Seeing bigger value in shared value

Clear the stage for Puma CEO Jochen Zeitz. He’s the latest big name calling for a paradigm shift towards businesses thinking about how to “do more good, not just less bad”. ‘CSR’ can't be confined to a single department, he says, ‘responsibility’ must be woven into the fabric of big business.

Zeitz has seen the business benefit of this kind of approach. His comments are reported in Marketing Week in an article titled ‘The New CSR: This time it’s profitable’, which documents the rush of companies realising that good business is good for the bottom line.

From M&S' £50million benefit of Plan A, to Coca Cola's $100million saving from reduced packaging, this is valuable reading for those knocking on the Chief Financial Officer's door.

The idea that businesses can generate real business value through delivering broader societal value is nothing new. It’s something that Good Business has been helping companies to achieve since 1997! But there certainly seems to be a real and growing buzz about ‘shared value’ this year, kicking off in January with a challenge to old-style capitalist models from Harvard School’s Professor Michael Porter. Let’s hope Marketing Week can inspire the marketing world to join the charge towards responsible growth.

Time to rethink your appearance

Recession and our choice of images - it's not something that I would have really thought about but, having read this recent article and gone through the process of helping write and source content and images for one of our client's responsible business section of its Annual Report, its clearly something on the corporate agenda. What we're seeing is a shift in the images used in corporate communication in these times of austerity.

Could this be a line in the sand that starts to demonstrate how much more companies are thinking about sustainability and corporate responsibility? Many businesses are showing they are concerned about what its stakeholders think of it. Business is aware that trust needs to be rebuilt. Aloofness, arrogance and one up-manship are out. In are open, friendly, inclusive pictures that show you, as a business, cares – as David Cameron might say – “we’re all in this together”.

Okay so we’re talking about communications and communications doesn't always mean the company has changed. However, I’m a great believer that half the battle is just starting the process. Often writing a report is less about what is written and more about the process of starting to think about the issues you are reporting about. Also, in this day and age of technology and social media if you don't live up to your word, you will be found out pretty quickly.

I’m sure there are plenty of examples of where companies have made this shift – can you think of any examples that stand out? Or examples that don't quite live up to the pictures?

Exporting Social Enterprise

I was reminded this week of a lunch I went to last year where I sat next to Jon Cracknel, director of the Goldsmith family's JMG Foundation, which funds campaigning work around ecological issues in farming. Jon made the point that in many ways the UK was over-provisioned with funders in the area of food and farming (true at the time, perhaps less so a year later) and that the way to use this over-provisioning was to create successful models to tackle particular issues. He saw the UK as an incubator of experimental initiatives and campaigns, where the funding surfeit allowed a tolerance of the sort of failure rates you might expect from dot com start ups and where the best would survive and could then be duplicated overseas at a fraction of the cost. It was an interesting market based view of philanthropy funding, but he wasn't able to come up with any examples.

The Sustainable Restaurant Association celebrates its first birthday this week. We launched into the teeth of the recession as a not for profit that supports restaurants making positive changes to the way they operate and we survived a challenging first year thanks to the generosity of some of the funders Jon was talking about. Over the last year we've learnt a huge amount and created a blueprint for a successful membership association which, with a little pump priming, can become a financially self sustaining business.

We are now, as a vindication of Jon's vision, working with our first overseas partner to launch in Netherlands later this year. It made me wonder how many other UK initiatives have been afforded the time and space to fine tune what they do, how this fits into the vaunted "knowledge economy" and what could be done to support the export of similar initiatives.

energyshare - 6/10

A colleague alerted me to the new energyshare initiative from British Gas (and, slightly bafflingly, from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall...who I know is most definitely of the knit-your-own-lentil-soup persuasion but wouldn't necessarily be my go-to person for advice on green energy) which wants to encourage us to get together with our neighbours and generate our own electricity, sell it back to the grid, and use the funds to do something awesome. So far, so very Big Society.

I really, really want to love this idea. It's got everything - getting to know your neighbours, cutting your carbon footprint, social media, saving money. But it's a classic example of a great idea let down by poor execution (at the moment - to be fair to British Gas this is the beta version) . If I was seized with a sudden urge to erect a wind turbine on the new pedestrian zone outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, I'm not entirely sure I'd know how to go about it based on this website. The "how to" guides are buried away, there are lots of different and distracting elements that take the focus away from the core idea, and it lacks an easy-to-use overview. On the other hand, if I already had the idea, the support, the know how and the motivation, perhaps energyshare would be the difference between my idea succeeding and failing.

So, 6/10 for energyshare - great idea, great potential, just needs a bit more work to make it truly great.

Inspire us, Don't scare us

The power of brands to inspire us and change our behaviour is huge.

The challenge to create a sustainable future for people and planet is huge.

So surely the opportunity to harness the power of brands, marketing and advertising to create a sustainable future is a match made in heaven. You’d have thought so, but the problem is that so few brands are seeing, or stepping up to, the role they can play.

Get it right and your brand could just be the disruptive force that makes us think in a different way (about the world and your brand). Makes us re-look at the way we have always done things. Inspires us to be better. Drives us to a more sustainable future.

The drive bit at the end is actually what inspired me to write this. BMW have just launched its stand alone sub-brand, called BMW i, with the motto “Born Electric”. The car maker is rebranding its sustainable vehicles division in an effort to differentiate its upcoming line of electric vehicles.

What caught my eye is the video on its new website. The video is not about reducing things. It’s not about stopping what you are doing or having a worse life.

It’s about inspiring us to do more. It’s about having a better life. It’s about thinking about things in a different way.

Okay, so BMW aren’t going to stop producing gas guzzlers for the foreseeable future, but if they can stimulate greater consumer demand for change by inspiring more of us to think differently, we might move more quickly towards a more sustainable future.

Fairtrade Flavours this Fortnight

Fairtrade Fortnight has returned, and this year it’s all about showing off.

Businesses, says the Fairtrade Foundation, need to be ‘loud and proud’ about how they’re helping sustainable development through fairtrade. What better week to start getting loud than this?

Sainsbury’s agrees. As of today, you can find fairtrade coffee from the Democratic Republic of Congo on its shelves. And Cadbury is getting loud too, keen to let everyone know about the Fairtrade goodness of Dairy Milk. 20% of profits from the chocolate bars sold during the fortnight will go towards solar power projects in Ghana.

If you’re looking to participate on a personal level, you could get involved with the world record attempt for bunting (fairtrade style, of course). Personally, I think I’ll head down to Soho’s Fairshare store on Berwick Street, where they’re serving up Fairtrade Flavour cupcakes. What tastier way to show support?

Marketing a Bigger Picture

Marketing has the power to transform brands, inspire consumers and move the world. But has marketing forgotten its own potential?

A new white paper from The CarbonNeutral Company says that too many companies forget to think about branding when they think about sustainability. Instead of inspiring consumers to favour responsible companies, marketing has become fixated on the short-term and oblivious to consumer interest in the bigger picture.

And there’s no doubt there’s interest. Recent research indicates that a corporate citizenship strategy accounts for 13% of consumers’ overall impression of a brand, and two-thirds rate environmental and ethical issues as important when deciding which brands to buy.

The potential for sustainable messaging hasn’t been lost on all. Ethical brands such as Innocent and Green & Black's have become household names through making it easy for consumers to put their money where their ethics lie.

We know there’s a market for inspiring sustainability messages. Now we need the marketing teams to get inspired.