The Body Shop remains the paradigm buster.
Its campaign, Stop violence in the home, originating in Canada, wasn’t based on the usual passion drivers. Instead, it addressed the taboo of domestic violence, a subject which at the time even western governments would barely acknowledge. And from that counter-intuitive platform, it launched a campaign which by 2008 was running in 56 markets. Now we know from personal experience that most brands working with international properties – including the Champions League, the World Cup, F1, the Olympics even – can only dream of 56 participating markets.
The UK petition alone collected 2 million signatures, a figure which today would trigger automatic Cannes Lion application frenzy. And let’s not forget, we’re talking about old world, real time, analogue engagement – not page hits, tweets or likes.
For nearly two decades, The Body Shop communicated its brand, engaged with consumers, and shifted product exclusively through activity which would traditionally be classified as CR. It proved beyond any shadow of doubt the potential of social issues to provide brand platforms every bit as powerful as sport or entertainment.
And then, in that same year, 1994, it came a bit of a cropper – when Jon Entine waged a wounding media campaign to convince the world The Body Shop was a sham. For a short, hellish period, worldwide media jumped on the bandwagon, sales faltered and the share price plummeted. And then, ten days later, media interest dried up – for want of a genuine story, the bulk of consumers remained loyal and the share price, well, it took a beating. Entine’s article still haunts university business ethics classes, according to Wikipedia.
The Body Shop’s story remains emblematic of business and CR: could we, should we, dare we … promote our corporate responsibility investment?
Businesses are suitably nervous about claiming environmental or social or ethical credentials which they can’t defend. They’re generally aware of the need to walk the walk before talking the talk. They’re universally fearful of the unwanted attention of persistent campaigning NGOs, and justifiably concerned at the potential for reputational risk. At the same time, The Body Shop happened. Ben & Jerry’s happened. Interface happened. Plan A is happening. And evidence exists, hard evidence, of CR’s ability to deliver many of the traditional benefits of sponsorship, lifting sales (with plenty of caveats), engaging consumers and creating brand loyalists, driving employee engagement, supporting business ability to recruit and retain the best talent, generating new revenue streams, driving innovation and influencing stakeholders from academics, analysts and activists (to use Adidas phrasing) to government leaders ( to use Microsoft’s).
We were curious.
So we enquired.
We interviewed 50 directors of CR, CSR, corporate citizenship, sustainability, social investment, across a wide range of business sectors, predominantly from Europe, but also from the USA – an impressive list of global brands including Microsoft, SAP, BASF, Interface, BP, adidas and many more. We spoke to the leading specialists in the field, globally respected thought leaders like Maria Sillanpaa, Wayne Visser, and Alan Andreasen. We also spoke to some of the NGOs who have been most spectacularly successful in partnering with corporates.
We asked all of these: what is preventing more businesses from working more pro-actively, more strategically and more publicly with CR?
What we heard has been fascinating – here’s a flavour:
- ‘Brand is about the identity of the corporation, and corporate citizenship is very much an expression of that – brand and corporative citizenship have everything to do with each other’
- ‘We are big believers of doing first, and telling after.’
- ‘The marketing team had to accept there’s a different level of proof required – you can rock up and say ‘we’re selling the tastiest ready meals’ because nobody could prove otherwise, but if you say ‘I’m using only free range eggs in those ready meals’, well frankly, Compassion in World Farming could prove otherwise’
- ‘The biggest learning from marketing was how to talk about CR simply and accessibly’
- ‘When I first started out in CR, it was to tough get to marketing, but increasingly, I’m seeing that the marketers are banging down my door.’
- ‘You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to hold your hands up and say, ‘We’re doing our best. It’s a long road. Join the movement’’
- ‘The campaign around our CSR report…was phenomenal, we had more than 40 million page reviews within two weeks’
- ‘As we look at our brand, we would see citizenship as one of the top three drivers of brand satisfaction, moving forward.’
Any of those sound familiar?