The challenge
The paper started from a gap in consumer behaviour: while 8 in 10 New Zealanders want to live more sustainably, 71% name cost as the barrier (Kantar, 2022), and Bain & Company found sustainability ranks well below quality, price and durability when people actually choose clothes. Sustainability, sold on its own, loses.
Working through attitude theory — the cognitive, affective and conative components — I argued the lever is the affective one: the feelings attached to a brand, which shift through the peripheral route of visual communication. Tie sustainability to quality, durability and identity, and it stops reading as an expensive add-on. That became the brief for the ad:
“How do you sell sustainability to people who rank it last — without ever arguing about the price?”— the brief the ad had to answer
The ad
The advertisement answers it through feeling, not a spec sheet. A hiker moves through an inverted landscape — the world flipped so nature reads as the ground you stand on — under a vertical line that spells “Patagonia walks the talk.” It positions the brand as a genuine sustainability leader, which Kantar found is exactly what New Zealand consumers look for: brands “committed to making society better.”
The thinking
The closing line, “Wear what you stand for,” moves the pitch from product to person — turning the purchase into a small act of identity rather than a trade-off against cost. Every choice is a peripheral cue: the wilderness imagery, the confident wordmark, the absence of any price or eco-claim. Nothing lectures; the feeling carries the message.
It's a compact piece — one image, a few words — but it's the point where the marketing theory in Part A becomes a design decision in Part B.
Read it
The written assignment — Part A on consumer behaviour, Part B on the ad. Six pages; drag a page, click a side, or use the arrows to turn.
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