Triple G Magazine Winter 2013 by Magpie Comms

WINTER 2013

How tHe recession Has cHanged your customers for good

wHat a movie director, a sports coacH and a professional golfer can teacH you about building your vision

wHat does your triple g score say about your business?

HOW TO BE A BUSINESS OF THE FUTURE Where does your business stand in the new world order?

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The principal role of 21st century marketing is to create growth with a conscience and build businesses with a purpose. This new agenda for doing good should not be a substitute for commercial success; making the right decisions may affect short term profit but will drive long term success.â&#x20AC;? Amanda Mackenzie, Marketing Society President. 2012

We believe that it's time for a new kind of communications group, one specifically designed around 21st century business challenges in a world that is now high speed, high on scrutiny, highly sceptical and highly connected. Business as usual is not an option. Good business is the only option. Reputation, trust and relationships are your most valuable and most vulnerable assets. Good is the new currency of reputation. We call this...

THE POWER OF GOOD

Do you uNDERsTaND youR 'poWER of gooD'? FEATURE S

THE CHaLLENgE of gooD

Why did the cream of the UK's business community come together in July 2013?

TRIpLE g REsEaRCH

Do you know the value of your 'soft capital'? If you don't yet then you should. THE posT-CRuNCH CoNsuMER 13 How the recession altered the nature of consumers and why it matters to businesses. THE VIsIoN THINg 26 The three steps to building a vision that inspires your people, told by the movie director, the pro-golfer and the sports coach.

Can you feel the change rippling around you? Certainties and norms that you always relied upon are contorting and transforming into crisp new realities. Consumers are demanding change faster than businesses or governments can deliver it to them. at times, unprepared to wait, they are creating necessary change for themselves and forcing us, their ‘leaders’, to go along with them or be left behind. Consumers have never been better connected; never had a clearer vantage point from which to scrutinise our leadership of their world. and they have never had a greater appetite for flexing their muscles if we don’t act in a way that suits interests wider than our own. These changes directly impact on the very notion of leadership, and our ability as leaders to progress our companies' fortunes for the good of society; we need to understand and tackle ‘the challenge of good’. More and more, ‘good’ is becoming a currency, a universally recognised measure of a company’s value and worth. as we tear headlong into an unpredictable future, an understanding and demonstrable execution of ‘good’ as an outcome may increasingly be the distinction between businesses that thrive and those that do not. unlocking this phenomenal power of 'good' requires investment and expertise. for businesses to be a force for good means them doing the right things and acting in

the common interests of all their various stakeholders. It means using insights and creativity to engage those audiences and build authentic relationships with them. Then it means finding ways to drive advocacy and encourage recommendations for your business. at the good Relations group we’ve kickstarted a debate with our clients and the wider community that more and more leaders are becoming involved with. We took the three elements of ‘good’ as described above and baked them into a piece of consumer research; more than 3,500 consumers scored 100 consumer-facing companies on good actions, good Engagement and good Recommendations – resulting in each brand being given a ‘Triple g’ score (see page 8). some powerful insights and stories emerged from the first tranche of research (which we now intend to evolve). These stories suggest patterns of what it takes to be a successful organisation in this new era. CEos who attended our launch of Triple g in the summer (see article on page 4) have not been slow to approach us for a conversation about what all this might mean to their businesses. We understood that we had something of potential value and we wanted to share it. This then is Triple g, the magazine for the good Relations group. We exist to help our clients unlock the power of good and build trusted brands.

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OPINION

JoN LEaCH

A brief history of trust. JaCKIE BRoCK-DoyLE

Lessons from London 2012: we live in the 'age of partnerships'.

aMELIa ToRoDE

Peering into the future: how to avoid a crisis of imagination. CASE STUDIES

uNILEVER

yEo VaLLEy

ABOUT US

WHaT WE Do

The Challenge of Good | The ConferenCe

WHY dId THe CReAM OF THe uK’s BusIness COMMunITY COMe TOGeTHeR In JuLY 2013?

PhotoGraPhy: PhiL adaMs

...and what do you need to know about the debate that they kick-started?

MARK CHOUEKE

here is a crisis in leadership. Countless research studies tell us so. We have entered a new era in which consumers begin their engagement with brands and companies from a default position of mistrust. It is then up to us earn that trust piece by piece. That creates one of two potential problems for organisations. The first problem is that because in previous eras we never had to earn that licence to operate with all our stakeholders, we aren’t sure how to win back the trust that we once took for granted. What built trust in the past isn’t doing it now and won’t do it in the future. Meanwhile elsewhere, there are many great examples of outstanding, principled and responsible leadership of businesses and brands. More than ever before these leaders are working simultaneously across three fronts to serve their people, the planet and their profit targets. For various reasons however; maybe because the skills needed to create authentic and meaningful communications with relevant audiences are also a feature of this new era, the organisations these progressive bosses lead are not getting credit for their good work. It was with all this in mind that 120 business leaders gathered in a private room at London’s Mandarin Oriental hotel on the hottest evening in July. They came to debate the Challenge of Good. Kevin Murray, chairman of the Good Relations Group which hosted the evening, set the scene: “As leaders you

have many urgent priorities and competing agendas to deal with. You have to deliver the good profits and performance expected by your owners today. “But you also have to create the conditions for success in the future. You have to satisfy your increasingly demanding consumers in more ways than through just excellent products and services.” The emergence of the corporate sustainability strategy as more than a bolt-on idea that ticks a box in an annual report is evidence perhaps that business leaders have begun to recognise the need to be a force for ‘Good’. The evening of the 22nd July, 2013 however, marked the beginning of the process of the business community

YOu HAve TO sATIsFY YOuR InCReAsInGLY deMAndInG COnsuMeRs In MORe WAYs THAn THROuGH JusT exCeLLenT pROduCTs And seRvICes answering the tough questions: ‘What must we do to help business become a force for good? What must we change? How do we win back trust and create an environment in which everybody thrives?' Here is what some of the event panellists and attendees told us.

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What they said... Lord davies of abersoch

the PaneL

Chairman of Chime (and chair of the debate) “Whether it's politics or business, trust has been eroded and we’ve got to rebuild it so this is a hugely important debate. When you’re a CeO or on the board of a company whether private or public, you’ve got to produce value for all your stakeholders. You’ve got to make profit but with principles. There’s never been a greater time for more visible leadership in business. We need leaders now to set an example on good practice. Actions speak louder than words. Consumer and employee power together is putting pressure on boards of directors to put their houses in order.”

The Challenge of Good | The ConferenCe

Good Relations Group chairman Kevin Murray asks the question of his audience: 'what must we do to make business a force for good?'

fiona daWson Managing director, Mars Chocolate “For me, actions are the most important ‘G’ in the Triple G research. The recent issues faced by the food industry on horse meat demonstrated that actions and decisions taken during an incident can cause as much damage as the actions that cause the incident itself. I believe good intent followed up by good action builds the trust of your employees, and fundamentally your consumers as well. every business, every industry, faces difficulties and challenges. One of the areas for us as a confectionery business where we get challenged is around marketing and there can be tough conversations but rather than hide, you have to be involved in the debate. I find it difficult to understand when people who are facing into a big debate don’t get involved. do you want to put your head in the sand and ignore the issues, or do you want to face them? Because, it’s actually quite liberating and powerful when you do face into the tough issues.” sTuarT rose Chairman, Ocado

amanda mackenzie Chief marketing officer, Aviva “As leaders there are certain decisions that are absolute and others that are relative. The absolute ones are comparatively easy. It is the relative ones that are more difficult and those conversations are important to have. In a pure world, when you’re struggling with a ‘where do we draw the line’ kind of conversation, it sometimes has to be less about staying within the letter of the law or the rules and more about what ‘feels’ right and wrong. “There comes a moment when everyone has to agree that there is a different way to do business. It’s about people at the top being fundamentally unwilling to walk past some tough decisions. There are great examples of companies doing this such as M&s and unilever and even some funds in the City are choosing very carefully what kind of ventures they want to invest in so there is momentum

building. Those that are standing up for being successful in the longer term by doing the right things are reaping the benefits such as their employees wanting to work harder and to give more.” JonaThan WarburTon Chairman, Warburtons “If I asked you to write down the values you would run your own company by, I think things like ambition, care and trust would all play a large part. To get the best out of people, they need to be able to leave home and get to work without morphing into another being. They need to come to work and go, 'okay, this feels good'. If you behave badly, the whole organisation knows about it, so it’s been second nature for us to do the right thing. If you don't behave properly, you’ll be found out.”

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“Businesses run the world and have a moral responsibility to do the right thing and act in the right way. We have to listen to consumers who want us to make a difference. I can only say what we said at M&s, which is, we’re not perfect, but we’re sincere in our intent. When we get it wrong we must apologise. “On the whole issue of the horse meat scandal; part of the problem was society where we are all buying and consuming more than we need, and that is what people like myself have done. I persuade you to buy more hamburgers because I get judged on how many hamburgers I sold last year, and then the next year I’ve got to sell more. In reality, what we’ve got to do is educate people. The bit that’s missing is educating people to understand that you cannot sell four hamburgers for 20p without there being something less than real in there. You cannot make a t-shirt to sell in the Western world today for a pound without somebody suffering. You cannot pay a fair living wage to the poor girl or boy who is making this stuff. something has to give. Yet, we’re blind to that, and I think that’s a bigger responsibility that we’ve got in business, to educate the apparently already educated people in the Western world.”

The Challenge of Good | the conference

What they said... the

Ocado chairman Sir Stuart Rose and Mars Managing Director Fiona Dawson grapple with some tough questions put to them by members of the audience as panel chairman Lord Davies of Abersoch listens in

Guests

chrisTine hodgson Chairman, Capgemini UK “The things we heard tonight are the things that we all deal with every day. Fiona from Mars mentioned that she is judged by her employees on living up to her values. similarly, when young people come to interview with us they no longer ask: ‘how much am I going to earn next year?’ or ‘what are my career prospects?’ now they ask: ‘What is your sustainability agenda? What are you doing about the environment; about youth unemployment; what are your values and how do they manifest themselves?’ Thanks to social media if you don’t live up to your values, you get found out. You need to do the right thing by your customers, your employees, your supply chain. We may not change the impression of business overnight but we all have the responsibility to do this.” david WheLdon Head of brand, reputation and citizenship at Barclays Group “We all remember when banks were the trusted cornerstones of society. Trust has plummeted due to events such as the Libor scandal. I think deeply about this issue because I’m partially responsible for looking after our reputation. Healthy banks make for healthy economies which make for healthy societies so it’s very important that banks get themselves back on track. We are very focused at Barclays on helping people achieve their ambitions in the right way and that means we need to focus on the long term and on rebuilding trust. We are clear that this will take a long time – our trust is back to the pre-Libor levels of ‘16 out of 100’. I hear people talking about that as good but we can do better. We have a long way to go to rebuild trust and we’ll achieve it only by doing the right thing over and over again. And if we do the wrong thing, learning from it, owning up immediately and getting it right the next time.” John neiLL Chairman of Unipart

PauL drechsLer Outgoing chairman and CEO, Wates

“You have to think about your business as your family. You try to make sure that your family grows up properly. Why wouldn’t you want the same thing for your business? Of course there are distortions to cope with - the free market is the best system that we know but publicly quoted companies face challenges. not all of their investors are on the same page as their other stakeholders, some are in and out very fast. In the end business is about relationships; relationships with your customers, your suppliers, your employees, the communities. everybody in our company is drilled to try to inspire our stakeholders to want to stay with us for life. We can’t easily succeed in that but that’s the aspiration.”

“The only sort of profitability we are interested in is long term profitability and that is about the sustainability of the company. We are a privately owned family business, fourth generation, 115 years old. Our number one priority is to hand over a bigger, better, more sustainable company to the next generation of the family. You can only do that through ‘quality profitability’ that considers the impact of the company on the environment and the local community. I’m encouraged by the event we have been at tonight and encouraged that there are an awful lot of people in business that believe that being a good company matters.”

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Opinion

Jon Leach

A BRIeF HIsTORY OF

JOn LeACH, pLAnnInG dIReCTOR AT THe GOOd ReLATIOns GROup, CHARTs THe evOLuTIOn OF THe One THInG We ALL desIRe THe MOsT FOR OuR BRAnds

A VIEW FROM THE AUDIENCE Marcus davey

ceo and artistic director of the roundhouse “Most of you probably think that the Roundhouse is just a big performance venue but underneath it there are 24 state of the art studios. That’s where we work with more than 3,000 11-to 25-year-olds each year, 60% of whom are from disadvantaged backgrounds. It's a big issue that there are a million young people unemployed in this country today. We can only work with 3,000 of them a year. In London, there are 150,000 young people that are long term poor. We work with them in music, theatre, circus and radio and we’ve found that to take young people seriously, you have to deal with each young person independently and separately. For the past four years we have had two young people on the main board of trustees. We also have a youth advisory board, which advises us on everything in the Roundhouse, not just the aspects that are to do with young people. These are among the most important initiatives that we’ve created because instead of talking about young people, we were talking with young people. From that dialogue we have seen our retention rates go up. Our relationships with young people are just extraordinary. The skills they are learning and the experiences they are having through the Roundhouse are amazing. What’s more important is that while a number of those young people have fallen by the wayside again and again; going in and out of probation and youth services all their lives - now they’re in jobs. They’re gaining employment for the first time, they have families that have been unemployed for three to five generations and now they’re doing something of value not just to themselves but also to society.”

over the years, indeed over the millennia, mankind has placed its trust in many different types of person or institution. Going way back to the dawn of time, it was our close relatives - or at most our small tribe - who were the only people inside our “circle of trust”. everyone else was literally a deadly threat. the only other ‘good’ forces in the world were our (dead) ancestors, but there again, their actions and motivations were hard to figure out, so you didn’t want to rely on them too much. kith and kin. they were pretty much the sole recipients of our trust back then. Later on, as cities evolved, we learnt to trust the kings and the priests who stood as the power behind the throne. Maybe not all kings were good and not all Gods benign, but on the whole we trusted our rulers and our religious leaders. that was when we began to extend our trust past merely the people who shared our lives and started to trust in our institution. step forward a few millennia and into the mid-20th century...let’s say the 1950s and 60s. while politicians may have replaced the kings, and religion may have declined somewhat, we still largely trusted these institutions. in addition, some new trustworthy entities had arisen and for a large part of the 20th century we were also trusting businesses, brands, the media and banks. to look at this historical journey from another perspective, it has also been important over the years to have someone to blame when things go wrong. these days we may not blame our ancestors, our gods or our kings quite so much, but, just as we have transferred our trust, so we have modernised the blame game. nowadays, in terms of whose fault “it” is – whatever the “it” may be - modern man can choose freely from politicians, businesses (and their perfidious brands), the media or – a very popular current choice this one – bankers. but, if it is still very important to have someone to blame, so homo-sapiens also need to balance this with someone to trust. we all still need to know who the good guys are. so peering into the triple G survey, who’s “good” today? well, going back to our human social core we still trust the recommendations of our friends and family. to modernise this a bit, we might add colleagues too, and for that matter we might even add in “celebrities”, who are just friends you haven’t met yet.

but this “recommendation” thing is reciprocal and so, as social animals, we are careful to recommend only the “good” companies to our friends, families, colleagues etc. (cynics may say this reciprocal spirit does not seem to apply to well-paid celebrity endorsers). Looking at our survey, solid, competent, reliable delivery is what counts in order to earn the recommendation G. to earn a good actions G you seem to need to act with integrity, wisdom, and maybe even a sense of duty; you need to be seen to act as a good citizen who takes into account the well-being of the whole tribe. ideally, you need to show some leadership and have a sense of purpose. finally and perhaps strangely, earning the good engagement

WHILe sOCIeTY HAs BeCOMe MORe COMpLICATed, THe WAY THAT peOpLe WORK OuT WHO Is GOOd And WHO TO TRusT HAs deep AnTHROpOLOGICAL ROOTs And Is In MAnY WAYs unCHAnGed G is the toughest one of all. it seems that sharing the values of the tribe and communicating well are part of this. but also you need to have a degree of humility and not seem to be too big or too dominant – no one likes a tyrant after all. and if you come from the financial classes (or money lenders, or merchants, as we used to know them) then you will be particularly harshly judged. to conclude, while society has become more complicated, the way that people work out who is good and who to trust has deep anthropological roots and is in many ways unchanged. indeed, the more things change the more things stay the same.

Feature | TRIPLE G RESEARCH

Can you measure

GOOD? 'Good' IS bEComInG THE nEw mETRIC uSEd To EvALuATE buSInESSES. Good ITSELf THEREfoRE muST SomEHow bE mEASuREd. THIS IS THE SToRy of How A PR AGEnCy TRIEd To do juST THAT...

MARK CHOUEKE

ir Stuart Rose, former chairman of British retail bellwether Marks & Spencer, and now chairman of online grocer Ocado, says: “For a leader, building reputation and trust is the day job, which makes communication the day job too.” The PR industry has long argued that leaders must pay more heed to their organisation's intangible assets such as reputation, trust and leadership communication; that these intangibles will determine the future success of your organisation. While the business community – boards of directors, the banks, the analysts, the brokers, the financial journalists and so on – measures the value of companies largely in numbers on the balance sheet, they are beginning to recognise the value of their intangible assets. In that regard, consumers are way ahead of them. To evaluate companies and often to inform their purchase decisions, consumers amalgamate everything they know and everything they have heard or read of the particular brand into one broad umbrella question: ‘Is this company Good?’ Worryingly, this question is shorthand for a myriad of different deeper questions, almost all of them concerning your intangible assets: Is this company known for the safety of its products; for

the welfare of its employees? Do I trust this company? Are its products reliable? Is it known for being well-behaved? Does it do the right thing ‘when nobody is looking’? Does it demonstrate a sense of responsibility towards the environment; to its customers; to its suppliers? Do I like this company’s marketing? Does it set the right example to others? Does it use ingredients that are harmful to my children? Does it do anything outside of the ordinary for society or those in need? Would I recommend its products and services to my friends and family? The environment that companies must now operate in is no longer one where the numbers at the bottom of their balance sheets effectively tell us everything we need to know about how good they are. Brands and businesses must now think about how ‘Good’ they are in a hundred different ways if they are to thrive in the future. In today's super-speed, ultra-networked and high scrutiny landscape, any management team that doesn’t bother to heed the new metric of ‘Good’ risks falling foul. By the same token any company leaders that do choose to take the ‘Good’ metric seriously, must learn to quantify the good that they do. With the Triple G research the Good Relations Group has created what it sees as a first attempt to measure ‘Good’. Triple G is a new rating system that the Group believes can indicate the future success and sustainability of any organisation. "Where an ‘AAA’ credit score acts as an indicator of your organisation’s financial performance or hard capital," says Group Strategy Director Amelia Torode, "a Triple G rating measures increasingly important elements around good actions, engagement and

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recommendations across your business that together, could be described as your reputation score, or ’soft capital’." Aspects of soft capital might include the strength of an organisation's relationships with its suppliers, its ability to recruit and retain the best talent, the motivation levels among its workforce; the loyalty of its customers and the trust that builds from consistently providing quality products or services - all critical issues that directly impact on financial performance. The first tranche of the Triple G survey was carried out by the Good Relations Group in the summer with consumers scoring brands on good actions, good engagement and good recommendations. The agency contends that getting all three of these dimensions right will organisations unlock their 'Power of Good'; they will be doing the right things, engaging in a way that wins them credit for doing so along with powerful advocacy among their target audiences. PR, after all, is now measured as much in the reputation of a business and whether it is known to do the right things as it is in coverage. Reputations are built on what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Research company, Chime Insight & Engagement (CIE), undertook the research methodology to help get under the skin of how consumers felt about more than 100 brands. More than 3,500 people were surveyed, each asked in detail about brands with which they had a good amount of familiarity with and felt able to comment. The results of the survey paint a fascinating picture of what consumers are looking for in the brands that they will increasingly champion in the future.

Feature | TRIPLE G RESEARCH

What is Triple G? The power of

The power of

GOOD ACTIONS

GOOD ENGAGEMENT

GOOD RECOMMENDATIONS

Doing the right thing even when no-one is looking

Inspiring strong relationships through communications

Inspiring powerful advocacy

Out of 100 brands surveyed in the research: l 20 brands got “Triple G” rating l 20 brands got a “Double G” rating l 18 brands got a “Single G” rating l 45 brands got no Gs at all Meanwhile: l 42 brands were awarded a G for Good Actions l 27 brands were awarded a G for Good Engagement l 49 brands were awarded a G for Recommendation

'THE START OF A LOng jOURnEY'... This research isn’t 'the final word' on anything. It certainly won’t match the many millions of pounds that your organisation might spend on insight every year. but what it is, we feel, is the beginning of something new, interesting and different to what is out there. Patterns have emerged through Triple G that suggest ways of winning in the new business landscape that we all serve. A number of insight-heavy conversations have sprung up between our central planning team and our PR practitioners who are now going together to talk to clients and others in the business community about what our findings might be telling us. we’ll be investing into expanding and improving this research and sharing the debate with anyone who is interested. Let us know if you want to be a part of it...

HOW MUCH IS YOUR 'SOFT CAPITAL' WORTH? do something before you read any further. Look at your watch and check the exact time. Got it? ok. If you’re a CEo or a board director, you’ll know exactly how much your business is worth right now at this exact moment of time. If the value or market capitalisation of your organisation has dropped or increased in the past few hours you’ll be aware of it and probably also the reasons for the change. Quite rightly, you’re on top of it because it falls within your remit to manage it. That market cap though relates solely to your tangible assets, your hard capital. How aware are you of the value of your intangible assets, your ‘soft capital’? your soft capital could include your brands, your stakeholder relationships, your leadership, your systems and processes, your IP and your corporate values and culture that play such a large part in how motivated, engaged and committed your employees are. If it were possible to do so, what monetary value would you attribute to your company’s corporate reputation? How much is the perception that your customers and consumers have of you as a brand and an organisation worth? How much was it worth yesterday and how much could it be worth tomorrow? In terms of daily priorities such questions may seem irrelevant. Certainly they are complex and hard to answer. Strategically though they are of grave importance. In may 2001, the uK government’s department of Trade and Industry published a report entitled: “Creating value from your

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Intangible Assets.” It was a report ahead of its time. "In practice," one passage read, "there are few sources of competitive advantage that cannot be duplicated and matched by competitors. ultimately, a company’s ability to flourish in this environment will depend on its ability to create value from intangibles.” more recent evidence also suggests that the state of your soft capital can actually effect your share price. A report published in 2012 by global accountancy practice, deloitte Touche

“there are few sources of competitive advantage that cannot be duplicated and matched by competitors. Ultimately, a company’s ability to flourish in this environment will depend on its ability to create value from intangibles.” Tohmatsu, entitled “The Leadership Premium”, says effective leadership can raise company valuations by as much as 16%. It says surveys market analysts in the uK, uSA, China, India, japan, and brazil and finds that the quality of senior leadership – including honesty and integrity – has a direct and measurable impact on assessments of whether companies have been successful and will be successful in the future. According to the report, quality of leadership could affect analysts’ valuations of companies by 16% positively, and by up to 20% negatively.

Feature | TRIPLE G RESEARCH

1 GOOD ACTIONS

GOOD ENGAGEMENT

Doing the right thing even when no-one is looking

TRIPLE

100 BRANDS In detailed consumer survey

Really get me and have a lot in common with me

Stage research approach

GOOD RECOMMENDATIONS

CROWD SOURCED

Brands I'd definitely recommend to friends and family

METHODOLOgY Triple G is a rating system that aims to indicate the future success and sustainability of a brand. The Good Relations Group commissioned sister company Chime Insight & Engagement to survey 3,500 people, asking them in detail about brands which they are familiar with. For holding companies, CIE gave a description of the company to consumers, which included brands in their stables. For example, with Diageo, researchers explained that it is the maker of Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff and Baileys. The results provide a picture of which brands are strong on three elements â&#x20AC;&#x201C; good action, good recommendation and good engagement, and which were not, and why. The second stage of the research was crowd validation. Five-hundred people were shown the results and asked if they agreed or disagreed with them. People had the option to move a brand into or out of obtaining a G rating across any of the three criteria. The aim is to give a thorough view of how the UK public at large consider this broad spectrum of brands operating in a variety of sectors.

validations

TRIPLE g SECTOR PERFORMAnCE

nUMbER OF g'S

AvERAgE g

SuPERmARKETS

2.3

oTHER RETAIL

1.8

fmCG (ExCLudInG SuPERmARKETS)

1.7

TRAvEL & LEISuRE

1.5

TELEComS & TECH

0.7

mEdIA

0.6

fInAnCIAL SERvICES

0.5

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Feature | TRIPLE G RESEARCH

WHY WE CREATED THE TRIPLE g SURvEY jon LEACH There are several reasons why we created the Triple G survey, some more noble than others. Let us explain... Clearly, creating a piece of work like Triple G is a smart thing for an agency to do. If it resonates with clients, speaks to their challenges and prompts useful conversations then it works as a valuable marketing tool. Lord knows there’s plenty of research out there that gets labelled ‘thought leadership’ before being shunted out to the world in the hope of a response. we believe Triple G is more than that. Clearly we’re pleased that it has won us the interest of several CEos and we hope to turn that interest into projects that will bring in revenue for the Good Relations Group. yes the branding and mechanism of the Triple G survey carries a degree of chutzpah (but then it’s not our fault that Tony Good created the company 50 years ago). but there was always a pioneering spirit of enquiry behind the creation of Triple G too; an interest in how businesses are perceived today; an attempt to try to diagnose the challenges the client community may be facing. And as Tom Peters said “what gets measured gets done”. nobody, we felt, has tried before to measure the things that Triple G looks to measure. we felt that some hard numbers could lead to some interesting discussions. many of the values and beliefs of the team at the Good Relations Group were coalescing around the idea of the ‘Power of Good’. If we believe that clients should be purpose driven, have a cause and do the right thing, then perhaps we should not just be neutral advisors but also express our own views on how business should behave. we needed some skin in the game too. with representatives from our various group companies present at an early brainstorm on how we should articulate the

core proposition of the newly formed Good Relations Group, an idea formed: we wanted to create good engagement between our clients and their stakeholders, to advise them on the good actions they needed to take and in doing so we were trying to create good recommendations them; to build advocacy for them. what would happen, we wondered, if we surveyed ordinary people on what they thought of various companies on these three

NOBODy hAS TRIED BEFORE TO MEASuRE ThE ThINGS ThAT TRIPlE G lOOkS TO MEASuRE. SOME hARD NuMBERS COulD lEAD TO SOME INTERESTING DISCuSSIONS dimensions of Good? what if we rated each of these companies on these three qualities and then awarded them one, two or three Gs depending on the results? what if we created a Triple G rating system to measure what we were now calling ‘soft capital’, in parallel to the Triple A rating system of the credit rating agencies that measures hard capital? And so Triple G was born. It has faced many challenges in its young life but, for now, its fresh faced youthfulness seems to be taken as an asset rather

TRIPLE g RATED bRAnDS

than an impertinence. Indeed, there has been great interest in how to nurture this sapling survey and create a mighty oak of insight that might become a permanent feature of the landscape. for example we have been asked: Are you going to make this an annual survey like the Interbrand brand valuation survey or wPP’s brand Z? (Answer: very probably). Can you include my brand on the next survey ?(Answer: yes , we are going to run a supplementary survey soon on brands we probably should have done the first time). Are you intending to do a b2b version or an “influencer/ expert” version? (Answer : these are in the pipeline). Are you intending to do an international version ?(Answer: maybe, if we could justify the budget). but why does it matter? well beyond the self-serving nature of the invention, it does generate discussions as to what does it mean to be a “good” company today. what does it take to become a truly trusted brand? what can we learn from those who rate highly in the survey (or indeed perform badly)? we would express some caution in seeing the survey as definitive : the survey is too new and in some cases too small scale to be seen as providing absolute “findings”. However, many patterns emerge that do offer insights on what the challenges are that companies face today. Some are thriving in this environment (we would argue that the Triple G companies are) and some have yet to respond to 'The Challenge of Good'. but more than this, there are some interesting new examples of “Top Rated” companies that any student of communication, brands or reputation might want to pay attention to. for example Pets at Home, ASoS, yeo valley, Aldi and Subway appear to be “breakthrough acts” that have much to teach some of the marketing aristocracy. finally, if we believe as an industry that soft capital – brands, relationships, trust, reputation - is just as important as hard capital (indeed is it the investment in the soft capital that creates more hard capital), then perhaps as an industry we need to have our own measures of Good Assets that we can set alongside those of a more financial nature. while we hope that Triple G will become an industry standard it is probably more important that conversations are had about the “Challenge of Good” and that bold new plans are formulated to meet those challenges. we look forward to observing - and rating these ventures. Spreading the word: How Marketing Week magazine featured the Triple G survey as its front page cover feature in August 2013

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Opinion

JACKIE BROCK-DOYLE

ThE aGE of

Good RElaTIoNs GRoup CEo JaCkIE BRoCk-doylE REvEals hER Top BusINEss TakEouT fRom ThE suCCEssful dElIvERy of ThE loNdoN 2012 olympIC aNd paRalympIC GamEs The last decade of bidding for and staging the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games taught me many things. So when people ask me about what made London 2012 the success it was I tend to think very carefully. Was it the athletes? Undoubtedly. Was it the team we had in place? Yes, absolutely. Was it the attention to detail and planning? Of course, that was critical. Was it the Games Makers, the way the British public embraced the Games, the city itself? Yes, yes and yes. It was all of these things. But it started with a dream – a vision – that was clearly and consistently reiterated, that connected with people and helped us to create strong and enduring partnerships. In hindsight the creation of our vision – to use the power of the Games to inspire lasting change – was the easy bit (although perhaps it didn’t feel like that at the time). Much harder was transitioning it from the bid to the Games and creating the engagement that made London 2012 the game changer it became. This fully required us to build a network of strong partnerships with a huge number of stakeholders, all of which rested on our joint buy-in to the vision and really understanding what it meant. The authenticity of your vision is your desire to make good on your promises and be accountable for your ambition. Your ability to stand by your ambition and inspire others to join the journey you are on is directly linked to people’s belief in your vision and the evidence of your actions. Simply put, if those experiences and actions lack authenticity, you lose! So what does this mean to businesses today? It means understanding a wide range of different groups; not just your core customers but pretty much anyone that might influence them. It means spending time working out what ‘great’ looks like to you so you can keep communicating it, making sure everyone understands what you stand for and what you are trying to achieve. Importantly it means listening, really listening and finding solutions that work for people other than just you. I don’t pretend we got this right all the time but when I look back over the last 10 years, one of the key elements that enabled us to deliver our engagement was our determination to work in partnership. Partnership became a watch word within the organising committee. It underpinned the way we delivered our vision. We knew we couldn't deliver the Games on our own - in fact 19 Government departments, the Mayor's office and all of its agencies, a network of teams in the nations and regions, international sport bodies, the Olympic and Paralympic Committees and of course our worldwide and domestic sponsors

were all partners in our operational and inspirational delivery. The biggest and longest partnership of them all was the one we had with the British people. We made a promise that the Games were for everyone but clearly the venues would never be big enough to hold everyone. We wanted tens of thousands

IT sTaRTEd WITh a dREam – a vIsIoN – ThaT Was ClEaRly aNd CoNsIsTENTly REITERaTEd, ThaT CoNNECTEd WITh pEoplE aNd hElpEd us To CREaTE sTRoNG aNd ENduRING paRTNERshIps

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to volunteer but had hundreds of thousands apply so had to turn good people away. We wanted thousands of torchbearers, special people with amazing stories that we could shine a light on, but we couldn’t take everyone. We knew from the outset that we had an ambitious and brave vision. Our task was always to be true to that vision, to be honest, to be fair and to find ways in which the country could participate in the Games. These Games were, after all, designed to inspire a generation so we needed to engage all generations in them. One of the main points for business is that it is not up to the public to engage with you. It is up to you to engage them and the modern communication landscape means there are no shortage of channels or platforms. Don’t be afraid of them, embrace them and use them well. The public needs to be inspired and motivated at a local level so it is important to create ways for people to engage with your organisation in ways that appeal to them – not always the same as what appeals to you. And in this lies the real challenge for many businesses. As you can see from our Triple G research, which measured consumer perceptions on how 100 brands score for Good Actions, Good Engagement and Good Recommendations (see the highlighted numbers on page 9 of this magazine) proper, recognisable, credit-giving engagement is tough. Only 27 brands out of the 100 we surveyed scored highly enough for their engagement to achieve a ‘G’ for their efforts. Engaging our audiences in a way that is meaningful to them seems to be almost twice as hard to get right as doing whatever it takes to get them to recommend us to others or appreciate our good intent and actions. This makes me wonder if there is a shortage of skills in the corporate world when it comes to truly understanding how to engage consumers and other stakeholders in this new transparent world. Perhaps it is not enough insight or not enough good data being put to good use. Perhaps it is a fear or apprehension of new channels. Maybe a fickleness of consumer or lack of listening on behalf of the corporate world or perhaps organisations are not clear enough about their purpose, are not articulating it well enough to engage partners or for their stakeholders to understand it or believe in it. Whatever the reasons we need to address this engagement deficit quickly. Strong, enduring, trusting partnerships will be critical to business success in the future but stand for nothing if there is not a common purpose or the skills required to properly, authentically and effectively engage your customers.

the post-crunch consumer

Life after

THE BIG

SQUEEZE As the recession comes to An end, the impActs it hAd on our purchAsing behAviours remAin. how well do you know the post-crunch consumer?

by mark Choueke, new business director, good relAtions group, And PeTe marCuS, director, hArvArd It’s the summer of 2008. A handful of vastly experienced leaders are just weeks into their new posts as CEOs of some of the most successful businesses in the world. Ralph Topping was appointed CEO at William Hill in February after working for the company since 1973. Colin Matthews took over as CEO at airport operator BAA in April after success in several big roles including the top job at Severn Trent plc. After three decades of working for Coca-Cola Muhtar Kent takes up the position of CEO in July. John Rittenhouse and Vittorio Colao are appointed CEOs of EDF Trading and the Vodafone Group respectively later the same month. None of them are yet aware that the news rippling over from America of trouble building in the US sub-prime mortgage market is to become a financial tsunami; a crash that will see the world collapse into a financial meltdown bigger than any in living memory. The effects of the turmoil that will spread across the globe following Lehman Brothers’ declaration of bankruptcy on September 15th will be felt for several years.

What may last even longer though, even as the global economy begins a gentle upturn in 2013, is the reset in values, beliefs, needs and behaviours of consumers who experienced the recession. Five years on we can look back and join the dots to see that the economic crisis and other factors such as the proliferation of mobile digital technology have transformed not just our daily lives but our relationships with big business and with one another. Even before the crash, forward-looking CEOs were aware that consumers were changing. Prior to his appointment as CEO of Coke, Muhtar Kent had worked on and off for the company for three decades. He recognised Coca-Cola was very much still set up to serve the customer it served when he joined the company in 1978. On starting out as CEO he gathered his most senior leaders to discuss the global trends that he felt business needed to embrace in order to succeed. From that meeting emerged the company’s 2020 vision, a plan to double the size of the business within 10 years. Since then however, the world has moved on again;

Feature | the post-crunch consumer

change has accelerated and the biggest impact of that change is on how consumers view the relationships between themselves, their world and the responsibilities of big business and brands towards them. This is no temporary blip – the very axis on which this relationship rests has shifted and is likely to keep on moving according to experts. Increasingly, the success of every kind of business will rely on an understanding of the triggers that drive the purchasing behaviours of the individual consumer and indeed the channels in which that individual prefers to rely on. The new world that must shape your commercial strategy is now inhabited by a target customer with a different nature to the one that you may recognise from eras gone by. Meet your new target audience. Welcome to the world of the ‘post crunch consumer’.

The PoST-CrunCh ConSumer

Global CiTizen The emergence of low-cost airlines in the early 1990s transformed the notion of travel for Brits. People who had not been able to afford to do so before could suddenly holiday abroad regularly. People living in Manchester found it easier to organise a weekend break in Barcelona than a similar trip to London. Add evolving technology to that shift and it becomes easy to see the planet shrinking before our eyes. We no longer needed wait for a postcard from globetrotting loved ones. Emails, social media and platforms such as Skype and Apple’s Facetime mean that anyone with a mobile or tablet device can talk to somebody on the other side of the world in real time. The reach and power that we have as individuals and among our closest kin has multiplied exponentially. The internet doesn’t care much for border restrictions. Consumers expect to access almost any information, any product or any experience wherever its origin. That has a massive impact on business. Your competitive market may no longer be the one laid out on your internal sales charts. The new rival could come from a different geography or indeed from a game-changing business with a different model. The travel industry is currently being shaken up by the super-fast growth of Airbnb. Founded in San Francisco in 2008 by a couple of former grads from the Rhode Island School of Design, Airbnb is changing the hotels and hospitality business. Instead of booking a hotel room the internet brand allows you to book accommodation for your holiday in a house or apartment belonging to someone living in the city you want to visit. It builds on the trends for global travel, community and trust and, by building an online marketplace of spare rooms and family spaces, also taps into the post-crunch consumer’s desire for unique and authentic experiences. Through Airbnb you can book experiences at any price point (inventory includes luxury apartments and private islands) and the business has a presence in 150,000 properties in 19,000 cities across 192 countries. mobile deCiSion-maker Information flows in real-time for the post-crunch consumer. That means your customer waits for nothing. Reviews and expert testimonials on your product can be

Value, community, technology, influence and morality are all factors that are driving fast evolution in the way we live and communicate

read, purchases can be made and views and opinions on the service your staff provide can be shared. All within the space of five minutes. The smartphone and other devices such as tablets have rendered the concepts of ‘opening hours’, the ‘nine to five’ working day and store locations largely meaningless. Smartphones outsold basic mobile phones for the

THE SMARTPHONE AND OTHER DEVICES SUCH AS TABLETS HAVE RENDERED THE CONCEPTS OF ‘OPENING HOURS’, THE ‘NINE TO FIVE’ WORKING DAY AND STORE LOCATIONS LARGELY MEANINGLESS first time ever in Q2 of this year. We’ve reached the tipping point. Even smartphones and devices may soon seem somewhat obsolete to the early adopters of new technologies. Samsung recently launched its Galaxy Gear Watch, a device on which wearers can make calls and surf the internet. Apple, Google and Microsoft among others

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are reported to be following closely behind with plans for their own watches as well as other wearable technologies. It seemed that with the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets that progress was slowing; ever decreasing circles of innovation coming down to ever smaller margins of improvement. It now looks like the future is only going to accelerate again. If you serve the post-crunch consumer, you’ll feel that speed build. Value Seeker The financial crash that began in 2008 no longer seems like an abberation as much as it does a correction. The UK economy may slowly be returning to growth but many of the newly-shaped personality traits of the post-crunch consumer will remain. In boom-times one would rarely admit it in public if they had managed to pay less than full price for a product or found a cheaper, discounted version. Today, the post-crunch consumer will work hard to achieve a discount, seeking all possible online advice and intelligence from his or her peers and then wear that discount like a badge. In its latest Consumer Outlook report, The Futures Company tracked the attitudes of postrecession consumers and found that 59% of UK consumers agreed with the statement: “I am now more focused on enjoying what I already have instead of trying to become better off.” That was twinned with a strong agreement among UK consumers that “I’ll never again spend my money as freely as I did before the recession.” It is worth recognising too that value doesn’t always mean cheaper. The post-crunch consumer is more than

Feature | the post-crunch consumer

Smartphones outsold basic mobile phones for the first time ever in Q2 of this year

WHAT DID THE WORLD LOOK LIKE

‘PRECRUNCH’? in 2008 coca-cola’s most senior leaders were quickly gathered to a special summit to discuss the trends that were forcing structural change on that and many other global businesses. the coca-cola company’s ‘2020 vision’ which emerged from that meeting, is built around six global trends identified by ceo muhtar kent and his colleagues. these, some of which are now being realized much faster than predicted, were: a GrowinG middle ClaSS between 800m and a billion people entering the middle class between 2010 and 2020 signalling the greatest economic shift in history. more than 60% of this new wealth was expected to come from emerging nations. maSS urbaniSaTion people were moving off the farms and into cities. kent told his team that for the next several years, an urban population the size of new york would be created every 90 to 100 days.

happy to pay extra for premium brands when the value is still present. “Value is about the whole package,” says Andrew Curry of The Futures Company. “It’s the emotional and service benefits as well as the product or core service.” Sometimes that value comes in the form of values – the values of your organisation. Consumers will still pay more to associate with your values if they align with their own. ConTenT CreaTor In 2003, Matt Harding left his home in Westport, Connecticut to go travelling around the world at the age of 23. A few months into his trip, he and his friend Brad were filming one another on the streets of Hanoi when Brad said "Hey, why don't you stand over there and do your stupid dance? I'll record it." Matt did as he was asked. They both thought it made for a pretty funny video, so Matt then repeated his silly dance for the camera in every city that he visited. He put the video of his dancing adventures on his blog, and in 2005 he found it on a new site called YouTube, where someone had uploaded it. A million people had already watched it. To Matt’s surprise he had got semi-famous as "That guy who dances on the internet.” Then he got an email from a chewing gum company called Stride. They asked if he'd be interested in making another video of himself dancing in various locations around the world. They would sponsor him to go and dance wherever he wanted, while his girlfriend, Melissa would be paid to go with him in order to film it. That second video made Matt even more famous. The project began like the previous one finished, with Matt

dancing in front of iconic landmarks, but along the way he found himself in a small village in Rwanda where he danced with a bunch of kids. The kids joined him immediately and without hesitation. Matt later referred to that moment as the best thing that happened to him on the trip. He said the kids taught him that people are a lot more interesting than old landmarks and monuments. Matt immediately went back to Stride and told them he done it all wrong; that they needed to send him around the world again. They agreed, and in 2008 he put out another video that showed thousands of people laughing, smiling, and goofing around together. It took him five years and three tries, but he felt he had finally got it right that time. As the internet exploded, Matt went A-list. Visa hired him to do his dance in a series of TV ads that air across Asia and the Middle East. With the money he earned he settled down with Melissa in Seattle, Washington and bought a house. Matt has continued to travel the world and make films of his adventures. His videos have been watched by more than 100 million people around the world. He sells the videos along with travel, t-shirts and other merchandise on his website, Wherethehellismatt.com, where he discusses travel tips with his fans. On YouTube along with his films there is video of him speaking at business conferences on his success and if you simply type ‘Matt’ into Google he is in the top two ranked results that come up. He no longer dances alone. Wherever he goes in the world there are hundreds of fans waiting to dance with him in his videos. Watch his 2012 video, already seen by more than 11m people, and see for yourself.

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eConomiC rebalanCinG the world was being redefined; one or two economic superpowers were being replaced by economic powerhouses brazil, china, india, russia and followed by others such as indonesia, turkey, morocco, vietnam, chile and mexico. an emPowered GeneraTion Futurists were noting the rise of the most sophisticated and engaged youth generation, empowered by incredible new communications, alongside growth in the over-40 generation. riSinG PriCeS with more people and more wealth we will find ourselves challenged by a constant scarcity of resources, leading to volatility in commodity and energy prices. not an aberration but a readjustment. ‘The new ConSumer’ kent’s teams were seeing a fundamental consumer reset in terms of their priorities, their values and their expectations. this has led to a new focus on the meaning of the word value. Source: Marketing Week

Feature | the post-crunch consumer

WE’RE STILL ON DAY 1 OF THE INTERNET technology is one of the main drivers in changes to the way we live our lives: how long can it possibly keep evolving at such speed? here are some surprising reminders that may suggest that we are only a very short way into an evolution that doesn’t appear to be slowing.

google is only 15 yeArs old

2.4bn people used the internet in 2012, 1.1bn oF whom were in AsiA

youtube is only eiGhT yeArs old

1.2 Trillion the number oF google seArches in 2012

twitter is only Six yeArs old Apps Are only fiVe yeArs old there were 691m websites on the internet in december 2012 51m more thAn in 2011

9.66m the number oF tweets posted during the opening ceremony oF london 2012

Matt was one of the early stars of user-generated content. Today there are billions of individual and personal blogs, websites, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Multiply that number by many hundreds to give you the number of comments that third parties have added to content created by others. User generated content and social media dominate the internet. As someone responsible for running a brand, your online voice is often dwarfed by the sheer volume of the conversation being had by individual content creators, publishers and directors. It’s a difficult conversation to get into. Informing customers on a subject where you can demonstrate expertise in an engaging way, moving them or simply entertaining them is far more likely to work in your favour than simply selling to them will. The post-crunch consumer doesn’t speak in these terms but PR and communications skills will build you the relationships you crave with the post-crunch consumer far more effectively than advertising will. reSPonSible buyer Bananas were at the heart of a lively communications spat between two of the big four supermarkets recently. Sainsbury’s locked horns with Tesco with its advertising claiming the bananas it sells are Fairtrade, whereas Tesco’s are not. Food provenance is something Sainsbury’s is promoting, having launched a campaign claiming ‘same price, different values’. The use of the word ‘values’ in the advertising strapline is deliberate. The post-crunch consumer will, where possible and relevant, let their values guide their spending decisions and just like its competitors,

october 2012 sAw 1 billion monthly users on FAcebook For the First time december 2012 sAw 200m monthly users on twitter For the First time

Sainsbury’s knows this only too well. The supermarket’s other ads communicate about the origins of its Basics range of food, including free-range eggs and sustainablysourced fish fingers. Food provenance, along with price, will be further highlighted by the company into next year according to head of brand communications Mark Given. Given was recently quoted as saying: “One of

WITH PERSONAL BUDGET TIGHTER THAN EVER, WE HAVE BECOME MORE INTERESTED IN MAKING THINGS OURSELVES RATHER THAN JUST BUYING THEM the trends [we see] is that in the UK it is [still] difficult for our customers in terms of being a family with a constrained budget. [However], we also know that people are increasingly concerned about provenance and the sourcing of their food and that is only going to get more important.” How the retailer sources its food is part of its 20x20 Sustainability Plan, which was announced last year. One aim is to double the amount of British food it sells and make sure its own label products will not contribute to

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global deforestation by 2020. Elsewhere away from supermarkets there has been a marked increase in the number of companies looking to hire marketers with CSR and internal communications experience as brands look to improve the reputation of their organisations both outside and within. This is according to Recruiter Badenoch & Clark’s June 2013 “Professional Talent Spotlight” monitor. The recruiter firm’s qualitative research among its own clients also found there has been a rise in demand for marketers with a strong CSR focus. A properly designed and executed CSR strategy can work for both a business and its consumers when it inherently addresses some social purpose beyond profit and addresses consumer demands for responsible, ethical and transparent behaviour . Be warned however, a bolt-on CSR policy with no remit to drive fundamental changes to an organisation’s policies and practices will be exposed as ‘greenwash’ all too quickly. CreaTiVe arTiSanS As post-crunch consumers have had to reassess their personal circumstances they’ve also reassessed their values, and it seems many of them have decided that defining themselves solely through what they consume no longer makes sense. Instead, they increasingly want to define themselves through what they do. Citizens of this postcrunch world see the fruits of this shift all around them. With personal budget tighter than ever, we have become more interested in making things ourselves rather than just buying them.

Feature | the post-crunch consumer

Left: Post-crunch consumers are getting inspiration from TV shows like The Great British Bake Off. Below: Sainsbury’s claimed recently the bananas it sells are Fairtrade, whereas Tesco’s are not

So what does this shift mean for businesses? There’s a clear hunger amongst post-crunch consumers to see themselves as more than just “consumers”. It’s not that they’re antipathetic towards brands; it’s simply that they’re more willing to engage with and be loyal to brands that understand this new reality. On TV we get our inspiration from shows like Masterchef, The Great British Bake Off and Great British Sewing Bee, which celebrate individual, participative creativity over mass production. On the high street we look for “crafted” or “handmade” objects, from artisan Monmouth coffee to Byron burgers and locally-brewed craft beer. Online we can opt to personalise the design of our trainers from NikeiD, the colours of our bike from Mango or the design of our greetings cards from Moonpig. (In the UK Google searches for the term “homemade” have more than tripled since 2005, while searches for “personalised” have more than doubled.) This desire for self-fulfilment through creating, building or designing something even extends to our nights out. Rather than just going to the pub, we may visit one of the many new venues like Drink, Shop, Do in King’s Cross, where group activities are scheduled alongside the food menu. SoCial Sharer Post crunch consumers are using the internet to share their lives, opinions and experiences with global online communities. While these communities are made up of people that online users may never meet they can bond over common interests and even forge strong friendships that live purely online. Conversations are being had about every product or service in the world all day long. The brands and manufacturers responsible aren’t invited to join in those conversations and indeed in most cases are simply not welcome when they try. Brands that succeed often do so by engaging with a specific audience in a way that seems relevant, useful, engaging and human as opposed to overly corporate; remember, these are conversations as opposed to campaigns. Brands like Oreo and Paddy Power succeed by creating engaging and humorous content that consumers enjoy sharing. The likes of O2 and Nike have actually built products and platforms that bring their audiences flocking – after all, if you can’t own the conversation then you might as well own the room where it is taking place. Similarly, Unilever food brand Knorr is launching an online portal to recruit food enthusiasts to act as advocates as part of a wider £12m marketing push to raise its profile in the UK. ‘Foodie’ consumers will be able to interact with the brand’s 230-strong team of ‘Knorr Chefs’ who are responsible for creating Knorr products as well as share recipes from both the experts and celebrity chef Marco Pierre White. Sharing is a currency that business leaders need to understand. Local community websites are springing up everywhere in order to organise carpools for the school

The ConSumer and biG buSineSS workinG hand in hand on The ThinGS ThaT maTTer kArin lAlJAni

globAl md, corporAte citizenship Few however, have learned to talk about it convincingly to all business is the force that drives our global economy. it has of their stakeholders. this in part, is because to report back on immense resources and profound economic, social and success requires metrics and this is activity that many businesses environmental impacts. business has recognised this and in have never attempted to measure before. many cases, understands why it has to aim to be profitable and through our advice and guidance designed to understand issues responsible at the same time. the difficult bit is the ‘how’. such as materiality and our bespoke tools such as socio-economic As unilever and the other progressive organisations that impact studies, we help our clients understand sustainability achieved a triple g-rating in our survey (see page 8) demonstrate, as an overall social it can be done. purpose and As we work with component of future organisations across business success. the world to help only then will them do the right companies be placed things in this regard, to take the lead and we gather a lot of use their influence knowledge about the help consumers tools and practices and customers. that can help deliver in terms of their what the good communications, relations group is businesses are starting to refer to often seen purely as not as ‘sustainability’ persuaders - what but as ‘thrive-ability’. was the last thing For example we you bought that you have a point of view The Marina Bay Sands and the Supertrees, Singapore, where did not need after about collaboration. Corporate Citizenship opened its newest office in October being convinced by while there is much powerful communications? in the future companies can also be that business can do to help create an environment in which seen as educators. if you can be persuaded to buy things you everybody thrives, it cannot do this alone. governments, aid really don’t need it should be possible to help individuals adopt organisations and academia all have a role to play as well. the more responsible behaviours too. greatest success-stories from the corporate world very often All of this is important because of the simple truth which the include collaboration between two or more of these parties. business community needs to embrace. that is that no business increasingly now, a fifth party is getting involved: the consumer. can thrive in a bankrupt society. businesses cannot be sustainable i was reminded of this in my hotel room recently in singapore unless they're creating environments in which everybody can where we opened our third office to add to those in new york and thrive. this is that ‘thrive-ability’ idea that i mentioned earlier. london. i found the little notes encouraging hotel guests not to there’s a shift that is happening now; leaders are becoming request that their towels or bed sheets get changed. this of course aware that they face higher expectations than ever before from is about conserving water and energy, something hotels feel is now consumers and indeed all of their organisation’s stakeholders. it's demanded of them by their consumers. a shift caused by attitudes that are undergoing dramatic change this same initiative also started one of sustainability’s as we become a more connected and transparent society. great challenges in corporate responsibility and environment doing good and getting the credit for it is now foundation for a programmes. the term ‘green wash’ was coined by business case. to avoid your efforts being seen as green wash environmentalist Jay westervelt who accused the hotels in the means doing your part and engaging consumers in your social 1990s of only starting such programmes to cut costs under the purpose. every company is capable of working with governments, guise of being concerned for the environment. whether that really aid-organisations and academia to help contribute solutions to was the motivation at the time is unknown. problems such as poverty and climate change challenges. what i do know is that the hotel industry has gone beyond the in preparation for the european climate change conference towel notes – many have extensive food waste reduction targets, where i recently spoke, i challenged my team in corporate local community programmes and environmental construction citizenship to come up with 25 things individuals could do to initiatives. the initiatives have proliferated for a reason. that help without compromising their current life-style. it took the reason is that where possible, consumers want to spend their team five minutes. money in line with their values. that is the challenge of the 21st century – no one wants a companies have spent much time and effort changing the reduced standard of living – no company wants to reduce their way they do business in order to be more socially aware, more share price or profits. the good news is we don’t have to. environmentally responsible and ethically accountable.

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Feature | the post-crunch consumer

Who do you trust? Cosumers spend thousands of pounds on a family holiday following testimonials written by people they have little in common with

run, create new small business alliances or social groups and to offer advice and recommendations on almost everything imaginable. Elsewhere consumers are willingly buying bigticket items based on product and service reviews and testimonials written by people that may have little in common with them. Trusting someone you’ve never met

CONSUMERS ARE WILLINGLY BUYING BIG-TICKET ITEMS BASED ON PRODUCT AND SERVICE REVIEWS AND TESTIMONIALS WRITTEN BY PEOPLE THAT MAY HAVE LITTLE IN COMMON WITH THEM after reading their testimonial enough to spend thousands of pounds on a family holiday, a car or a digital camera may sound crazy. Brands however are becoming savvy enough to realise that their advertising campaign is often only the start of the customer journey. Once the spark of an idea for a new purchase is there, consumers will research user reviews for

weeks at a time before making the decision. This may mean some entirely new processes to follow and relationships to build in terms of where you spend your marketing money and with whom it is important to gain influence. ouTraGed aCTiViST The internet and in particular social media has given the post-crunch consumer the power and the voice to speak out against what is seen as immoral, unethical or irresponsible behaviour, unfair treatment and hypocritical or duplicitous attitudes. The anger that has fuelled the online fire around scandals such as MPs’ expenses, widespread use of phone-hacking in the media, and the risks taken by bankers and traders that contributed to the financial crash has given rise to a powerful new authority in ‘the people’. Figures supposedly answerable to the public rarely seem tested beyond their comfort zone by the likes of select committees when accused of skating the fine line between what is unlawful and what is simply ‘not right’. An outraged consumer however has more teeth. Individuals, brands and even governments can be brought down by a fast increase in volume of angry voices online. When parting with money or good faith, the consumer takes away an assurance; a promise that he or she will be treated well while receiving a quality product or service that will work in the way it is meant to . Where people now start largely from a premise of ‘trust’ when dealing with online communities, the opposite is unfortunately true when they are dealing with businesses. The reaction, when that promise is broken is both instant and visceral. l

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HMV, Blockbuster and Jessops all failed to imagine what their customers would look for in the future

Opinion

imagination

AmeliA torode

A CRISIS OF

AMELIA TORODE, DIRECTOR OF STRATEGY AT THE GOOD RELATIONS GROUP SAYS A LACK OF VISION CAN ONLY SEND A BUSINESS ONE WAY

As businesses we are in serious crisis. i’m just not sure that we have correctly identified what kind of crisis we are in. what we do know for sure is that times are tough. you only have to pick up a newspaper, look on the internet or talk to people in the pub. but whilst the media describes an economic crisis i believe that what we are actually living through is a deep crisis of imagination. marissa mayer, the ceo of yahoo, once delivered a speech in which she described how “creativity loves constraints”. At the time she was talking about pixel sizes, but the point she was making is absolutely applicable to the current state that uk plc finds itself in. when the second world war was over rear Admiral sir Frederick donald gosling was looking for a new job. the economy was in ruins as was london where he lived. in a wonderful example of what the article on these pages calls ‘reimagining the world’ and indeed, his own place in that world, rear Admiral gosling took £200 and purchased a bombsite in holborn. From there the ncp multistorey car park business was created. it is that kind of vision and imagination that i believe we are lacking a bit of at the moment. my case can be argued simply be looking at some of the high street casualties that have been forced to shut up shop: blockbusters, Jessops and hmv to name but three. what unites these brands is that each of them managed to fail whilst operating in a specific sector that was booming. the reason for failure in each case was the inability to imagine what the future might look like or what their customers might be looking for above and beyond the status quo. in the case of Jessops, it thought it was merely in the business of selling cameras and photographic equipment. it missed the opportunity to put itself at the heart of the ‘digital imaging and photography’ business in a time when we were taking, modifying and sharing more photographs and images than we ever had before. somehow Jessops failed to imagine a new business model that moved away from simply selling hardware. some numbers serve to put that failure into stark context: every year each of us takes an average of 500 photographs (though we may never actually print them). there are 200,000 photographs added to Facebook every minute. there are 130 million users of instagram sharing 45m photographs every day and we have posted 16 billion images onto the web to date. we are self-documenters on an unprecedented scale with digital images as our tool of choice. Jessops’ leadership team did not see any correlation between this trend and the company’s brand heritage and story. blockbuster made similar errors in an industry that it thought was all about renting videos but was arguably more about a growing and unquenchable demand for great entertainment content. there is a lovely quote from ted sarandos, the executive creative director of netflix, who talks about his company’s desire to “become hbo before hbo becomes us.” he said this when he was unveiling netflix’s first foray into original programme content, house of cards with kevin spacey. hbo of course, is the celebrated us cable channel famous for its commissioned series’ such as sex And the

city, the wire and the sopranos. prior to house of cards, netflix was best known as being an online dvd rental and delivery business – sending out millions of dvds a year across the us. in effect, netflix took the decision to rip up a perfectly valid business model and re-imagine its business. it developed live-streaming capabilities; it employed a creative director and began to commission groundbreaking new shows such as house of cards, Arrested development and orange is the new black. imaginative and successful, netflix has seen its share price rocket 20% since the start of the year. As manufacturers and retailers, industry analysts and experts race to predict the future of television, netflix has made itself a player. the company, born in the midst of the dotcom boom in 1999, understood that as well as wanting to rent dvds online and over the phone as opposed to walking into a retail outlet, its customers were simply interested in watching quality content, regardless of whether

SOMEHOW JESSOPS FAILED TO IMAGINE A NEW BUSINESS MODEL THAT MOVED AWAY FROM SIMPLY SELLING HARDWARE it came in the form of television, movies or clips. it understood that customers wanted to choose to watch it in different ways, at different times and on different platforms. blockbuster, by contrast founded in 1985 and at one time in command of almost 50% of the gigantic home video rental market in the us, never managed to get its head around this. it continued to try to build on a dated business model whilst elsewhere, video was becoming the new star of the internet. today more than six billion hours of video are watched each month on youtube. that means more video is uploaded to youtube each month than the three major us networks created in 60 years. these are not all videos of cats falling into toilets. youtube has more hd content than any other online video site. blockbusters witnessed the growth of the likes of netflix and youtube and assumed that they were competing in a totally different business sector to these two organisations that has very different business models to its own. it was blinded by its own definition of the category it was in; as a consequence it didn’t even roll out an online service until 2004. it lacked the power of imagination and it paid the ultimate price. And then there is the lesson of hmv. in July 2010, the then ceo simon Fox described his vision for hmv as an ‘entertainment superbrand’. it felt like Fox was the man to give the 89-year-old business a future outside of selling cds that were available to music lovers at lower prices online. After all, hmv could claim a heritage in the world of music, games, books and entertainment in general.

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the business made a string of what seemed like the right moves. it bought a number of top live music venues, launched some very successful (but sadly unbranded) summer music festivals such as lovebox. it started to build its own ticketing business. it made some headway into selling technology products, becoming the third largest retailer of Apple products at one point. it even bought 50% of a digital media company in 2009 and on the back of that acquisition, launched hmvdigital, a digital music downloads portal. under Fox hmv attempted to transform its offer and its positioning. what it failed to do however, was to let customers know. All of its external marketing and communications continued to relate to cds and dvds in a war against the internet that it could never win. its in-store communications strategy was haphazard at best. Fascia displays announced cheap music in bric-a-brac bargain baskets as opposed to high-margin technology and hi-fi equipment that was often hidden at the back of the shop alongside products such as socks and crème eggs. store staff knew all about music but couldn’t work the internal ticket selling system properly and didn’t have enough knowledge to cross-sell the online assets, the live music events or the store’s loyalty scheme hmvpure. meanwhile other companies were encroaching onto the entertainment and popular culture space with market savvy and clever partnerships; companies slick enough to constantly re-imagine and re-structure their product offerings and branded services. one example was Finnish gaming company rovio who created the global entertainment mega-brand Angry birds, also the number 1 paid app of all times. rovio sourced multiple partners to bring Angry birds to life and open up new lines of revenue. they partnered with mcdonald’s in china, developing specific parts of the game that could only be played in a mcdonald’s wi-fi zone: free fries, shakes and burgers could all be won. rovio partnered too with sony pictures entertainment to create a 3d movie due for release in 2016. producers david maisel, the executive producer of iron man, and John cohen, the producer of despicable me, are both on board for the project. Angry birds branded clothing ranges were also launched as were kids’ toys and household items such as duvets and bedside lights. it is this depth of imagination that hmv showed when poor performance forced the management team to make some tough decisions. A choice was made to sell the music venues as opposed to breaking out of a business model reliant on shifting huge volumes of music cds. From then hmv’s demise was not hard to predict. i believe that imagination must now be the defining corporate characteristic of a successful company. As marketing professor and brand consultant mark ritson says, business categories don’t really exist. they are invented by business people to make sense of their business. the post-crunch consumer doesn’t think in categories. instead he or she thinks laterally across them, and so must we. imagination could be our fastest route out of the remainder of this financial crisis. let’s get to work.

CASE STUDY

UNILEVER gOOD ACTIONS Triple G rating

Business success can no longer be measured by shareholder value alone. Quarterly earnings guidance should be scrapped. And hedge fund investment in companies is not welcome. These are not the ramblings of a radical campaign group, but the views of the CEO of one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. Paul Polman has been at the helm of Unilever since 2009. Under his tenure, the maker of Lipton teas, Wall’s ice cream and Persil detergents has put a vision for sustainable living at the heart of the firm. But in tough economic times, will its good actions deliver results for the business? Unilever’s food, personal and homecare products are on sale in more than 190 countries and more than half its sales come from emerging markets. The bold corporate vision is to double the size of the business whilst increasing the positive social benefits from their brands and reducing their environmental impacts. The corporate purpose - to “make sustainable living commonplace” – may sound glitzy but it’s more than just warm words. When the Sustainable Living Plan was launched in November 2010, the stand-out feature was a series of audacious targets. By 2020, Unilever has committed to help a billion people take action to improve their health and hygiene, to halve the environmental footprint of its products and to source 100% of its agricultural raw materials sustainably. The goals sound noble on paper, but the real challenge is ensuring that they work for the business. The litmus test for Polman will be demonstrating how his plan increases sales and profits, reduces risk and drives shareholder value in the long-term. The interest in responsible business practices goes back to the days of Unilever’s founder, William Lever. He first popularised the hygiene benefits of soap in Victorian England. Lever was quick to realise that social benefits can be healthy for the bottom line too. Unilever’s most recent Progress Report on the Plan documents an extraordinary range of targets. It reveals that 224 million people have been reached so far with interventions that: reduce diarrhoeal disease through handwashing with soap; provide safe drinking water; promote oral health; and improve young people’s selfesteem. More than a third of agricultural raw materials now

UNILEVER SHOWS THAT COMPANIES CAN PUT gOOD ACTIONS AT THE HEART OF BUSINESS SUCCESS The business case Unilever’s financial success has been helped by its Sustainability Plan, according to its most recent Progress Report. Whilst many assume that good actions can be costly, the evidence for Unilever seems to point the other way. Environmental efficiencies have helped to save costs of more than €300 million since 2008. Traceability of key commodities in the supply chain has reduced risks. Above all, innovation is playing a critical role. A new range of dry shampoos by brands like TRESemmé and V05 grew over 19% last year, whilst also encouraging people to wash their hair less often and so lower their environmental impacts. That’s a solid story to put a smile on the faces of shareholders as well as consumers in waterscarce countries. The top priority for Unilever in the coming years will be to measure the value that they are creating for society, the environment and the business. Human rights is a particular area that the company has said needs further development as part of its commitment to enhancing social impact. meet their tough sustainability standards and they’ve helped to train 450,000 tea farmers in responsible farming practices. Crucially, Unilever’s good actions are guided by their impacts on society. Rather than imagining what commitments might “sound good”, Unilever’s scientists embarked on a rigorous study of the plan’s business impacts. A detailed assessment of 1,600 products examined not only their own operations, but also the environmental footprint of raw materials, distribution and even how consumers use the products at home. The key insight from the research was that Unilever’s biggest water, waste and greenhouse gas impacts are outside of their core operations.

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For this reason, they’ve set out to engage farmers to adopt more sustainable practices and tackle the tricky issue of how to get consumers to cook, clean and wash with a lower environmental impact at home. Behaviour change among consumers is perhaps the most revealing area where the skills of the marketeers are helping to power the business case for good actions. Massive R&D spending has brought a steady stream of product innovations to market that have a lower environmental footprint. For example, concentrated laundry detergents have reduced greenhouse gas emissions whilst dry shampoos encourage less water use in hair washing – a critical issue in some emerging markets. But Unilever doesn’t see its responsibility ending when the product flies off the shelf. They are trying to engage consumers to change their habits at home, from turning down the temperature dial on the washing machine to taking shorter showers. Unilever is accelerating the integration of sustainability into their brands and taking the message to consumers, according to their most recent report. For example, their Knorr brand of soups and stock cubes now put messages on sustainable sourcing on some packs. Dove is well-known for its advertising on real beauty and promoting women’s self-esteem, whilst Lifebuoy soap, popular in markets like India, leads on its handwashing campaigns. By positioning sustainability at the heart of its offer, Unilever hopes to convince consumers that its good actions make it a trusted organisation that does the right thing. Since the launch of the Plan in 2010, the share price has performed strongly and growth in emerging markets has been particularly marked. So far, it looks like the power of good actions is paying off. But this is no accident - Unilever has made strident efforts to show the world that good actions need not cost the company, they can actually enhance its prospects for growth (see THE BUSINESS CASE). As Polman has told shareholders, they shouldn’t confuse altruism with a lack of business sense. “This is not idealistic at all,” he said late last year. “All of the actions that we do are hard-wired to our business purposes, hardwired to our brands”. The challenge for Unilever is to provide the evidence that sustainability and business go hand in hand. That requires metrics that show how good actions can benefit society as well as the business over the long-term. Having done away

Case Study | UNILEVER

Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever - makers of Dove among other brands - says only businesses that make a positive contribution to the world “will be accepted by consumers” in the years to come.

2bn ½m ¤300 1bn THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO USE A UNILEVER PRODUCT ON ANY GIVEN DAY

NUMBER OF SMALL-HOLDER FARMERS TRAINED IN SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES SO FAR

MILLIONS SAVED FROM ENVIRONMENTAL EFFICIENCIES IN MANUFACTURING SINCE 2008

NUMBER OF PEOPLE TO BE HELPED IMPROVE THEIR HEALTH AND HYGIENE BY 2020 with quarterly earnings guidance, Unilever has been given the benefit of the doubt by its shareholders. But the business is just three years into its ten-year plan. A commitment to keeping up the good work will require nerves of steel – particularly if financial performance hits the buffers. Polman has spoken of “a unique opportunity to restore that faith in capitalism and develop these new business models that are desperately needed. growth and the needs of society don’t actually work against each other, but go hand in hand”. Unilever deserves credit not just for its quiet history of good actions, but also for its bold new vision for a more sustainable world. If it meets its aims, Unilever hopes to become the first large multinational to demonstrate that sustainability and commercial growth support one another. Paul Polman has predicted that only those businesses that make a positive contribution to the world “will be accepted by consumers” in the coming years. If his prediction proves correct, good actions won’t just be a nice-to-have, they’ll become the prerequisite for successful brands everywhere.

KeY DRiVeR Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, has been instrumental in leading the charge for sustainability in business. Citing short-termism in financial markets as an inhibitor to long-term success, he made a bold move to do away with quarterly financial guidance. Polman spent nearly three decades at two of Unilever’s fiercest rivals – P&G and Nestlé. A marketer by training, his opinions on advertising are no less controversial than his views on financial markets. As he recently explained, “If I project … out five or ten years, then I don’t see Unilever as an advertiser. I see us as a solutions provider. I see us as a co-creator, with the consumer, of mainstream sustainable living. Neither the word, nor the accounting line of ‘advertising’, means anything to me”. A regular figure at the World Economic Forum, his tone can, at times, come across as evangelical. Although originally determined to become a doctor, he trained as a priest at a Carmelite seminary. In 2012 he was asked by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to become one of the 27 imminent members of the High Level Panel for the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals.

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CASE STUDY

YEO VALLEY GOOD ENGAGEMENT Triple G rating

As stories go, the rise and rise of Britain’s leading organic dairy brand is one that is well worth re-telling. It was 1961 when husband and wife Roger and Mary put their roots down in Holt Farm with 30 cows, a few sheep and some arable crops to keep them occupied. Business grew quickly and by the end of the Sixties they had bought the land next door to their farm. In 1974 they expanded the herd and began to make ‘Yeogurt’, selling their yogurt from the gate of their farm and to local shops. By the 1980s there was an increase in demand and the decade saw the family business jump from 30 to 135 people. In 1990 though, Roger’s death meant his son Tim joined Mary at the helm – the plan was that they would run the business together. Four years later they agreed their first deal to buy milk from a group of organic dairy farmers, and the Yeo Valley Organic brand was born. The rest is history. Yeo Valley encouraged more local farmers to become organic and form a cooperative, guaranteeing to buy their produce to cope with growing demand. The modern iteration of the Yeo Valley brand, a household favourite, is based on a product and a company that is at one and in love with its surroundings. This is not just about the building of a new head office fuelled by elephant grass and the many accolades since awarded to Yeo Valley (including two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise for Sustainable Development). It is also not just about the ‘rapping farmers’ X-Factor ads, which two years running were more tweeted about on their launch nights than X factor itself! Engaging stuff. Instead the success Yeo Valley enjoys today is about the way it engages with its audiences and customers in a way that authentically tells its own story, communicates its beliefs and values. To return to the point at which we left the retelling of the history of the company, the rolling hills of Somerset did not escape the tough and changing economic climate after the global crash. Like family businesses across the globe, the livestock of so many economies, Tim and Mary faced challenging times. Their outlook was further clouded by foreign conglomerates intent on taking the market by its horns. Big dairy players with big beefy budgets, the likes of Danone, Nestle and Muller, were upping the ante in-store and buying up the competition. How would this private, British family business manage to retain a level playing field?

YEO VALLEY GROwS SHARE BY CREATING AuTHENTIC CONTENT FOR CuSTOMERS TO ENGAGE wITH

The answer was to focus on having a direct conversation with the customer. For a family business borne and nurtured of a single minded ambition to ‘do the right thing’, it is only natural to find mums at the heart of plans for organic growth. Yeo Valley often refer to mum consumers as Sally. Sally wants nothing but the best for her family. She is part of a movement, the zeitgeist of authentic brands. She is the matriarch – the buyer and bearer of what’s ‘in’ versus what is ‘out’, (out of the shopping trolley, the kitchen cupboard, the school lunchbox and so on). She is constantly searching for the truth behind the products that she buys. She is looking for brands that are built on reality rather than spin; for the stories of the place behind the facade and the values and behaviours that drive a manufacturing organisation’s everyday actions. Sally and Yeo Valley then are like a match made in Somerset. If Sally were to make a conscious purchasing

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decision based not only on the brand’s great taste but so too the values behind the brand, the Meads surely had a winning formula. Just one question, then: how do you take the Valley, to Sally? The need to answer that question prompted a brave new approach that moved away from a traditional corporate FMCG marketing model, to one built on good engagement. Insight is a wonderful thing. Research revealed Sally’s passion points: fresh food, cultural events and a spot of gardening on the weekend to name a few. It also allowed the Meads to map her influencers, among them leading media, bloggers, celebrity chefs and nutritionists. It became clear that the most effective means to reach Sally was through a ‘brand news’ led approach, in which real-time content is made to work as hard as possible across various channels and platforms. Moreover, this intelligence informed the nature of the brand-led content itself; the answer to how to take the Valley to Sally lay in - well - taking Sally to the Valley in virtual or physical form! The Meads knew that if more people could learn about the real Yeo Valley and its ethos in action – the working farm, the organic garden and its myriad of conservation projects (see timeline below) – as well as encouraging them to taste the goods, then more and more people would become fans of Yeo Valley’s products and its cause. They devised a series of experiential initiatives designed to bring opinion-leading people just like Sally – an entire community of influencers - to the Valley. A local theatre production company from Bristol staged performances on site. Respected horticulturists hosted garden tours and events at the home of Yeo Valley. Jamie Oliver served up a ‘Catch & Cook’ day of sustainable fishing on Blagdon Lake followed by a lunch reception serving Yeo Valley produce, naturally. This activity and more created a rolling programme of contagious stories, all amplified through the ‘brand newsroom’ approach. People identified as online influencers, those with large and loyal social media followings, began spreading the word across the community of likeminded consumers. Sally got talking. The brand’s share of voice quickly grew to lead its competitive set, dominating the category at over 50 per cent. And soon figures showed a double-digit uplift in sales – and a lovely signal to the Meads that they were doing the right thing. l

Case Study | YEO VALLEY

Yeo Valley's boyband The Churned, whose single 'Forever' was born out of its ad campaign; but the recent rolling news and content that emanates from Yeo Valley's 'brand newsroom' approach has helped move the dial further

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN GO WRONG BY ROBERT ANDERSON, DIGITAL, SOCIAL AND INNOVATION DIRECTOR, GOOD RELATIONS You can’t always control events, but you can control how you plan, contain and respond to them. As social media becomes the new front line in crisis management, and as issues escalate faster than ever before, research I’ve carried out at Good Relations has revealed just how unprepared many companies are. Our survey, conducted by Watermelon Research, covered 100 UK-based communications, marketing and social media professionals at organisations ranging from SMEs to large multinationals. While more than two thirds of those polled recognised there was a gap in their social media planning, many admitted they had not done anything about it yet. Top ﬁndings of our research included: l 69% of those polled were worried their social media activities could go wrong l 41% said their existing crisis plans had no signiﬁcant social media element l 30% admitted they were not sure how they would use social media in a crisis situation Good Relations has developed a social media crisis simulation tool that allows brands to prepare for issues and test their plans in a realistic role play scenario. For more information contact randerson@goodrelations.co.uk

ENGAGEMENT - MORE THAN THE ICING ON THE CAKE BY RICHARD MOSS, MD OF GOOD RELATIONS BRAND COMMUNICATIONS Years ago as a marketer I looked after the Mr Kipling brand. First conceived in the early 1960’s by advertising agency JWT, it was made from the two classic marketing ingredients of the time consumer research and imagination. Mr Kipling started its life as a question: “What do you want from a packaged cake brand”. In its case, in a world where the local bakers’ strict opening hours stood between you and your sweet baked confectionery, the answer was simple: accessible, baker-made cakes. With a brief like this, it didn’t take long for some of ad agency land’s most creative minds to conjure up the answer. Mr Kipling, a brand built around a ﬁctitious baker. A baker that you’ll never see, but who you always know is present through the quality of his cakes and of course, his signature on every pack. While every resource possible went into the packaging design and the drama of the TV ads, not a thought was given to what was planned behind the brand façade. Fast forward to the late 1990s and Mr Kipling was a top 20 brand by sales. The formula had worked. Consumers couldn’t eat enough French Fancies, Mini-Battenbergs or Mini-Victoria Sponges. Things were going so well in fact that every key UK

retailer had by now established ‘own brand’ offerings and Mr Kipling was made in Europe’s largest cake baking factory, with Mr Kipling Apple Pies coming off the same line as cakes for Asda and Tesco. Did this matter? Not until the day a call was received from The News of the World. The newspaper had put an undercover reporter in the bakery who claimed to have found all sorts of ‘nasties’ in the factory. The front page story was a little bit of a wake-up call. Until that time, as a classically trained FMCG marketer, I’d never really considered the inherent dangers that exist in the traditional brand engagement model, where a façade is built between the corporate and the public facing brand. Only when I moved into the public relations industry did I start to observe the power and rewards that come from authentic engagement strategies. Strategies where the purpose and beliefs of the corporate brand are used to create brand causes that activate communities. Indeed, only recently did I discover that there is a straight line correlation between how authentic you believe a brand is and how much you are willing to recommend it – a key measure of future sales growth. Today, Good Relations Brand Communications is built to develop and activate authentic engagement strategies. We call our approach the Four ‘C’s. The ﬁrst C is cause, the alignment of the corporate vision with that of its customers and wider stakeholders. Brand causes aren’t ‘exceedingly good’ brand boasts, they are statements of belief that act as the North Star for everyone associated with the brand. Visit Yeo Valley in Somerset and you’ll see that ‘doing the

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right thing’ doesn’t just refer to producing some of Britain’s most delicious yogurts. Our second C is community. Today’s hard-bitten consumers have not only benefited from a life-time education in advertising spin, but are also damn hard to find. We believe brands need to deploy ‘hand-raising’ strategies, targeting passion points, influencer groups and impact points that resonate with a brand’s target audience. Authentically engaging around these is far more likely to turn a passive member of the public into an advocate of your brand. The third C is content, content that will entertain and engage consumers at the right time in the right way. This is the sugar-coating around the cause, the reason for them to invest their time in you. And finally we have contagious. Research in the US indicates that 50-70% of the effectiveness of an advertising spot on sales occurs after the first exposure. Every other spot has diminishing returns. If this is right, it indicates two things. Firstly, that huge amounts are being wasted on high frequency ad campaigns and for us, more importantly, the effectiveness of brand news. We believe brands today need to have their own ‘newsrooms’ championing their beliefs through their causes and activating communities through a 24/7 stream of engaging content. Look at some of the most successful brands today through the lens of our four ‘C’s: Nike, Coca Cola, Apple, Red Bull and Yeo Valley for example, and you begin to see fundamental changes in the way these organisations are tackling the challenge of authentic engagement. Today the organisation, its beliefs and products, need to be at the heart of every brand communication strategy. Put simply, they must be more than just icing on the cake.

CASE STUDY

Good ReCommendATIons Triple G rating

This is what we know. We know two thirds of deals in the IT sector require some kind of customer reference. We know purchasing decisions can happen 30 per cent faster when supplied with a customer reference. We know the volume of reference customers required by many organisations has doubled every year for the last three years. The IT sector understands the value of a customer recommendation. In making a technical, high-value, high-risk purchasing decision, the opinions of a third party matter. This peer endorsement is the most effective influencer of purchase decisions, a crucial factor in moving deals forward. It provides validation and reassurance. It enables customers to decide, quickly. HP understands this more than most. The HP customer reference programme captures, manages and filters thousands of references each year for use by its sales and marketing teams, around the globe, 365 days a year.

From global enterprise to local schools HP is as complex as they come. Tens of thousands of people; inventors, designers, sales, marketing procurement, warehouse staff and many more, enable HP products, services, software and solutions to touch the lives of over one billion consumers in more than 170 countries on six continents. HP ships more than one million printers and 48 million PCs each year; one in three servers shipped worldwide is made by HP. Its customers range from national governments and global banks, to community colleges and local start-ups. All of which means the volume and diversity of reference customers required by HP is high. The challenge for HP’s reference team is to meet this demand.

sharing stories HP uses its customers’ experience and voice to explain technical issues or endorse its human qualities. Rather than simply tell potential customers of these qualities, it has its existing customers show. A reference can take the form of a written case study, audio or video content, a telephone call with customers, or even participative face to face meetings. In addition, customers often speak at HP events, sharing their stories with their peers.

WHAT CAn We leARn fRom HP And THe ResT of THe TeCH seCToR AbouT THe PoWeR of AdvoCACy?

specialist such as inevidence can make.” inevidence is the world’s largest customer reference agency. Part of the Good Relations Group, inevidence has worked with HP since 1991, and acts as an extension of the reference programme; helping HP recruit customer advocates, create reference materials and to get these proof points where they are needed, when they are needed.

constant reinvention

aboUt hp l Ships more than one million printers per week l One in three servers shipped worldwide is from HP l HP Software makes calls possible for more than 300m mobile customers around the world l HP helps 50m customers store and share over four billion photos online l HP supports the top 200 banks and more than 130 of the world’s major stock exchanges Free Flowing recommendation Customers are never paid for their endorsement. The customer benefits from a closer working relationship with HP by being brought further into the fold. The responsibility for managing this flow of Good, of feeding the pipeline of new references and making sure content is distributed through the business to customers, is ˇ held by senta Cermáková - worldwide customer reference program director at HP. “We understand the impact customer endorsement can make to the bottom line. It creates trust and confirms our credentials. As a global organisation the challenge is make it easy for our happy customers, wherever they are, to act as references on our behalf. We then need to harness this good recommendation and make sure it’s ˇ used effectively,” says Cermáková. “We oversee the creation of customer reference materials in multiple languages from anywhere in the world, for any one of our business units. but we’re a tech ˇ company, not a content producer,” says Cermáková. “We’re successful because we recognise the importance of customer references and understand the impact a true

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The dichotomy of trust-based marketing is that while the public is less willing to place blind trust in governments and organisations the need for peer endorsement is rising at an unsustainable rate. simply put, customers need more evidence. And they want this evidence to come from their peers. The concern for all organisations is that by overusing its advocates it risks creating a bank of detractors. There needs to be a fresh pipeline of new references to keep pace with demand. HP is addressing this, integrating and automating parts of the reference process and providing the means to scale to meet future demand. It wants to make it easier for sales teams to onboard reference customers, and make it faster for bid teams and marketing to access customer endorsements. Where there is positive customer sentiment, it wants to capture it, bank it and understand its value. ˇ Cermáková expects this evolution to deliver several benefits. It will be easier to bring hundreds of new customers into the programme and easier to check their impact. bottom line, sales automation and systems integration will deliver the cost savings to allow HP to do more for less, and for team members to work on highervalue activities. It will be able to better assess which references are in danger of over-use, spot possible gaps, and invest in high-quality relevant reference materials that meet the revolution in the way we all consume content. “our goal is to leverage existing communication flows to the maximum extent possible. To that end we want to keep things as streamlined as possible,” says ˇ Cermáková. “We are building a platform to support the scaling of our reference programme and long-term trusted partners such as inevidence are key to our success. As a business we want to bring our customers closer. Customer endorsement works both ways: the more we listen, the happier the customers are to talk.” l

Case Study | HP

Word of mouth: peer-topeer recommendations are a powerful influence on a customer's decision-making process. Technology brands adopted customer references as a sales tool long ago; others are yet to follow with similar scale

how cUstomer recommendation delivers new bUsiness For hp

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SUrvEY rESPonDEnTS THAT rEfEr To PEErS AnD CollEAgUES wHEn mAking PUrCHASE DECiSionS

THE inCrEASE in rETEnTion rATES wHEn CUSTomErS ArE rEfErrED bY oTHEr CUSTomErS

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HP Software & Professional Services teams in Sweden were working on a multi-million dollar opportunity with an automotive manufacturer.Â Although managed from Sweden, this was a huge global transformation project. The HP bid team wanted to strengthen its proposal by securing a reference visit with an existing customer to observe a similar large, global project. The reference team identified a global aircraft manufacturer as a good fit, which hosted a site visit and enthusiastically told their story about how HP had successfully consulted and implemented this solution, what the experience was like and how their business had been positively impacted. Peer endorsement in action. HP won the business. it was the only bidder able to arrange such a visit, a huge advantage over its competitors.

Feature | The power of a vision

the vision thing

This arTiCLe is an exTraCT froM Kevin MUrraY's forThCoMinG booK communicate to inspire

how Do YoU DeLiver a vision ThaT inspires sUpporT froM aLL YoUr sTaKehoLDers anD iMproves YoUr ChanCes of aChievinG a TripLe G raTinG? a sUCCessfUL Movie DireCTor, a worLD-CUp winninG rUGbY CoaCh anD a Top CLass professionaL GoLfer share The seCreTs of ‘The vision ThinG’ wiTh GooD reLaTions GroUp ChairMan Kevin Murray

Kevin Murray

ow do you build a vision framework that inspires support for your organisation's goals? Let me tell you three stories taken from three remarkable people that i've met that may give you some valuable clues to answering that question. the first story begins with another question. how do you take the imagination of a writer, and turn it into a movie that delivers box office success? Making a movie is risky and can be hugely expensive. What is the magic element that great directors bring that makes a movie succeed? Michael Apted is a prolific British film director, known for movies such as James Bond film the World is not enough, gorillas in the Mist and Amazing grace, the story of english politician William Wilberforce and his battle to end the British transatlantic slave trade. Michael has been President of the Directors guild of America, has worked in television and has produced many acclaimed documentaries, including the official film of the 2006 FiFA World Cup. in a recent interview, i asked him how he managed to inspire a diverse crew of technicians, cameramen, set designers, support staff, money providers, studio bosses, make-up artists and – of course – actors, to create movie magic. “it’s the vision thing,” he said. “it’s so important that you have a vision for the film, a vision that you have to fiercely protect, but also use to encourage a collaboration festival where people can build on it.” “the most precious thing you have as a director of a film is the commitment, enthusiasm and creativity of all the people involved in your endeavour. You have to encourage their energy by encouraging their participation. You have to say that you know what you want to achieve but you don’t know how to do it: can they help you? You have to help them to see what you see, but then let them advise you on how to achieve it. You have to create a great atmosphere that engages people and allows them to contribute to your vision, while never taking your eyes off the prize.” Michael talked of the paradoxes of leading a film project

– the need for both flexibility and firmness, the need to absorb other people’s ideas while not compromising your vision, and the need to deal with 1000 details but one big picture. “When you make a movie you are dealing with three different creative arenas,” he said. “these are the writers, the actors, and the editors. they all bring very different skills and talents to the project and all require different handling. As you move through the writing, the filming and the editing, your project is a living thing and it changes all the time, but you just cannot succumb to the movement, or get lost in the detail. You have to stay true to your vision and keep it in mind all the time, ensuring that everybody else has the same shared meaning. that’s the only way you can bring such a diversity of talent together to create something amazing.”

ChRis LookeD At Me With A sCoWL, AnD i FeAReD i hAD oveRstePPeD the MARk. he shook his heAD AnD sAiD: “i Don’t BeLieve thAt i CAn MAke AnY iMPRoveMents to MY teChniqUe...” iT’S THe viSiOn THinG THaT DriveS yOu On As the leader of a project like this, says Michael, you can’t ever sit down. You have to provide the energy that keeps everyone going. “if you do sit down, the film does too. At all times, it’s the vision thing that drives you on, compels you to keep trying, to achieve the impossible.” Does this sound familiar? have you yet found a way to create a vision that inspires the creativity, commitment and determination of your own team, and keeps you going when times are tough?

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hold this thought for a moment. i want to tell you the story of my interview with Clive Woodward, a former english rugby union player, the head coach of the 2003 Rugby World Cup winning side, and later a director of sport for the British olympic Association during the 2012 olympic games in London. the 2003 Rugby World Cup was played in sydney, Australia. england played Australia in the final. Jonny Wilkinson kicked a drop goal in extra time to win the game 20-17 for england, who became the first northern hemisphere team to win the Webb ellis Cup and become world champions. During our interview, i asked Clive whether he had given his World Cup winning team an inspirational speech on the night before the big match. “no,” he said. “You simply didn’t need to at that stage. the focus was on ensuring that every individual did their job. i told them that if every individual did their own job properly, understood what everybody else was doing, trusted them to do it, shared the passion of a common purpose, and did their job better than their opponents in the other team, then we would win the match. it was that short and it was that simple.” so, two stories and two observations: the critical importance of the vision, and the importance of people knowing their job and how it contributes to the vision, and then working as a team to achieve it. unreaSOnaBLe BeLieF DriveS unBeLievaBLe SuCCeSS one more tale, this time about tiger Woods, arguably one of the most successful professional golfers of all time. Actually, the story is about Chris DiMarco, another professional golfer, who twice lost to tiger Woods in allimportant Majors, including one that has one of golf’s most memorable moments at the centre of the story. the Us Masters is one of the four major championships in professional golf. it is the first of the four majors in the golfing calendar to be played and is the only one to be held each year at the same location – the Augusta national golf Club in the city of Augusta, georgia, in the Us. For many, it is the major tournament to win. in 2005, during the fourth and final round on the sunday, the tournament came down to a two-man duel between tiger Woods and Chris DiMarco. on the 16th hole, tiger

Feature | The power of a vision

THe LanGuaGe OF LeaDerS

Below: England’s World Cup winning team battles against France in the 2003 tournament. England coach Clive Woodward said: "I didn't need an inspirational speech...”

i began my career in communications as a journalist in south africa. i was the crime reporter on The star newspaper in Johannesburg. since then i’ve been aware of the value of asking the right questions and learning from the answers. in a sense i’ve been ‘interviewing’ people my clients, my leaders and my colleagues – ever since. My book The Language of Leaders was the result of me interviewing more than 70 Chairmen and Ceos of global organisations from every sector on the theme of leadership communications. one of the things i repeatedly heard during that process was why it is vital as a leader to be able to articulate your vision; a compelling picture of the future that, when communicated serves to inspire your people and give meaning and purpose to all

your stakeholder relationships. easier said than done right? all the leaders i interviewed had a different way of going about this. in Communicate To inspire, the book i have just finished writing in time to be published at the start of next year, i revisit the 12 principles of leadership communications that emerged from The Language of Leaders and i use my own experience and that of others to ask the ‘how’ question: ‘how do you actually do that?’ For more details on The Language of Leaders or Communicate To Inspire, please contact: Matthew Smith, Publishing Director, Kogan Page. 020 7843 1953 MSmith@Koganpage.com

commitment, passion and belief! how do these three observations combine in a way that might inform us as business leaders? Well, first, you have to have a clear and motivating vision. it has to power the passion of all of the individuals in your team, and give them a clear sense of shared purpose. the more clear and compelling the vision is, the greater will be the commitment to it. secondly, the more clarity around their individual roles and how they contribute to the vision, the more cohesive and competitive your team will be. Finally, the stronger their belief in the purpose, your cause, the more likely you will be to achieve your vision. raTiOnaL Or eMOTiOnaL?

Woods made a sensational chip, aiming far to the left of the hole and letting the ball run down a steep slope to the hole. the moment that followed was captured on television and must have been shown a million times or more around the world. tiger’s ball, with the nike logo resplendent, appeared to stop on the lip of the hole, paused, then dropped in for a sensational birdie. DiMarco was two down with two to play. somehow, Chris managed to claw his way back, win the next two holes and finish the game tied with Woods. it all came down to a dramatic sudden death on the 18th hole, where tiger buried a birdie putt to win his fourth Masters and his ninth major title. DiMarco finished at 12 under for the tournament. Afterwards he said: “i went out and shot 68 around here on sunday, which is a very good round and 12 under is usually good enough to win. it was just that i was playing against tiger Woods.” Later that year at the sun City golf Classic in south

Africa, on the famous gary Player Country Club, i had the enormous privilege of partnering Chris DiMarco in the pro-am tournament on the Wednesday before the championship. After 12 holes, i felt i knew him well enough to ask the questions that were burning to be asked. “Where do you go from here? how do you improve in order to beat tiger?” Chris looked at me with a scowl, and i feared i had overstepped the mark. he shook his head and said: “i don’t believe that i can make any improvements to my technique. i think my technical skills are as good as they will ever be. the difference is in here,” he said, tapping his forehead. “When you play against tiger, you can just feel his belief. his belief is so strong that it can give him that one shot extra that he needs to beat you. he just sees the end result more clearly. “i have to work on that, not on my technique.” so, my third observation is about the power of clarity,

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too often, however, leaders use the achievement of financial goals as their purpose, because they are more comfortable being rational and objective. too often, followers say they don’t get out of bed in the morning to achieve financial or other numerical objectives. they come to work and want to be inspired by a sense of doing something important, something that makes a difference. Which one to choose? My answer is that a great vision needs to contain both of these elements, in order to satisfy both constituents. Leaders need to create a framework that enables decision-making and empowers front-line staff to succeed without having to go up and down the chain of command. in an age of blinding speed, radical transparency and connected consumers, we do not have the luxury of command and control processes. We need to enable leadership everywhere, and this can only be done by providing a framework for freedom of decision-making. the “vision thing” is, i believe, all about telling a story that is both emotional and rational. the vision of the future needs to describe the commercial goals of the business, but it also needs to describe what success will ‘feel’ like to all the stakeholders who will benefit from that success – whether they be shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers or even local communities. Feelings and emotions are the driving force of our lives. great communication has to be about feelings as much as it is about facts. head and heart. Your vision framework needs to contain elements that are uplifting and inspiring, as well as elements that are about clear goal-setting and prioritisation. l

INTRODUCING

The Good Relations Group is a new kind of communications group, one specifically designed around 21st Century business challenges. In a high speed, high scrutiny, highly sceptical and highly connected society, trust is bust and the court of public opinion reigns supreme. Business as usual is not an option. Good business is the only option. Reputation, trust and relationships are your most valuable and most vulnerable assets. They are formed by what you do, what you say and what others say about you. To build trusted brands, we believe our clients need to be a force for good and be seen as a force for good; build and maintain good relationships, through better engagement and help stakeholders to become their advocates, in order to drive good recommendations.

The POwer Of GOOd We believe that good is the new currency of reputation. We call this the ‘Power of Good’. Our 280 consultants in offices across the UK and the world build trusted brands and positive reputations for 300 clients by activating their power of good. We develop and communicate good actions, drive good engagement and accelerate good recommendation through: Strategic counsel Corporate social responsibility advice and services Consumer engagement programmes Customer reference programmes B2B campaigns Corporate social responsibility advice and services Reputation management Crisis and issues management Political communications programmes Employee communications programmes

Our approach To help you build a trusted brand, we first seek to understand, deeply, your issues. We have planners who work to bring us the deepest insights…to help us understand your world. With those insights, this is how we approach client problems: What you do – GOOd aCTIOnS What you say – GOOd EnGaGEmEnT What others say about you – GOOd RECOmmEndaTIOn

OUR AGENCIES A new kind of communications group, we have specialist businesses and services. We create client teams from across the Group to make sure you have the best skills and capabilities to meet your needs.

Good Relations Brand Communications is our multi-disciplined public relations consultancy providing integrated communications solutions for consumer, b2b and corporate brands. With experience across a wide range of industries, Good Relations Brand Communications helps organisations engage their audiences’ better, unlocking greater levels of advocacy and results. It achieves this through its industry leading insight, creative and digital innovation capabilities. Clients: Yeo Valley, Airbus, Weetabix, TalkTalk, British Land, Subway For more information: www.goodrelations.co.uk Contact: Richard Moss, Managing Director RMoss@goodrelations.co.uk +44 (0)207 861 3216

inEvidence, our specialist customer reference and advocacy business, unlocks the power of good recommendation. With a team based in Europe, the US and Asia Pacific, inEvidence builds comprehensive customer reference programmes to identify who a brand’s most valued and influential customers are and creates effective plans to mobilise their advocacy. Clients: HP, Citrix, Vodafone, Honeywell Aerospace, Pitney Bowes For more information: www.inevidencecrp.com @inEvidence Contact: Robin Hamilton, Managing Director rhamilton@inevidencecrp.com +44 (0)1628 526 482

Working closely with Good Relations Brand Communications, Good Relations Regional includes offices in Manchester, Leeds and Cardiff. Its innovative and experienced team of seasoned PR and communications professionals deliver results-driven public relations services to both business to business and consumer clients across a range of industries. Clients: Co-operative Energy, Thwaites PLC, Duchy of Lancaster, The National Lottery, Slumberdown For more information: www.goodrelationsregional.co.uk @GR_Regional Contact: Zoe Ensor, Managing Director zensor@goodrelationsnorth.co.uk +44 (0)1625 506 439

Corporate Citizenship is a global corporate responsibility consultancy that uses clear insights and a simplified approach to sustainability to deliver growth and long term value for business and society. We believe in the power of good actions. Clients: Unilever, GoldenAgri, Abbott, Lafarge, BDO, Diageo For more information: www.corporate-citizenship.com @CCitizenship Contact: Karin Laljani, Managing Director mail@corporate-citizenship.com +44 (0)207 861 1616

Harvard works with brands who put technology at the heart of what they do to leave a lasting impact on the world around them. It helps global giants and the coolest start-ups to tell their stories in the most imaginative ways possible, bringing them to life and taking them to the right people, in the right places, time after time.

TTA Property is our leading communications consultancy focused on property, lifestyle and investment in the commercial, residential, luxury and leisure sectors, both in the UK and abroad. It has a range of clients from the UK and overseas including property developers, hotels and resort operators, construction firms and luxury brands.

Clients: Sky, Fujitsu, Qualcomm, Love Film, Playstation For more information: www.harvard.co.uk @Harvard_PR Contact: Louie St Claire, Managing Director Louie.StClaire@harvard.co.uk +44 (0)207 861 2847

Clients: Berkeley Group, Harrods Estates, Hyder Consulting, Malcolm Hollis, National Grid, Northacre, Palazzo Versace, Pradera, Redrow, Taylor Wimpey, Weston Group For more information: www.ttagroup.co.uk | @TTAProperty Contact: Charles Begley, David Martin or Tim Reid +44 (0)207 861 2040 pr@ttaproperty.co.uk

evidence: Assessing and measuring impact of your business Using an internationally recognised global standard for measuring and reporting corporate community investments, and the socio-economic value of your company brings to the wider society. These impact frameworks are developed by Corporate Citizenship and proven to establish authenticity and credibility.

Movements: deliver effective corporate sustainability brand integration Beyond marketing and traditional citizenship programmes. Creating movements moves a notion of 'doing it together' â&#x20AC;Ś enabling people to share passion, ideas, time, innovation, skills and recourses, to achieve real and lasting change for good.

Stakeholders: Key opinion former strategy Understanding, which experts who can provide the right sustainability communications programmes is the key to success. we can convene key opinion formers, facilitate panels and reach the target audiences.

Matrix of opportunity Our planning approach for businessto-business markets ensures creativity at the heart of every campaign.

THIS IS HOW WE DO IT Our agencies build trusted brands and positive reputations by activating their power of good through a wide range of products and services. Here is a sample of the tools we use to drive good actions, good engagement and good recommendations for our clients.

GOOd ACTIONS

GOOd eNGAGeMeNT TrIPLe

GOOd reCOMMeNdATIONS

ET IN TOUCH... We create client teams from across the Group to make sure you have the best skills and capabilities to meet your needs. To find out how we can activate your power of good to overcome your business challenges, please get in touch.

Inspiring advocacy We build powerful causes, activate communities on and offline, develop contagious stories and make brands truly remarkable in the media

Kevin Murray Chairman

a former national newspaper journalist, magazine publisher and communications director at organizations including British airways, aEa Technology and Bayer, Kevin specialises in strategic communications, reputation management and leadership communications coaching. He has been leading Chime Public Relations businesses since 1999. He advises chairmen and chief executives, as well as directors of communication and marketing. He also has considerable experience in managing complex and global communications projects and departments. He has managed significant issues and crisis communications in the heat of controversies in the chemicals, nuclear,

aviation and banking sectors, to name but a few. He has advised companies including BSkyB, G4S, Gazprom, airbus, Lloyds TSB, mcLaren F1, British nucleur Fuels, Emirates airline, 118118, marconi, Vauxhall, British Gas, Permira, the nuclear decommissioning authority, adobe, and allen & Overy. He is the author of ‘The Language of Leaders’. The book, the result of more than 60 in depth interviews with the Chairmen and CEO’s of some of the world’s leading businesses and charities, reveals how leaders communicate to inspire, influence and achieve results.

Jackie Brock-doyle OBE, former director of Communications and Public affairs, London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, is Group Chief Executive of the Good Relations Group. With more than 25 years in Communications and marketing, she brings phenomenal expertise, energy and international experience and is recognised as one of the world’s leading communications practitioners. Jackie has designed and directed marketing, communication, media and sponsorship programmes for some of the world’s biggest brands and events, including Visa International, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, the 2002 manchester Commonwealth Games, Coca Cola,

Samsung, mars and most recently the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In 2012 she was voted PR Week’s ‘PR Professional of the Year’ for her work in delivering the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and together with her team, was awarded the ‘PR Week Campaign of the Year 2012’. In 2011 she was voted Corporate Communications Professional of the year and she is also named in the Holmes Report’s ‘Influence 100’, a list of the world’s most powerful and influential communications professionals.

after eleven years as an awardwinning journalist, mark joined the Good Relations Group as new Business director at the start of 2012. He is charged with the task of pinpointing the right strategy and skills required from across the PR, CSR, advocacy and Political Communications teams, to deliver the right solution and blended team to precisely meet a company’s needs. Formerly the Editor of marketing Week for three years, Editor of Precision marketing, Features Editor of The Grocer and a correspondent on the business desk at The Sunday Telegraph, mark has a formidable knowledge of marketing best practice

and what works for brands. His ability to dig into a client’s challenge and apply this deep marketing knowledge along with his critical journalist mind is unique. Clients such as Kraft Foods, Experian and SaBmiller have already benefited from his counsel. Passionate to drive best practice in marketing, mark is also a board director of the UK’s marketing academy which helps transform today’s young marketing and communications talent into tomorrow’s business leaders.

KMurray@goodrelationsgroup.com +44 (0)207 861 8588

Authentic brand newsroom: Our multi-media editorial team connects brands with their market in a fresh and authentic way on a daily basis.

Content creation Our production team brings to life our story-telling in engaging design, video, animation and info graphics.

Jackie Brock-doyle

Chief Executive Officer

full-cycle customer reference consultation: Our customer reference specialists identify how brands can most effectively use happy customers to win more business, more quickly.

Proof points next-generation case studies built around engaging content for sharing.

Social media crisis training Our social media crisis simulation tool helps brands to put crisis strategies to the test.

Mark Choueke new Business director

JBD@Goodrelationsgroup.com +44 (0)207 861 2050

MChoueke@goodrelationsgroup.com +44 (0)20 7861 8569