Sustainable Brand Practices and Long-Term Customer Retention: The Mediating Role of Trust and the Moderating Effect of Perceived Greenwashing

Abstract

Sustainability is no longer a fringe concern in brand strategy - for many firms it has become a central way of competing for customer loyalty. What's less clear is exactly how sustainable brand practices turn into lasting customer relationships. This paper builds a framework connecting sustainable brand practices to long-term customer retention through a chain running from signal credibility to customer trust to relational commitment, and it treats perceived greenwashing as a condition that can weaken or reverse that chain. The framework draws on stakeholder theory, signaling theory, and the commitment-trust theory of relationship marketing, grounded in empirical work published between 2021 and 2025. To show what testing the model actually involves, the paper analyzes a simulated dataset (N = 320) built to match the reliability levels, sample sizes, and effect sizes reported in comparable published studies; every statistic reported below - reliabilities, correlations, regression paths, bootstrapped mediation effects, moderation tests - comes from this illustrative dataset rather than new fieldwork. The results tell a fairly clean story. Sustainable brand practices relate to long-term retention only indirectly: the serial indirect effect running through signal credibility, trust, and commitment is significant (standardized indirect effect = .079, 95% bootstrap CI [.050, .114]), while the direct, unmediated effect is close to zero and not significant (β = .02, p = .67) - a textbook full-mediation pattern. Perceived greenwashing significantly weakens both the practice-to-credibility and credibility-to-trust paths, consistent with the idea that unsubstantiated sustainability claims carry outsized reputational risk. The paper closes with theoretical and managerial implications and a call to replicate the analysis with real consumer data.