4 Companies Getting Politically Active — and Growing
Mission-driven companies build their brands and their business
Ben & Jerry’s board member Jeff Furman takes pride in the fact that the company actively and publicly campaigns for social causes. On the board since 1982, Furman extols the company’s brand activism in its support for voting rights and anti-racism campaigns in the United States, efforts to promote the integration and inclusion of refugees in Europe, and the fight for greater income equality worldwide.
Obviously, the ice cream company doesn’t choose the simplest problems to address. “We are moving into huge, difficult issues now,” he says. And that makes work both more challenging and more meaningful for the company’s employees.
Here are four B Corps that incorporate political activism: Why and how they do it, and do it right.
Ben & Jerry’s
As director of values-led sourcing for Ben & Jerry’s, Cheryl Pinto jokes that she spends at least half her time with suppliers, half developing new supplier relationships, and half collaborating with other activists to improve the lives of producers and farmers in the company’s supply chain. The work is too compelling for her to slow down, she says.
“We have to create ripple effects and help our values-aligned partners get much bigger, because the problems we’re attacking are so vast,” Pinto says.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield founded the company in 1978 as a tiny ice cream parlor in Burlington, Vermont. The mission-driven company now has 477 employees in Vermont, and factories in Las Vegas, Ontario and the Netherlands. Ben & Jerry’s sells about $1 billion worth of ice cream each year across 35 countries. Its sole shareholder is Dutch multinational Unilever, the world’s 147th-largest corporation with nearly $60 billion in sales.
Ben & Jerry’s is also a leading evangelist for the movement to give capitalism a conscience. The company adopted a triple mission in 1988 to produce the best natural ice cream, earn a decent financial return, and make a difference in society, fostering a “linked prosperity” for the business and those connected to it.
“When the whole company is values-aligned, corporate activism really works,” Ben & Jerry’s CEO Jostein Solheim says. “The people who believe what we believe are extremely loyal to our business, and they buy a lot of ice cream.”
Read more about brand activism as part of Ben and Jerry’s core identity.
Beautycounter
Everyone has the potential to be an agent of change. That tenet of civic engagement was not lost on B Corp Beautycounter’s founder Gregg Renfrew as she started and built the nontoxic, multichannel beauty-product company that sells online, in retail stores, and through a network of consultants. Renfrew’s vision included training each salesperson as an activist involved in making the industry safer and better.
“By incorporating advocacy and education into the role of a consultant, Beautycounter has also empowered thousands of women across the country and across North America to participate in the democratic process,” says Lindsay Dahl, Beautycounter’s vice president of social and environmental responsibility. “Often, we have heard women say that they did not think they could affect change. Yet, democracy only works when everyone participates and our successes thus far proves this to be true.”
The 130 employees at Beautycounter work with nearly 27,000 consultants, who operate in both the U.S. and Canada. Consultants sell products through social gatherings, one-on-one consultations, and unique codes for online shopping and can qualify for incentives, such as the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C., with the Beautycounter HQ staff and advocate for better beauty laws.
“The personal care industry, as is, is scary. Plain and simple,” says Jessica Jones, a Beautycounter consultant. “I believe that it’s incredibly unfair to allow ingredients that are known harmful ingredients — some even banned in other countries — into the things we put on our bodies each and every day.”
Over the past few years, Beautycounter’s clients and consultants have made more than 3,500 calls, sent more than 80,000 emails and attended more than 650 meetings with their members of Congress and Members of Parliament in Canada.
“In 2017 we achieved many milestones, and 2018 promises to be our most busy year yet, with cosmetics reform ramping up in both the U.S. and Canada,” Dahl says. “Looking further ahead, we hope to make headway in the area of labeling and supply-chain transparency for the beauty industry.”
Read more about Beautycounter’s effective corporate activism.
Patagonia
Rose Marcario is CEO of Patagonia, the iconic brand founded by Yvon Chouinard that has earned its reputation partly for its product quality and partly for its strong sustainability profile and leadership. The company has not shied from actively engaging with the public around environmental efforts, and that engagement has contributed to Patagonia’s enduring popularity and success.
“When you look at the roots of Patagonia and the values that … our founder, Yvon Chouinard , had around environmental protection and preservation and conservation of these wild places that we love and that we care about … it’s always been a real core value of environmentalism,” she says. “It’s built into our mission statement, to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
Marcario believes in the idea of activism within business, which seems counterintuitive to some.
“We’re living in a world where business is responsible for more than 60 percent of the pollution of our air and our water and our land, and yet they take very little responsibility,” Marcario says. “I think what the B Corp community does is it brings together these like-minded companies to be a greater force for good in the world.”
To further those goals, Patagonia recently launched a new digital platform connecting customers with local grassroots organizations working to save the planet. The new platform, called Patagonia Action Works, aims to help Patagonia customers learn more about local environmental issues and how to get involved with events, petitions, fundraising and volunteering time and skills.
Read more about Patagonia’s environmental activism through the years.
Seventh Generation
Seventh Generation is one of the old-guard conscious companies. The household and personal care products maker has a strong commitment to the environment, to communities, and to standing up for causes it believes in.
In September 2016, global giant Unilever announced it was acquiring the Vermont-based brand. Seventh Generation’s CEO John Replogle says the company was able to maintain its mission despite the changes.
“I think it’s a duty for all companies to play a very active role. Some choose not to. If they have good reason I can respect [that choice], but I think we all have to realize the [default] switch is ‘on,’” he says. “If you’re not going to play a role, then consciously decide why you’re not going to be engaged. Otherwise, every company has a moral duty to play an active role.”
Business leaders should emphasize the value of ethics internally and externally, he says.
“Unless you have a clear ethical compass, as an organization you are bound to damage and destroy your business over the long-term,” Replogle says.
CEOs should have a firm understanding of their company’s purpose, he says, and be able to convey that to employees.
“I wish they thought less about the bottom line and more about how they run their business, what the core values and the purpose of their business is all about, and how they can connect their employees and their core purpose to the core purpose of the organization. … It’s not just good ethical and moral responsibility; it’s good business to think that way. We’ve got to get beyond short-termism and start to think about what we’re trying to build for the long term. That’s the definition of true sustainability.”
These four companies are part of the community of Certified B Corporations. Read more stories of people using business as a force for good in B the Change, or sign up to receive the B the Change Weekly newsletter for more stories like the one above, delivered straight to your inbox.
