Case Study
Creating the concept of ‘green-hushing’
A leading European climate solutions provider published a report every year as part of a thought leadership strategy to engage its corporate customers all over the world.
We had worked with them on retainer for years, and they knew that we prefer to be involved early in report development to maximise impact.
In this case, we recommended producing a survey of corporate sustainability leaders to provide primary data for the report, and carefully crafted questions that would provide new and unique insights.
The results showed that a growing number of corporates were choosing not to publicize their climate targets to avoid scrutiny and allegations of greenwashing – an emerging trend that had until then, not been explored.
In a brainstorm with the client, we developed a new term to describe this – “green-hushing”. We wrote and designed the report and then developed a strategy to secure maximum coverage of the report, including press materials in different languages, with tailored results for each region.
We connected the client’s experts with key media titles around the world, and ensured the untold story of green-hushing garnered worldwide coverage, including in Bloomberg, Business Times, Financial Times, POLITICO, and many more.
Since then, “green hushing” has become established in the lexicon of climate change, and continues to generate significant attention, including for our client.