Member Story
Thoughts on “Is ‘community-washing’ the new greenwashing?”
How to address community (peer producers) in a multi-sided market
Community-driven brand building is commonly heralded as best practice for 21st century companies.
In this article, NEIL BARRIE AND ISAIAH WELLINGTON-LYNN (“authors”) highlight how companies using community-driven branding to grow their company can create a “net community impact [that] can feel less empowering and more exploitative.”
You may find the article here.
What is community-washing?
Community-washing, as described in the article, is “a feel-good wrapper, employed inconsistently, largely for PR,” where a company promotes its community (creating alignments between the platform-owner and the peer producers through incentives; the peer-producers are the community in this case) but the relationship between the platform-owner and the peer producers is disempowering and exploitative.
In general, platform-owners disempower their community by inhibiting participation in corporate decision-making and taking a large percentage of value created by the community.
The authors discusses some examples o this relationship, including Spotify and DoorDash.
Both Spotify and DoorDash act as intermediaries in their two-sided markets, listeners and publishers in Spotify’s case, and delivery-drivers and restaurant-patrons in DoorDash’s case. Both do provide amazing products but the peer producers do not see as much of a return in value compared with the amount of work they are putting in. The authors provide an example of Spotify’s community-washing in the quote below.
“Take Spotify, currently valued at $61.3bn. While its marketing consistently and beautifully spotlights a diverse range of artists and it provides best-in-class access to fans, it’s a painful truth that >80% of artists earn under €230 per year off the platform, according to research from the Musician’s Union and the Ivors Academy. Understandably, most grass-roots musician organisations are calling for systematic change. Small wonder given that a huge part of that $61.3bn was generated by artists but none of them have a real say in leadership decision-making.
While we love Spotify’s product and there’s no question that a huge part of the value created is down to the amazing talent of Daniel Ek’s team, it’s still one of many examples where, despite positive intent, the net community impact can feel less empowering and more exploitative.”
The DoorDash example described in the quote below is even more egregious.
An egregious US example of this was the 2019 expose detailing the gulf between food delivery app Doordash’s warm talk of empowering its ‘Dashers’ (delivery drivers) to earn work and live and its tipping model which, in many cases, funnelled customer tips to the company rather than drivers. Doordash has since ended the practice and introduced a number of meaningful community initiatives to help its communities mitigate the crippling impact of Covid-19, suggesting there is now real commitment behind the rhetoric.
Addressing Community in Organizations
The authors centers on 3 areas that need to be addressed to incorporate community into organizations:
- leadership,
- governance, and
- ownership.
The author’s thoughts on how community can be addressed in an organization are described below.
Leadership can be addressed by giving the community a c-suite (i.e., corporate) position.
This can look like appointing a chief community officer, someone with overall responsibility for genuinely nurturing and consciously moulding the community. Their mandate would be to cultivate the community as a strategic asset with community-focused KPI’s built into the role’s annual compensation.
Governance can be addressed by giving a board seat to a representative o community interests.
Introduce a fiduciary mandate where priority community interests are advocated for at board level.
Ownership can be addressed by having a community ownership structure whiche nsures that the community (i.e., the workers) are getting a air share o the value captured by the company.
“Commit to a minimum community ownership structure.”
Concerning community ownership examples, the authors mentioned Ampled, a platform cooperative, and Doors.live.
All three are acceptable ways o providing more community participation in companies, but I believe the best one is ownership because simply having a c-suite or board position does not provide enough control over a company’s governance if you have little to no control over how the majority of the board of directors is elected and removed.
Additional Quotes
“For the growing band of scaleups it’s important to instil[l] congruence between your community-building ideals and your business reality from the outset”
