Data-First Marketing Has a Blind Spot for Sustainability
I have spent most of my career inside the measurement obsession, and I say that with affection for the work. Across e-commerce, SaaS, and the teams I run now, the instinct runs the same way. Show me the cost per acquisition. Show me the cohort. Show me where 30-day retention slipped and why. We rebuild onboarding flows because two points of Week 1 drop-off mean something is broken, and we are going to find it.
In our own research at Uniqode, across 524 US marketers, the metrics teams reach for first are the familiar activity signals: click-through rate, engagement, conversion. We instrument the front of the funnel down to the decimal. We have trained ourselves to stop guessing the moment we can measure.
Then the same teams, the same disciplined, data-first teams, will approve a line like "we care about the planet" or "eco-friendly since 2012" and move on. No number behind it. No way for anyone to check it.
I keep returning to a question I have asked about other channels. You would never let a media buyer commit spend without a forecast. So why do we let a brand commit to a sustainability claim on faith?
The standard we have never applied here
Digital channels arrived with measurement built in. Every click, every scroll, every conversion came with a tracking pixel attached. The medium made rigor the default, and we grew up demanding proof because proof was always right there.
Physical channels grew up the other way. A claim on a package, a placard in a lobby, a line on a menu lived in a world where very little could be traced, so very little was asked of them. The standard stayed off these claims for years because there was no practical way to apply it.
Most of this is a taxonomy problem. "Eco-friendly" lives in the adjective bucket. It gets approved by someone focused on how it sounds, not what it can demonstrate. The same team that would reject a campaign forecast without a ROAS assumption signs off on a sustainability label that no guest can check. The standard we built for one set of claims has never been applied to the other set. Not because it would not work. Because nobody asked.
Then certification registries went public. Review platforms became the first stop in any booking decision. As some brands started publishing actual numbers, a comparison standard formed that did not exist before. A guest can now check a claim against a review, a certification registry, or a competitor's page before the elevator reaches their floor. The distance between what a brand says and what it can show is visible in seconds.
The claims have gotten loose, and the data shows it
When the European Commission screened environmental claims across sectors, it found that 37% used vague phrasing like "eco-friendly" and "sustainable," and 59% offered no easily accessible evidence to support the claim.
More than half of these claims would fail the first test we apply to our own funnels: can you prove it?
Scrutiny is catching up fast. From September 2026, the EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition rules restrict generic terms like "eco-friendly" unless they are backed by evidence, with penalties that can reach 4% of a company's annual turnover. The unverifiable green adjective is on its way out in major markets, on a timeline brands do not control.
A claim that cannot be checked does not sit there neutrally. It registers as noise. And once a guest starts filtering your claims as noise, the ones that are true get filtered too.
What I noticed as a guest
Last year, at a famous chain in Iceland, the green messaging was impossible to miss. A placard by the elevator invited me to scan a QR Code and "discover our commitment to the planet." So I did. By professional habit, mostly. I expected a number. A certification. Something tied to the building I was standing in. What I landed on was a generic corporate sustainability page: mission language, a stock photo of a forest, a paragraph about "our values." Nothing about this property. No figure for this stay, this city, this year. The scan had promised proof and delivered vocabulary with an extra step. I had actively tried to verify the claim and came away knowing less than the placard already told me.
The work at that property may well have been real. What reached me was the adjective, and the adjective was the one thing I had no way to verify.
The standard already exists
"We removed 40,000 single-use plastic items last year" is verifiable, and so is “Your towel reuse saved 18 liters of water this stay." Neither asks for faith. Both could be looked up. That is what it takes to move a claim out of the "eco-friendly" category and into the kind that sticks with a guest.
Where it falls apart is placement. A sustainability number that lives in the annual report, or on a sustainability page, no guest visits during a booking decision, is functionally unverifiable to the person it needs to reach. The proof is real. It is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is the same problem as having no proof at all.
The brands that have not figured this out are not necessarily doing less on sustainability. Many of them are doing more. The problem is that all of that work gets reported as an adjective.
The hospitality teams are already asking that question and building proof that guests can check at the moment they need it, which we explored in Sustainability in Hospitality: The Operational Playbook for Hotels.