Marketing With Purpose Kit: Avoiding Purpose-Washing by Staying Authentic in Your Actions and Claims

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the Bliss Business Podcast series, Marketing With Purpose, where we explore how to embed purpose into every level of your marketing. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and Mike Liwski. Hey, guys.

**Mike Liwski** (0:33)
Hey, it's good to see you again.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:36)
Yes. Yes. So today we are talking about avoiding purpose watching. Purpose washing. So in other words, how to make your purpose something you live, not just something you say, right? I think we've kind of all seen examples out there, or something where it felt like someone was just checking off a list on their sheet there, as far as purpose and the causes and things that they are doing. So purpose washing, it happens when a brand claims values it doesn't consistently demonstrate, right? So it's like the cousin of green washing, but it's broader. So it can be about sustainability or DEI or mental health or any purpose-driven claim.

**Mike Liwski** (1:25)
Yeah, and Stephen usually shows up when purpose is treated as something that just happens in the marketing department or a marketing slogan, instead of it really being a core belief of the entire organization. Customers today, they're savvier than ever. They'll notice if there's a disconnect right there between what you're saying and what you do.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:50)
Unfortunately, when there's a disconnect, the costs can be huge because what is the cost? You can lose trust, you can get public backlash, and sometimes even employ disengagement as a result of it. Once people feel duped, it's hard to rebuild credibility from there.

**Mike Liwski** (2:12)
For sure, Tullio. There's some common traps that really lead into this problem of purpose washing.
In fact, some of the traps that we see all the time is either just jumping into social issues without showing long-term commitment really. We saw Pepsi at one point with the Black Lives Matter movement, get a ton of backlash with regards to this. Also, others overstate the impact with vague claims or say that they maybe are eco-friendly, inclusive, sustainable, but without really showing some hard evidence and examples of that. Then the last one that we see as far as a trap goes is isolating purpose, again, just to the marketing team. Well, the operations or the supply chain tell a completely different story and live something completely different than that purpose.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:11)
Yeah, exactly. Your purpose, it has to hold up under scrutiny. So from customers, employees, and partners, you can't claim to be people first if your glass door reviews paint a very consistent awful picture about your company. So you want to be about it through and through.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:32)
Yeah. I mean, it can't be disconjointed. You can't say one thing and then act a certain way. Everything has to align, the customers, the employees, the partners, everything has to align. So let's talk about some examples. There are some brands that get it right. We've talked about this brand many times. We don't get any money from them, by the way, just to be clear. We just like them. We're a great example of this, Patagonia. We'd love to have them as a client, but they don't pay us to say this, so it's not a sponsorship kind of thing. We just really like the brand. The Patagonia is an obvious one because their purpose is protecting the planet.
They prove it through their actions, like donating their profits to environmental causes and embedding sustainability across their entire supply chain. Their entire operation ties into this purpose. It's not just a nice, fancy statement to attract customers that are into that. They live it.

**Mike Liwski** (4:35)
Yeah, they truly do. Another brand that does a great job of this as well as Ben and Jerry's, they recently have done their Justice Remixed Campaigns. One of those things that they have stood behind for a long time. They've consistently tied even the product launches. They made a very specific product for that Justice Remixed Campaign. It's really this consistency. We're seeing that not just in the products, but in their marketing campaigns of activism.
They really get back up the policies that they're talking about. They're also donating to that cause and helping more units through that cause and even advocating for that. We've seen them run ads as well, video ads on YouTube advocating for this specific movement. Whether you agree with it or not, of course, there's just no question that they truly do mean it.