Promises, promises: How to showcase the authenticity of sustainability claims through digitalization

Increasingly companies incorporate sustainability claims into their communications, but there is a challenge both in ensuring that the claims made are kept, and in communicating them effectively, so that consumers and other stakeholders can distinguish between the ephemeral and the real. To integrate sustainability, companies need to ensure that their commitment is authentic, in that it is true to the organization’s beliefs and to the needs of its stakeholders. In this chapter, we put forward a model that demonstrates how digitalization can be used to structure and independently verify authentic sustainability claims, to monitor processes and to communicate through the sharing of stories. Using such examples as Illy Coffee and Tony’s Chocolonely we show how the meaning of a sustainability claim is co-created by companies and their stakeholders together.