I recently published an article in the Journal of Sustainable Marketing. This discussed the intersection between politics and better business. What is happening as better business meets politics?
Should Business Stay Out Of Politics?
There are two ways to look at this question. Firstly, there is a wider question. This can be seen as an ethical or social question, see here for my thoughts on the view that better business is a threat to democracy.
In the piece I am discussing today, I cover a much narrower question. Will involvement in politics inevitably reduce profitability? The answer is rather obviously no. Look no further than Fox News or MSNBC. The business models are pretty clearly political. The move in the news business from expensive on-the-ground reporting to cheaper in-the-studio commentary from often overtly partisan voices has financial benefits. (I’m not commenting here on how good or bad this is for society. I’m only saying it is easier to make money giving the public what they want to hear rather than paying the expenses for journalists to report from far-flung bits of the world about which the public knows little and is happy for it to stay that way).
Better Business Meets Politics
That said, better business, indeed non-better business, often does not benefit from being explicitly political. The challenge can be that having a cause will often bump into wider social and political issues regardless of whether the firm wants to get involved or not.
Although the causes espoused may vary significantly between them, better businesses must, by their nature, engage with wider social issues. To tackle social disadvantages or environmental destruction it seems necessary to have an opinion on the root causes of the disadvantage or destruction. Better business, cause-based businesses, and social involvement are hard to disentangle. As better business grows in significance it will inevitably impact more on major social issues and politics.
Bendle, 2023, page 2
Trying to impact society can often be very sensible commercially. There seem a lot of good commercial reasons for a better business that is not polluting to argue against lax environmental standards that allow competitors to gain an unfair advantage through the rival’s environmentally destructive practices.
A better business is still a business. This means it is not dispassionate about how the rules of society are constructed. There will be a commercial interest in influencing the way all business is done which creates an inevitable point of connection with politics.
Bendle, 2023, page 2
Managing the challenge of having an interest, but not being a partisan political entity, is a fascinating problem.
Depth Or Breadth
Another challenge better business has is what might be called the depth/breadth tradeoff. Better business is more successful if it can build a greater body of support. To supporters of better business, an ideal world is when all businesses are better businesses. (There is breadth to the movement). Yet, at least when being a better business is voluntary, the way to facilitate more to join the group is to make joining easier. That said, if every business can easily join the idea is so diluted (the depth of the movement is reduced) that there isn’t really any meaningful idea of better business anymore.
Finding a way to balance the views of those who might want to take strong, potentially exclusionary, stands on controversial issues with the need to be a broad tent creates tension. In any group aiming to affect positive change, there is always likely to be a division between those with differing ideas of what can practically be achieved in any given timescale.
Bendle, 2023, page 4
There isn’t an easy answer to this tension. The right balance between depth and breadth will depend upon the specific perspective of the observer.
For more on sustainable business see here, here, and here.
Read: Neil Bendle (2023) Politics and Better Business. Journal of Sustainable Marketing,10(5), 1-11.