Creating a memorable and recognizable brand image, message and promise is the ideal for every chief brand officer, brand manager or business owner, but how does one get there?
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And The Winner Is….
Excited, hands trembling through agitation rather than caffeine, I typed the web address into my trusty browser. Up came the site… but there was nothing there about Sustainability Reporting.
Puzzled I checked out the URL and let out a small, frustrated sigh on finding I’d been automatically redirected to the UK website. So I got myself over to the company’s home site in the USA and checked that out.
But still there was nothing about Sustainability Reporting. Not even under the Investor Relations section, which is where large corporations tend to display their green credentials.
What was going on?
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Branding in the Spotlight – What is Branding?
The role of branding in business and marketing has grown significantly in terms of prioritization across the corporate and small business worlds, particularly with the advent of positions such as chief brand officer and chief imagination officer. The question remains: what is branding?
Despite branding’s move to the spotlight, the vast majority of businesspeople still don’t have a firm grasp of what branding truly is. In fact, I dare say that many businesspeople view branding as another funnel of expenditures by the marketing team that does little in terms of generating ROI.
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The Global Reporting Initiative — A Brief Overview
It’s the marketing men’s idea of a near perfect viral product. The work of a 25 person secretariat living on grants and donations has swept around the world with barely a penny spent on advertising.
Now hailed as the defacto standard and on its third generation of guidelines, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) dominates the world of environmental reporting.
Even those outside the CSR profession prick up their ears when they hear the acronym. It means something: it has respect and gravitas. If you comply with GRI you must be one of the Good Guys.
But what actually is it, and what makes it so popular?
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Drilling For Mud
Imagine 30,000 Amazonian tribesmen carousing along the street, waving their spears and whooping at the top of their voices in celebration.
They’d taken the petrochemical company Chevron to court and won huge and unprecedented damages.
For over twenty years Texaco, now a Chevron subsidiary, had dumped hazardous waste from its oil drilling enterprise into open lakes of effluent.
Toxins seeped into the groundwater and poisoned over 1,500 square miles used to live and farm by local indians and settlers. Now they’d got payback.
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Standards Schemes and Certificates
John Comana sat at his desk, headache pumping and a queasy feeling in his stomach. “I’ll take responsibility!” he’d volunteered. Now it didn’t seem such a smart move.
He, like many other corporate officers, has discovered that there are many different facets to environmental and social responsibility and although John Comana may be fictional, the headache is a very real one for many businesses.
No firm guidance exists on what corporate responsibility is, which activities should be measured or how data should be presented.
Instead there is the simple regulatory requirement that there must be analysis of “environmental … social and community issues”, including an appropriate measure of the company’s performance.
[Read more…] about Standards Schemes and Certificates