By Jemima Jefferson, co-chair, LGB Business Forum

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There are few worse ways to start the week than dozens of legal letters flooding your inbox, especially when it happens on a Sunday. That’s the nightmare Amnesty International faced this month in the wake of its latest report, entitled A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.

This extraordinarily ill-judged document slurred dozens of charities and grassroots women’s organisations, describing them as “anti-rights” – without, of course, defining what rights they supposedly oppose.

Cue a firestorm of online condemnation and ridicule, fuelled by the defamed organisations publishing their letters to Amnesty asking what evidence the report’s author used to reach her conclusions. As LGB Alliance hinted in our own letter, the report is childish and petty; having intervened on the losing side at the UK Supreme Court, Amnesty is snidely insinuating that its opponents are morally corrupt.

This isn’t the place to go through the absurdities of this adolescent smear. Suffice it to say that the report resembled the regurgitation of a conspiracy theorist’s late-night Wikipedia binge; even Amnesty seems to have realised its shortcomings, deleting the report from its website “while it undergoes an internal review”.

Some might dismiss this as yet another skirmish in the interminable sex v. gender wars. But it’s also an object lesson in why so many brands go wrong when they try to display their Social Justice credentials.

First, let’s get one thing straight: I don’t agree with that lazy slogan “Go Woke, Go Broke”. Readers of a certain vintage might remember Anita Roddick’s groundbreaking commitment to fair trade, environmental responsibility, and ‘cruelty-free beauty’. This was revolutionary for its time, and astonishingly successful: in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there was barely a High Street in Britain without a Body Shop.

Today, social responsibility is big business. In a 2024 report, PwC reported that consumers are willing to pay an ‘ethical premium’ of almost 10% for brands that commit to sustainability and workers’ rights.

The mistake brands make, however, is thinking they can surf this ethical tide by allying themselves with every fashionable cause that comes bobbing along, while neglecting to do the most cursory due diligence on what customers actually think before telling them what they ought to think.

The current decade is littered with examples. Gillette saw backlash after chiding men for toxic masculinity (who do you think buys your razors?) as did Starbucks’ after its cack-handed attempt to address racism. Everyman beer brand Bud Light tanked its sales after hiring female impersonator Dylan Mulvaney as the face of its brand. Jaguar famously ran an ad campaign for its new car that featured gender-fluid dancers…but not the car itself.

These examples (and there are many others) all smack of decisions that sounded brilliant in the boardroom – what some analysts call ‘CEO activism’. These campaigns were not disastrous because they were ‘woke’. It’s because they were utterly out of touch with customers and, even worse, completely antithetical to the brand.

Such clunking mistakes aren’t always a result of malfunction in the marketing department. Other brands have taken a major hit to their reputation by denying services to customers because they don’t agree with their opinions or (perfectly legal) speech. These include Natwest and PayPal, which decided to de-bank Nigel Farage and the Free Speech Union respectively.

It seems to have escaped these businesses, but the entire financial services industry is based on trust. If customers see their bank arbitrarily refusing service because they don’t like a person’s opinions, it doesn’t just undermine the brand; it chips away at the already-fragile confidence in the whole banking system.

Which brings us back to Amnesty. The once-lauded human rights charity isn’t just ripping up its reputation, but making a mockery of the ideals it fought for decades to uphold. As Jo Bartosch points out, Amnesty used to be the conscience of the free world; a champion of dissidents and those who stood up to authoritarian power. Now it’s publishing lists of enemies, pronouncing guilt without a trial of the facts, and shaming ‘anti-social elements’ in the eyes of the wider public.

Brands are built over decades; trust too. Amnesty is just the latest organisation to trade in its reputation for the sake of some self-righteous backslapping from a dwindling band of fellow-travellers.

The reaction to Amnesty’s sham report provides a salutary lesson for businesses considering getting involved in politics: don’t forget the public before you take a stand on the ‘right side of history’. Because the wisdom of crowds is a better predictor of the future than a single self-righteous CEO.