Authenticity is in the Eye of the Beholder
maslansky + partners
The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or client — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.
Not all actions that companies take in the name of ESG are controversial. How do some companies manage to seamlessly integrate ESG initiatives into their brand messaging while others get accused of superficial “greenwashing” or “rainbow-washing”? In this episode of Hearsay, Michael Maslansky, Will Howard, and Keith Yazmir discuss the delicate balance of serving stakeholders while remaining authentic and credible.
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HearSay Ep308 – ESG Part 2
Michael Maslansky:
They said, what? Welcome to HearSay, a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we give our take on the strategy behind the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the market today and what you can learn from them. Our philosophy is it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And that’s why we call this Hear Say. I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of Maslansky and Partners and author of a book called The Language of Trust. And I am happy to be joined today by two of my colleagues, my partner, Keith Yazmir and Will Howard, who is a vice president here and a long-standing colleague of ours. Welcome gentlemen.
Will Howard:
Thanks for having me.
Keith Yazmir:
Great to be here guys. And really looking forward to this conversation.
Michael Maslansky:
All right, so it is not news to anyone that there has been a lot of controversy over ESG over the last couple of months or year, at least for those people who are paying attention. We’re gonna dig in a little bit deeper in the subject and really try and understand what’s going on, what makes certain measures or initiatives or efforts that companies undertake controversial while others are not. Because I think as we think about ESG, environmental, social, and governance, and all of the actions that companies take that fall within those categories, it’s clear that not everything creates a controversy. Only certain things do. And so, you know, I think the first place that I would like to start is, what separates the two? Are there certain reasons why if we had to pick one reason why some actions that companies take are controversial while others are not. What is it?
Will Howard:
I think there’s a couple of dimensions to look at. I think it certainly shouldn’t be overlooked that if you array today’s kind of social and environmental issues on a spectrum, some are more controversial than others and more likely to provoke response. But even within that sort of matrix of varying levels of controversy around different issues, I think a really common ingredient comes down to what I would call authenticity, which is sort of how much you believe. a statement coming from a particular company or how much a particular set of actions or particular narrative around that company seems to fit. And when you think about ESG, when you have companies who are engaging on these issues, taking stances on these issues and, and occasionally being accused of greenwashing or rainbow washing, being told that their actions aren’t credible, I think a lot of that boils down to authenticity, whether or not you, you feel that this action is believable coming from this particular company.
Michael Maslansky:
the way that you phrased your answer, not surprisingly, something I picked up on, is you framed it from the perspective of the audience. So, I think a lot of people talk about authenticity, a lot of people talk about it as being from the organization’s perspective, what they think is true to them. The way that you framed it is from the audience’s perspective. And so, is authenticity in the eye of the beholder?
Will Howard:
Behold, oh, you took my line. Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say that. I think one of the things that I really want to drive home by bringing up this authenticity point is that I think there’s a perception today that taking stands on issues, getting involved on issues, having an ESG position is going to get you in trouble. And based on the work that I’ve done, I firmly believe that that’s much less true than the idea that taking, taking an ESG stance poorly or weekly, or not taking the time to frame it is what’s going to really get you in trouble. Because as you think about it from the dynamic right now where there are critics out there who are looking for companies to make an example of, the companies that are getting called out are the companies whose stances are the easiest to make look ridiculous, are the easiest to literally call washing or that feel forced and unnatural to their perception. It’s kind of like being the sick one in the herd. If they’re looking for an example, they’re going to pick the company whose commitment to the issue seems the weakest. who they can most easily make look ridiculous. And that often comes down to whether or not your stance feels like it makes natural story sense or said another way is authentic.
Michael Maslansky:
Yeah, I know. I think that that’s a really important point. not everything is going to be controversial and that if people, if companies look at what’s going on in the news and look at the headlines and they read the news stories about the extreme examples, they’re gonna get the wrong message that they should stop doing anything as opposed to the right message, which is stop doing these things the wrong way.
Keith Yazmir:
kind of play that out to me. I’m a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I’m like, the water’s too hot right now. I want to go home and play golf, right? I don’t want us sticking our head out and doing anything that could potentially get us in trouble. What do you say to me? Why is that not a smart and sound business approach?
Will Howard:
Well, I think there’s a couple reasons. So, for one thing, if you look at the universe of ESG actions, and I think this is a really important piece of talking about and thinking about the topic, when I say ESG, in today, you’re probably thinking woke, you’re probably thinking LGBTQ, you’re probably thinking of a very small circle of issues because it’s been coded that way. But ESG as a bucket is massive. And critics are lumping it all together with whatever the most polemical example they can find is. But in reality, there are a huge range of ESG actions. There are some companies that are very strong activists on some of those issues. For them, this is probably an easier conversation, but for everyone else, if you think about certain environmental issues, certain community issues, you may have a company that kind of holds to those values, their employees hold to those values. And they want to be out there talking about these issues, but out of fear of reprisal, they’re shying away from that identity, which may cost them with employees, which may cost them with their own satisfaction with their mission, right? Setting, taking values entirely out of it and just talking about value. There are a huge range of topics within ESG, energy efficiency, governance practices, there’s a huge bucket of responsible business practices that make a ton of, like it makes a lot of sense for Ford to be investing in EVs right now, but they’re kind of nervous about it because all of a sudden, it’s being politicized. So, you have companies who probably had very real business reasons to want to take these ESG actions in the beginning that are being stymied from being able to take those steps.
Michael Maslansky:
I mean, if we even push beyond kind of energy efficiency, so if you’re a business that uses a ton of water, conserving water is really important. So, if you’re PepsiCo or if you’re P&G and you’re taking action to protect the watershed, to make sure that you’re contributing more water back to the environment than you’re taking out, like that is clear connection to business. If you’re an energy company and you’re worried about the impact of extreme weather and you’re taking action to mitigate that it’s clearly connected to business. It shouldn’t be remotely controversial. And even on the people front if you’re in a war for talent. and you’re competing to hire the best talent in whatever market you’re in, and that includes making it clear to people who may not look exactly like the current employee base that you are welcoming to them, then doing things to welcome other people to your employee base shouldn’t be terribly controversial. And most people will say that it’s not controversial. But if you’re at a company, why is it hard to figure this out? Why are companies seemingly continuing to create controversy when that certainly is not their intent?
Keith Yazmir:
The first reason it’s hard is that communications is fundamentally, fundamentally based on context and the context. If you are a for-profit business is that people bring certain expectations to the table and those expectations are that you were there to provide your service or products and make money. And through the lens of making money, but doing providing your service and products, there is a negative tint when it comes to doing social good and doing environmental good. There is a tension there naturally between those two. So, when I’m looking at a big company, when somebody is looking at a big company, there’s a bit of a filter of they’re probably not doing this for the good of humanity. They’re doing this for self-interest. And so, one of the biggest challenges, of course, we start with authenticity is What if we’re doing both? How do we say that in a way that actually will be convincing to our different audiences, both internal and external.
Will Howard:
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s absolutely the first obstacle, which is how, why is it hard to be authentic? Authentic because the baseline assumption is that every company in America is not being authentic, and you have a burden of proof to convince people otherwise. And then I think there’s another layer, which is going back to the eye of the beholder piece here. If I asked you, who do you think you really are deep down? What do you stand for? What do you believe? What do you like? You might give me a very rich and intricate tapestry of an answer. If I asked your best friend. You’d probably get a slightly different answer that doesn’t line up exactly perfectly. And then if I ask somebody who met you for 10 minutes at a party, I’m going to get a much simpler caricature. And what we’re dealing with is the 10-minute impression at the party. Right. So you know yourself better than they know you, but that doesn’t matter because you have to figure out and line up with that fundamental basic story that people have about you, which takes some effort, it takes some introspection, some extrospection. I don’t know what the word is where you look at yourself from the outside and try to really think about this from that perspective. How would I fit this story this piece of a new data point into my story?
Michael Maslansky:
If that’s not a word, it should be a word. There should definitely be a word for that.
Will Howard:
It’s just a good way to describe market research.
Michael Maslansky:
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll add a couple of other things that I’ve seen that I think make this hard. So first is that we’ve got a lot of different stakeholders that have very different agendas that are pushing or putting pressure on the company to move in a lot of different directions. And so many companies are trying to thread the needle. When it comes to figuring these things out. I’m gonna say something that may sound totally inconsistent with that… There’s a lot of data out there, has been a lot of data that consumers want companies to act with purpose. And companies have taken this as a directive to do ESG type stuff. And I think what we’re seeing now that makes it particularly hard is that the purpose that companies have thought that consumers wanted, it’s not shared by all consumers, you know? And so, companies have often interpreted this as a, I think in many ways, a distinctly progressive view of purpose. And, we’re hearing much more from people on the other side and they’re saying, okay, you can be for purpose, but still opposed to many of your consumers. And that gets to the third thing that I would say, which is what I would call the kind of the mandate problem. in politics, we often see that a candidate wins 51% of the vote, which means that 49% didn’t vote for them. And they say that they have a mandate. And they take the extreme position because they got a majority. And I think we see that all over the place. It’s almost like the categorical imperative view ESG, we can’t just be for, let’s say, supporting diversity on our teams, we have to go to the most extreme view of that idea. And similarly, on the opposite side, we have to completely shut it down. There’s no room for middle ground. And that’s what makes it hard, right? When companies, when inside companies, they think because we support a value, we need to support the extreme view of that value. All of a sudden now you’re not only outside the majority, you’re outside the mainstream and probably the even the super majority of consumers. And so, it’s hard.
Keith Yazmir:
What you and I did some work a while ago that tried to kind of look from a company leadership perspective about kind of where do you want to be there, right? Because it really does get in this. Are you minimizing negative impact or are you actively going out and trying to create positive impact? And do you want to be leading in society? And to what extent? Should a corporation or as a corporation really want to be a political player, as opposed to simply weird acting as responsibly as we possibly can, which is I think is where this conversation started 30 or 40 years ago when we first started talking about, that’s why it was called corporate social responsibility, because it was about responsibility, taking responsibility for your actions versus moving forward but it feels like the challenge becomes, how do you remain authentic when to a certain extent you’re reacting to different stakeholder demands versus saying this is something that we personally have believed in for years, and we are just trying to figure out a way to get it out.
Michael Maslansky:
You know, you’ve got companies that are being pushed by stakeholders, they often don’t know what it is that they stand for. And I think until recently, the pressure was really coming from one direction. It was coming from the left. But it felt like that was the only question, was how far you go. And frankly, the pushback was not meaningful. There were no boycotts. There were many threatened boycotts from conservatives prior to the Bud Light boycott that had no material impact on business. I could not find a single instance where there was any impact, more than a quarter, of a conservative boycott. Until the Bud Light Boycott. And so, I think it is both illustrative or evidence that was a particular challenge, but also that it’s a particular moment where things have changed. And so, companies need to behave differently. But it is that doesn’t mean that you can’t do things the right way and still continue to pursue company goals on on environmental and social issues and do it in a way that is perceived as authentic, right? So how do we do that?
Will Howard:
It starts with taking a second to think about how people probably think about your brand. And think about it in the simple primary colors sketch, the simplistic picture that they’ve got of you. The issues and the stances that most naturally slot in or starting to look for the issues that most naturally slot into that perception. I think to the point of multi-stakeholder capitalism and the idea of responding to pressures, I think reactivity translates very easily, it’s very easy for people to see when you are adopting stances because you’re being asked to take them, as opposed to when you are kind of selectively and ideally proactively choosing stances that align with something that makes sense for your company. So, I think it starts with understanding who you are in the eyes of your holders and starting to look for the issues that most easily build on that story to make the ones that are the center of your story.
Keith Yazmir:
We talked this other day about this as well, about alignment, right? So, Michael, you had some great examples of companies that were aligning their actions with who they are as a brand and to your point, Will, to a story that will flow seamlessly for them to tell. I mean, everyone talks about the Patagonia’s of the world, which we all agree is a bit unfair because they just do this so well that they’re almost an unfair comparator, but you know you have Warby Parker that is the eyeglass retailer. That’s very committed to vision and a lot of their ESG programs are related to helping people who are underserved getting vision care get vision care They have a buy one get one free glasses program where they’re giving away glasses to people that can’t afford them. So figuring out things that really are in your wheelhouse, so it makes perfect sense why you might be doing that, seems to be a very important element of choosing that issue.
Michael Maslansky:
Yeah, I think probably one of the things that has come to an end is that there were a lot of companies who were kind of jumping on the ESG bandwagon because they thought that they could get a free ride and didn’t do the work. As is often the case when you’re not really sure why you’re doing something, that’s when you’re going to get into trouble when the rubber meets the road, so to speak. companies are going to have to be much more deliberate about whether or not there is that alignment with the business. You can’t just do the things that you know you’re doing internally. So often companies live, they see close up. these actions that the companies are taking, they are deeply familiar with things that the company is doing. They feel like it is authentic. And the reality is, is that it isn’t authentic unless the people externally think it’s authentic. And so, you know, you go back to a Nike example when they did the controversial ad with Colin Kaepernick on race, like there were criticisms of it. there were people who didn’t like it, but it didn’t feel like it was separate from the brand. And so, it was okay.
Keith Yazmir:
That Nike example is such a fascinating one in that first, you know, in that marketing and comms and I’m sure the CEO’s office, there were a lot of voices saying, let’s not do this. We don’t have to do this, right guys? If we don’t do it, nothing’s going to happen. Let’s not do this. And the voices that went out were those that said, oh no, this is exactly what we need to do. And they went out. They got a lot of pushbacks for those ads. And what do they do? They ran an ad saying, here’s how to safely burn our sneakers. They leaned into it. They owned it. They didn’t back up, but it was also, completely on brand. It’s Nike just do it. And I’m sure there were people in that room that probably use that phrase. We’re Nike. Let’s just do this.
Will Howard:
It’s really interesting. I hadn’t really thought about this, but there’s sort of a divergence here because the Nike example is a great example of how to take a stand on something very authentically. And then there’s probably some people out there looking less interested in taking a stand and looking to like the first example that came to my mind was Dawn, which is so much less controversial, but just the duckling and the way that their soap has been used in oil spills for decades like it’s so intuitive and so feel good that it is immediately jerked out of any realm of being an environmental stance. But the implications of it so much are broader. Like if we started listing off household chemicals that you have a problem with, or brands that you have a problem within your home, from environmental concerns, Dawn would probably be one of the last ones you got to on the list because of that halo, that they’ve built around the way that it’s used.
Michael Maslansky:
Would that message, if they did that today, would that be more challenged? Or is this a sign that companies need to get back to like those are real actions that they could take? I think there’s an argument to be made that purely symbolic actions are likely to be received with greater scrutiny today than they were. there’s gotta be more of a roadmap for how something connects and why people are doing it. But what would change today in the Dawn Exam?
Will Howard:
Well, they’re running that ad right now again.
Michael Maslansky:
Oh, they are?
Will Howard:
Yeah. So, I mean, they clearly doubled down. But part of why I thought of it because it was just on last night, but I think one of the easiest ways into it for me is to reverse engineer from the criticism. I always like to look at what you’re being criticized of and try to diagnose what’s underneath that. So, the word, if we take the word of one of the words of the day, probably it would be “woke,” but another would be the idea of washing green, washing or rainbow washing. Like I like to think about you’re applying the accusation is that you’re applying a layer of paint on top of something and what are some of the fundamental add-like antidotes to that accusation? I think paint was applied last. It is a recent addition. It was something that’s thrown on top after everything else was done. So as much as possible, if you can be pointing to a track record of having been doing this for a while in the Nike example, they unveiled that they’d been paying Colin Kaepernick salary the whole time. Right. So, this had forethought and it had investment over time baked into it. So, it’s not greenwashing if it’s been with you for a while. another thing is paint is purely decorative. It serves no functional purpose. It is an, uh, cosmetic feature of an apparatus. So, it’s not greenwashing if this commitment actually does something for my business. If it plays a functional role in how I operate as a company. And contributes to the financial success of my business, ideally over the long term, because now it’s a gear in the machine instead of a coat of paint on top of it. So, I think about establishing that track record and pointing to something where there’s at least a couple of dots that you can start to draw a line through. Ideally, dots that people will have seen or will be able to remember seeing, or so like, like to the point of they can’t just be purely internal actions. No one knew you was taking, and then ultimately culminating in some sort of intuitive business benefit to your company.
Michael Maslansky:
I think there are lots of examples of where these efforts are kind of integrally connected to a business. And then there are gonna be other situations where they’re not, or they’re less clearly connected. But let’s say we take carbon emissions as an example for companies that maybe are not, they’d be fine operating on whatever the predominant energy sources at the time, but they have a belief in the need or the responsibility to reduce their emissions to address climate risks. What do they do?
Keith Yazmir:
Well, I mean, I think this gets into the concept around incrementalism, communications, especially in the commercial setting, you are setting expectations that ideally, you then go on as a company to fulfill, right? And one of the things that can sometimes happen being too grandiose in your ESG approach is that you appear to make promises that you’re just not gonna be able to live up to. So, with carbon, it’s a great example because you have a ton of different companies that are saying we are working towards carbon neutrality in our own operations. We have full control over them. This is not out of the question, whether it is simply by reducing our emissions or by typically doing a balance of offsets and planting trees and doing other things that are contributing. But it’s very doable. Then you have BP, which renamed itself to Beyond Petroleum several years back in a big well-known kind of transformation. And several years later was lambasted having 96% of its investments, not just profits, but investments still going into oil and gas production. So, they said, okay, screw it. We’re going to shoot for the moon. And that was certainly seeing as greenwashing in a big way, but also it was just a very different way of thinking from a communications perspective about what is reasonable. And really you can think about that again through this lens of on one side you have, we want to do no or less harm. We want to be carbon neutral. On the other side, we want to save the world. And it’s a very different kind of paradigm, which, and I certainly don’t believe that going out with more ambitious agendas is always wrong, but it’s definitely part of the calculus and communications of if you’re going to make a promise. Don’t be Volkswagen that then you turn off the emissions controller and actually your emissions are sky-high Keep your promise
Will Howard:
Yeah. So, I think for the carbon issue, it’s really interesting. I, it’s probably easier to start with what you don’t do or what you don’t have to do. So, I think the instinct today is all this pressure and conversation is around climate change. So, we’re just going to say we’re making climate commitments. Well, I can tell you from testing that if you say climate instead of environment, you’ve immediately cost yourself 10 to 15 points with ours because climate is a loaded word in the culture wars perspective. So, you don’t have to go there, but I would venture farther that we can be pretty creative here and thoughtful with how we frame this. Do we even have to talk about carbon? Like clean air we know and reducing pollution are both much more intuitively beneficial things. So now I’m not even talking about carbon, and I’ve moved one step closer towards a more general and broader benefit, right? But there’s a whole other way to frame this, which is not about what I’m moving away from, why don’t we just talk about what I’m moving towards my company’s really excited about clean energy and investing in the new opportunities that come with that and the potential to reduce costs over the long term and why can I, why do I have to make it about reducing carbon instead of increasing my focus on other things as well? Right. So, I think when you’re approaching this reactively from what’s that one hot-button issue that some people are talking about, and can we jump on it? That’s when you get in the most trouble. And when you take a step back and you start thinking about, if I start to not just look at that, word or that idea, I start to think about what actual actions and outcomes are associated with that idea and how can I turn those into things that, that line with my business. It’s a way to kind of prime factor or break down some of these big ESG buzz topics into much more manageable bite-size pieces.
Michael Maslansky:
Yeah, I mean, I think so that example is a good one of being closely attuned to your customer base. And I think arguably over the last decade or so, the shift has been focused to be very attuned to your employee base. I think that’s still important. I think there’s probably a shift now to kind of make sure that you understand where your customers fall on this and that Very often what we find, the most powerful insights that we find, I think, in work is when we can find language that brings together to politically opposite audiences around a new set of language. And that’s the win. And Will, I think your examples are really good ones of how do we reframe the issue so that it’s not using coded language, it doesn’t kind of immediately trigger a polarized result, but it’s getting at the right thing to help companies move forward.
Will Howard:
Yeah. And I love that. That one thing that I’ve been toying with is we, we often talk about, you’re not going to be successful if you’re trying to be all things to all people. Right, I might argue that from an ESG perspective in today’s environment, the goal is to be one thing to all people. If you can find a particular issue or a particular idea and find the way to make it as inclusive and flexible for as wide an audience as possible. And if that one thing is true to you, I think you’re setting yourself up for it. just the other day, I saw an ad for, I think it was like a college in, or it was some supplement, but it said for everybody with a body.
Michael Maslansky:
Mm-hmm.
Will Howard:
And the whole ad was a bunch of people doing a bunch of different activities. Some of them are strongly coded as like LGBTQ up activities. Some of them traditional. female, some of them traditionally masculine activities. It was a ton of different people doing a ton of different things. And I don’t think anyone could argue or I’m sure someone could, but it would be uphill battle to say that doesn’t make sense for them or is them just taking some sort of stance.
Michael Maslansky:
The idea that we need to find ways of framing things so that they appeal to all people. So, it’s gonna pose a big challenge to the left, right? Because I think the left really wants to hear their issues communicated in their language. But every time that we do testing and we’re talking about something that’s trying to serve underserved audiences if we choose language that says we wanna make sure that all people are treated equally, it tests much better than if we say, we wanna make sure that previously underserved audiences are getting the same treatment as other audiences, right? So, the language of identity tends to be much more polarizing than the language of everybody. The language of the environment is much better than the language of the climate. You know, the challenge for progressives may be that to get what they want from a substantive perspective, they may need to give up what they expect from a messaging perspective.
Keith Yazmir:
Are you saying it’s not what they say, it’s what they hear?
Michael Maslansky:
Someone told me that and I think that’s a great way to end. So, Keith, Will, thank you very much. Great conversation. I really feel like we tackled some issues in ways that we haven’t talked about before, which is amazing. And thanks to everyone for listening in all the way to this point for more language insights and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing. Follow us on LinkedIn at maslansky + partners and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. That is all for now. Stay tuned for more episodes of HearSay because when it comes to truly effective communications, as Keith said…
Keith Yazmir:
It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear!
Michael Maslansky:
Boom.
