Brands with a conscience

‘Brands with a conscience’ sets out to demonstrate that brands can behave ethically and still achieve business success. It features an array of case studies written by a number of different authors to make the point, and each chapter concludes with some “reflexive questions”.

After the few first chapters, I wasn’t sure  whether I was going to like it or not. While it is very much on trend aligning itself with the numerous books out there about brands needing a purpose, it felt like it was going to be a bit too ‘worthy’.

In the end though, it proved to be a worthwhile read.

This was down to some of the case studies themselves. While the quality of the writing varies, some of the stories are very powerful. The stand-out stories for me were the ones about Tony’s Chocolonely, Dilmah Teas, The Slow Food Movement and Tata. I might have added John Lewis if I hadn’t already known it so well.

The tale of Tony’s Chocoloney is one of two crusading journalists and their campaign to end slavery in the chocolate trade. Amongst other things it explains how they ended up creating their first bar as part of a storyline for one of their programmes and why they deliberately don’t divide their chocolate bars into equal sized pieces.

The chapter on Tata, written by Sudhir John Horo in collaboration with Shtam Vasudevan is a powerful one with a very genuine love of the brand shining through. It also spends some time explaining the difference between CSR and Legacy Giving and introduced me to the “future minus me” test - “the process is to answer one single question: what happens when your enterprise does not exist in the future”. It is another expression of the difference between giving a hungry person a fish and teaching them how to fish.  It also includes the inspirational quote from Tata founder Jamshetji Nusserwanji: “In a free enterprise, the community is not another stakeholder in business, but in fact the very purpose of its existence”.

The chapter of the Slow Food movement is a good read and has interesting learning for brands of all types about the need to maintain coherency whilst constantly changing, and how different parts of the same brand can express things differently without becoming schizophrenic. Peter Lord demonstrates this by citing examples from the Slow Food International website, the UK website and the Slow Food Youth Network website and explains that Slow Food “has an evolving conscience, based on consistent values, but adapting as the environment around it changes.”

However, there are weaker elements in the book; too many examples of brands set up by successful entrepreneurs who later in their lives wanted to do something good and create super premium brands with a conscience.

Also the chapter on place branding feels a little out of place.

The conclusions aren’t perhaps as strong as I would have liked. The emphasis on being ‘principles driven’ I think is important, namely, having a “commitment to a cause or a principle that is independent from consumer trends or competitor actions” is what drives these brands. However to conclude by saying that brands with a conscience are “fair”, “responsible” and “open” is a bit self-evident and left me feeling a bit flat after a number of inspiring stories.