The ESG Mirage: Why Your Sustainability Story Is Falling Flat
At the 2026 Davos summit, Mark Carney retold Václav Havel’s story of a shopkeeper who puts a slogan in his window just to signal compliance, even though he doesn’t believe in it. The system keeps going because everyone participates in rituals they know to be false. ESG has become the corporate equivalent of a shopkeeper’s sign. Stick it in the window, signal the right things, and hope nobody looks too closely at what’s actually happening out the back.
The problem is that most brands have built their sustainability story on an assumption: that impact starts and ends at the head office. It doesn’t. Over 90% of a business’s ESG footprint sits in the supply chain, in factories you’ve never visited, with tier 2 suppliers you’ve likely never heard of. You can have the greenest canteen in the country and still be funding something you’d rather not read about in the Sunday papers.
The certification rush made this worse. Pre-2025 B Corp status became a reasonable case study in what happens when standards are set low enough that compliance doesn’t require change, or that a check box approach has been followed without necessarily doing the thinking behind it. A badge on your website won’t stop a supplier three steps down the line from cutting corners on people or the planet. If the hard work hasn’t been done, the logo is just expensive wallpaper.
So what does the hard work actually look like? It looks like applying the same rigour to sustainability data that you’d apply to a set of audited accounts. You wouldn’t file a rough-and-ready tax return or ‘guesstimate’ your quarterly P&L. The same standard needs to apply to carbon figures and labour statistics. Granular, auditable data is the only thing that separates a genuine strategy from a well-designed PDF.
Transparency matters here too, but not in the way most brands think. It isn’t about presenting a polished picture of progress. It’s about being willing to show the work in progress, to say, here’s the plastic problem in our secondary packaging we haven’t solved yet, and here’s exactly what we’re doing about it. Consumers don’t expect perfection. They do expect not to be misled.
Which brings us to the marketing problem. People don’t buy based on what they need. They buy based on what they want. Nobody wakes up wanting a carbon-neutral logistics solution. They want something that works, looks good, or makes their life easier. When brands lead with sustainability as the pitch, they’re asking consumers to do the moral heavy lifting, and most people didn’t come to your website for that.
ESG shouldn’t be the hook. It should be the foundation that makes the hook credible. Your customers want to buy the thing they actually want, with quiet confidence that you’ve already handled the ethics. That’s a completely different proposition to being lectured at.
If sustainability isn’t genuinely informing decisions, if it’s something bolted on to stay relevant, it will eventually show. The audience for corporate performance is getting sharper. Stop performing and start reporting, as that’s when it starts to mean something.
Guest Author: Tim Dee-McCullough is a London-based finance leader and sustainability advisor with over 25 years of experience working with complex international businesses. As an ACCA-qualified professional and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Tim specializes in technical accounting, ESG strategy, and governance, helping organizations navigate increasingly demanding regulatory environments.
Through his work advising Boards and Audit & Risk Committees, Tim brings clarity to the intersection of financial performance and sustainability, showing that strong governance and ESG practices are not just compliance exercises, but drivers of resilience, trust, and long-term value.