Consumers are increasingly keeping tabs on brands’ ethical practices and behaviors—or lack thereof (see Ethical scoreboard, trend #35 in “The Future 100: 2021“). “Media whistleblowers have always been calling out brands, so I don’t think that this is a novel endeavor,” Pooj Morjaria, founder of independent watchdog site Did They Help?, tells Wunderman Thompson Intelligence. “But now what I think is different, as opposed to before [the pandemic], is that everyone is starting to care collectively about the bad practices of these companies and public figures. The whole world is going through this pandemic and we’re all suffering together; it’s imbued us with a sense of justice.”
In response to this heightened vigilance, a slew of new tools is being released that help consumers track and measure their own ethical behavior and the behavior of brands. Below, we round up the top five recent ethical calculators.