We have spent considerable energy as an industry discussing greenwashing — the practice of overstating environmental credentials. And rightly so. But there is a more pervasive and in some ways more insidious version of the same phenomenon that has gone largely unchallenged: purpose-washing. The practice of brands claiming social purpose, community values, and ethical commitment that bear no relationship to how they actually operate.
Purpose-washing looks like the fast fashion brand that launches a mental health campaign while paying its garment workers poverty wages. It looks like the tech company that runs advertisements featuring diverse, joyful communities while its own workforce and leadership remain strikingly homogenous. It looks like the bank that positions itself as the financial partner of India’s underserved while charging fees that systematically exclude the very people its marketing celebrates.
The proliferation of purpose-driven brand strategy over the past decade has produced something nobody intended: a marketplace so saturated with purpose claims that the concept of genuine corporate purpose has been almost completely devalued. When every brand has a ‘mission beyond profit,’ the phrase means nothing. When every product launch comes with a cause partnership, the cause becomes marketing collateral.
The communications professionals who build these campaigns are not always the ones making the fundamental decisions about how the business operates. I understand that. Many of us are working with the constraints we are given, doing our best to find the genuine story in an organisation’s behaviour and amplify it. But there is a point at which finding the genuine story requires acknowledging that there isn’t one — and that the right counsel is to build one, not to communicate as though it already exists.
I have turned down purpose-washing briefs. Not many, but some. The ones where the gap between what the client wanted to say and what the organisation was actually doing was wide enough that any communications strategy built on it would eventually produce a more damaging exposé than simply saying nothing would have.
The antidote to purpose-washing is a concept so simple it should not need stating: do the thing first, then communicate it. Fix the supply chain. Pay the wages. Diversify the leadership. Build the programme. Then — and only then — tell the story. Purpose that is communicated before it is lived is not a communications strategy. It is a liability waiting to detonate.
Our industry needs to stop accepting purpose-washing briefs, and it needs to start saying so publicly. The reputation of the communications profession is inseparable from the reputations we build. When those reputations are built on fiction, we are all implicated.
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