Why Good Ethics Are Now Big Business—And How To Embrace Them

By Phil Lewis

https://www.forbes.com/sites/phillewis1/2020/10/14/why-good-ethics-are-now-big-business-and-how-to-embrace-them/?sh=4ee2be0a4748

Was 2020 the year that “purpose” went mainstream? It’s been an increasingly popular buzzword in big business for a few years now, following on from sustainability, ethics and, before that, Corporate Social Responsibility, but all have suffered from the same problem: a strong whiff of insincerity. 

As with greenwashing, that glow of ethical warmth all too often turns out to be a glossy veneer, beneath which lies the proverbial can of worms: the legacy systems that refuse to be cleaned up; the company culture that fails to match the honest-sounding words on its website; and, of course, the bottom line, which prioritises shareholders’ profits over good behaviour. 

Yet, as the world’s businesses were forced to suddenly change gear at the start of the pandemic, the public’s gaze shifted from the shiny glamour of consumerism towards social and economic injustices laid bare by struggling economies. 

And they were unforgiving. Those companies who treated their staff appallingly, sacking them without scruples and filching grants from governments, have been called out and castigated, though the long-term effects on their reputations are yet to be seen. 

Robert Ordever, Managing Director of workplace culture expert O.C. Tanner Europe predicts that trouble lies ahead for such firms. "When things go awry, there are those companies that are quick to ditch their values, seeing them as a ‘nice to have’ in the good times rather than as a necessity at all times. Such companies ultimately bring about their own downfall by revealing their true colours.”

For many businesses, “buy more things” is a harder sell to customers sitting at home in their pyjamas (home entertainment and delivery brands, such as Amazon and Apple, excepted). Marketing has had to concentrate on comforting its traumatised audience instead. And so “purpose” has found its place, for now. 

But taking an ethical stand isn’t as easy as it seems. Where the lines are drawn, how seemingly impossible ethical dilemmas are solved, and how to reconcile commerce and altruism are among the issues that arise for companies who decide to pursue “purpose” as part of their business. And social media is an absolutely ruthless place when they get it wrong—remember Pepsi’s controversial protest ad with Kendall Jenner a few years ago? 

So how should you go about navigating such choppy waters? One company that has some  experience of this already is Mantra Media, a marketing agency based in Sheffield, UK, and Kyoto, Japan, whose founder Johnny Pawlik has been driven by purpose and ethics since launch. 

“In a nutshell, we’re an organization that creates positive change in the world, and positive outcomes in areas that need them,” he says. “We create better outcomes for people who are in challenging situations.” 

Sounds like a no-brainer, but even with clients like the RSPCA and Aspire2Work (which provides educational opportunities to young people excluded or alienated from formal education), there have been some difficult choices—including which clients are acceptable, and which marketing formats are ethical. 

For example, Pawlik has said he wouldn’t work with a giant tech company whose supply chain practices are incompatible with Mantra Media’s values. Yet for marketing purposes he does continue to use social media companies—rarely out of the news for their difficult relationship with ethics.   

He acknowledges this precarious line and accepts its challenge. “Marketing has, so far, been used in quite a perversive way, and has caused a lot of negativity, but perhaps someone needs to get to the nitty gritty stuff and use these things in a different way… You could say that the internet is used for lots of ills in the world. But it’s also used for lots of good. Sometimes you have to work with the instruments or the apparatus you have available, to create the outcomes you want to see in the world. It’s a challenging one.” 

In other words, despite some of the questionable business models that perhaps underpin these platforms, there is an opportunity to use them for good—to deliver messages to people that they really need to here. The end justifies the means. 

It would be a lot easier to not have to dance around this dilemma—but, in an interesting parallel with the current situation, what drives Pawlik is a history of seeing injustice and bad behaviour and wanting to tackle it. 

Growing up a very bright kid on a council estate in the Midlands, he noticed something that seems staggering today. 

“I don’t think they could get away with it these days, but the kids on the council estate were segregated from the kids that weren’t. You were put in a class where the expectations were very, very low. And you go, ‘Why am I being treated differently? I seem to be doing all the right things. What’s the difference? Oh yeah, we’re from that estate.’ So I quickly learned about injustice. 

“And it taught me a lot about understanding that we’re all human, we’ve all got our own challenges. Why not just be a bit nicer to each other? It’s that idea of: ‘Can work be a place that is actually enriching and purposeful?’.”

Certainly, Pawlik has been keen to ensure that as well as only working with organizations that fit the agency values, the workplace culture itself lives up to them too—even going so far as to employ an in-house psychologist to “look after the whole person”, he says. 

“I think ethics cascading through the business, through the teams and managers, is very much about cascading the culture, but a culture that everyone understands. It’s about hiring the right people. People who share our values,” he explains. 

“And this wouldn’t work if you were just thinking about today or tomorrow as a business. But if you think about five years, or 10 years, or 50 years, the way Japanese businesses operate, looking after people, giving them a sense of purpose, making sure that the growth path of the business is also thinking about the growth path of the individual… If you really look after people, that intrinsic motivation will follow.”

It’s almost a karmic approach to business, then: do good things and good things will come to you. That’s an approach Pawlik has taken through the pandemic too—and it seems to be proving its worth. 

“When this happened, we were very much, ‘What do you need? Can I help you with strategy? Can I help you reach a new market and diversify? Whatever it is, let's put some time together, and you can ask questions, and I'll just help.’ I offered to do loads of free training to organizations, to support them. The approach was: let's just give them more value and see if we can help people. 

“And that came back tenfold. People were so happy with how we've supported them, that when they got stronger legs, they came back to us and said, ‘You know what? You really helped us through that difficult time period. You didn't need to, you didn't ask for anything back. And now we want to reciprocate.’ It's perfectly logical. Help people, and good things will come back.”