Corporate Eye

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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

Branding Lessons from David Beckham

I’ve talked about how businesses can learn from celebrity branding before on Corporate Eye, and today, I’m going to discuss lessons to learn from the David Beckham brand. 

The online buzz this week centered around David Beckham and his apparent fading brand image.  The David Beckham brand reigned supreme while Beckham dominated in Europe.  Despite his strength on the U.S. Major League Soccer (MLS) playing field, his brand has dimmed a bit since his Los Angeles Galaxy jersey became a regular sight in U.S. stadiums.

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Branding and the Silo Effect

In marketing terminology, the silo effect occurs when a lack of communication or coordination of efforts between or within business units, departments, teams, etc. has a negative impact on overall performance in terms of meeting goals.  It’s important to be aware of the silo effect as it affects branding, because the negative affect to your brand could hurt your business and bottom-line in the long term. [Read more…] about Branding and the Silo Effect

Front Seat Sustainability

I’m a bit of a DIY throwback, more inclined to bodge my own solution than use hardware provided by well known home improvement stores.

Most things which go up are usually held together by a bit of cardboard wedged in just there and I seem to have developed the use of badly fitting screws into something of an artform.

Then there’s the issue of tools. There’s many I don’t have so I regularly rely upon a strange concoction of screwdrivers and chisels to get most jobs done. Occasionally I use a sledgehammer, when the frustration gets too much.

It’s taken DIY many years to reach the stage where every shed contains a toolbox of the properly calibrated tools and each home a person with the knowledge to use them properly.

Business is embarking upon a similar cycle for the development of sustainability practices. At the moment it’s in bodge mode, with everyone patching things independently of each other, hoping that that’s what’s needed.

A Socio-Economic Assessment Toolbox
However some businesses are taking the lead and publishing the methodologies which underpin their practices, making the tools they use available to all.

Recently Caisse d’Epargne released their financial products certification methodology, as described in Squirrels of Sustainability. Similarly, Anglo American have released their Socio-Economic Assessment Toolbox (SEAT) into the public domain for any company to use.

Its primary purpose is help individual Anglo-American operations to measure and improve the impact they have upon the communities within which they operate.

To achieve this, eight steps are identified for an organisation to go through:

  • Profile the current operation
  • Profile the community and identify key issues through dialogue with key stakeholders
  • Identify and assess current impacts, management measures and social initiatives
  • Share results of the assessment with stakeholders and get recommendations for management action
  • Develop Key Performance Indicators and associated management and monitoring plans
  • Improve contribution of non-core activities to local community
  • Post operation closure planning
  • Prepare report and feedback to the community
Anglo American SEAT
Social Investment Programme Chart

The toolbox itself consists of 23 tools which can be deployed to fulfil these steps.

Many of them are fully comprehensive, such as the one to follow when establishing social investment programmes (pictured). This tool alone consists of over 30 steps spanning the three phases of planning, implementation and monitoring.

Sharing is Better
The most praiseworthy part of the whole venture is that Anglo American has chosen to publish their toolbox without restraint for downstream use.

This flies in the face of accepted business practice where companies either don’t share their solutions, or they seek to licence them and so generate further revenue streams.

Conversely, the need to establish sustainable business practices in a critically short period of time demands that companies collaborate freely and openly with one another.

The publication of toolboxes such as this is one way of achieving this. There is nothing particularly complicated about the tools and much of what they describe is pretty straightforward.

However, other companies also need to change their approach so that they understand the inherent value toolboxes such as this have within them. The basic planning and identification of considerations and outcomes is common to most industries and sectors.

In this way companies across business sectors can start to work together to build sustainable business practices, refining processes and methodologies and creating genuinely broad based foundations for the future.

Thankfully, DIY is not my profession otherwise my bodging ways would quickly lead to future customers hearing how inept I am and seeking other people to put up their shelves.

Similarly, businesses who don’t engage with one another in a true spirit of co-operation may find their reputation failing, and with it their ability to continue in business.

5 Factors of Brand Positioning

Last week, I wrote about how to break through branding clutter by defining your brand’s unique value proposition then owning it in the the marketplace thereby establishing your brand’s position.  Today, let’s take a look at the 5 main factors that go into defining a brand position.

1. Brand Attributes

What the brand delivers through features and benefits to consumers.

2. Consumer Expectations

What consumers expect to receive from the brand.

3.  Competitor attributes

What the other brands in the market offer through features and benefits to consumers.

4.  Price

An easily quantifiable factor – Your prices vs. your competitors’ prices.

5.  Consumer perceptions

The perceived quality and value  of your brand in consumer’s minds (i.e., does your brand offer the cheap solution, the good value for the money solution, the high-end, high-price tag solution, etc.?).

Take some time to create a thorough picture of the current market and how your brand fits in that market to determine your brand’s current position.  If that’s not the position you want for your brand, take the necessary steps to change it based on the gaps defined when you analyzed the five factors above.

Do you use any other factors in your brand positioning definition process?

Image: Flickr

Website or Blog – Daddy or Chips?

Daddy or Chips ?

A long time ago, McCain posed this question which still reverberates in the minds of us old enough to remember it – and young enough to have been worried by it.

Now there’s a new question … website or blog?

Like Daddy or Chips, the question is unanswerable, because you may be able to have both. In fact, you almost certainly should have both, if you can.

Occasionally I’m asked what the difference is between a website and a blog – and usually the starting point for the answer is straightforward:
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Squirrels of Sustainability

I’ve got a bit of a height thing. When I’m more than eight feet above the ground I start to feel all a bit funny inside, as though I shouldn’t really be there.

This means I have several “challenge your boundaries” moments each year as I run up and down ladders to clean windows, repair shed roofs, lop encroaching branches off the council’s trees, and so on.

Yet whenever I return to terra firma, nothing serious has ever happened and quite what got the emotions all worked up remains a mystery.

Languages provide another “ladder moment” and my knee-jerk reaction is to reach for the nearest online translation website. This is especially shameful if the language is French as I have a reasonable if rusty grasp of it.

So I was relieved to find myself quite happily ploughing through a French website, almost oblivious to the fact it was a different language.

The resulting understanding of a brand new certification scheme for financial products was well worth pushing my boundaries a little further.

Going Beyond Commitments
The story begins in 2005, when Friends of the Earth (FoE) analysed the environmental practices of several French banking institutions.

One of those cited as lacking credibility was Caisse d’Epargne whose logo, incidentally, is an idealised squirrel. The bank took the criticisms seriously and made a commitment to improve its practices.

Two years later it launched the Bénéfices Futur (Future Benefits) framework for a sustainable future. This in turn has led to many initiatives, including the opening of the first French bank accessible to deaf and hard of hearing.

Caisse d’Epargne
Financial Certification Scheme

At the same time it entered into collaboration with a number of bodies, including FoE, WWF and the French environment agency, to produce a certification system for financial products.

This summer that certification system was launched. And boy, is it good!

Fast Moving Financial Goods
The scheme rates savings products in three categories, displaying the results in a schematic similar to that used for the energy efficiency of Fast Moving White Goods (i.e. fridges, freezers, washing machines, etc).

The three categories are broadly defined as follows:

  • Security: how secure is the capital invested. Considerations include the variability of the product’s interest rate and the riskiness of the underlying investments.
  • Responsibility: how the underlying investments are judged against social and ecological ethical standards. Considerations include the administration of the savings scheme itself as well as the behaviour of the organisations invested in.
  • Climate: how the underlying investments are judged against climate change benchmarks. Considerations include a bank’s own emissions as well as those of any product invested in throughout its lifecycle.

The innovation behind this scheme is precisely that which was envisaged in “Green without Sustainability”: the introduction of a non-financial based methodology for measuring performance.

In addition, this scheme goes far beyond those measurements which are in common use today.

For instance, car manufacturers are usually measured according to the emissions produced during the manufacturing process. This scheme measures them according to the emissions produced during the lifetime of their product.

There can be no misunderstandings about what has happened here: this is a huge and ambitious step forward whose consequences will be far reaching and lasting.

Following The Leader
It’s all very well for one bank in France to introduce such measures and many environmentalists will instinctively look for the greenwashing angle.

Most greenwashing stems from companies’ desire to bring sustainability under their marketing aegis, instinctively trumpeting their successes while concealing their failures.

Caisse d’Epargne
Sustainability Overview

This is one of the reasons transparency is such a key feature of sustainable business practices. If you are open about what you do and how you do it you cannot be accused of deception, and so are much more likely to gain trust in the longer term.

Caisse d’Epargne understands this and has taken the unprecedented step of publishing the scheme’s entire methodology, in all its mathematical eye-crossing glory.

The bank and its partners are now calling for other financial institutions to look at adopting the scheme themselves. It’s difficult to imagine how other institutions are going to be able resist this call, especially given the international reach of FoE and WWF.

Ripples Across The Pond
As the scheme spreads, pressure will increase upon companies to adopt sustainable business practices. Before too long, this pebble dropped by Caisse d’Epargne in the pond of commerce will have created waves upon shores near and far alike.

The only hope is that as this happens financial institutions use common sense and use this scheme rather than trying to invent their own.

Otherwise they may find themselves feeling as embarrassed and stubborn as I did when I discovered the English translation of the bank’s website and documentation long after I’d finished writing this post.

C’est ma vie*, and I’m used to it. However, Finance has to wake up now and realise how creative it’s influence could truly be. Driving that realisation must be an understanding of how serious of our situation truly is.

* Such is my life