Brand Purpose: Lipstick on a Pig?

As you may have guessed from some of my snarkrageous posts, I’m very skeptical of companies who like to shout about how much good they’re doing in the world. Is it better than them doing nothing? Maybe—unless they’re covering up ever-worsening behavior behind the scenes.

This is the problem with a culture that demands “purpose” from corporations. It incentivizes the signaling of purpose but doesn’t necessarily create good organizations. That's a longer-term project that requires self-reflection and a sense of community. An inward- looking effort that should be entirely separate from marketing, so organizations can decide what and who they are.

If they're simply a company that makes a great product with great customer service, we should celebrate the living fuck out of that. If they can contribute to the greater good while being decent corporate citizens, wonderful. But if they feel the need to pretend they're some benevolent provider of virtue while they abuse workers, make us wait 6 hours to speak to an actual person or dump half their waste into Grandma’s backyard, then fuck 'em. They're nothing more than opportunistic charlatans; and we should feel a certain amount of shame in enabling their outright shittiness. 

Have a Crushtastic™ holiday season everyone. Cheers!