Conscience Needs Evidence | The New Era of Purpose After X-Washing

Why Purpose Belongs to the Company, Evidence Belongs to the Business, and Branding Must Make Both Credible

Purpose has had a rather eventful career. It began as one of the oldest questions a company can ask itself: why do we exist?, and eventually found its way into brand workshops, advertising briefs, sustainability reports, and beautifully typeset manifestos. Somewhere along that journey, an idea that belongs at the foundations of an organisation was frequently reduced to something that marketing could package.

That confusion matters because purpose is considerably more consequential than a positioning statement.

Purpose belongs to the company. It sits at the same foundational level as the definition of the company itself and its business model, alongside values, principles, distinctive capabilities and the broader role the organisation intends to play over time. It establishes its raison d’être, the enduring reason for which the enterprise believes it deserves to exist.

Business takes that foundation and converts it into choices: where to compete, what to offer, which capabilities to develop, how value will be created and captured, which objectives matter and which opportunities deserve investment. If you agree, let’s call it ‘strategy’.

Branding then performs another job. It translates the company and its business into meaning that people can understand, recognise, experience and choose.

The sequence is important: from company to business, from business to brand. Purpose begins in the first of those spaces. Evidence accumulates principally in the second. Branding makes both intelligible in the third.

When those levels are aligned, the purpose makes sense. When they drift apart, the narrative kicks into high gear. That’s when certain ‘sinister, strange noises’ enter the picture.

Purpose Is a Company Question

The expression “brand purpose” has become so common that challenging it can sound slightly pedantic. Yet the distinction is strategically useful.

A brand does not independently decide why a company exists. The company does. Capisci?

Purpose provides continuity beyond individual products, services, technologies, markets, and even current business configurations. A company may enter new categories, leave old ones, acquire businesses, change distribution models or develop capabilities that were barely imaginable when it was founded, while a sufficiently robust purpose continues to provide direction.

This is also why purpose is different from mission or vision. Mission translates purpose into what the organisation sets out to accomplish through its current business -today-, while vision establishes a desired future condition -tomorrow-. Strategic objectives make both actionable through priorities for growth, transformation, performance and impact.

Purpose lives above those choices because it provides the reason from which they emerge -always-.

Current thinking across the branding and strategy profession increasingly recognises purpose as useful only when it shapes decisions rather than decorating communication, and when it is connected with business models, products, experiences, culture and commercial outcomes.

I’d like to take that logic one step further: if the purpose genuinely changes, the company has changed.

A cosmetic rewriting of the sentence is irrelevant. A substantive change in why the organisation believes it exists represents something closer to a re-founding. The legal entity may retain the same registration number, offices and employees, yet strategically it has become a different enterprise because the principle from which its decisions should flow has changed.

This is why changing purpose is considerably more serious than changing positioning.

A company can reposition its brand because competition, audiences or its business have evolved. It can redesign its identity, adjust its portfolio or transform its customer experience while remaining recognisably the same company.

Change the purpose in substance, and you change the organisation itself. That is why purpose should be written slowly and used frequently.

Further reading on the subject: ‘Purpose-to-Brand Alignment | Why Purpose, Business Strategy and Branding Must March in Step’

Business Turns Purpose into Consequence

Purpose becomes real when the business has to make choices. That means translating an enduring reason for being into mission, vision, strategic objectives, priorities, investment criteria, capabilities, and eventually a business model capable of generating value, results, and positive impact.

If a company claims that access matters, the business should reveal where access influences design, pricing or distribution. If longevity matters, it should affect product development and after-sales service. If inclusion matters, someone eventually has to change a process, interface, recruitment decision or customer experience. If environmental responsibility genuinely forms part of the enterprise’s reason for being, it should leave traces in sourcing, materials, operations, innovation and capital allocation.

Purpose becomes evidence through consequences.

Too Good To Go provides a particularly clear example because its stated intention and its business model largely reinforce one another. By creating a marketplace for surplus food, the transaction itself connects commercial value for partners, economic benefit for consumers, and reduced food waste. In 2025, the company reported more than 157 million meals saved globally, together with corresponding estimates for avoided emissions and water use.

The interesting lesson sits beneath the numbers: impact is built into the transaction rather than added as a communications programme after the transaction has taken place.

The closer purpose comes to the mechanics of value creation, the less rhetorical support it requires.

Branding Translates; It Does Not Manufacture

Once purpose has travelled through business strategy and become visible in choices, branding can perform its proper role.

Brand strategy synthesises company and business decisions into meaning. Positioning establishes what that meaning should become for key audiences. Creation makes it perceptible through language, symbols and distinctive expressions. Experience and activation allow people to encounter the promise through products, services, relationships and moments that matter.

Branding therefore does something enormously valuable, although slightly different from what purpose marketing sometimes suggested, it makes strategically relevant significance understandable and recognisable.

A brand’s deeper meaning must be underpinned by operational evidence, as weak foundations force organisations to resort to increasingly costly narrative strategies. The British Institute of Branding has put forward a similar argument from a measurement perspective, calling for evidence that links the brand to commercial outcomes, rather than grandiose claims backed up by impressive-looking dashboards.

This fits directly with the view of the brand as an operating system. The brand becomes the shared grammar through which company meaning and business choices acquire coherent expression across products, culture, experiences and communication, or, as Q(uirino) Malandrino puts it with his remarkable precision, in other cases, we should view the brand as a ‘cone of light’, a directional space within which everything the company does, says and carries out must reside.

Further reading on the subject: Brand as Operating Systems | How Brands Guide Strategy, Decisions and AI

Greenwashing Is a Narrative Tactic

Seen from this perspective, for example, greenwashing becomes much easier to locate. It belongs mainly at the tactical narrative level.

A company does something, or sometimes very little, and communication magnifies one selected element until the narrative creates an impression larger than the underlying reality. Environmental language, imagery, certification, campaign ideas or isolated initiatives are used to suggest an organisational commitment that business decisions do not adequately support.

The sequence has been reversed. Say begins trying to compensate for gaps in Do, while Think remains conveniently offstage.

Greenwashing therefore represents more than questionable environmental communication. It is an alignment failure in which narrative travels further than the organisation itself has travelled.

The same mechanism can produce purpose-washing, woke-washing, innovation-washing and any number of linguistic relatives likely awaiting invention by someone in a workshop.

Medinge Group has repeatedly argued for the opposite sequence: think, do, say. Conscious branding should be rooted in observable actions, evidence and behaviour, with story-building preceding storytelling.

The implication for branding professionals is important. Our task is not to make a weak reality sound stronger. It is to help organisations discover, organise and express a reality worth believing.

Why X-Washing Is Becoming Harder to Sustain

X-washing has always carried reputational risk. What is changing is the organisation’s ability to control the evidence around its own story.

Let’s Go Back to Greenwashing

Twenty years ago, a company possessed considerably greater control over the information environment surrounding its activities. Today evidence is distributed across regulatory filings, sustainability reports, supply chains, employee testimony, product databases, certification bodies, NGOs, customer reviews, investigative journalism and social platforms.

Artificial Intelligence -AI- adds another layer because claims that once lived comfortably in separate corners of the internet can increasingly be retrieved, compared, and summarised together.

A polished sustainability statement may now sit one query away from supply-chain data, employee comments, regulatory action or an annual report showing a rather different allocation of resources.

Humans interpret what this means; AI increasingly helps them decode and assemble the evidence.

Regulation is tightening at the same time. Directive (EU) 2024/825 requires EU Member States to apply new consumer-protection rules from 27 September 2026, including stricter treatment of misleading environmental claims, generic green claims that cannot be substantiated, and certain sustainability labels. The Directive explicitly calls for environmental information to become more reliable, comparable and verifiable.

Greenwashing is therefore becoming difficult to sustain for a simple reason: the narrative is becoming easier to test against reality. Good branding should welcome that.

Evidence Does Not Mean Pretending to Be Perfect

One unfortunate consequence of increased scrutiny is that some companies become reluctant to communicate progress at all, giving rise to what has become known as greenhushing. That solves the wrong problem.

A company should be able to explain genuine progress, as long as it describes that progress proportionately, provides evidence and acknowledges relevant limitations.

VEJA Limits

VEJA offers an interesting example because its public transparency includes a section dedicated specifically to the limitations of its own project, discussing unresolved issues involving materials, production and financial partners alongside its advances.

There is something strategically mature about that approach. Evidence does not need to prove perfection; it needs to demonstrate that stated principles influence decisions, that progress can be observed and that remaining contradictions are understood rather than carefully cropped out of the photograph.

Conscience is a direction of travel combined with criteria for making the next decision. That is considerably more believable than sainthood.

When Products Become Evidence

Fairphone Impact Report

Fairphone provides another useful illustration because the intended impact becomes visible in the physical and economic design of the offer.

Its approach connects device longevity, repairability, materials, working conditions and electronic waste with product development. Its 2025 reporting states that the Fairphone Gen 6 contains more than 50% fair and recycled materials by weight, while the company reports more than 11,000 people experiencing improved working conditions and over 2,000 tonnes of CO₂ avoided through longer device lifespans during the year.

The figures are valuable, although the deeper evidence is visible before the report appears. Replaceable components, repair information, spare-parts availability and extended software support make the principle tangible in the customer proposition. The product carries part of the proof.

This is exactly where company, business and branding reconnect: a company principle influences the business model and product; the resulting behaviour gives the brand something credible to mean.

When Impact Enters the Revenue Line

Signify offers an example from another end of the market. Its sustainability programme has linked circularity to product design and commercial performance through the measurement of circular revenues. The company reported that circular revenues reached 37% of sales in 2025, above its 32% target, while its design framework addresses serviceability, repair, upgrading, refurbishment, remanufacturing and recycling.

That is particularly interesting because evidence has moved from a separate sustainability discussion towards a business metric.

Circularity becomes something the company wants to sell more of.

That is a useful test for any purpose-led organisation: can we identify where our stated intention changes the economics of what we do? When the answer is yes, conscience is moving closer to strategy.

Conscience Is the Missing Discipline

Purpose on its own tells us why the company exists. It does not automatically tell us how to behave when interests collide.

This is where conscience adds a further layer. I’d like to understand conscience as a decision system. Purpose provides direction; values clarify what matters; principles help establish what the organisation should do, should avoid and sometimes should refuse, particularly when commercial attractiveness and wider consequences point in different directions.

This view has close roots in work developed through the Medinge Group, where Brands with a Conscience has long connected organisational responsibility with the interests of broader stakeholder communities rather than treating social responsibility as an external programme.

In Allegro 234, our current approach extends that thinking through company, business and brand.

• At company level, purpose, values and principles define the enduring foundation.
• At business level, those principles become choices around value creation, results and positive impact.
• At branding level, branding translates the consequences into promises, expressions, experiences and relationships that people can recognise and judge.

That is why a brand with a conscience cannot be produced by branding alone; it has to begin with the company.

Further reading on the subject: Businesses, Leaders and Brands with a Conscience

From Storytelling to Story-Building

The practical shift is from storytelling towards story-building. Storytelling asks how to describe the organisation, while story-building asks what the organisation needs to do so that a meaningful story becomes true.

That means evidence starts before measurement -which is obvious… sometimes. The first piece of evidence is often a decision that would have been different without the purpose or principle behind it. Measurement then makes consequences visible. Verification increases credibility. Communication gives those facts context and meaning.

For this very reason, the growing demand for evidence should be welcomed, rather than viewed as a hindrance. It restores a more strategic role to the brand, in which creativity is not merely used to embellish claims, but helps people understand the significance of decisions already embedded within the company and its business. This relationship between the organisation, the business and the brand is central to tackling transformation, as it helps organisations clarify what must endure, helps businesses translate that foundation into strategic decisions, and helps brands turn those decisions into experiences that people can understand, trust and prefer.

Regulators can challenge the claim, employees can contradict it, customers can compare experiences, journalists and NGOs can examine the evidence, AI can help connect information that previously remained scattered, and eventually the business itself has to live with the consequences of what it said.

Conscience helps decide what deserves to be done. Evidence shows whether it actually happened. Branding helps people understand why it matters.

Purpose can then return to the job it was meant to do all along, giving the company a reason to exist and a direction from which to build its future.

And remember. Change that reason fundamentally, and you have changed the company.

Image

• Cottonbro Studio, Pexels