B Corp
Design agencies and purpose washing

A wave of design agencies are seemingly overnight rebranding as ethical, purpose-driven and becoming B Corp certified. Having run one of the first ethical design agencies since 2003, specialising in purpose-driven work for charities, non-profits and businesses addressing social, environmental and climate challenges – and having been an environmental campaigner and activist for many years – I have some observations about this.

Service businesses, like design agencies, can create massive harmful social and environmental impacts through the outcomes of their work for clients.

At the same time, the social and environmental impact of running a design business is inherently modest. To be slightly flippant, they often require little more than computers and internet access.

For example, an agency that helps grow an oil company, or conversely a renewable energy company, as I have done, creates a net difference far outweighing its own operational footprint. This understanding is gaining traction. The Creative Integrity Playbook by Creatives for Climate, and the work of Purpose Disruptors highlight how ‘serviced emissions’ – the uplift in emissions driven by the outcomes of the service – can far exceed an agency’s own footprint.

That’s why the first question to ask of an ethical agency isn’t how it operates, but who it chooses to work for – yet even B Corp’s new standards continue to focus largely on operational policies and practices, rather than the downstream impact of an agency’s client work.

When the accreditation does consider who a business works for, it uses the less stringent ‘negative’ screening. Certified businesses are required to avoid or minimise servicing clients in the most negative/harmful industries – at the bottom end of the spectrum – while still allowing them to work with the majority of organisations. By contrast, the alternative approach – ‘positive’ screening – would have inverted this, requiring certified businesses to work only with those at the top of the spectrum: ethical, environmental and progressive organisations.

I presume B Lab has adopted the less restrictive negative criteria so that more businesses can join. But this approach appears more like ‘business avoiding the worst’ than what B Corp heralds as ‘business as a force for good’. Surely, for an agency to be a genuine force for good, it must work with organisations that are a force for good. Requiring positive criteria would greatly reduce the number of B Corp design agencies, but as it stands, the claim to be a force for good sounds at best like exaggeration and at worst like purpose washing.

B Corp design agencies promote themselves as a purpose-driven force for good. But many continue to work with much the same kinds of clients they always have. They are still helping to sell the same lifestyles, products and economic system that are driving the crises we face. That is purpose washing: claiming a social or ethical purpose without taking substantive action. For an agency, that action would mean choosing to work only with organisations striving for a fairer, healthier, safer, greener and more equal world.

Slightly tongue in cheek, I’m setting up A Corp – a certification scheme for creative agencies that are a genuine force for good because they work exclusively with organisations that are a force for good: charities, non-profits and ethical businesses.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – email me.