Looking to refresh your communications or for a PR partner with a bit more power? We’d love to hear from you.
By Kelly Pepworth, MD Speed Communications
There’s a conversation in boardrooms and it goes something like this: the sustainability team wants supply chain transparency, procurement wants cost control, and marketing wants to tell a compelling story. The problem is that all three are talking past each other and not connecting. In an age where authenticity, reputation and trust are not soft metrics but hard currency, this has become a fundamental brand risk.
The key shift is that your supply chain no longer sits outside of your company or your brand. It is your brand. Everything your marketing team says about your values, your environmental commitments, and your social responsibility is only as credible as what’s happening three tiers upstream.
What happens when they don’t align? Boohoo built a brand on trend-led fashion. But when an undercover investigation revealed workers at a UK supplier factory were being paid as little as £3.50 an hour – well below minimum wage – the brand story collapsed overnight. By 2024, institutional investors had filed lawsuits in the UK courts, alleging the company made misleading public statements about its labour practices. The reputational damage was not a communications problem. It was a supply chain problem that became a communications catastrophe.
Drax, the UK energy provider, found itself paying £25 million and submitting to a full supply chain audit after the energy regulator uncovered reporting failures in its biomass operations – the very operations it had positioned as a “green” alternative. A single word ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ applied without the supply chain evidence to support it, can become an expensive liability.
For those in PR and marketing, this used to be a reputational risk conversation. Now it’s a legal one. In January 2026, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published updated guidance making clear that any brand repeating, relying on, or disseminating misleading green claims across its supply chain can face enforcement action with fines of up to 10% of global turnover. This means than brands can no longer take supplier assurances at face value. They are expected to take “reasonable steps” to verify claims before putting them in front of consumers.
For sustainability managers, this is both validation and pressure. Validation, because the business case that supply chain transparency matters is now enshrined in law. Pressure, because marketing teams may not yet understand that the copy they write is now closer to a legal document than a brand narrative.
Supply chain transparency has historically been framed as a cost. Due diligence, audits, supplier questionnaires, third-party verification – if your supply chain runs into hundreds of differing businesses this can be time-consuming and expensive. It can also be difficult to communicate externally. Most of the value gets buried in a sustainability report that relatively few people read.
The brands that will win the next decade of sustainability communication are not the ones with the most ambitious commitments. They are the ones who can demonstrate, specifically and verifiably, that the thing they claim about themselves is true all the way down the supply chain.
Verified supply chain data gives you real, auditable, substantiated proof that your claims are true. In an environment where consumer scepticism about green claims is at an all-time high, and where regulators are actively looking for companies making unsubstantiated assertions, proof is extraordinarily rare and valuable.
It’s clear that marketing and sustainability cannot operate as separate functions. The organisations making progress are treating sustainability managers as strategic partners in brand development, not compliance gatekeepers at the end of the process.
When supply chain integrity becomes a genuine brand differentiator, it creates commercial advantage: stronger relationships with investors and authentic stories that resonate with audiences that have become very good at detecting ‘green washing’.
If your marketing team were asked tomorrow to substantiate every environmental claim on your website with supply chain evidence, could you do it? If the honest answer is ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ you have a brand risk.
The supply chain is your brand now. The sooner marketing and sustainability sit at the same table to work through what that means, the stronger and more credible your brand will be.