For B2B companies, certifications lose their power in turbulent times like these

Social and environmental certifications (e.g., fair trade, organic, recyclable) create commercial lift in calm markets. Unfortunately, today’s world is anything but calm, and recent research has found that when markets are turbulent, certifications aren’t the way to drive revenue. 

To be sure, certifications offer non-revenue-generating benefits, including internal operational discipline, commitment signals to regulators and investors, and a baseline verification mechanism that can matter for compliance. But when it comes to B2B sales, this is a good time to rethink how much you lean on certifications.

The evidence

In a 2025 article in Industrial Marketing Management, Marcel Aksoy and Benedikt Schnellbächer ran a controlled scenario experiment with 655 German business professionals. They tested three ways of framing sustainability for a purchasing audience: monetization (financial return, cost reduction), certification (third-party verified standards), and risk reduction (exposure, resilience, downside protection). Certification and risk framings were evaluated alongside a no-frame control, under both low and high market turbulence.

Each frame outperformed no frame at all (I’ll come back to this later). Their effectiveness, though, diverged sharply as turbulence rose.

Under calm conditions, certification had a statistically significant effect on purchasing decisions. Under high turbulence, it didn’t. Risk framing was the reverse: insignificant at low levels of turbulence, a notable benefit at high ones.

Why certifications lose their benefit

When buyers experience turbulence, their priorities and behavior change. A 2022 study by Leff Bonney, Lisa Beeler and Nawar N. Chaker in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management found post-COVID buyers reporting greater formalization of purchasing, less openness to new providers and a greater reliance on incumbents, with risk reduction as the chief reason.

As one of the purchasing managers they interviewed put it: “It’s all about hedging risk for us, and that’s why we are doing this. I think that our previous decision-making processes focused on cost reductions mainly around unit price of products being sourced and occasionally on labor savings. But now, we have to factor in risk.” 

This pattern is echoed across different roles and timeframes. For example, it appears in what sustainability professionals say about themselves today, according to Deloitte’s 2026 CSO Benchmarking Survey. The results show “a clear focus on ‘defensive,’ bottom-line activities. Most CSOs are using sustainability to protect value by boosting efficiency (76 percent) and managing risks (76 percent).”

In other words, in turbulent times, a focus on risk crowds out other factors, including your credentials. Fundamentally, from the buyer’s perspective: Certification is about you. Risk framing is about them.

What works instead

“Here is how this reduces your exposure” lands harder in volatile markets, when buyers are in a downside-management mode, because that framing meets buyers where they are.

Monetization showed the strongest overall effect against the no-frame control (although, unlike certification and risk, it wasn’t tested against different turbulence levels, so we can’t compare results under various conditions). Framing sustainability in terms of financial return, ROI or measurable cost reduction consistently moved purchase decisions. (Disclosure: Monetization of sustainability’s benefits is what we do at Valutus, so I may be biased toward this result. So don’t take my word for it; test monetization with your own audiences.) 

The implication for practitioners is clear: Analyze your market conditions before deciding what to lead with. Certification can be part of the story in calm markets, In turbulent ones, it lags behind risk.

Now is the time

SBTi and ISO have both recently updated their net zero standards, forcing practitioners to articulate what their certifications actually mean to buyers, investors and internal stakeholders. That moment of scrutiny is an opportunity. 

The question “What is our certification actually doing for our commercial relationships?” is easy to skip during a period of assumed consensus. But that’s not where we are. 

The credential doesn’t change with the market. But the buyer does, and your message should too.