Our thinking

Messaging and meaning

10 January, 2025

Where best to locate a corporate sustainability team in a business? A perennial question that Unilever’s reported decision to merge its sustainability and corporate communications and affairs teams has put back in the spotlight.  

Ten years ago, most sustainability teams sat in the corporate communications function. Sustainability was a largely separate endeavour from the core business, and the emphasis was on explaining corporate efforts to the outside world. But times have changed.  

Last year, just 19% of respondents to our  Sustainability Leaders Panel said they were part of the communications function, with almost twice that number saying sustainability was a standalone function or fully integrated into the business. As sustainability matures, becomes more embedded in business strategy and as reporting on sustainability becomes more regulated and more closely integrated into financial reporting, it’s less common to find sustainability professionals working in communications. That’s not to say comms isn’t a crucial part of the process – over 90% of respondents said they worked closely with their communications colleagues, who have a crucial role to play in explaining a company’s sustainability efforts to stakeholders. As the culture wars heat up and some companies begin to assess what they say about sustainability and how they say it, having skilled professionals navigate this landscape effectively makes a lot of sense.  

But separating the functions also makes sense. The goal of corporate communications and corporate affairs is to serve the best interests of the company. A legitimate aim but one that is not always well aligned with sustainability which – at best – should be balancing the needs of the business and society. And while in the long term, the two should align, putting the two together risks undermining a business’s ability day to day to make tough decisions and plays down the importance of innovation, strategy and procurement in sustainability. Locating it elsewhere connects it more closely to these core business functions where there is a possibility to create real change.  

So Unilever’s choice is an interesting one, particularly as it pulls back from the ambitious goals set by its previous leadership team in favour of “more focused” sustainability goals.  Time will tell if this is a cunning masterstroke designed to raise the profile of sustainability or a cost-saving measure which will see sustainability deprioritised within Unilever’s strategy.

By Claire Jost