Is Purposewashing the new greenwashing

The article has been written by AllBright Australia member + guest-contributor, , co-founder of .

Over the past few years there has been a monumental rise in brands professing to be ‘purpose-led’. All sorts of businesses from early stage start-ups through to established corporations are adopting the term and splashing it across their comms – from keynote speeches to dedicated website pages – but how, as businesses - and businesspeople - do we ensure that our internal actions add up to our external proclamations?

Because of our agency’s impact-led niche within the PR and Digital Marketing realm, we hear from lots of brands who are about to launch but ‘need’ a token cause to latch on to, as they believe that’s the secret sauce to a successful business. The idea of shoehorning an ‘ethical’ mission in this way is a difficult conversation to approach and an even harder one to make recommendations around. 

When we first started Compass, we were very much focused on environmental sustainability as our sole ‘purpose’. At the time, this felt like the most important responsibility. But what we’ve since come to realise is that there are many extremely important – and multi-layered – issues in the world and all of these causes hold varying degrees of importance and urgency to everyone, usually depending on our age, gender, culture, ability, belief systems, personal privileges and occupation.

For instance:

A family struggling to afford their weekly groceries are naturally and rightfully less concerned about the impact of industrial agriculture than they are about the rising rate of financial inequality across the country.

A person of colour who endures the effects of unconscious – or even conscious – bias on a daily basis is probably even more passionate about the battle for racial equality than the battle against ocean plastics.

A woman who is continually harassed when catching public transport late at night would almost certainly rather her local government crack down on surveillance, security and sanctions to keep her and her friends protected before using its entire transport budget on building a couple of electric car charging stations.

You get the picture. Purpose is, by nature, relative.

However, what we’ve started to see recently is a lot of businesses picking an issue, labelling it their ‘purpose’ and self-congratulating themselves for doing so, but then ignoring or not even acknowledging all kinds of other crucial problems that society faces – from systemic discrimination to domestic violence, animal cruelty to generational poverty, and sadly many more.

Of course, it’s always better to do something rather than nothing. We would never discourage or discredit any piece of positive progress. However, putting out a token recycling bin, giving employees one performative day of ‘charity’ a year, or simply ticking a CSR box in another fairly superficial way does not automatically make an organisation ‘purpose-led’.

So how can businesses become aware of their potential blinds spots and avoid them?

Here are four ways to add substance to your business’ sense of purpose:

EXPAND YOUR CONVERSATIONS

You need to allow your team a platform to voice their perspectives and passions and share them with those who may have had little or no exposure to certain matters. Empower your people to create initiatives around the things they care about and educate others about them, so the lessons can live on.

SHOW DON’T TELL

Not every good move you make needs to be shouted about on social media. Quietly getting on with good work behind the scenes is far more authentic than sprinkling ‘sustainable’ and ‘purpose’ beside some highly designed Instagram tiles. Although there’s a lot to be said for spreading awareness, not everything you do has to become a loud marketing campaign. Actions always speak louder than words – their intentions are purer.

MAKE IT A CURIOSITY, NOT A DUTY

Making the time, effort, and often uncomfortable move to open your mind, test your empathy and learn about something outside of your everyday life needn’t be a burden. When anything feels too overwhelming, many of us end up doing nothing, which isn’t helpful at all, so my advice would be, just start somewhere.

How about organising a non-fiction book club among your colleagues and/or friends, where each month a different person selects a social topic that everyone reads about?

Or, instead of binge watching five episodes of your favourite series on a Sunday evening, try scrolling a little further through Netflix and turn it into a weekly doco-night, where you can immerse yourself into a new subject each week and discover something you would have never otherwise engaged with?

PAY ATTENTION TO WHO IS PAYING ATTENTION

As well as noticing the brands that are plagiarising purpose badly, it is also really worth examining those who embed and execute it well.  In my opinion, an excellent example of this is .

The brand began by selling bottled water in single-use plastic and used the profits to fund projects towards ending world poverty. However, over the course of a decade since they started, attitudes towards single use plastic changed dramatically and Thankyou found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the good they were doing for people with the bad they were simultaneously doing for the planet. Ending world poverty is their fundamental mission, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of the environment, so after 12 years of business they let go of their genesis product and found alternative ways of making an even more positive contribution. 

We’d love to hear what your business’ guiding purpose is. Has it has evolved over time? And how does it apply in practice? Please feel free to share in the comments below.