Designing Meaning: The Construct of Sustainability in Brand Identities

The proliferation of environmental claims, including cases of greenwashing, has become the subject of the most recent developments in policy-making that seeks to empower consumers for EU’s green transition. But how much protection can such efforts actually provide? Hypothesising the important role visuality plays in implicit communication of societal values, the aim of this on-going research is to uncover and analyse the design of layered meanings that contributes to the construction of perceived sustainability. A distinction between the conceptual and constructive properties of the notion of sustainability is made, first, by arguing a concept of sustainability which encompasses the broader socio-economic context, while the construct is presented as a product of said context: a complex narrative structure built from various semiotic resources within a dominant social paradigm. In an attempt to uncover the elements shaping the construct of sustainability, a case-study method is applied, analysing the images posted over a period of one year on Instagram accounts of Latvia’s top five Greenest Brands of 2023, as established by the most recent findings of the annual Brand Capital study. The results are a series of narrative patterns observed in brand communication that are put forward for further discussion on perceived greenness.