Walk your path, speak the truth: the balance between sustainability commitment and communication

Purpose This study aims to examine how consumers perceive and interpret corporate sustainability signals in light of the alignment between firms’ actual sustainability commitment and their sustainability communication. Design/methodology/approach Grounded in legitimacy theory and signaling theory, this exploratory qualitative study uses in-depth interviews with Brazilian consumers to examine how they interpret sustainability signals across various organizational commitment and communication configurations, as conceptualized in the transparency matrix. Findings Interview participants judge corporate sustainability by the coherence between what firms do and what they claim. The findings clarify how participants define sustainability commitment and show that they strongly penalize opaque companies, while viewing translucent companies more ambivalently. They also accept incremental progress and legitimize “shades of transparency,” where firms coherently disclose partial but authentic efforts. Research limitations/implications As the study is exploratory and conducted in a single national context, with participants predominantly well-educated, the findings should be interpreted cautiously. Practical implications The findings guide managers in aligning sustainability communication with actual commitment and organizational maturity. Acknowledging limits and trade-offs reduces perceptions of greenwashing, builds stakeholder trust and strengthens legitimacy, even when progress is incremental. Originality/value The study extends the transparency matrix by introducing an intermediate configuration, labeled “shades of transparency,” which captures companies that communicate partial but genuine sustainability efforts in alignment with their organizational maturity. This reconceptualization moves beyond dichotomous classifications, offering a more nuanced framework to understand coherence as a driver of legitimacy.