The article is a version of a paper published in the Journal of Brand Management (2011).

Jack Yan¹
Jack Yan & Associates
jack.yan@jyanet.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL NETWORKS have been hailed as the next media for marketing, its proponents pointing to the presence of politicians and actors on Twitter and Facebook. Since mainstream media pointed out that actor-writer Stephen Fry was on Twitter, there was a sudden growth in subscribers in the UK. A further mention on The Oprah Winfrey Show saw some talk about an ‘Oprah effect’ on Twitter, spurring growth Stateside. The most complimentary publicity for Twitter, however, was for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, with some crediting the service for his success.
   Each one of these statements has an element of truth to them. There is no doubt that celebrities have managed to harness social media to broadcast to their fans, bypassing the press and setting the record straight. Fans feel somehow connected, as though their idol is talking to them directly.
   The Obama campaign, meanwhile, tapped in to a group of voters who are computer-savvy. The campaign managed to mobilize people who might not have voted, giving the senator an edge that his principal opponent, Sen. John McCain, did not consider.
   But how real are these phenomena and how do they impact on branding?
   Aside from setting some ideas for future research, this paper aims to provide an examination of blogs and social networks, considering their branding potential and what organizations need to consider to build their brands using them.

Why brand online?
The case for online branding has been set elsewhere, with the conclusion that most of the same rules apply. Brands still need to be differentiated and communicated to audiences, and it was found that successful online firms in the late 1990s tended to have strong CEO involvement in their websites.² As the web mainstreamed, countless exceptions emerged: there was no longer a talent vacuum when it came to managing website relations with consumers, and CEOs could step back from answering feedback forms. Staff who grew up in the web era understood how to deal with online questions; databases with copy-and-paste answers were developed; and, in some cases, “knowledge bases” looked for keywords in a submitted question and fielded prepared answers without human intervention.
   In essence, the promise of the 1990s’ World Wide Web began disappearing: once seen as a democratizing force where stakeholders could speak directly to company heads, especially in the small- to medium-sized enterprises that went online in the early days, it became just another medium.
   Blogs were seen as the next step: Chua and Parackal have done some incisive research into CEO blogs,³ which give some leaders a chance to provide audiences with an idea of their philosophy. But in an era of competing media and short attention spans, Facebook updates, fan pages and Tweets became part of the branding lexicon.
   Facebook’s commercial potential was always present, from the minute founder Mark Zuckerberg took the service away from its North American college-campus roots and allowed non-students to create profiles in 2006. It has become more commercialized (and arguably less concerned with user privacy)⁴ since then, in order to capture business and profits through advertising. Originally a site that aimed to connect friends and contacts, Facebook broadened to include groups and fan pages for organizations, creating a closed network of 400 million (and rising) users who advertisers might wish to pitch.
   Many flock to the service. Facebook allowed blogs to be imported, forcing more users to stay on the site rather than go to the source. It gave the impression of direct engagement: companies could, for instance, communicate directly with their supporters. It attempted to bridge the gap between organization and audience again, much like the web and email once did.
   In politics, the author is currently in a bid for the mayoralty in Wellington, New Zealand. A Facebook fan page has been set up, and the same behaviours are apparent: supporters seldom head to email to ask political questions. They field them on his Facebook fan page. Some of his opponents have set up rival pages, and other cities’ mayors and mayoral candidates have done the same in this election year. Interaction is often rewarded with additional supporters.
   Outside politics, the author has observed the growth of the designer Tamsin Cooper, whose Facebook page, set up during the first quarter of 2010, has brought 658 fans at the time of writing. Cooper lives in a town, Arrowtown, New Zealand, of 1,700: the Facebook page has been a way for her to centre her international marketing activities, complementing her website and online sales. Importantly, it allows Cooper to interact directly with her supporters and clients.
   Twitter, which claims to have Sen. Barack Obama as a user—though later it emerged that the ‘Tweets’ were those of his campaign team⁵—is less formal. One user Tweets a statement of 140 characters, usually an update of what that person is doing. In terms of the Obama campaign, the Tweets pertained to the senator’s political speeches and campaign ideals, and followers could ask questions and engage with him.
   It was a masterful use of the service. While it was not Sen. Obama himself on there, it gave the illusion of his presence. It certainly reflected his views. Secondly, his campaign team was careful to follow back as many supporters as possible—Twitter users can see who has become a “follower”, giving them an option to return the favour. This, too, satisfied netizens’ feeling of being engaged: that there was a genuine belief of a two-way street in communication with the senator.
   The desire for engagement is not limited to the United States. The Residents 2010 conference in Wellington, New Zealand, brought residents’ associations from around the country together for a day, discussing issues that were pertinent to them. The Hon Peter Dunne, MP, stated early in the conference that such organizations need to ‘band together’ to fight for their communities, acknowledging that ‘power resides in the community, with their representation and their engagement. Community engagement is not political … local democratization is occurring more in residents’ associations.’
   Showing a video from author John Ralston Saul,⁶ it was stressed that one of the causes of community alienation stems from specialized managers who are employed to solve various problems. But their specialization restricts citizens who have other ideas, which combats the democratic nature that one expects.
   Other comments heard include, ‘The Local Government Act does not empower local representatives to represent local people’; ‘Councils will become less representative, because their business objectives will alienate citizens’; and ‘As [local issues] become more pressing, how can we activate the public response?’
   In another speech, New Zealand’s native Māori population was a victim of “ticking the boxes” when it came to their needs, trivializing and indeed restricting what they were about. (Parallels were drawn with the rights of women and blacks in the US in earlier centuries.) There was a general fear of politicians losing power through engagement, and talk after talk highlighted that engagement was not happening early enough with citizens.
   If there was one sector where engagement was called for consistently, it was in local politics. In her concluding conference speech, New Zealand Chief Ombudsman Beverley Wakem stated, ‘The internet’s tools are important [in describing] how to mobilize and educate people regarding their rights and the legislation.’
   Short of an Obama-style campaign engaging the public, New Zealand’s local political scene was in dire need of politicians and political processes that could engage the public. In the wake of the American presidential election, citizens’ feeling of alienation could quickly be dealt with through social media.
   The author is currently in a bid for the mayoralty in Wellington, New Zealand. A Facebook fan page has been set up, and the same behaviours are apparent: supporters seldom head to email to ask political questions. They field them on his Facebook fan page. Some of his opponents have set up rival pages, and other cities’ mayors and mayoral candidates have done the same in this election year. Interaction is often rewarded with additional supporters.
   Far more trivial, though no less interesting from an academic perspective, is the Twitter account of a fictional character, Jim Keats, from the recently finished television show Ashes to Ashes. An unofficial account, it was set up in January 2010, long before the character was introduced on the show. After the show commenced, the Keats account (at twitter.com/jimkeats) attracted an average of 100 additional followers per week, of fans wishing to supplement their television viewing with Tweeting—even if it was with a fictional person. Very few of the 900 followers the account attracted were bots, surprisingly. ‘Jim Keats’ interacted with other fictional characters on the service, all role-played by other fans. It helped take the programme’s brand on to Twitter and provided viewers with an additional access point to the TV show.
   In most cases—those in which fictional characters are not involved (!)—blogs, Facebook and Twitter are helpful in revealing the thinking of the people behind the brands. They satisfy a need: the desire of engagement with a brand they wish to be associated with, or, to put it in Engeseth’s terms, to feel “one” with the brand.⁷ Their motives are connected to the idea of corporate citizenship and how successful brands promote its ideas.⁸
   Engeseth’s theory is that the separate nature of many brand relationships—the “them” and “us”—is obsolete. Companies need to collaborate with consumers not just for R&D, but for everyday marketing purposes. Examples he cites includes Linux, where the user base collaborate on developments to the operating system and become evangelists in the process. WordPress, the blogging platform, is another. Engeseth also points out that Michael Dell spends 40 per cent of his time dealing with Dell computer customers directly. As does Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea.
   Brands cannot be controlled centrally or in a top-down manner in these circumstances. Coinciding with these developments has been the rise of virtual working, of people expected to unite under a single banner with a uniform brand despite being based in homes or in spread-out offices.
   But Linux is a real collaboration: the results speak for themselves. The real fear with brands in the social networking era is that they will fall into the same traps they did with email and the web, where the interaction with those in charge is gone. Facebook and Google, two brands that rank relatively highly in surveys, are notorious for being opaque: Facebook’s privacy changes frequently prompt criticism, while there is virtually no support for the free users of Google, unless they are lucky enough to find a person in authority. Both companies may provide tools for online interaction that can aid transparency, but neither practises it when it comes to their core products.
   Above, the author has pointed out that Barack Obama’s Twitter account, during the presidential campaign, was not manned by him. Thus, it is as easy to obscure one’s identity with these services as it is with any other medium.

   An analysis of some of the top celebrities and politicians indicate that they are not engaging their fan base, undermining the use of the Twitter service. There is little or no engagement by some of the most-followed users of the service, including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and Al Gore (Table 1). For them, Twitter is a one-way service, an extra broadcast channel where the relationship with the audience matters less than their own message. However, President Obama, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry have better ratios, indicating more engagement, or at least, a greater intention to engage. (The ideal number is 100 per cent, although this is impossible to expect, especially when a Twitter account acquires mass following over a short period of time.)
   Given this, are they genuine tools for transparency and the sort of “oneness” preached by Engeseth? And what advantages can organizations get from using them?

Brands and social networks
The theory behind social networking is sound. Brands must be genuine. Those that are “surface” are soon uncovered. It is no different from a government offering sound bites that seem pleasant to the public ear, but whose policies differ from the electorate. It is a sure way of being unelected at the polls the first chance voters get.
   By going to blogs and social networks, people can understand the personalities behind the scenes. In fact, this can prove more useful for the smaller organization because the principal can be the one who writes, updates the Facebook fan page, or Tweets. It allows that organization to be more responsive to audiences and consumer demands. It also allows the chief decision-maker in the organization to grasp the prevailing mood of the public.⁹ They are more cost-effective media than above-the-line advertising or even formal PR,¹⁰ and go some way to levelling the playing field for small- to medium-sized enterprises.
   Brands that are unsupported by additional media can fail because they are not letting their stories shine through. The importance of “legends” inside the organization have been shown by many writers and researchers to be important, providing a hook for brands to be understood internally and externally. Therefore, even the less well presented company, lacking the budget to look as swish as a richer competitor, might be able to exploit a competitive advantage by telling a story without the interference of a communications’ department.
   The personalities can come through: a traditional law firm might still Tweet but do so in a formal way—writing in complete sentences, never abbreviating or using internet acronyms, and providing useful knowledge to its followers. It would have to stop short at revealing any privileged information, but its personality can still come through. At the other end of the scale, a musician might provide samples of her work online, downloadable through a blog, and connect that blog automatically on to her Facebook page and Twitter account. Regardless of the situation, a unique voice can emerge, one that is sufficiently differentiated from competitors. The organization manages to solve not only the question of differentiation, but those of transparency, engagement and accessibility.

Issues
   With an increasing amount of activity happening in the social media sphere, it would seem prudent to examine how to incorporate the media into a brand strategy.
   Along with his colleagues at the Medinge Group, the author participated in writing Beyond Branding,¹¹ which dealt with the growing consumer desire for transparent brands. There is nothing to suggest that that desire has lessened in the last seven years: anecdotally, it has grown as social media have.
   It would suggest, for many organizations, a total change in how they communicate, abandoning the top-down process for something that accepts inputs from audiences to drive strategies.
   When many authors discuss transparency in branding, it is not simply about ethics. There are obvious savings in communicating the same message to internal and external audiences. By being open, every audience has the same potential access to the same information. Perhaps most importantly, stakeholders feel that sense of corporate citizenship and oneness, which helps build brand loyalty and grows awareness.
   Issues for practitioners will include:

• how to include this level of transparency into a branding strategy, and whether the organization itself can handle the added work. As part of the vision-setting for the organization, organizations must ask themselves if they desire extra scrutiny. Questions will include whether principals are willing to schedule in regular entries on to a corporate blog, and work alongside their communications’ department. The structure is flatter. They might want to consider whether they wish to read the feedback personally. Ideally, they will need to ensure that it is their voice and not one that has been too sanitized by communications. The organization has to consider whether these statements appear in a corporate account or a personal one, and the relationship between the two;
• it will have to look at researching its audiences and whether they demand the level of interaction that social media provide. Some businesses might not need it because their audiences are not connected online: those targeting elderly audiences might find conventional media to be more useful. The author notes that a growing number of clients are finding that their audiences are demanding, at the last, a Facebook presence;
• the organization will have to look at extending the rules surrounding its brand usage in to new media. It will also have to consider whether it is to influence the appearance of personal accounts. If personal blogs and Twitter accounts have already been set up before the organization has created its own, it needs to ask itself how official they are;
• the organization needs to consider how to measure the success of branding in social media, either through surveys on whether audiences believe transparency has increased, or using other measures, such as brand equity constructs, revenue, market share, or follower or fan numbers.

Challenges to transparency
   Labour malpractices, child exploitation and environmental harm have nothing to do with branding, even if, in the eyes of Klein¹² or Quart,¹³ the profession is complicit. Equally, the misuse of blogs and social media are not due to any inherent problem with the platforms. If certain parties choose to use Twitter as a one-way channel, then it is their choice: there is no rule book that governs the service. But it would be a wasted opportunity, doing little to promote interaction and understanding audiences. Instead, those that use the technologies as top-down media risk making themselves look separate, going against transparency and oneness. In an era when both are valued, the brand, whether personal or organizational, is weakened through appearing “above” one’s supporters.
   Secondly, there is the problem of having someone other than the claimed person behind the blog, Facebook or Twitter account. The organization should ensure that in the case of a shared blog or Facebook fan page, the identity of the writer is known; but ghost-written media can prompt criticism; this can only undermine the brand.¹⁴
   The looming problems are also technological. Each medium starts off being exclusive. The programming that appears on that medium appeals to that exclusive audience. But as it mainstreams, that exclusivity is lost.
   For the most part, there is nothing wrong with this diffusion of an innovation. Television would be useless if TV sets cost the equivalent of a motor car; motor cars would have failed to transform society if they remained the playthings of the rich.
   But with the democratization of technologies, they have become utilitarian. Email was once exclusive; it is now a tool, with few business people using it for leisure as they did 20 years ago. Along the way, spam threatened to make email useless; email newsletters risk being caught in spam filters.
   The same tendencies are emerging in the blogosphere, with some websites generating fake entries. Blogger, the blogging platform owned by Google, has been using a bot to detect fake blogs that are created using automated scripts. A small percentage of legitimate blogs have been deleted including, for a brief period in 2010, one for the respected UK firm Minale Tattersfield, which was out of action for two weeks. Vox, the blogging service owned by Californian firm Six Apart, is a target of many “sploggers” (spam bloggers).
   Twitter, which is much harder to patrol and easier to manipulate, has its share of fake accounts, with programs adding followers and Tweeting fake messages. Reports of Twitter’s growth stagnating have surfaced in the technological press during 2009 and early 2010.¹⁵
   Facebook, meanwhile, is turning off a small minority of users fed up with its privacy changes—although the carrot of 400 million users is too great for many organizations to abandon it.
   All may well turn users away at some point, especially when they feel they can no longer have the sense of engagement and oneness with the brand.
   Therefore, while these tools are useful, they may well be replaced by others in the 2010s. Perhaps those tools will integrate visuals and the person’s voice, things that are (at this point) harder to automate. For now, they are real, and they need to be considered in a branding strategy.

Conclusion
   Audiences have demanded greater ethics and transparency from brands for many years. However, that demand has become far louder as audiences found their voices through the internet, in particular, driving a greater awareness of social responsibility in the 2000s. Alongside those demands have been ones for transparency, forcing organizations to work more closely with their audiences. People want to know that they have some influence over the brands they connect with.
   As technologies change, social media are where audiences can interact with those brands. They have their pitfalls, with many organizations not building them into their overall branding strategies, or failing to use them to interact. In neither case is transparency increased. Technological problems limit their appeal.
   Nevertheless, if used correctly, blogs and social media can be useful tools for differentiation as they allow a company’s personality to shine through. They also provide means for audiences to engage and access brands. Importantly, they can provide greater transparency, a behind-the-scenes look at the thinking of organizations, giving their brands greater relevance and appeal.

Notes
   1. LLB, BCA (Hons.), MCA. CEO, Jack Yan & Associates (http://jya.net); Founding Publisher, Lucire (http://lucire.com); Director, the Medinge Group (http://medinge.org). Copyright ©2010 by Jack Yan & Associates. All rights reserved.
   2. J. Yan: ‘Online Branding: an Antipodean Experience’, in Kim, Ling, Lee and Park (eds.): Human Society and the Internet. Berlin: Springer 2001, pp. 185-202.
   3. A. P. H. Chua, and M. Parackal: ‘Co-creating value through corporate blogs: a proposed research framework’, 5th National Conference on Computing and Information Technology (NCCIT), Bangkok, Thailand, May 22-3, 2009.
   4. B. Krishnamurthy and C. E. Willis: ‘On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks’, Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN), Barcelona, Spain, August 17, 2009.
   5. M. Kirkpatrick: ‘Obama: “I have never used Twitter”‘, ReadWriteWeb, November 15, 2009, <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_i_have_never_used_twitter.php>.
   6. Cf. J. R. Saul: The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin 2006.
   7. S. Engeseth: One: a Consumer Revolution in Business. London: Cyan-Marshall Cavendish 2005.
   8. N. Ind and R. Bjerke: Branding Governance: a Participatory Approach to the Brand Building Process. Chicester: J. Wiley & Sons 2007, pp. 51-7.
   9. An example of a responsive CEO is Christian von Koenigsegg, who made modifications to his company’s sports car after criticism on the TV show Top Gear. A new model was ready for testing within weeks. A larger company would have added the criticism to a longer improvement cycle and the modification might not have been seen for years.
   10. S. Engeseth: The Fall of PR and the Rise of Advertising. Stockholm: Stefan Engeseth Publishing 2009.
   11. N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003.
   12. N. Klein: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador 2000.
   13. A. Quart: Branded: the Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing 2003.
   14. Especially in politics: opponents of the two high-profile politicians in the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, flung accusations about ghost-writing.
   15. D. Gross: ‘Has Twitter peaked?’, CNN.com, January 26, 2010, <http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/26/has.twitter.peaked/index.html>.

Dr Nicholas Ind
Partner, Equilibrium
nind@equilibriumconsulting.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

WHILE CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IS a widely used and well-understood term, conscientious brands is not. Its origins lie with the Medinge Group, which since 2004 has given its annual Brands with a Conscience awards. The Medinge Group argues that a brand with a conscience has the following attributes.

• It has a visible conscience.
• It apologizes when things go wrong.
• It invests time and energy in relationship building.
• It promotes the value of caring for one another.
• It acknowledges that we are all fundamentally equal.
• It’s visibly accountable for all its actions.
• It takes risks in line with its values.

The attributes were not defined through research, but rather were derived from discussion among members of the Group.
   In thinking about brands as conscientious, one important association to emphasize is that of services dominant logic.¹ Here we can argue that it is the connectedness of consumers and other stakeholders with the brand owner that creates the brand. A brand may be managed by an organization, but its meaning is formed out of the purchase, usage and dialogue that the organization and stakeholders engage in. This view is relational and suggests a model of inseparability between the one who offers and one who consumes. It shifts the idea of brand building from transactions to relationships: ’because a service-centred view is participatory and dynamic, service provision is maximized through an iterative learning process on the part of both the enterprise and the consumer.’² The importance of this change of perspective is not only due to the dominance of service industries in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries³, but also to a reinterpretation of the process of exchange. Vargo and Lusch argue that everything, whether tangible or intangible, is a service. This distinction also serves to emphasize that increasingly brand owners cede control of their brands to consumers. As people use brands, discuss them with others, form communities of interest and interact online with companies, so the influence of the brand owner diminishes. Now a brand is created in a conversational space where the organization and the individual meet.
   The word conscientious also brings specific associations with it. It is a word that we normally apply to individuals and it suggests attributes such as hard-working, thorough and attentive. It conveys the idea that someone is aware of the needs of those around them. If we connect the word to brand, the implication is that the brand owner is capable of understanding and meeting the needs of diverse stakeholders; of extending sympathy and creating value for all.⁴ As Rorty notes,⁵ the moral imagination, which is essential to an ethical perspective, occurs when people are willing to move beyond the possibilties dictated by precedent and empathize with others. This is a view that is distinct from approaches that stress a narrow focus to creating value and recognizes instead the interconnectedness of all those that touch or are touched by an organization.
   This is becoming increasingly important as the size and influence of organizations and their impact on more aspects of people’s lives grows. Indeed, we can argue that the role of the organization has changed: ‘companies have to recognize their accountability not only to shareholders, but to all audiences and to society as a whole.’⁶ This is a point that Freeman⁷ makes when he writes that the stakeholder view is an ethical requirement for companies and that the linkage of different stakeholders requires a balanced approach. In their 2007 book Freeman, Harrison and Wicks⁸ note that the the primary aspect of corporations is cooperation. They suggest that the business organization should be a vehicle ‘by which stakeholders are engaged in a joint and cooperative enterprise of creating value for each other.’⁹

The attributes of ‘Conscientious Brands’
If we can argue that a conscientious brand is one that is cogniscent of, and tries to meet, the needs of all its stakeholders, what might this mean in terms of attributes? Building on the Medinge list, we would argue that there are three core attributes that are necessary for a brand to be seen as conscientious: a committed and inclusive approach, the ability to think long-term and a willingness to keep promises.
   One important omission from the core attributes however should be noted: altruism, which can be defined as an unselfish regard for the well-being of others. We encounter a problem here of who ‘others’ might be, but if we argue that ‘others’ encompasses stakeholders external to the organization, altruism creates a problem of imbalance. For as well as achieving the well-being of others, brands must be able to deliver well-being for themselves and those inside the organization. Altruism could consign a brand to destructive decisions. In its place we might argue that brands should have a selfish regard for themselves and for the well-being of others.

A committed and inclusive approach
A facet of conscientious brands is that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is not seen as a marketing tool or a department or a process that orbits far away from the corporate sun, but is integrated into the fabric of the organization. The greater the orientation towards a communications-based approach, the stronger the tendency for CSR to be seen as superficial. In fact, telling consumers about CSR through traditional media such as advertising increases the risk of provoking scepticism.¹⁰ However, there are examples such as the Norwegian sportswear brand Stormberg,¹¹ the Dutch Fair Trade pioneer Max Havelaar, the Swiss Bank, Pictet et Cie and the Bangladeshi telecoms operator Grameen Phone, that are stakeholder-focused and make CSR a part of everyday practice.
   For example, Pictet et Cie, which was founded in 1805, has a focus on sustainable development and encourages the maximum investment in sustainable areas for a given risk. The bank manages a Water fund, which was launched in 2000, and has become the world’s largest of its kind, with over €4 billion in assets; and a Clean Energy fund. The company has also establishe the Prix Pictet—the world’s first international prize dedicated to photography and sustainability—mandated to encourage the use and power of photography to communicate vital messages to a global audience. Pictet et Cie understands that business is not somehow separate from the world, but is very much part of it and must demonstrate a broad commitment to stakeholders and to society at large.
   Hewlett-Packard (HP) also exemplifies this in the way it works with other companies, governments and NGOs to improve the health, education and infrastructure in developing markets, because its long-term growth depends on new consumers. Anholt writes of HP and others, that ‘they (big companies) need consumers who are wealthy enough to buy their products, have enough free time to enjoy them, are educated enough to consume advertising messages and evaluate products and brands, and live in countries where there is the liberty to make money and spend it.’¹²

Long-term thinking
Key to the cited examples is the prevalence of long-term thinking, which runs counter to the sometimes short-term view of shareholders. Acting conscientiously means rejecting expediency for principle, temporary advantage for long-term gain. Grameen Phone didn’t look a good business prospect in the late 1990s in a country suffering from high levels of corruption, political uncertainty and poor infrastructure. But new distribution methods were established, low-cost pricing plans introduced and innovative and socially valuable services, such as HealthLine and Community Information Centres, established. Today, Grameen Phone has 23 million subscribers (February 2010) and is the most desired company to work for in Bangladesh.
   At Anglo-Dutch fast moving consumer goods company, Unilever, reducing environmental impacts while improving performance is the core vision and it means taking a longer-term view and tackling short-termism head on. In 2009, CEO, Paul Polman, in an attempt to move the focus away from short-term returns, stopped providing earnings guidance to investors. Seeing his mandate as more concerned with long-term success, he also railed against hedge funds, arguing, ‘they are not people who are there in the long-term interests of the company.’
   One implication of shareholder short-termism might be that it is easier for privately owned companies to act conscientiously. While Freeman et al¹³ argue for the mutual interest of different stakeholders, the power of shareholders in publicly quoted companies whose primary motivation is in above average returns can run into conflict with other stakeholders. In privately owned companies such as Pictet et Cie, Max Havelaar, Stormberg and also US outdoor brand, Patagonia, it is the long-term shared vision of owners and managers that drives decision-making.

Keeping promises
There has been a shift in emphasis in brand-building, from making promises to keeping them;¹⁴ from communication to people. This represents a turning away from traditional advertising and a focus on direct interaction. Indeed, some organizations are moving branding entirely away from communications and towards connecting strategy, culture and a wider stakeholder involvement. They recognize that branding is a process that is too important to be left just to the marketing or communications department. These organizations have understood that brand building is a participative process involving the whole organization and is the responsibility of all employees.¹⁵
   This suggests the importance of widespread employee engagement with the organization’s brand ideology—the set of ideas that define what the organization is, how it does things and what its aspirations are. The better individuals identify and internalize the ideology, the greater the likelihood of its delivery in the experiences that connect the organization and its stakeholders.
   As an example of this consider the software company, Mozilla. This is example of an organization that lives up to its stated mission of promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web. It is a non-profit organization that grew out of Netscape and is involved in building communities of people that both help create and use their products such as the web browser, Firefox, an email client, Thunderbird, and a global community of innovators, Drumbeat. Mozilla employs a core group of people (around 300) that develop software, manage process and market the products, but since the start of the company, much of the development of products has been due to the enthusiasm and involvement of customers who have become volunteers.
   In the early days of Mozilla, when it was up against a very dominant competitor in the form of Microsoft, there weren’t enough resources internally. As many software developers identified with the ideology of keeping the web open and accessible to all, they gave up their spare time to develop products they themselves would like to use. It was also an opportunity to work with smart people and solve difficult problems. Of course, Mozilla could have closed their doors to these would-be helpers, but it would have shown up that the principle of openness was just a veneer. Asa Dotzler of Mozilla says, ‘by 2004, the majority of the code had been written by Netscape employees, but there were many hundreds of volunteers who played a substantial role in writing code including important features. For instance the first implementation of tabbed browsing was a volunteer written code. Our first implementation of pop-up blocking and session restore when you crash, and lots of other key features were developed by volunteers.’
   By 2010, more than 12,000 free community-generated add-ons had been implemented. Mozilla has encouraged outsiders to help evolve the project. The idea of improving the internet experience for people everywhere led to one volunteer choosing to pioneer disability access because he felt passionately about it, while volunteers around the world seized on the opportunity to preserve the integrity of their languages, by translating content. When Mozilla launches a new version of Firefox, it is delivered in 75-plus languages simultaneously (2010). As long as the initiatives align with the Mozilla ideology, the organization chooses to make it easier for people to do what they wanted with the brand. A similar philosophy has also been adopted for marketing the Mozilla brand whereby a community of marketing professionals and enthusiast consumers helped to construct and implement a marketing campaign, even to the extent of donating money to run a launch campaign for Firefox.

Challenges to the concept
The concept of conscientious brands and the blocks on which it is built can be challenged from different angles. First, the stakeholder perspective has been challenged by Frooman¹⁶ in particular for being too company-centric. While he recognizes the impact of Freeman’s 1984 book, he also judges that in his ‘hub-and-spoke conceptualization, relationships are dyadic, independent of one another, viewed largely from the firm’s vantage point, and defined in terms of actor attributes.’
   Certainly traditional models of organization-stakeholder interaction have emphasized the organization as doing things to, and communicating at, stakeholders. In a more networked world where interactions are fluid and organizations are more porous and transparent, it has become clear that the connections between stakeholders has become more complex and the locus of control has shifted away from the organization. This has become evident during uprisings in North Africa and riots in the UK (2011) as brands such as Facebook, Blackberry, Vodafone and Twitter have been used to facilitate civil unrest. As a consequence, these brands have been criticized by governments. Yet the point should be made here that it is citizens who are defining how these brands are used (whether it be for good or for bad) in ways that were never conceived of by the brand owners.
   Alternatively, Martin¹⁷ (2010) is critical of much management thinking because it lacks a sufficient customer orientation. He describes the stages of modern capitalism, from Berle and Means’ The Modern Corporation and Private Property,¹⁸ which signified the emergence of managerial capitalism to Jensen and Meckling’s Theory of the Firm,¹⁹ which signified a shift to shareholder capitalism. Jensen and Meckling’s emphasis on maximizing shareholder value has since become a standard of modern management and argues quite explicitly for the pre-eminence of the shareholder. Martin’s critique is that the focus on shareholders hasn’t done anything for shareholder returns: ‘there’s no sign that shareholders benefited more when their interests were put first and foremost.’ Shareholder capitalism has also made organizations dysfunctional, in that it also downplays the interdependence of their audiences. As several studies have shown, involved and engaged employees are important contributors to customer satisfaction which in turn leads to enhanced performance.²⁰ Similarly, having a positive reputation among influential people and organizations helps a business to achieve its broader goals. Where we might diverge from Martin is in his solution to shareholder capitalism. His argument is that the new orientation should be customer capitalism and he cites two key examples of organizations who have exemplary long-term performance and live up to their rhetoric: Johnson & Johnson and P&G. They are interesting choices and they certainly give prominence in their corporate statements to consumers, but the important thing is that they stress the intertwining of stakeholders. Johnson & Johnson’s credo is both long-lived and well known and connects doctors, nurses, patients, parents, children, communities and stockholders. P&G’s Principles state: ‘We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s consumers. As a result consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.’

A new approach
’Corporate brands are hugely influential on society and can either be part of the problem in fuelling excessive and high-impact consumption or part of the solution in driving consumers towards sustainable living.’
—Dax Lovegrove, Head of Business & Industry Relations, WWF UK

The central problem for the concept of conscientious brands is that one of the requirements for the organization is encouraging consumption, while a conscientious brand should be aiming to limit or shift consumption to ensure it is sustainable. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek observes, you only have freedom to the extent that you make the right choices, which means: ‘you are free to do anything, as long as it involves shopping.’²¹
   Yet, there are some signs of resistance to the Zizek view in the emergence of the idea of voluntary simplicity. ‘Voluntary simplifiers’ describes a category of people who have made the conscious decision to reduce their consumption levels and find meaning through reducing their spend on products and services and spending more time on activities that generate meaning for them. This group is anti-consumerist and ideologically motivated.²² The size of this audience is difficult to estimate, but it is suggested that in the US there are some 60 million people who fit into the category.²³ These are still consuming individuals, but they are, in their eyes at least, consuming responsibly within self-defined boundaries. Kozinets has argued persuasively in his analysis of the Burning Man Festival that it is impossible to escape the market²⁴—except temporarily. Consumerism is all pervasive. Yet the emergence of voluntary simplifiers demonstrates that the ‘less is more’ mantra has a significant number of adherents.

Conclusion
Branding is changing. It is moving away from a focus on products and consumers to a services-dominant logic that weighs up and tries to balance the needs to all stakeholders in an increasingly transparent and fluid dialogue. What’s important for marketers and brand owners is to see this change not as a threat but as an enormous opportunity for brands to make a positive difference to the world. Brands can respond to the stated desire of consumers and citizens to live responsibly (even if there is a gap between stated intent and actions)²⁵ by using the tools of branding to change people’s behaviour so that it becomes more sustainable. This extends the role of brand owners beyond simply marketing products to helping people become more ethical. As Devinney, Auger and Eckhardt²⁶ argue, ethically oriented consumption requires consumers to become knowledgeable participants so that they can become more socially conscious in their purchasing and consumption. This will require organizations to move beyond their tendency to short-termism and their overt orientation on shareholder returns. Instead there will be a requirement to focus on the real needs of people and to engage with them in a services-dominant approach that recognizes the importance of participation and dialogue.

Notes
   1. S. L. Vargo and R. F. Lusch: ‘Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing’, Journal of Marketing, vol. 68, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1-17.
   2. Ibid., at p. 12.
   3. Thirty-four countries that are members of the forum that is committed to democracy and the market economy.
   4. D. Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Penguin 1969.
   5. R. Rorty: ‘Is Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics?’ Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3, 2006, pp. 369-380.
   6. N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003.
   7. R. E. Freeman: Strategic Management: a Stakeholder Approach. Boston: Pitman 1984.
   8. R. E. Freeman, J. S. Harrison and A. C. Wick: Managing for Stakeholders: Survival, Reputation and Success. New Haven: Yale University Press 2007.
   9. Ibid., at p. 6.
   10. A. M. Sjovall and A. C. Talk: ‘From Actions to Impressions: Cognitive Attribution Theory and the Formation of Corporate Reputation’, Corporate Reputation Review, vol. 7, no. 3, 2004, pp. 269-81.
   11. L. E. Olsen and A. Peretz: ‘Conscientious Brand Criteria: a Framework and a Case Example from the Clothing Industry’, Journal of Brand Management vol. 18, no. 9, 2011, pp. 639-49.
   12. S. Anholt: Brand New Justice: the Upside of Global Branding. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann 2003, at p. 160.
   13. R. E. Freeman, J. S. Harrison and A. C. Wick, op. cit.
   14. R. J. Brodie, M. S. Glyn, and V. Little: ‘The service brand and the service-dominant logic: missing fundamental premise or theneed for stronger theory?’ Marketing Theory, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, pp. 363-79.
   15. N. Ind and M. Schultz: ‘Brand Building, Beyond Marketing’, Strategy & Business, July 2010.
   16. J. Frooman: ‘Stakeholder Influence Strategies’, Academy of Management Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 1999, pp. 191-205.
   17. R. Martin: ‘The Age of Customer Capitalism’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 88, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 58-65.
   18. A. Berle and G. Means: The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers 1932.
   19. M. Jensen and W. Meckling: ‘Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behaviour, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure’, Journal of Financial Economics, vol. 3, no. 4, 1976, pp. 305-60.
   20. A. Rucci, S. Kirn and R. Quinn: ‘The Employee-Customer-Profits Chain at Sears’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 76, no. 1, 1998, pp. 82-97; M. G. Patterson, M. A. West, R. Lawthom and S. Nickell: Impact of People Management Practices on Business Performance. London: the Institute of Personnel and Development 1997; D. Maister: Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Performance Culture. New York: Free Press 2001.
   21. S. Böhm and C. de Cock: ‘Liberalist Fantasies: Zizek and the Impossibility of the Open Society’, Organization, vol. 14, no. 6, 2007, pp. 815-36; S. Zizek: Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books 2008.
   22. F. M. Belz and K. Peattie: Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons 2009; C. J. Oates, S. McDonald, P. Alevizou, K. Hwang and W. Young: ‘Marketing Sustainability: Use of Information Sources and Degrees of Voluntary Simplicity’, Journal of Marketing Communication, vol. 14, no. 5, 2008, pp. 351-65.
   23. J. A. Sandlin, and C. S. Walther: ‘Complicated Simplicity: Moral Identity Formation and Social Movement Learning in the Voluntary Simplicity Movement’, Adult Education Quarterly, vol. 59, 2009, pp. 298-317.
   24. R. V. Kozinets: ‘Can Consumers Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man’, The Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 29, no. 1, 2002, pp. 20-38.
   25. Young et al. notes an estimated 30 per cent of consumers indicate concern about environmental issues but only around 5 per cent translate this concern into action. W. Young, K. Hwang, S. McDonald and C. J. Oates: ‘Sustainable Consumption: Green Consumer Behaviour When Purchasing Products’, Sustainable Development Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 2010, pp. 20-31.
   26. T. Devinney, P. Auger and G. M. Eckhardt: ‘Values vs. Value’, Strategy & Business, no. 62, spring 2011.

Stagis A/S, the firm founded and run by Medinge Group member Nikolaj Stagis, has won the 2011 Danish Communication Award.
   The award was given by the Dansk Kommunikationsforening (Danish Communication Association) at the DR Koncerthuset (the Copenhagen Concert Hall).
   Five projects were nominated, with Stagis A/S’s one for Movia among them. It received nearly twice as many votes as the runner-up.
   The Movia project, dubbed ‘Chauffører med karaktér’ (bus drivers with character), was initiated and executed by Stagis. The project integrates efforts in the fields of organizational culture, corporate branding and corporate communication in order to create more character, pride, appreciation and job satisfaction for the bus drivers and managers in greater København. The ultimate aim is to deliver a higher level of service and create a better experience for the bus passengers and get more citizens to use public transportation.
   Three years ago Stagis set out with a test project that proved it was possible to change attitudes and pride within bus companies. Almost 7,000 bus passengers have sent their stories about “good moments” to the bus driver website www.buschaffor.dk, supported by a media effort, a training programme, and a Bus Driver of the Year award.
   Mr Stagis said, ‘We are really proud of the award and the acknowledgement we’ve received from our colleagues in the field of corporate communication … What makes me just as proud as receiving the award is meeting some of the bus drivers who has been involved in the project, and who tells me that it made a difference in their lives. Like the bus driver Linda, who was awarded the Danish Bus Driver of the Year on September 2 and is soon flying to Singapore to see public transportation there and meet bus drivers in that region. She loves the bus and the passengers and now she is going to board an aeroplane for the first time in her life to fly to Asia!’
   Mr Stagis collected the award with Movia executive Maja Nellemann and Stagis project manager Louise Kramer.
   Further information on the award can be found at the Dansk Kommunikationsforening website.

2011 Brands with a Conscience winners

Aquamarine Power/UK
www.aquamarinepower.com
Aquamarine Power’s Oyster tidal energy technology produces electricity from the ocean waves. A demonstration-scale installation has been successfully deployed in Orkney, Scotland, proof that this alternative energy strategy could create sustainable zero-emission electricity, heralding the eventual progression away from dependence on fossil fuels.

BBC World News–Newsweek for World Challenge/UK
www.theworldchallenge.co.uk
Now in its sixth year, World Challenge is a global competition aimed at finding projects or small businesses from around the world that have shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots’ level. World Challenge is about championing and rewarding projects and businesses which really make a difference. In making this award, the Medinge Group wishes to acknowledge a channel of mainstream media for using their power and influence to help those under-appreciated organizations in need.

Caja Navarra/Spain
www.cajanavarra.es/en/home.htm
This not-for-profit Pamplona-based bank loaned €3·3 billion and had a net profit of €200 million in 2008. Customers decide the social causes to which profits shall be allocated. There is a policy of complete transparency and exemplary peer-to-peer lending; and bank staff are encouraged to do voluntary work. In an era where banks are regarded with scepticism and disdain, Caja Navarra stands as a model for conscience-driven financial institutions.

Masdar City/UAE
www.masdarcity.ae/en/index.aspx
The world’s first zero-carbon city, designed to be powered by the sun and free of cars and skyscrapers. Projected to accommodate 50,000 people, at least 1,000 businesses and a university. Now under construction, it is being designed by British architects Foster and Partners, funded by the ruler of Abu Dhabi, HH Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Medinge’s Simon Nicholls remarked, ‘If it works, it will combine 21st-century engineering with traditional desert architecture to deliver safety, health and happiness.’

2011 Colin Morley Award

TED/USA
www.ted.com
TED’s simple credo of ‘ideas worth sharing’ is a concept absolutely core to the philosophy of the Medinge Group. This non-profit organization believes that sharing compelling ideas is the way to change the world. They have created a simple but powerful mechanism for doing it: an 18-minute filmed talk shared for free on the web, an elegant demonstration of the positive power of internet-borne social media which exists in tandem with regular international seminars.

2011 Brands with a Conscience committee
Chairman: Sergei Mitrofánov
Committee: Enric Bernal, Thomas Gad, Sicco van Gelder, Ava Hakim, Pierre d’Huy, Nicholas Ind, Tim Kitchin, Sascha Lötscher, Philippe Mihailovich, Johnnie Moore, Stanley Moss, Simon Nicholls, Simon Paterson, Dmitry Petrov, Tony Quinlan, Anette Rosencreutz, Yousef Tuqan Tuqan, Erika Uffindell, Jack Yan