Yes Logo

In a society where every waking breath seems at risk of being branded, Victoria Earle and Martin Wright ask whether the power of these 21st-century icons can ever be wielded on the side of the angels.

Brands: dontcha just hate ’em? They’re on every high street, every screen, missing no opportunity to shove their logos in your face and, given half a chance, deep inside your soul as well. In George Monbiot’s evocative phrase, they’re privatising our minds.

More prosaically, Naomi Klein (author of No Logo — a book so influential it’s almost become a brand in itself) accuses them of eroding democracy, bankrupting local businesses, taking away customer power and choice, and generally burgering up our lives.

Yes, but...brands aren’t about to fade away — indeed, their grip on the psyche of shoppers seems stronger than ever. The odd brick through the window hasn’t exactly led to a mass haemorrhage of customers from McDonalds, and you don’t notice vast numbers of street-smart kids spurning Nike in favour of fairly-traded trainers. So...do we simply rail against their unelected power, or acknowledge their ubiquity and ask whether we can harness it for the greater good? Is there any way in which brands can promote sustainability, not just price and product?

It’s a question that is increasingly breaking surface in the mainstream. Late last year, The Economist ran its ‘Pro Logo’ leader, arguing that, through their dependence on public trust, brands actually increase corporate accountability. Their very prominence keeps them under a spotlight, which can only encourage good behaviour. In the words of Interbrand’s Rita Clifton: "If people fall out of love with your brand, you’re out of business." And as this issue of Green Futures goes to bed, it’s even hit the features pages of Marketing magazine...

Not every brand’s a Big Mac, of course. There are some powerful brands which are avowedly on the side of the angels. Greenpeace is one; the Body Shop (at least in its Roddick days) another. But it’s the big guys who really have a hold on the public’s wallet. In the eyes of Esther Maughan, director of the Strong Language consultancy and co-author of The Future of Brands, there are two clear ways in which they can be wielded as levers for change: as a ‘message carrier’ or as a ‘practical exemplar’ of sustainable business.

The brand as change agent

"A brand can often put a message through to its audience more effectively than, say, a government department," says Maughan. Its loyal customers take its words to heart more than a piece of nannying PR from the state. Take McDonald’s work in promoting the Keep Britain Tidy campaign.

It doesn’t just give money: it displays posters about litter in its outlets and actively encourages staff and customers to take part. And in so doing it plays a key role in the campaign, says Peter Gibson of organisers ENCAMS. "The group that drops the most litter are teenagers. And that’s McDonald’s customer base.

It’s not just the funding that helps, but the power of the logo itself. They can get to the consumer for us." (And, of course, reap the reputational rewards along the way.)

And if clearing up litter seems small beer in the greater scheme of things, what about curbing car use? That’s the issue tackled head on by motor manufacturer Kia, another ‘message carrier’, although in this case, the message is ‘buy our product, but don’t use it too much’ — as encapsulated in the slogan, "Think Before You Drive." Kia backs this up by supporting Safe Routes to School initiatives (encouraging walking or cycling instead of the school run) and including free bicycles with certain models.

All good stuff — but this is about the message, not the messenger. Kia might be encouraging their customers to walk more, but their fuel-hungry people carriers don’t exactly ‘walk the talk’ themselves. Maybe so, says Andrew Levy of Mustoe Merriman Levy, the agency that created the Kia campaign, but..."companies confuse not being able to do everything with not being able to do anything at all.

We’ve been told that we could do what we did with Kia only because we were just launching, and that if Ford ran such a campaign they would be criticised. But if Ford actually went ahead and did it, they would change the world! I want companies to get criticised, and I want them to fight back and say, ‘Would you rather we did nothing?’ I want to see mainstream brands being agents for social change and making that central to their positioning, simply because that is what consumers are becoming interested in."

Agents for social change? Heady stuff. For Maughan, the most persuasive approach a brand can take is that of ‘practical exemplar’: weaving sustainability into the heart of the business.

"This is much harder because it requires an operational overhaul of every single aspect of the product or service that it’s delivering," she says, citing B&Q as one brand which has at least gone some of the way to doing so. The DIY chain has led the way on labelling paint products and sourcing timber from sustainably-managed forests; it’s won plaudits for its employment policies and it grades its suppliers according to environmental performance.

 

Citizen — or mere consumer?

Which makes its lack of puff for such policies surprising. Social responsibility manager Claire Cooper says that this is because the issue is simply not at the top of the customer’s agenda. "Sustainability is just one aspect of our business that contributes to our brand value. We want to become a more sustainable company because it makes good business sense, but typically most customers do not buy products on environmental and social criteria."

Then there’s the familiar ‘head above the parapet’ fear. If B&Q really blew its sustainable trumpet, Cooper suggests, it wouldn’t be long before the media was round, probing into every cupboard in search of a skeleton. "In the past we have felt that by promoting what we were doing well, there was a risk of being attacked for what we were not doing."

Hamish Pringle, director general of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, disagrees. He thinks B&Q is missing out on an important marketing opportunity. Brands can benefit from selling the way they retail, not just what they sell: "The danger for B&Q is that if a rival came along and created a sustainable and ethical brand [in this sector] they might find themselves undermined. They’ve got a great story to tell, and they should tell it."

Pringle, who has co-authored two books, Brand Spirit and more recently Brand Manners, argues that "people’s concerns are increasingly to do with the brand’s role in the community and in society; they will have to build these concerns into their architecture. You can’t push customers in a direction that they may not want to go, [but] what companies should do and are doing is picking up on and responding to new trends." He cites the Co-operative Bank, which has done "extremely well" by picking up on its customers’ "lurking concern" about investing in unethical companies over 10 years ago.

Being a ‘message carrier’, says Pringle, isn’t enough. "As customers have become more sophisticated, as journalists have become more inquiring, as government agencies have become more engaged, you can’t get away with just promoting an image. The internal values of the company have to be aligned with the external." This is an ad man talking, remember...

A similar point is made by marketing consultant Wendy Gordon, author of the Green Alliance pamphlet Brand Green: "Brands of the future will have to stand not only for product quality [but will have to] signal something wholesome about the company behind the brand. That ‘something’ is social responsibility. Brands can no longer afford to behave badly and assume they will get away with it."

All the same, there’s a limit to what brands can do in isolation, warns Seb Berry, a public affairs consultant now working with leading photovoltaic suppliers Solar Century. "In new markets such as LPG (liquid petroleum gas) and solar pv, you need a strong brand to push the product — but government also has to play a role. What triggered the market for LPG cars, for example, wasn’t the environmental benefits, but the cut in duty.

It just became cheaper to power your car on LPG rather than petrol. In the pv market, the government has just launched a major demonstration programme offering people 50% grants. And direct grant funding like that is absolutely critical to building a market..."

Writer and campaigner George Monbiot (author of Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain), goes further. "The fundamental premise behind the ideas that brands can be positive is that consumers have genuine power to affect political and economic outcomes. I seriously question that. While you [as an individual] can use consumption in a positive way, such as buying fair trade products, it is hard to see how you can prevent other people from buying unfairly traded ones.

Another problem is that many transactions are not business-to-consumer but business-to-business. So as consumers we have very little scope for affecting these major buying decisions." All in all, says Monbiot, "consumer power is a red herring. The only way you can make the market work for people and the environment, rather than against them, is through regulation. There is no substitute for democracy. We have to be active citizens rather than active consumers; let’s stop getting distracted from the fundamental task, which is that of using our citizenship to generate political change."

 

Quiet revolutionaries

There’s a rigorous logic to that view, and it certainly puts in its place some of the fluffier rhetoric around the redeeming power of brands. But it doesn’t seem to leave much space for quiet revolutions like that undergone by Harrogate tea merchants Betty’s and Taylor’s. They started with a scheme whereby customers could send in tokens from the packs of their best-selling Yorkshire Tea, and in return the company would donate £1 to Oxfam’s tree planting projects.

Twelve years and over two million trees later, what started as a piece of simple, old fashioned cause-related marketing has helped transform the business, says communications manager Katy Squires: "It made us think long and hard about the way we operate." The upshot included everything from office recycling schemes to award-winning sustainable buying and trading policies. The company also launched its organic ‘Feel-Good’ range, which shares profits with community projects in the area around suppliers’ plantations.

"And because of our long-term relationship with Oxfam," says Squires, "we are very aware of the value of their work. So when there are disasters in coffee-growing areas such as Papua New Guinea and India, we sell a special SOS coffee through Tesco which raises about £15,000 per month towards Oxfam’s relief work. But there is plenty more we can do and we will carry on stretching ourselves." Agents for social change, indeed.

But if the citizen-consumer ever forgets who really calls the shots, Wendy Gordon has some salutary words for them: Like any icon, "brands can’t be imposed on us: it’s us who give meaning to them".

 

Victoria Earle is a freelance journalist and communications advisor to non profit organisations.

victoria.earle@btinternet.com

14 July 2002

Martin Wright and Victoria Earle