Is Your Brand Fit for the Future?

Brand Value + Social Media + Corporate Responsibility

CSR reports have become the vehicle by which organizations put a moral and ethical face on their existence.  At its core, it is a reporting exercise. It is usually reflective and without standards — but is that about to change? In autumn of this year, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) will release ISO 10668 – Monetary Brand Valuation.  What does brand valuation have to do with CSR? Well, the back of this ISO offer has an interesting hook, SAM Group – the guys who produce the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) – intend to upweight businesses in the DJSI if they adopt ISO 10668.  Suddenly, the criteria for exacting value on brands is directly linked to their sustainability ranking.

The upweighting is based on three key factors: Legal, behavioral, and financial analyses.  Taking a look at behavior analysis, the brand must understand the size of the market and trends. What are the stakeholder attitudes? What are the economic benefits bestowed on the business by the brand? In many cases media is still used as a platform to talk at instead of enabling conversation with constituents and customers.
 
Here’s the reason why social media, brand strategy and CSR folks should start meeting by the water cooler more often. If we’re entering a new paradigm of evaluating brand behavior as well as CSR reporting methodologies representing the practice toward improved corporate citizenship, and if we agree that social media is the most relevant way to start and maintain conversations with people to share a brands values, how might we use this brain trust to help shape business strategy?

The following are 5 key challenges that, if addressed correctly, will differentiate leading brands and lead to greater customer loyalty.

1. Create value with Values- gain trust through responsible and transparent actions.

2. Visualize brand value (and risks) across the complete brand eco-system: the offer, culture, business model, and communications.

3. Stop approving obvious solutions; overcome incrementalism as the hallmark of efficiency engineering, and make change that people want and need.

4. Bring back experimentation and invention as business values, and open them up to collaborators.

5. Constantly challenge, inform and refresh people’s exposure with the brand over their entire experience- not as market segments with prescribed preferences.

Zappos’ innovative approach to customer service, Target’s social giving platform, Patagonia’s footprint chronicles, Proctor & Gamble’s the brandery, Interface Carpet, and Seventh Generation are just a few of the increasingly inspiring examples where brands have embraced the system of social communication, and embracing some or all of these challenges in a way that builds brand loyalty and value, while mitigating risk, reducing costs, and positioning the business for a new era of growth.  

Is your brand fit for the future?

(Eric Wilmot)

photo courtesy of Victoria Garcia, Creative Commons