The Dark Side of Purpose: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Purpose Washing

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
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** (0:16)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show. We are covering purpose today, and we're covering particularly purpose washing. What is it? Why is it important? That's what we're talking about today. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher. Hey, guys.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:34)
Hey, here we are.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:37)
So diving into purpose some more. We're actually going to be doing a big series on purpose coming up. But this topic in particular, what we're talking about is purpose washing. So this is when companies appear to be purpose driven without genuinely committing to the values they claim to champion.
So it's kind of a form of performative marketing, right? Saying all the right things but not doing the hard work to back it up. And unfortunately, we've seen many high profiles examples of this, especially in areas like sustainability, social justice, employee welfare. But yeah, let's look at that sustainability area as one topic. So some companies have been accused of greenwashing, and that's basically the same thing, right? It's promoting environmentally friendly initiatives while continuing to engage in the harmful practices behind the scenes. There's a notable recent case with H&M in fashion. So they were sued a couple months ago for allegedly deceptively capitalizing on the interests of conscious consumers by presenting their products as environmentally friendly. This is still being litigated, so we want to respect the process. But this is the kind of thing, you know, when it comes to purpose, where you can get into trouble if you talk the talk, especially in marketing, and you don't walk the walk. You want to be able to back it up. So if you're talking about all the great things you do for the environment, well, you better be doing that.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:15)
Kind of reminds me of that series on HBO's Silicon Valley. They did like a thing where all the companies were like, and we're here to change the world. We're here to change the world. We're here to change the world.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:27)
We do this and we're going to change the world.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:29)
Not enough. Anything to change the world. It was all about some.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:34)
Exactly. It kind of like this.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:37)
That was hilarious. But anyway, another example, this is all like H&M, which is just a new case is actually something that happened. It was public and came to conclusion is Volkswagen. They promoted their clean diesel vehicles, very heavily promoted their clean diesel vehicle, touting lower emissions as a key selling point. And yet later was discovered that they had installed software in their cars to cheat the emissions system and tests. So the vehicles were actually needing more pollutants than advertised. And the scandal exposed a massive gap between the company's environmental claims and its actual practice. I think they actually got fined something to the tune of a billion dollars.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:26)
Yeah, it was a ridiculous amount, whatever it was. This is the diesel gate that we had talked about.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:31)
Diesel gate, yeah. I mean, it's like, hey, it's clean.
And then, instead of actually making it clean, they just created software to trick the emission test. I mean, come on. But yes, that's purpose washing right there.

**Ash Maher** (3:48)
You know, another company, yeah, I was going to say, Steve, another company that did it really, Facebook is another one where their big initiative was trying to fight misinformation and try to combat people's digital unwell-being. So they're trying to promote digital well-being. But that recently in doing that, they were also accused of purpose washing. And I think a lot of the confusion is going on with Twitter and all these different social platforms arguing, you know, was Facebook accurately fighting against misinformation or were they just using this as their purpose washing to say, hey, we actually care, but they had their own intentions. I guess that's where the accusations are coming in. They're like, you could say that you're trying to block against misinformation, but we believe otherwise. And you think you're just saying that to tell us what we want to hear.
But your actions have shown otherwise, according to some segments and groups. But again, that is another accusation of purpose washing. Facebook has been in the heat for that.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:39)
You know, whatever the algorithm is on social media, they should, anytime you post misinformation in it, it recognizes misinformation and maybe the community recognizes it.