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Key Takeaways Not every company has to have a purpose-driven mission, and that’s okay. But if you do claim to stand for something, you’d be wise to back it up with genuine action.
Be honest and transparent about your journey, and take ownership of past wrongs.
Consumers have been growing more skeptical in recent years, and the truth is, it’s with good reason.
Take the controversy in which Starbucks found itself embroiled back in 2020, when the coffee giant launched a heartwarming UK campaign called #whatsyourname, celebrating transgender people using their chosen names at Starbucks stores. The company pledged to raise £100,000 for Mermaids, a trans youth charity, through the sale of special mermaid-tail cookies. The ad went viral, won awards and generated overwhelmingly positive sentiment.
But almost immediately, past and present employees criticized Starbucks for not living up to its promise of being trans-inclusive, pointing out a number of offenses inconsistent with the chain’s alleged commitment to allyship: software prone to deadnaming, managers willfully misgendering employees and an insurance policy that didn’t cover transition-related surgeries. In other words, its claims to be trans-inclusive appeared to be mostly superficial.
When it comes to where people spend their money, morality matters. According to the marketing research firm Gitnux, 86% of consumers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they’ll support, while misleading content will cause more than half of consumers to never buy from a brand again.
Not every company has to have a purpose-driven mission, and that’s okay. But if you do claim to stand for something, you’d be wise to back it up with genuine action — after all, the gap between what you claim to do and what you actually do is where trust goes to die. Here’s how to be honest about your ethics without overselling.
Start from the inside
Before you launch a single social media campaign or issue a press release about your company’s values, stop and take a beat. First, you have to look inward.
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