New Zealand Celsias

There’s nothing wrong with branding as a practice, but when it comes to companies who use branding tools for less ethical ends, that’s a whole different story, says Jack Yan, a director of not-for-profit branding think-tank Medinge Group. Earlier this year the group held its Brands with a Conscience awards, showcasing smart brands with an ethical edge. He tells us why a socially responsible business might actually help an organization cut through the clutter and get more sales, and shares with us who he thinks has got it right when it comes to best practice.

Tell us a little more about yourself

I was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to New Zealand 1976 where I started my own business in graphic design in 1987. I began doing small jobs and went through uni doing marketing and law. With the marketing, I began specialising in branding, which is what I did for my master's. A good part of me was frustrated that, in the design world, I wasn't able to affect the marketing strategies of my clients.

By the end of the 1990s, I had become more concerned with the effects of globalization and began writing quite extensively about them. I met Chris Macrae, who had an interest in brands online (his Dad was the deputy editor of The Economist.) Chris and I teamed up and were the original contributors to Allaboutbranding.com here in New Zealand.

Chris had hooked up with a bunch of brand professionals in Sweden and I was invited to the meeting at Medinge, a few hours west of Stockholm, in 2002. I presented a paper there (and have continued to do so each year) and found a bunch of people who saw the world through the same lens as I did: that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with branding as a practice, but there was certainly something wrong with companies who were using branding tools for less ethical ends. From that meeting, the Medinge manifesto was born.

We wrote a book, Beyond Branding, which might be thought of as a response to No Logo, showing that brands can be transparent, ethical and socially responsible.

Since then, we've been on a quest for what our chief executive Stanley Moss calls 'humanistic branding'. We launched the Brands with a Conscience Awards soon after, and have announced them at a ceremony in Paris each year.

Being a responsible corporate citizen means...

I define corporate citizenship slightly differently from CSR itself. But here's what I think it means:

• Treating people as people, and in the way you want to be treated, and not as a number.
• To treat people as intelligent beings, so they feel a sense of citizenship.
• To welcome their inputs, so they feel a sense of contribution.
• To unite people's passions, and making people feel happy.
• Delivering what you promise.
• Being a valuable member of a community, and promoting that community.

How do you, through your work, engage in socially/environmentally responsible business?

In my own business, it's about adopting socially responsible practices ourselves, and getting behind causes that are in line with our beliefs. For example, in fashion magazine Lucire, we teamed up with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) back in 2003 to promote environmental causes before they became mainstream. Our argument: you can't market in green magazines only, because you're preaching to the converted. Our aim: get in green labels and put them alongside mainstream ones, and change the industry from the inside. Since then, UNEP has used more mainstream ways to reach the public. In 2005, Lucire was the first international magazine to run sustainable style editorials.

In our consulting businesses, we try to provide our clients with a socially responsible or humanistic element, whether that's getting them to engage with their audiences, or formally building in a CSR element—for example having a set practice to adopt carbon-reducing policies, and communicating them properly as part of the brand.

What’s the biggest challenge in implementing such initiatives?

The biggest challenge is perceived cost. The second biggest challenge is convincing people that they are genuine, because we're now many years down the line of socially responsible marketing being mainstream. There has been some greenwash and scepticism.

The perceived cost is not always as great as people think and, in reality, it might help an organization cut through the clutter and get more sales. We believe a growing number of people want to do business with socially responsible organizations.

How can businesses benefit from engaging in corporate citizenship?

It depends on their aims. Most will want to improve their bottom line, and we can find ways to use CSR policies to do that. Others want to increase their market share, share of mind, or number of people served. We feel that it's often the quality of engagement with people rather than the number of people, which in turn helps the organization innovate, position and understand itself.

Can you give us an example of a business whose brand noticeably benefited from implementing corporate citizenship measures?

Almost any in the Brands with a Conscience awards qualify but the best known one here is probably Dilmah Tea. Here is a company that not only talks about ethically grown tea, it is making moves in Sri Lanka to preserve wildlife areas, is bringing traditional Ayurvedic medicines into hospitals, and is ensuring that the value-added elements of their marketing are done in the home country, to benefit the people there.

After the Boxing Day Tsunami, it was the first to re-equip local fishermen, whose lives were destroyed, with new nets so they could return to normality as quickly as possible. It's easily one of the best-known tea brands out there, and in our minds, by some degree the most ethical.

Another, which my fellow Medinge director Nicholas Ind writes about, is Patagonia. In Propeller, he wrote, “Established in the early sixties, Patagonia has a very distinctive culture based around environmentalism. It engages its employees with its ideas, not primarily through training and communication, but by involving people with the purpose and the values of the organization … Patagonia has achieved something simple and powerful by defining and delivering a brand that attracts a certain type of employee who identifies with the organizational cause: to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. This stance will not appeal to everyone, but if a person is happy with the idea of the company giving 1% of turnover to environmental charities, comfortable with the idea of being trained in non-violent civil disobedience (and having their fines paid if arrested) and willing to put environmental principle before profit (Patagonia happily repair product, generally for free, rather than encouraging people to buy a replacement purchase) then this is an organization that could fulfill their needs.”

What’s your pearl of wisdom for companies wanting to embrace corporate citizenship initiatives, but who don’t know where to start?

Look within. Everyone wants to do right by themselves and by their communities. What is the one thing that's unique to you—that you're passionate about, that you can ‘live’ as part of your organisation's daily life? When I say you, I mean the corporate you: for smaller organizations, it can be that of the founder; for larger ones, I believe it's possible to come to some accord about what that organisation's passion is.

If you didn't work you’d be...

A worldwide troubleshooter, with some foundation funding my way to talk around the world about ethical business and peace. Oh, hang on, that's still work.

In 10 years time you'd like to be...

Living in a better world, which I've helped contribute to.