How to Stand on Your Principles Without Overselling

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.

The reason the Starbucks campaign failed is that the internal reality contradicted the external messaging, and its employees noticed. If your workforce doesn’t believe your stated purpose, your customers won’t either.

Authentic purpose isn’t actually in bold claims and glossy marketing materials. It’s in the day-to-day — generous benefits packages, equitable hiring practices, fair pay. The outdoor apparel retailer Patagonia, for example, not only backs up its environmentalist claims by donating one percent of all sales to preservation efforts, but it’s also a great place to work. It may be best known for its policy of letting employees go surfing on days when the waves are too good to ignore, but in practice, that may be less important than its on-site childcare centers.

“Culture matters,” says Dean Carter, the company’s head of HR, adding that doing the right thing means not just doing it when times are good, but also in the downswings. “That’s the test of true culture: when decisions you make are consistent.”

The best way to stay consistent is to clarify your values and repeat them often. If you claim to value diversity, that commitment should be reflected across all aspects of the organization, from your hiring panels to your promotion rates. If you’re emphasizing sustainability, it should be reflected in your vendors and supply chains.

Be honest about your journey

No company is perfect, and no founder is, either. When I first started Jotform, I had a pretty good handle on being a programmer, but zero experience as a leader. It took time to figure out what I wanted my company’s values to be and how I wanted our culture to look.

Moreover, times change. When the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders was founded in 1971, it had few ethical qualms about publishing pictures that we now recognize as dehumanizing. That all changed in 2020, when the organization took ownership of its past wrongs, recognizing where it had previously failed and committing to change going forward. It laid out exactly how it would do better, and urged its supporters to hold it accountable.

This kind of transparency — admitting mistakes and showing how you plan to move forward — builds far more trust than pretending you had it figured out from day one. When you communicate about your values, be transparent about where you actually are versus where you hope to be. Share both progress and setbacks. When a company publishes results that include areas where they fell short of goals, it signals genuine commitment rather than performance.

Equally important is knowing when to stay silent. Not every trend or news moment requires you to weigh in, and putting out empty statements on issues where you have no actual expertise or substance is the very definition of purpose-washing.

Purpose in business doesn’t have to be big and flashy. Before you commit to a big ad spend trumpeting your good works, take a breath. Identify your core values, like treating your employees well and being transparent in your operations, and get those in line first. Build trust by being the sort of organization that makes good on its promises, is honest about its missteps and has real, tangible plans to improve in the future.

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.