You’ve probably spotted the B Corp logo – a B in a circle, underlined – on websites, in shop windows and on packaging. It’s the new shorthand for ‘good business’, with 6,000 companies (and counting) around the world joining the B Corp movement and meeting its standards. Each of these businesses is striving to do better. So it’s a shame no-one’s reading the details. After the privacy policy, the ‘impact’ section is the least visited part of most companies’ websites. Social posts about how many tonnes of carbon a brand has saved get as much interaction as one of those open-ended ‘leave your comments below’ questions (cue tumbleweed). 

It’s not because people don’t care about businesses being a force for good – they do. They’re not reading on because B Corp creds aren’t packaged up in the best way. Who’s got time to read a report about their shampoo? To be fair, it’s never easy to make a supply chain sound gripping. But it’s still weird that most brands hide all the best stuff they’re doing in content and wording that most people don’t read.

This is on our radar because we’ve ended up carving out a (nice) niche working with smaller B Corp businesses. They’re all doing business in a good way, all growing fast and they’re good at branding. But they’re all struggling to articulate quite why what they’re doing is markedly different to anyone else, beyond the B Corp badge.

The main thing we tell them is to stop thinking of B Corp as a reporting exercise alone. Yes, putting together an ‘impact report’ is part of the B Corp deal, and it’s good that everyone has to do a series of things to be accredited. But that doesn’t mean everything has to be presented like a Corporate Social Responsibility report.

B Corp businesses need a pitch. Instead of diligently setting out the facts, and giving everything equal weighting, start with the bigger, most compelling story. What is it that your business does better than everyone else? Every brand we’ve worked with has something special to say. For Union Coffee, it’s about sourcing speciality coffee fairly (way above the Fairtrade minimum price). Pip & Nut use the best nuts and natural ingredients (all stuff you can find in your kitchen). Everleaf Drinks was founded by a conservation biologist, so there’s a natural story there about plants and the environment. Whatever the big pitch is, it’s generally part and parcel of what the business does overall, rather than a side project. Yes, it’s good your staff volunteer once a year in the local allotment, but if you’re KeepCup, your lead story is about reducing plastic waste. 

Assuming you’ve worked out the overall pitch, the hardest part is to make it stand out. If you’re hiring outside help form wordy thinkers like us, this is where we can make the most, ahem, impact. Because you need your messaging to work in overdrive to combat greenwashing, ie everyone else is trying to make out they’re as ethical as you are, even if they’re not. Coming back to Union Coffee, all the coffee brands, from high street names to local indies, use the same ‘ethical’ cues. When Caffè Nero uses a brown ‘craft’ paper bag, writes about ‘single origin’ beans and namechecks farmers, customers find it hard to understand why they should pay more for their coffee elsewhere. (Caffè Nero also write ‘100% coffee’ as if that’s a thing – it probably works when people read it quickly.) We helped Union pull out a memorable way to show that their coffee sourcing is leagues ahead of everyone else’s, and how their standards are higher than industry shorthands like ‘Fairtrade’ too. To separate them from the rest of the pack, we positioned Union as leading – and setting – the standards in speciality coffee, versus ‘commodity coffee’ (everyone else). Union did it first, and everyone else followed, or at least tried to.

The second big thing we tell our clients is to move the most compelling parts of their sustainability strategy out of their impact report and into the customer-facing stuff: online, on pack and on social. For Union, we came up with a pair of lines for their packs that links their sourcing and roasting, like this: IF YOU KNOW WHO GROWS YOUR COFFEE… YOU KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO ROAST IT. Repeating this couplet on every pack means Union can draw out how they’re different to everyone else. Their sourcing is stronger than a typical independent local coffee shop and their roasting is a cut above most bags on the supermarket shelf. Above it all, though, is more opinion and a standard-setting stance.

That’s not to say the reporting shouldn’t work harder too. Granted, customers aren’t going to fact check your impact report in Sainsbury’s, but getting the basics right feeds into everything. Sorting out the structure, hierarchy and titles first makes a massive difference. As we said, your report shouldn’t be neatly divided into equal headings that reflect B Corp’s accreditation system. It’s better to lead with the bigger pitch and thread it throughout. When we wrote a book for Honest Burgers, the first page set out the thread we followed through to the last. Which is that the biggest way for Honest to tackle its carbon footprint is by sourcing their meat from regenerative farms. Recyclable takeaway packaging, supporting local indy breweries and so on all play their smaller parts, but the meat is the deal breaker.

Once you’ve cracked the big pitch, write the rest of the report in clear, natural language. There’s no reason why a report has to sound ‘reporty’. ‘Sourcing principles’ and ‘Climate Smart and Regenerative Agriculture in Argentina’ in Pip & Nut’s impact report sounded like titles from a PhD. Whereas “Now: how we work with farmers and partners” and “Looking ahead: regenerative farming and climate projects” is already clearer. And the titles do some of the legwork to tell the story, so even if people don’t read the details, they can get the gist of the work Pip & Nut are doing now and what they’re working on next.

Giving guidance on how to make more of a brand’s impact and sustainability credentials has become standard practice in our tone of voice projects. Writing less formally is only one piece of the puzzle (Chat GPT, we see you stepping in to do some of that). People will really understand how you’re doing better once you crack the big narrative and find a hook that sets your brand apart from the greenwash noise. What you don’t want to do is rely on B Corp accreditation alone. Especially as more multinationals like Nestle-owned Nespresso are given B Corp certification (and the self-accreditation process is coming under scrutiny). When big business falls short (hello BrewDog), you don’t want to be tarred with their greenwash brush.