Why Australian consumers are more sceptical than ever — and what it means for your marketing

Trust is at a multi-year low — and Australians know it

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer put trust in Australian business at 52% and trust in government at 45%, with Australia recording one of the steeper year-on-year declines in the 28-country study. The same report found that a majority of Australians believe business leaders are "purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations".¹

Roy Morgan's long-running Net Trust Score tells a similar story on the industry side: sectors including banking, social media and energy have carried negative net trust scores for years, and advertising itself continues to sit near the bottom of Roy Morgan's professions ranking, with advertising people trusted by only around 8% of Australians surveyed.²³

Why scepticism has hardened

Three things have compounded. First, high-profile enforcement — the ACCC's action against Clorox (GLAD kitchen and garbage bags marketed as containing "50% Ocean Plastic" that were made from plastic collected up to 50km inland), and ASIC's greenwashing actions against Vanguard, Mercer and Active Super — has been widely reported and shown consumers that well-known brands do overstate environmental claims.⁴⁵

Second, cost-of-living pressure. Consumer Policy Research Centre research published in 2024 found that 79% of Australians are concerned about businesses making misleading environmental claims, and that many will not pay a premium for a "green" product they cannot verify.⁶

Third, the ACCC's internet sweep. Its March 2023 sweep reviewed 247 businesses across eight sectors and concluded that 57% made concerning claims about their environmental credentials. The finding was widely covered in mainstream Australian media, which reinforced the public view that vague green marketing is often unsupported.⁷

What sceptical customers actually do

The behavioural pattern in Australian consumer research is consistent. Sceptical customers don't stop buying — they discount claims and shift trust to signals they can check. In practice that means:

• Looking for a specific number, unit or period rather than an adjective. "30% recycled content" beats "made with recycled materials".
• Looking for a named third party or programme. Climate Active, the Australasian Recycling Label (ARL), Good Environmental Choice Australia (GECA), GreenPower and B Corp are the ones Australians recognise most readily.⁸⁹
• Reading the "about" and FAQ pages before the product page. Vague values-language on those pages now increases scepticism rather than reducing it.
• Cross-checking on third-party sites — CHOICE, news coverage, ACCC media releases — before big-ticket or repeat purchases.

What this means for marketing copy

The instinct to add more emotive language to compensate for lost trust is the wrong one. Sceptical customers read intensifiers ("truly", "genuinely", "deeply committed") as red flags. The copy that performs is the copy that reads like it would survive an audit.

Four adjustments do most of the work:

1. Replace adjectives with attributes. "Sustainable packaging" becomes "cardboard mailer, 80% post-consumer recycled, kerbside recyclable under the ARL".
2. Name the third party. If a claim relies on a certification, scheme or standard, name it and link to it on the same page.
3. State the scope. Which product, which site, which period. "Our Melbourne warehouse ran on 100% accredited GreenPower in FY2025" is a claim; "we use renewable energy" is a slogan.
4. Say what isn't done yet. Australian consumer research and the ACCC's principle 8 point the same way: openness about the transition builds more trust than a polished but incomplete story.¹⁰

The overlap with regulatory risk

The claims a sceptical Australian customer distrusts are almost exactly the claims the ACCC flags under its eight principles: vague, unqualified, unsubstantiated, missing scope, missing evidence. Fixing marketing copy for trust and fixing it for compliance are, in practice, the same edit. There is no version of the copy where vague language wins on either axis.

Related reading

See what Australian consumers actually expect from environmental claims, the ACCC's eight principles, and Australian enforcement examples.