Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Every business must serve a social purpose”. These are not the words of a social campaigner or a politician; they are the words of a banker, Ashok Vaswani, the CEO of Retail and Business Banking at Barclays, one of the world’s largest banks. Barclays has been involved in at least one major trading scandal and holds the dubious honour of the most fined bank in Britain. There will be some people who will treat his words with understandable cynicism but that would be to miss the point.

The point is not whether the words are sincere or not – it is that they should have been said at all. Banks are concerned with the control of money, why should they concern themselves with any purpose beyond that? The reason is that society is demanding they do. When banks first started they fulfilled a social need in the community, to enable ordinary people to fund their ambitions. Over the years banks forgot that purpose and focused most of their efforts on funding their own ambitions through obscene profits, often at the consumer’s expense. The bubble burst in spectacular fashion with the downfall of Lehman Brothers in the US and RBS in the UK.

It isn’t just the banks that have lost their way. Now it’s critical for any business to demonstrate it has a purpose before, and beyond profit; that it seeks to improve the lives of its customers as a primary goal. Failure to have such a purpose, to be clear about it and to ensure it directs everything you do, will lose customers, employees and ultimately business value....

The Marketing Society defines marketing’s primary role as follows: “To create sustainable growth by understanding, anticipating and satisfying customer need”.

We invest serious resources to probe, sense and respond to customer needs, yet we disregard the fact that well-being is just as much a consumer need. Not addressing it could potentially drive down demand.

Well-being goes beyond the individual to the community and all the way to the planet that we inhabit.If we overlay this with the fact that concern for a consumer’s well-being is one manifestation of corporate social responsibility (CSR), it becomes apparent that marketers have a reason to be actively engaged in CSR...

Transparency can look different depending on the audience and the context. Find out which brands exemplify what it means to be transparent today.

Openness has never been more important in marketing and in business. Being transparent begins with knowing your customers—it requires having a relationship with your community of customers and engaging in ongoing dialogue, and many brands are increasingly turning to an online insight community to enable this type of deep engagement and learning.

As the examples below show, transparency can look different depending on the audience and the context. Here are 5 brands that provide examples of what it means to be transparent today....

"...a big question for companies is to what extent CSR - specifically behavior that affects the environment - actually alters shareholder value. Is it better to pursue a single bottom line, or do shareholders benefit more when a company supports the “triple bottom line” that includes people, the planet, and profits?..."

Worth reading!