Branding their way to clean streets (and world peace)

“If there’s one set of institutions on this planet that’s really good at changing people’s thinking and behaviour, it’s brands.” Steve Hilton talks to Martin Wright.

You want to stop playground bullying? Call Nike. Get kids to care for their community? Try Coke. Persuade teenagers to reach for the Sky...? (That one’s obvious.)

Sounds scary? Depressing? Wildly optimistic? Not for Steve Hilton. Along with ex-Saatchi’s colleague Giles Gibbons, he’s chief evangelist for the notion that the power of brands can be wielded for social change. They’ve set up a consultancy, Good Business, to prove it, and written a book of the same name. The message is simple: "If there’s one set of institutions on this planet that’s really good at changing people’s thinking and behaviour," says Hilton, "it’s brands. That’s the source of their success."

So the same skills used to seduce people into buying a more expensive gizmo — or a particular brand of trainer — could persuade them to do the right thing by each other, and by the planet.

That’s the theory. Hilton in practice is direct, enthusiastic and slightly impatient, as though he’s already preparing to be irritated that anyone could fail to see the logic of his argument. "Making sustainability issues popular is a huge challenge. A small proportion of people ‘do their bit’ but most hardly consider it. Not because they’re bad people, but because they don’t know what to do, they don’t understand it, it’s boring, it’s not cool, etc., etc. This has been the challenge for green groups for years. The government has run endless campaigns, but with no significant impact — or not one that anyone’s noticed. Our view is that brands could do a better job."

"Just think of all that creativity and energy in the marketing profession — and how it all goes into something like selling Aloe Vera toilet paper! Imagine if it could be applied to social and sustainability challenges. After all, people who work in business and marketing have pretty much the same values as everyone else — they just have a huge tendency to think they have to leave those values at home." Hilton’s vision is of someone who, on seeing a news item about some social or environmental problem, doesn’t wonder whether the government might sort it out, but whether there’s anything they could do through their work. "This isn’t about corporate philanthropy, about ‘putting things back’ — all that language is absolutely useless when it comes to getting real change."

Cool, not sad

He doesn’t reject a role for government: regulation and accountability are essential, he says, but "the only way we’re going to achieve lasting and dramatic change...is by achieving a massive culture change within business." And it’s in its own interests, because "it can help brands achieve their business objectives by linking them to issues which their customers care about. Lots of companies pay lip service to changing their behaviour, but they don’t really see it as a business tool — it’s just a compliance requirement.

So they don’t give it sufficient energy or creativity. If they started seeing it as a way to increase brand value, they’d put a lot more effort in." Changing the world for the better would suddenly become a core business activity, rather than the concern "of a few policy wonks in the corporate affairs team".

Cue the virtuous circle! This way the sunlit uplands! So, er, give us an example, then.

With a disarming lack of hype for an ad man, Hilton concedes that "our ambitions are in excess of what’s currently going on — so we’ve had to make up some case studies for the book." Some, but not all. There are already a few campaigns in place which use the power of a brand to — well — to refresh the parts that other campaigns can’t reach.

Like getting disaffected youth interested in a meaningful career. That’s the aim of ‘Reach for the Sky’, a partnership with the Murdoch TV empire that has already scored some significant successes in getting ‘problem’ teenagers engaged with careers guidance and training. It does so partly by getting experts in the field together with teenagers and communications specialists to design some imaginatively unstuffy schemes, but also by associating all this with something that is, in the eyes of the people targeted, unimpeachably cool: the Sky brand.

Hundreds of Sky staff take part as mentors and trainers, and careers are talked about in the same language as the rest of the Sky brand uses every day. At a stroke, this takes it out of the realm of boring grown-ups telling you what to do, and into something which teenagers already admire and aspire to.

Part of the reason this worked, says Hilton, was that it made business sense for Sky. "It was the perfect coincidence of a social need and a commercial objective. Sky was looking to broaden its appeal; to change its image from a masculine one based solely on sport, to something more family-based." Reach for the Sky helped deliver that.

Another example can be found in the pages of Good Business, and it’s one designed to wave huge red flags in front of the increasingly bullish resistance to the way brands sneak their way into our education system, comes courtesy of Nike. This is a company which, despite — or perhaps because of — some ferocious criticism by campaigners, has made some pretty substantial strides in improving working conditions among its suppliers, doing more than most to address the single ‘sweatshop culture’ which has brought such a fierce critical spotlight to bear on the sports good industry.

All the same, the idea of a Nike-branded school is enough to make most people hang themselves by the nearest set of trainer laces. But, writes Hilton, this one’s different. It seeks to tackle head-on the growing problems of playground bullying and intimidation. In essence, it takes an idea used by a particularly inspirational teacher in one school in Derby, which succeeded in dramatically reducing playground problems through a mix of new equipment, a whole new set of games, a mentoring system linking older kids with younger ones, and a series of imaginative ways to encourage children to take responsibility.

It was taken up by the Youth Sports Trust, which wanted to adapt it for use elsewhere. And it was their idea to bring in Nike — not only to help finance it (that’s the easy bit), but to lend all their skills in understanding what makes young people tick and how to create ‘youth appeal’ (one way was to rebrand the playground as a ‘zoneparc’, complete with ‘sports’, ‘skills’ and ‘chill out’ zones).

The book quotes the headteacher as reporting a transformation: less racism, less bullying; some of the most troublesome kids volunteering as mentors and supervisors, and so on. "Why?... Because they get to be called ‘zoneparc players’, and they think the whole thing is ‘cool’ rather than ‘sad’ because it’s something to do with Nike." Depending where you’re coming from, you’ll either find this heartening or deeply worrying. Possibly both.

Hilton’s keen, however, to distance it from the crasser types of corporate school branding: the sort "that Naomi Klein rightly condemns: that would have just meant sticking swooshes everywhere... That’s not what we mean by social leadership: it gives corporations a bad name, and they should stop doing it."

One of those awkward little truths is that the brands with the most impact on cynical teenagers are often those least likely to be viewed sympathetically by sustainability campaigners. Nike, McDonalds, Coca-Cola... Satan’s trinity, for God’s sake! And it’s Coke — another Good Business client — that provides Hilton’s next example.

Envy and resentment

For 25 years, the company had an "entirely conventional, philanthropic" arrangement with the Tidy Britain Group. They gave them money, and stuck the ‘litter bin’ logo on their cans. Which was fine, as far as it went, which wasn’t very far at all.

"It did nothing to influence anyone’s behaviour, other than the work the Tidy Britain Group was already doing. There was no connection between the Coke brand (which is all about being trendy and aspirational) and the support going to that cause." And precious little benefit for Coke, either. They were eager to make more of it, and the outcome encapsulates many of Hilton’s enthusiasms for the power of brands.

"Look at litter. Who are the worst offenders? Teenage boys. And by and large, they think Coke is cool. And Coke is also a huge sponsor of football, which has a tremendous aspirational pull for many of them."

Hence the creation (with specialist youth organisation Weston Spirit) of an ambitious project, known as the ‘sweeper zone’, where kids get involved in Coke-branded efforts to clean up the area around premiership football grounds — starting with Highbury and Anfield — before moving on to sports and community centres around the country. It’s not just about picking up litter, Hilton stresses — that’s just a starting point.

It’s about changing behaviours and attitude; getting kids to infect each other with a sense of pride in their ‘zone’ (that word again). "I was down at Highbury last Saturday, and what was really stunning was to see all these kids genuinely enthused. I can’t imagine another circumstance in which kids would be so passionate about a clean-up project."

For those of you thinking that it’s about time we had the ‘Yes, but...’ — here it comes. This might all be laudable stuff, but it’s doing sweet FA to address the reckless consumerism which is the life blood of virtually all successful brands. While they subsist on selling us more and more stuff, they’re always going to be inimical to any culture of sustainability.

And that’s leaving aside their contribution to social divisiveness; their deliberate fostering of a culture of envy and resentment. Have we really got to the sorry state where our schools have become so lacklustre and uninspiring that they need to shove swooshes round the playground just to stop kids killing each other?

Micro-credit and world peace

Hilton’s ready for this one: "Consumerism is in itself a good thing, because it creates the money to pay for social welfare, health, education, environmental protection... All that social progress that we say we want...is paid for by consumerism." Up to a point, maybe, but... no amount of tax revenue will tackle the mounting problems of massive overconsumption of energy and resources, so much of which is driven by brands.

So what brands need to do, responds Hilton, is find opportunities to sell less stuff, but more service; work out ways in which they can make more money out of fewer resources. (He applauds BP for its courage to go for the ‘beyond petroleum’ rebrand: putting down a very public marker of future intent.) OK, but all that’s been talked about a lot more than it’s been achieved — especially by the mainstream brands.

True, says Hilton, which means there’s all the more scope for some real social leadership from business here. It’s hard to fault the optimism — or the connection between brands and influence. All the same, there’s another ‘Yes, but...’ looming, and it goes like this.

Surely brands like Nike are cool precisely because they’re not some kind of stand-in mother telling you what to do. If they choose to go down that road, how long before their main market tires of the do-goodery? After all, it’s always cooler to be a rebel. Think of the MG ad: ‘full-fat...high-caffeine...’. Hardly the stuff of social responsibility.

Indeed, one of the problems facing environmentalists when they try to whip up enthusiasm among the young is the way in which the whole issue’s gone mainstream. Concern for the planet was once a badge of rebellion: now it’s worryingly close to a mark of conformity — at least in the eyes of ultra-hip youth.

Hilton agrees: "Yes, it’s a huge danger, so [getting brands to drive social change] has to be done well. It’s vital that we don’t let the good cause ‘lobby’ get their hands on it. We’ve got to give the brands free rein to do what they’re good at." All right — but what about all those causes that aren’t as appealing as careers advice; that don’t have such a neat ‘fit’ with brand identity as kids in the playground. Hilton isn’t bothered. "It’s an irrational concern.

If you apply the principles of good marketing, you can make any cause interesting and attractive. Which is, incidentally, exactly what our critics complain about. ‘These people are such cunning bastards they can make us buy anything against our will,’ they say. Well if that’s really the case, then we can use this for any cause you care to name."

The example people always cite, says Hilton, is that of mental health — but he insists it would be perfectly possible to use the power of a brand to achieve a seachange in the public’s attitude to the issue — and in Good Business he actually proposes doing just that, along with promoting micro-credit and world peace.

World peace? Well...an "Olympic truce". "It sounds ridiculous, but it isn’t. Sport is a fantastic way of eliminating conflict — look at Ireland, the Middle East, India: you’ve got examples of people who are in conflict prepared to play sport together."

"What really gets me", he says, "is that the people who argue against trying to use the power of brands are often the ones who’ve so comprehensively failed to tackle social problems in any significant way. People who claim to care a lot so often deliver very little." Hilton breaks off with a grimace — "Oh God, I sound like Mrs Thatcher now" — but soldiers on. "It’s the techniques practised by so-called uncaring people that are often the best way of tackling social and environmental problems. And these problems are so severe...the idea we shouldn’t try out new approaches is just dreadful."

14 July 2002

Martin Wright