Ethical Marketing: Winning trust in 2025

In a world of fake news, too-good-to-be-true claims and AI-generated content, distrust is widespread across all customer segments. To the extent that 71% of buyers don’t believe brands will deliver on their promises. This correlates with people not caring if 75% of brands disappeared overnight, as they’re considered easily replaceable.

To overcome this cynicism and make meaningful connections with customers, marketers need to build a believable, trustworthy brand. Is ethical marketing the answer? We’ll explore its potential benefits and pitfalls.

What is ethical marketing?

Ethical marketing is when companies create promotional activities for their products, services or brands that align with their corporate values and responsibilities. These ethics apply to both brand messaging and the approach marketers and salespeople take towards their work.

For example, an ethical business will create communications around its corporate social responsibility (CSR) and also have stringent customer data protection protocols. In short, ethical marketing is when brands both talk and act within their values.

This approach aims to build trust between customers and a business. An objective that has grown in importance alongside buyers’ cynicism towards brands.

Core principles of ethical marketing

Alongside a company's values, there are a few guiding principles which drive the ethical marketing approach, including:

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– Transparency: being completely open about business practices, such as product sourcing, data protection and operational challenges

– Sustainability: showing genuine commitment towards reducing a business’s environmental impact

– Responsibility: for social causes (by engaging in community initiatives) and a business’s actions (by taking ownership and accountability, even when something goes wrong)

– Honesty: avoiding misleading claims or making undeliverable promises about products or services and not manipulating customers’ decision-making

– Fairness: putting people before profits by truly understanding customer needs and treating them with respect.

The importance of trust in 2025

As the world has become more uncertain and unstable, people want reassurance from the brands they buy from. Brands that offer a sense of safety and security were more highly valued by 73% of buyers. For 71% of these, trusting brands is more important now than previously, rising to 79% for Gen Z customers.

Key to building this trust is the actions brands take, with 60% of customers saying their interactions with a business help them understand if it's ethical or not. They’re also five times more likely to buy from brands who commit to acting against climate change and four and a half times more if they stand against racism.

In short, brands that walk the walk, take meaningful action and are trustworthy will reassure people enough to buy from them.

Ethically-led brands

These businesses haven’t just put their money where their ethics are, they’ve put their values front and centre, and it’s paying off.

Patagonia

Environmental and social activism has been at the centre of Patagonia’s brand from day one. Flying in the face of fast fashion, consumerism and the resulting impacts on the climate, the brand actively works to educate customers about responsible consumption.

This extended to their Black Friday ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ campaign which promoted their Common Threads Initiative. This pledges that Patagonia will act alongside any steps a customer takes to lower their impact. For example, the Reduce pledge says ‘We make useful gear that lasts a long time. You don’t buy what you don’t need.’

In short, Patagonia brings its customers along on the sustainability journey by giving them helpful guidance and living up to its own standards.

The Body Shop

The first in the cosmetics industry to take a stand against animal testing, The Body Shop has since become famous for its cruelty-free beauty products. Linking with activist organisation Cruelty-Free International, they delivered a petition against animal testing with 8.3 million signatures to the UN in 2018.

This was after they’d taken a stand for human rights alongside Amnesty International in 1998, stopping the sex trafficking of children and young people from 2009 to 2012 and raising HIV and AIDS awareness for around two decades.

 Throughout these 35 years of change-making, the brand has aimed to ‘strive for long-term, systemic social change for the next generation.’ A track record that buyers would find undeniable and hugely attractive.

TOMS

The whole TOMS brand was built on a desire for social change. It was founded in 2006 by Blake Mycoskie after a trip to Argentina exposed him to the country’s extreme child poverty. He reinvented the ‘alpargata’ shoe design for the U.S. market and implemented the "One for One" model, where a pair of shoes is donated for each sold.

Branding themselves as a ‘giving’ company, they actively work to take feedback and do more through new products. Raising aid by selling their winter boots and sneakers, they also work directly with manufacturers and craftspeople in the countries they support. These efforts help to improve these communities’ economic standings and end shoelessness.

Everlane

To stop sweatshop manufacturing and promote ethical working conditions in the fashion industry, Everlane operates Radical Transparency. This policy means they’re completely open about their material sourcing and factory locations.

From only working with factories that score 90 or above on a compliance audit, to using Grade A cashmere and Peruvian Pima fabrics for their ranges, Everlane is completely open about its high ethical standards. So customers can know exactly what they’re buying and where the money they pay for items is going.

Read all about the brands ethical principles here: www.everlane.com/sustainability

How to get ethical marketing right

The first step to an ethical marketing approach is defining and setting your brand values. These need to be specific, achievable and true to your business. For example, if you can’t truly commit to improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) internally or the communities you work with, then don’t.

If your CSR values don’t fit in with your business, you’re putting yourself at risk of not meeting your promises. This can undermine the trust you’re looking to build and lead to embarrassing incidents of ‘greenwashing’ or ‘woke-washing’.

Once you have refined your brand values and ambitions, you must be open about them to your potential buyers. Whether you publish the details online, create a report or develop a creative campaign to promote them, your policies, aims and strategy must be completely transparent. This will build trust and demonstrate your commitment to customers.

Reflect your brand's ethics

Building trust through an ethical marketing approach will make customers more likely to choose you over other brands. However, to make it effective and avoid any pitfalls, you need to carefully develop your CSR policies and genuinely follow them.

To find out how to evaluate and enhance your brand’s marketing strategies to meet ethical standards, call us on 01926 754038 or drop us an email at hello@designmc.org