Sustainability is a post-rationalisation trigger, not a primary sales driver.
This is the paradox many sustainable brands face.
Consumers say they care about ethics and the environment, but at the moment of purchase, other factors – price, design, and immediate desirability – take priority.
The attitude-behaviour gap (Wintschnig, 2021) explains why consumers who express strong ethical and environmental values often fail to act on them when making purchasing decisions:
- Sustainability is important in theory, but it is rarely the primary driver of purchase behaviour, particularly for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) like beer
- Ethical considerations tend to serve as post-rationalisation justifications, rather than the impulse that drives the purchase itself
- Consumers will often default to heuristics such as price, familiarity, and brand perception, unless sustainability is seamlessly embedded into desirability
Toast Brewing, a brand on a mission to fight food waste by brewing beer from surplus bread, was facing this exact challenge when they launched their visual rebrand:
- They had a compelling sustainability story
- They had a fresh, premium design
- Their beer was roughly 60% more expensive than on-shelf competitors
Sustainability alone was not enough to justify the price premium.
And their new nature-driven narrative – a passion for the founders and brought to life by their visual design agency – was complex. It was a visual and thematic shift that tied their impact on food waste to a broader environmental story. But this narrative wasn’t an obvious, immediate connection to the product itself. Turning it into something customers instantly understood and found desirable was a challenge they commissioned us to solve.
The challenge: balancing three competing forces
- Premium positioning to justify the price point.
- Sustainability messaging without overwhelming the core sales message.
- A new nature-driven narrative that had to be seamlessly integrated without confusing consumers.
A poorly executed strategy would risk either diluting the mission or making the product feel more like an eco-statement than a beer worth paying extra for.
From a targeting perspective, beer is statistically drunk by men but purchased in the supermarket by women. This meant we had to build brand awareness with two target groups and find a positioning balance that created desire and recall with both.
The strategy: using editorial-style photography to create desire
Both luxury and FMCG purchases are driven by System 1 thinking: fast, instinctive, and emotional (Kahneman, 2011).
But sustainability messaging often triggers System 2 thinking: slow, rational, and effortful.
The Dual-Processing Problem
System 1 = “I see it, I want it.”
System 2 = “Why should I buy this?”
If an FMCG product requires System 2 processing at the moment of purchase, it loses to simpler, more intuitive choices.
Most consumers will not spend time deciphering an abstract story in a fast-moving retail or digital environment. If the emotional desire for the product is not established immediately, they will move on.
Our creative direction had to:
- Capture attention instantly by stopping the scroll, grabbing interest in a supermarket aisle, or creating desire at first glance.
- Feel premium and aspirational by positioning Toast Brewing as a choice, not a compromise.
- Embed nature without overwhelming the sales message to ensure the product itself was still the hero.
- Visually communicate the nature-driven narrative in a way that felt intuitive rather than requiring explanation.
Turning a complex narrative into an instinctive visual message
Natural elements to reinforce sustainability & storytelling:
We deliberately placed the cans in wild, nature-driven settings: ocean waves, misty beaches, wild berries, to create an instinctive link between the product and the environment.
This taps into priming effects (Bargh et al., 1996) where context influences perception. A beer seen in nature feels connected to nature without needing to explicitly state it.
By integrating organic textures, natural light, and immersive settings, we ensured that the visuals told the sustainability story before any text was needed.
Luxury-level composition & lighting
Instead of functional product shots, we used editorial-grade photography with rich textures, cinematic depth, and premium styling.
This aligns with luxury brand principles (Kapferer & Bastien, 2012) such as scarcity, craftsmanship, and exclusivity.
This ensured the brand felt premium first, with sustainability as an embedded layer rather than an overt selling angle.
Sales-focused visual hierarchy & heatmap testing
We tested the creative direction using heatmap analysis to ensure the brand name and product stood out first, to create recall and prompt on-shelf purchase.
This follows Fluent Processing Theory (Reber et al., 2004) – easier-to-process images create stronger consumer preference.
Editorial at the Top of Funnel, product-focused imagery for Conversion
One of our key findings from Meta ad testing was the performance gap between text-heavy and visual-first ads.
- In image-only ads, the brand logo had a 51.7% chance of being noticed.
- In text-heavy ads, this dropped to 23.4% – a massive decline in brand salience.
- Heatmaps showed that product-focused ads held engagement longer, while text-heavy ads fragmented attention.
This aligns with Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 1988): Too much information overwhelms working memory, reducing engagement.
Using this insight, we structured the campaign by funnel stage:
- Top of funnel: editorial-style imagery to build brand awareness and emotional desirability. These images showcased the broader nature-driven narrative, embedding sustainability without requiring explanation.
- Middle and bottom of funnel: product-focused imagery to drive recall and conversion. By the time customers were considering purchase, the focus shifted entirely to the beer itself.
This approach ensured that sustainability complemented the sales message rather than competing with it.
The results: a high-performing brand that felt as good as its mission
- 35.71% increase in placed order rate from email marketing
- 67% increase in D2C revenue
- 650% ROAS on digital advertising
- The campaign was featured in Waitrose magazine, amplifying its reach
- Toast Brewing was perceived not just as an eco-friendly beer, but as a high-quality product worthy of a price premium
The behavioural science: why this worked
This case study reinforces a key principle in sustainability marketing:
Ethics don’t sell, desire does.
Sustainability is a reason to justify a purchase, but the purchase itself must be driven by emotion, aesthetics, and aspiration.
Many purpose-led brands struggle with this balance. They lean too heavily into impact messaging and forget that a beautiful, desirable, and well-positioned product will always outperform an ethical one in a competitive retail space.
Sustainability isn’t a selling point – it’s a narrative layer
This campaign proves a crucial truth in sustainability marketing: consumers don’t buy ethics – they buy emotion, beauty, and desire.
Sustainability is a trust signal, not the hook that drives impulse. It must be embedded into the brand experience, not presented as the justification for purchase.
The brands that scale are those that understand:
- Sustainability should enhance desirability, not distract from it
- System 1 thinking dominates at the point of purchase – products that require System 2 processing lose momentum
- Luxury strategies work for premium FMCG brands because they frame ethical choices as aspirational, not sacrificial
Our campaign for Toast Brewing succeeded because it didn’t ask customers to think about sustainability, it made them feel it.
And when customers feel something, they buy.
Are you making sustainability a reason to purchase – or just a reason to rationalise?
Many brands face the same challenge Toast Brewing did: how do you balance purpose and profit, mission and marketing, ethics and emotion – without losing sales?
If your sustainability story isn’t driving conversions, it’s time to rethink how it’s being told. Are you building a brand that sells, or a brand that explains?