Why corporate hypocrisy is the fastest way to kill your brand
Companies spend millions crafting the perfect message, then undermine it entirely by doing the opposite behind closed doors. The gap has never been more visible.
I've spent far too many years watching companies spend enormous sums crafting finely tuned and perfectly timed marketing campaigns, only to have it discredited by their own actions or employees. Typically, these are big businesses trying to align with the current consumer demands, eg diversity, sustainability, human rights etc.
The pattern goes like this. The big campaign launch followed up with PR and social support to make sure the world knows this brand is doing good for everyone. Then a staff member posts on X ‘their truth.’ Journalists start digging, and suddenly we're all reading about 75-hour work weeks at a company that just ran ads about work-life balance.
Take BrewDog. Built an entire empire on “punk values” and anti-corporate rebellion. In 2021, more than 60 former employees published an open letter describing a "culture of fear", with toxic attitudes towards junior staff. That number eventually hit 250 current and former employees. Nothing says punk rock quite like 250 people saying they were miserable working for you. While this may be high profile, I personally know of a few businesses that have achieved B Corp status that are equally as bad, but just good at keeping under the radar.
Or Shein, the Chinese clothing behemoth, which adds roughly 6,000 new items to its website daily while strongly marketing its sustainability commitments. In September 2024, the Italian Competition Authority launched an investigation into Shein’s potentially misleading environmental sustainability claims on the company's website. Between 2022 and 2023, the company's emissions increased 81% while revenue grew 43%, impressive maths if you're trying to boil the planet faster. Greenpeace accused them of "taking greenwashing to a new low", which is genuinely difficult to achieve in fast fashion.
The purpose-washing problem
The gap between corporate claims and corporate reality is measurable. What we're seeing isn't isolated incidents, it's become systemic in how organisations approach purpose and values. The question isn't whether companies are engaging in greenwashing or purpose-washing - it's whether they understand the reasons why these gaps emerge in the first place.
The data is fairly grim. Research shows 56% of B2B marketing leaders admitted their brand was 'somewhat' or 'highly likely' to be promoting misleading cause-based messages without verification. More than half of marketing leaders know their business is essentially lying – and yet powerless to challenge those above and hoping no one checks.
We have even seen brands with genuine missions struggle. Oatly (the Swedish oat milk brand) faced backlash for taking investment from Blackstone, while the Dutch company Tony's Chocolonely was dropped from ethical producer lists over links to Barry Callebaut, a company that faced child labour allegations.
So it is all around us, big and small businesses, new and old ones, it’s not just the American giant conglomerates that are trying to retain market share and fast-track their sustainability creds because the truth is far too ugly to share.
And it's so much easier to hire an agency and make a lovely video about values.
What actual honesty looks like
Genuine corporate communication requires a fundamentally different starting point. Before organisations craft external messages, they need to understand the truth of what they actually are, not what executives wish them to be, not what sounds compelling in a campaign, but what they probably are.
This requires:
Internal honesty before external messaging. If your employee engagement scores are catastrophic, you cannot launch a people-first campaign. If your supply chain relies on exploitation, you cannot champion sustainability. The work begins internally or it's just expensive lying – and you will be caught out.
Operations and communications in the same room. Your chief operating officer and marketing director must be working from the same reality. If operations can't deliver what communications promises, you've already lost. You're just waiting to be caught.
Admitting gaps publicly. The brands maintaining trust aren't perfect, but they are honest about imperfections within the business. You may hear, “We're not there yet, but here's our plan to make it better, and here's how we'll measure it.” Consumers tend to respect transparency, far more than manufactured perfection.
Acknowledging trade-offs. Every business makes compromises. Say so. If you're prioritising growth over sustainability this quarter, explain why. The alternative is getting caught lying later, which is vastly worse.
The only way forward
We're living through a fundamental shift in accountability. Social media, employee review sites, and investigative journalism have made corporate behaviour more visible than it's ever been. The old model, separate internal and external realities is dead. Buried. Not coming back.
The brands that survive will never be perfect, but they will be the ones whose internal reality matches their external messaging. Where the chief executive actually behaves according to stated values. Where HR policies align with public commitments. Where procurement decisions support sustainability claims.
This is not complicated – but it becomes complicated when marketing and comms have to navigate false and alternative agendas. Advising businesses on these matters for 20 years, the first rule is to be honest. Because the truth will get out, journalists will investigate, consumers will move elsewhere – and the fallout is public, immediate, and permanent.
The choice is binary: transform the business to match the message or stop making promises you can't keep. The middle ground – where most companies currently live, spending millions on campaigns whilst doing the opposite – is becoming impossible to maintain.
Uncomfortable honesty isn't a communications strategy. It's the only strategy left. Everything else is just a countdown to exposure, and the countdown is getting shorter.
Five tips for communications professionals
1. Audit the reality before you write the campaign
Before you touch a brief about purpose or values, spend time talking to employees who aren't in the C-suite – as many as possible. Read Glassdoor reviews. Talk to suppliers. If the reality contradicts what you're being asked to say, you have two choices: fix the reality first or refuse the brief. No third option ends well.
2. Make operations your best friend
Your COO typically controls whether your campaign is truth or fiction. Get them in the room early. If they can't deliver what you're promising, you're building a time bomb. The award you win this year becomes the scandal you manage next year.
3. Replace perfection with progress
Stop trying to present companies as flawless. Audiences are more sophisticated than that. "We're not there yet, but here's our plan and here's how we're measuring it" is infinitely more credible than "We're perfect and always have been." Honesty about gaps builds trust. Pretending they don't exist destroys it.
4. Build in accountability before launch
If you're making claims about sustainability, worker welfare, or diversity, establish how you'll measure and report progress before the campaign goes live. Public commitments with measurable outcomes are harder to quietly abandon when leadership loses interest six months later.
5. Know when to walk away
Sometimes the gap between what a company does and what it wants to claim is unbridgeable. If leadership won't fix the underlying problems but insists on the campaign anyway, you're being asked to build the evidence for a future scandal with your name on it. That's the moment to find a different client.
Joshua Van Raalte is CEO of comms agency Brazil.
Further reading
If PR cares about climate change, it must stop shouting about saving the planet
PR should be leading the charge on climate adaptation, not hiding behind it