The word purpose has been batted around the PR industry for many moons, but since 2018, Kindred’s joint-MDs Sharon Bange and Sinéad Gray have tried to embed this into the agency's ethos – helped along by taking home coveted ESG and Sustainability Awards trophies for four years running.

In November 2024, Kindred released the Building a Better World: How can businesses take more action on the issues that really matter to consumers report, which addresses the gap between the issues UK consumers want businesses to take action on – and what is actually being done by businesses to make positive change.

But, how has the agency navigated the choppy seas of purpose in an industry that is predominantly driven by profit? We caught up with Bange and Gray to find out their secret:

Talk me through the Positive Change positioning, your latest report and where Kindred is heading with purpose-driven work.

Gray: Since 2018, we have been co-MDs and that's when we came up with the Positive Change positioning. At that point we were among the first agencies talking about it and what's happened since then is that agencies are talking about purpose. We talked about whether this would be a problem for us and if we should move away from purpose because everyone was doing it and it diluted it. But we decided this is important to us and that you need people trying to solve these big issues so we are doubling down on it. But what we are seeing in the client realm are questions about post-purpose and also budget pressures and that's something that has bitten our clients over the years and will likely continue into this year. They hit brick walls internally where they want to do purpose-driven campaigns but the money is allocated to other things – but our point of view is that you can do both.

Bange: We’ve had a decent year. In the foreword of our latest report we mentioned that we’ve been hearing quite a lot from clients and others in the industry about the pressure to do purpose-led campaigns. That’s always been our thing—all our campaigns have a positive change thread running through them. And it was reported that people were talking about post-purpose at Cannes last year, and that comms and advertising is shifting back towards profit and that’s just not where we are. Sinéad and I were saying that we’ve not done purpose as our agency positioning just because it's a commercial thing for us, we’ve done it because that's what we believe in and we believe businesses and marketers have a role to play in making change in the world. Not in a goody-goody way, but that’s why we do it. We weren’t ever going to change what we are doing because of trends [back to profit] in the wider market, but it is something we believe in as people. Doing that report was our way of presenting evidence to the industry for why this is a good idea, why we should be doing it and also empower clients and prospects that we work with who say they come up against brick walls when it comes to doing purpose-led campaigns. When the world’s going a bit crazy [the economic situation is tight] and people are focused on profit, we’d rather not lean into just that and instead double down on purpose and go more hardcore there to demonstrate there's still a commercial impact to doing that. It’s also the best thing for the planet too.

What else has come out of your recent report?

Gray: One of the things we developed for the report that we are going to focus on more is the Kindred List of Causes. We’ve worked with consumers to identify 93 issues that affect life in the UK today, and we did this because there’s lots of data out there exploring what people care about but the gap we saw was a lack of data on what people want businesses taking action on, so of these 93 issues across the political, economic, social, legal and technological issues we asked what consumers wanted to see businesses take action on. The Kindred List of Causes is a ranking of that data, and that’s something we are leaning into for 2025, tracking sentiment around those issues over time. We have the appetite to expand it beyond 93 issues at a later date.

Why do you think agencies are shying away from purpose-driven campaigns?

Gray: I think with money being tight, people are going back to what they know and are being profit driven. Some business leaders don't associate that with purpose – CSR is very different from sales. Our approach is to bring the whole thing together.

The other thing is cancel culture with greenwashing and a lot of businesses are scared to do anything and be called out, so they don’t do anything at all. They think they have to be [perfect] to be able to say anything about purpose when really everyone should be doing something, it just has to be authentic and honest.

Bange: We are at this interesting point in time where people had all these big [ESG] targets, that were due to be fulfilled by 2030 and we are now only five years away from a target that wasn’t realistic to start with and you can be quite pessimistic about that. Our view is that those targets have been good and pushed sustainability up the agenda, and made it a business issue. But we shouldn't shy away from being realistic and transparent with consumers, and the research we’ve done shows consumers do understand the complexity and grey areas, and these things are difficult. They want businesses to take them on a journey with it rather than shy away from it completely. We are at this important inflection point and that's why we want to put our views clearly on the line and find out what the barriers are from business leaders. People in organisations can feel quite lonely when they say I care about this and I want to do it but I'm getting blocked. We are having conversations like this with clients who also feel alone, and we did the report to bring awareness to it and understand that these are shared challenges while also sharing knowledge.

So, looking ahead, are you planning to ramp up the purpose side of your agency?

Bange: We will carry on the way we have been. Last year we refined our position a bit and we talked about positive change being serious business now, with the commercial benefits of doing purpose-led work and that’s where our focus will be. We will be looking at what we can do to further demonstrate the impact and work with clients to use their data to demonstrate the impact of purpose-led comms work and that’s where we see our focus for 2025. One of the other things we are exploring with our offering, is helping clients that want to do purpose, and are scared of greenwashing, from a strategic point of view to get them to a point where they are able to deliver more purpose-led campaigns. We are looking at how we do that now. We do that strategic work for a few clients but it’s something we want to do more of in 2025.

If the worst does happen and PR as an industry moves drastically away from purpose and into profit, what would that mean for Kindred?

Gray: I’m going to answer from a personal perspective if that’s okay? We live in a world that has lots of interconnected global challenges; Sharon and I are both working parents so we are thinking a lot about what future will exist for our kids. You need comms specialists who are willing to keep putting in the work to solve these issues from a communications perspective . People say they really care about [purpose] and in some cases say they are willing to pay more [for services], but are they actually going to pay more? We need people investing time and energy into how comms can solve the value/action gap that exists. This is something we are so passionate about and we believe it is so important for this world that we will not be led by market forces

Bange: It’s so integral now to not just the work we do for clients but how we operate as a business. It is so ingrained in the DNA of the agency, if we are pitching for something and we are not clear on the positive changes people [internally] call us out on it. And, we want them to. We’ve tried to formalise that now, and I discussed this at the last PRmoment Agency Growth Forum, as we have a score card to assess incoming briefs and the different elements to see if it does actually meet our positive change criteria. It also guides internal conversations around briefs.