In this article I’m going to do a breakdown of ERM’s brand and marketing, bringing you insights that helped them become market leaders in sustainability consulting.
If you work in the environment sector, then you’ve probably heard of ERM. For everyone else, ERM–an acronym for Environmental Resources Management–is a titan of the environmental consultancy world.
Raking in a respectable $1.4billion in global revenue in 2024 (£95m UK consulting revenue), and holding around a 4.3% share of the UK environmental consulting market, they’ve been a top organisation in the sector for decades.
Figure 1: UK top 25 market share for environmental consulting [Source]
In this article, I’m going to break down their approach to branding, marketing and sales. I’m going to try and show you what’s really working when it comes to growth for one of the industry’s biggest players.
Everything below is based on facts and data, with my analysis and insight added on top. For transparency, I (nor Fablr) have any connection to ERM, this analysis is entirely from my own extensive research.
A little background
ERM was formed in 1987 through the merger of UK-based Environmental Resources Limited and US-based Environmental Resources Management, Inc.. This transatlantic union immediately provided an international presence, a significant differentiator from its domestic-focused competitors.
Guided by co-founder Dr. Robin Bidwell, the firm established a reputation for deep technical excellence. This early focus on rigorous, science-based “boots on the ground” work built the foundation of credibility for its current “boots to boardroom” strategy.
ERM’s recently rebranded logo and Group CEO, Tom Reichert
Today, ERM’s success rests on four pillars: a laser-focused brand identity, an aggressive acquisition strategy, a seriously smart thought leadership engine, and a clever pivot into digital products. Let’s break down how they did it.
So, what’s their secret? It starts with saying no
In a world where professional services firms are constantly adding new strings to their bow, ERM did the opposite. They defined themselves with fierce clarity as “the world’s largest pure-play sustainability consultancy”.
“Pure-play” is the real killer move here. It communicates an unwavering focus and deep expertise. It’s a direct challenge to diversified consultancies and the Big Four, for whom sustainability is often just one practice area among many. ERM’s message is simple and powerful: for us, this isn’t a side hustle; it’s all we do.
They also lay out their stall without any ambiguity whatsoever. “Sustainability Consultancy”. No messing around. That’s what they do, and nothing else.
This “pure-play” identity is there to build trust as quickly as possible. When a company is facing a massive, business-critical challenge like decarbonisation, who are they going to call? The generalist, or the dedicated specialist?
Their recent rebrand by Pentagram has consolidated this messaging and woven it into the very fabric of their new visual and verbal identity.
The lesson? Once you’ve found something that works, lean in.
ERM’s brand evolution
Let’s wind the clock back and look at how their brand has changed over the years. The best way I can represent this change is by presenting a timeline of their website. Firstly, I could actually find this information, and secondly, a homepage is usually a great microcosm of a brand.
The first site that I could find a record of, from way back in 1997, looked like this:
Classic 90’s internet! You can see their logo in the bottom right—this remains mostly unchanged until 2023 when they did a full rebrand. There’s not much I want to comment here, other than showing you the various stages of change the brand went through.
Next we go to the early 2000’s:
Back then, web design was barely a discipline. Early web technology (and design software) simply wasn’t capable of producing anything like the modern designs we see today. Even having a large image banner could drastically slow the loading speed of a page to the point where nobody would hang around long enough.
The next set of sites show the progression over the last 15 years, culminating with their 2023 total rebrand. Check out their latest website here.
The logo itself has now changed, retaining the familiar spiral shape. Rather than try and explain the rationale behind this myself, here’s a take directly from the Group CEO, Tom Reichert, himself:
ERM’s original brand had its foundations in science and nature. Our refreshed brand builds on this rich heritage and the central role of nature in our future through the continued use of a spiral. It also captures the economic and societal transformation now needed, which we are passionate about helping to drive.
Our new logo features lines within two concentric circles, indicating both macro and micro perspectives; combining strategic transformation and technical delivery. It highlights the importance of embedding sustainability across every aspect of business.
Here’s some shots from the new identity (source, Pentagram):
So there we have it, a short walk down memory lane. You can immediately see how the new brand identity encapsulates everything that ERM is as a business. Now let’s deep dive into how they have applied this new brand across their marketing work.
What they did:
Full rebrand to align their business model, service offering, vision and values. Worked with an external partner to develop the brand and digital platform (their website). Leaned into their ‘pure-play’ roots as a sustainability specialist and built the foundations of a new brand around this entirely. The rebrand solidified their already dominant position in this niche.
What you can do:
While you probably don’t have the budget that ERM did, you can certainly look at doing either a full or partial rebrand. While ERM were well past 2,000 employees before even their second-most-recent website refresh, you might not be in a position to already be operating globally with £300m+ revenue.
Solidifying a leading position in the market might not be the route for you, certainly not if you aren’t a leader. Yet. What a brand transformation does for you is allow you to skip the queue, so to speak, and appear far more mature and sophisticated in your market than you would do so otherwise. It opens doors. Gives you an edge over your competition, who may still come across as working in the previous decade and not the one we’re actually in. This isn’t pretending, either. If your service offering is excellent, and your clients happy, then you’re already on the path to operational excellence. It’s just that your brand might not give that impression. If you’re not in a position to be excellent at what you do, then I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you’ve got far bigger problems than brand, marketing and sales to worry about! Great marketing rarely patches over poor service delivery.
You should consider what your true essence is as a professional services firm. What is your specialism? If you’re a general practitioner, then lean into that. You can talk about your breadth of services, and present yourselves as an end-to-end solution.
If you want to win bigger, more prestigious clients—which often involves pitching for work against larger, better armed competitors—then you better show up in your best branding. Looking the part is the first step in getting your foot in the door.
An x-ray on: messaging
ERM have focused their messaging around their primary business niche, which is sustainability. Their tagline spells it out about as clearly as you’re going to get:
Sustainability is our business.
What they did:
Simple, clear tagline that communicates exactly what you do.
What you can do:
Think about how you can best phrase your own tagline. This is the kind of thing that appears at the top of your website, on a business card, or on the front page of a sales deck or brochure.
Tone of Voice
The brand’s tone of voice is consistently authoritative, strategic, and socially conscious.
Authoritative and expert: ERM comes across as a knowledgeable leader with deep experience in the field. They achieve this through confident, declarative statements and by framing much of their work in light of client success. They use specialised terminology to speak to an expert audience, reinforcing this authority.
Strategic and forward-looking: The tone is not merely descriptive but prescriptive and forward-thinking. Their messaging focuses on creating long-term value for all stakeholders, positioning ERM as a trusted partner in sustainable success, not just a compliance consultant.
Cautionary and urgent: ERM aren’t afraid to use charged language to highlight risk and urgency where impact is needed. They will warn of consequences (e.g. “stalled projects, reputational harm, and diminished investor confidence”). Their cautionary tone emphasises the high stakes involved for their clients and frames their services as essential for risk mitigation.
Socially conscious and responsible: ERM consistently employs a vocabulary of ethical responsibility. They often call for “purposeful, inclusive development” and emphasise the need to “foster respect for human rights, dignity and culture of indigenous populations”. This kind of language reinforces their commitment to modern ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles. It’s a powerful signal that they are considerate and understand that their work doesn’t just involve them and their clients. There’s an entire world of people out there who can be affected by issues that they work on.
Language and sophistication
ERM’s language is sophisticated, professional, and tailored for a corporate and technical audience (no surprises here), including project developers, financiers, and government stakeholders.
Clarity and structure: They make sure that their content is very clearly structured and presents a coherent narrative. This extends from articles on their website to whitepapers and press releases.
Sophistication: Phrases such as “contending with an ever-shifting operating landscape”, “navigating a fragmented and contested stakeholder landscape”, and “continuation of long-standing patterns of marginalisation” show a high level of sophistication suitable for their intended senior stakeholder audience.
Action-oriented language: Despite its sophistication, the language is also pragmatic and action-oriented. Recommendations are stated clearly, often beginning with strong verbs, e.g. “Conduct culturally appropriate stakeholder analysis” and “Build internal capacity”. They want to be seen as doers, and not just report pushers. Active, not passive.
Core messaging
ERM’s verbal identity is crafted to deliver several key messages about their role and value proposition.
ERM is an integrated, end-to-end partner: They position themselves as a holistic partner that provides support “from the project site to the boardroom”. This “boots to boardroom” approach highlights their ability to handle field-level engagement while also advising on high-level governance and strategy. Why? Their clients want this approach, so ERM make sure to emphasise it whenever they can.
ERM translates complexity into action: ERM’s ability to navigate complex issues needs to be communicated in a way that clearly highlights an actionable output. Clients want impact, not a long email thread.
What they did:
Talk in a manner that resonates with their audience. Speaking the same language. Maintaining professionalism throughout, and continuously reinforcing their expertise and ESG values.
What you can do:
The same. You’ve got a complex offering with senior stakeholders, so talk like it. Just think about how your typical client speaks, and then speak in the same manner. Don’t overthink it. Be natural, be effortless, but shine a spotlight on your values and expertise as you go.
An x-ray on: content
ERM produce a huge variety of content, including:
- Website articles
- Social media posts
- Reports
- Whitepapers
- Podcasts
- Press releases
- Advertising (more on this later)
Let’s focus on their overall content strategy, and what insights we can gain.
Thought leadership is their main approach here. And that makes sense. They are a market leader in their niche and it’s important to maintain that position. To do this, they generate a large amount of content and disseminate it through several channels.
The extent of their thought leadership covers an impressive range of touchpoints. They position themselves as genuine thought leaders who are not just talking about, but helping to shape the entire sustainability agenda.
They do this in a few key ways:
Their own think tank: They have something called The Sustainability Institute, which is dedicated to publishing research and reports on the big, emerging topics in sustainability. The whole point is to develop practical, actionable insights that businesses can actually use. There’s a members-only area here (charged at $8,000/year if you’re curious) offering even greater benefits. Check out their brochure if you want to take a closer look!
Bringing in the experts: It’s not just their own staff. They’ve put together a high-level advisory group, the Council on Sustainability Transformation, which brings in senior leaders from corporations, government, and academia to tackle systemic challenges and publish guidance for everyone.
Sharing data and content: They’re constantly conducting industry surveys and benchmarking studies to see how companies are getting on with things like climate disclosures or emissions efficiency. They also publish a lot of content—an annual trends report, a podcast called “Sustainable Connections,” and their experts are often writing for major publications like the Harvard Business Review or being quoted by The Financial Times.
Global collaboration: They’re very active with major global bodies like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the UN, often contributing to working groups that develop official industry guidance.
That’s a lot of thought leadership. It’s a deliberate strategy to stay at the cutting edge. It means that when clients hire them, they’re not just getting a consultant, they’re getting a partner who is actively shaping the future of the field.
Now what do they do with all this content? They put it out into the world. This isn’t eCommerce, so ERM aren’t going to be too interested in worrying about the (largely) impossible task of tracking attribution from a blog touchpoint four months before a new client win. That’s just a waste of effort. Instead, they flood the zone, a term often used to describe propaganda—in this case, they are making sure that their message is the one seen by clients. They put this content on LinkedIn, on partner sites (such as Salesforce), on news and industry websites…everywhere their clients are.
When ERM makes a report, they ensure its topical, relevant, authoritative and designed to match their branding (see below for example).
You want to ensure your own reports follow your branding closely and if your have an outdated brand or one that just doesn’t work that well in a report format (whether PDF or for print) then you might need to do some work on improving that first.
Reports (and whitepapers) are typically used in the middle of the marketing funnel, when prospects are evaluating their options in terms of finding a solution to their problem. Reports are an excellent opportunity to dive deep into your expertise and tall the nitty gritty details of your client’s world. Authority, expertise and professionalism are the name of the game here. Save your light touch content and any hints of personality for your top-of-funnel content like articles and social media posts.
Reports are where you get serious. In ERM’s case, they often use their reports to dive into topical issues of relevance in great detail, leaning hard into “sort this out now, or it will be a serious problem later”. This gets their audience in a serious mindset and to consider them as that trusted expert partner they are looking to become.
Tip: want to see all ERM’s reports for some inspiration? Go to Google and use the search term: site:www.erm.com “report” “pdf”. Enjoy!
Their website houses most of their content with a clear insights page. Nothing groundbreaking here, but they are certainly consistent with their output which is important as stale content can quickly become outdated and even incorrect. Make sure you’re updating your old content regularly too, if it needs it.
One thing to note about their insights area is that they write around topics that match their service offering as well as core client industries. This helps to keep everything relevant and valuable for their audience.
In terms of topics, they are focusing on challenges and pain points that their clients will have. This is where you’ll get the most traction, as they are looking for an organisation like yours to help solve these problems. Stay on topic and think “what keeps my clients up at night?”. Then write about that.
On the content itself, they include the authors, which helps build credibility. They could actually improve on this by:
- Including a short excerpt for each author, covering experience and expertise
- Including author schema markup
- Linking the author section to an author page with proper Schema markup
Tip: read more about Schema markup or read a more technical explanation from Google.
They do nail the OpenGraph markup and meta descriptions though.
Webinars
ERM are producing webinars every couple of months, using them sparingly and tactically to drive awareness in key areas. They bring on relevant guests and approach topics which are relevant to both the services they want to sell and timely for their clients and prospects. For webinars which have been completed, they often present them on their website under the Events section and then gating access behind a form that requires a name, email, job title, company and industry—lots of useful info for the business development team to follow up on!
Here’s what the flow looks like:
The independent company ERM CVS, part of the wider company group (The ERM International Group) is also using webinars regularly, in combination with events, to great effect.
Interestingly, they had their own recent rebrand to pull their brand clearly into the ERM orbit, while maintaining their independent status.
The key aspect of a webinar is having a fixed date, and then generating interest in a live event, particularly so people can ask questions throughout. It’s a really engaging type of content that’s perfect if your office is 1000 miles away from in-person events and conferences.
You can promote them early to drive signups and then promote the on-demand recorded content afterwards. ERM also uses this as an opportunity to collect emails, gating some of their webinars behind a contact form.
Podcast
Many businesses have been experimenting with podcasting in recent years as it has grown more and more popular as a convenient way for many busy professionals to consume content.
Podcasts can be a great way of communicating to your audience in a more personal, less formal manner—it’s ultimately about people. The biggest downside is the time and resources for production, and then consistently creating new episodes.
You can see an example of a podcast by ERM here. The core content approach of covering relevant topics is explored here, and they bring in regular guests to discuss a variety of related topics, too.
Just the effort required to produce a consistent schedule of podcasts gives a premium impression all on its own, but when the content is relevant and useful to your audience, they’ll tune in again and again.
If you’re just getting started with a podcast, be sure to have some budget set aside to promote it. I recommend LinkedIn ads to start with (alongside posting organically on your company website and socials) and then encouraging employees to share on their own LinkedIn profiles.
What they did:
Built an extensive platform of thought leadership, creating consistent content and ensuring it meets brand standards. Content is promoted on all channels and is used across all funnels.
Top-of-funnel: Drive awareness through easy-to-consume content such as articles, social posts, podcasts.
Middle-of-funnel: More specific and complex content focusing on educating prospects in the evaluation stage. Webinars, reports, whitepapers, events.
Bottom-of-funnel: Drive leads and to find the most qualified prospects. Gated content such as on-demand webinar video access.
What you can do:
Utilise a range of content types to explore what your audience prefers. This differs from business to business.