustainability is implemented into corporate (brand) strategies.