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Consistency is the key to success in corporate social responsibility
Clear, innovative, and honest communications are
all-important to your future reputation as a company that
is serious about social performance, says Steve Hilton
As readers of this column may have figured out
by now, I'm hardly the harshest critic of business, more true
blue than deep green. But those of us who are keen to persuade
sceptics that corporations can - and generally do - make the
world a better place are often fighting with our hands tied
behind our backs as companies splash gaily around in vast
vats of corporate responsibility eyewash. Oozing sincerity
like Gruyere in a fondue, more and more businesses fling sustainability
rhetoric around in the hope that some of it will stick. Well
it won't, because everyone knows that talk is cheap, while
corporate responsibility nearly always requires tough choices
and complex, quiet but purposeful action. The reason this
matters is that loose language and loose thinking are the
main drivers of cynicism about corporate responsibility. And
if business leaders get the feeling that they're damned if
they do talk about sustainability and damned if they don't,
then they're less likely to champion it.
Since we're among friends, we can tell the truth.
And the truth is that many corporate responsibility strategies
lose credibility not through any inherent weakness or lack
of careful, painstaking work, but through the language used
to describe them - or the occasional step too far.
Prattling on about sustainable development in
your social report while parading the opposite in your annual
report is spectacularly unhelpful. Now I'm a fully paid-up
supporter of consumerism. It's the engine of wealth creation
and social progress, helping to pay for schools, hospitals,
overseas aid and all the other public goods a civilised society
expects. I'm all for business to behave ever more "responsibly",
and I'm even more in favour of brands using their innovation
skills, creativity, grass roots presence and cultural power
to tackle urgent problems through corporate social leadership
initiatives. But I worry about the thoughtless use of terms
like "sustainability" by companies whose business
strategy is based on selling consumers more and more things
that they really don't need and who haven't yet made a genuine,
often costly, commitment to principles like closing the lifecycle
loop for their products.
Equally, it's possible for excellent corporate
responsibility initiatives to be devalued by a small step
beyond the bounds of credibility. The Portman Group provides
a clear example. This body, set up in 1989 by the UK's major
alcohol industry players, has in many ways been a model of
progressive and innovative corporate behaviour, developing
projects like a national Proof of Age card to help deter underage
drinking, funding and disseminating independent expertise
through its Quarterly Review of Alcohol Research and creating
serious and effective campaigns to combat drink-driving.
All these things make sense, and are credible,
because they don't conflict with the core business goals of
the companies who fund them. But they go too far: the Portman
Group also works to "promote sensible drinking".
One of the members of the Portman Group is Bacardi-Martini.
Could someone tell me what exactly is so sensible about the
drinking featured in those Bacardi ads we know and love? Wild
scenes in Cuban nightclubs with even Vinnie Jones (hardly
a role model of sober moderation) stunned by the excess on
display.
I don't want to be too po-faced about this: Bacardi
can do what it likes with its advertising as long as it obeys
the law and relevant regulations. It's the "sensible
drinking" stuff I object to. While the Portman Group
spends a pittance telling 18-24 year olds "if you do
drink, don't do drunk", their booze baron backers are
busily and heavily promoting the opposite message – strictly
within the Advertising Standards Authority guidelines, of
course. I wonder how happy Bacardi-Martini, Interbrew, Diageo
et al. would be if their young British consumers, in some
unimaginable cultural meltdown, took Portman's entreaties
to heart and stopped getting drunk every weekend? This particular
component of the Portman Group's work feels like box-ticking,
two-faced, smug corporate claptrap to me. Sorry, but it does.
If brands are serious about promoting responsible
use of their products – and they ought to be – then
such messages should be delivered through their mainstream
marketing campaigns in creative and imaginative ways, not
through some poor relation corporate responsibility afterthought.
And if, frankly, a brand's business success depends on irresponsible
use of its products, then its most convincing line of defence
is to ensure – and make clear – that it's operating
within society's agreed legal and regulatory framework and
leave it at that, rather than irritating everyone with transparently
hypocritical flim-flam. What's wrong with pointing out that
in a free society, the primary responsibility for lifestyle
and consumption choices lies with the individual?
In last month's Ethical Corporation magazine,
Janus laid into PR firms and other consultants who pose as
CSR experts while knowing little more about the subject than
the clients they advise. One of the most damaging symptoms
of this trend is the inappropriate application of the language
of corporate responsibility to activities and strategies that
may suggest anything but. This type of wretched shystering
does immense harm to corporations' chances of developing a
progressive and credible reputation.
It's why Felicity Lawrence, writing about the
latest crop of sustainability reports in The Guardian newspaper
in the UK last month, was able to state without fear of contradiction
that "it's impossible not to be cynical about this latest
fashion." Go back and read some of the social and environmental
reports that doubtless grace your filing cabinet. Not the
minority that are independently verified and models of their
genre, but the majority that are not. You'll see that the
language is often painfully bogus – even when there's
bad news on the table. The honesty is too studied, the contrition
too measured, the self-criticism too self-serving. It would
be a disaster if all the fantastic, forensic work being done
in corporate responsibility were undermined by loose language
and the odd dodgy scheme. Careless talk cost lives, it was
once said. These days it's more likely to be reputations that
are at stake.
Steve Hilton is the founding partner of the social
marketing company Good Business and the author of the book
‘Good Business – Your World Needs You’ with
Giles Gibbons.
For more information visit http://www.goodbusiness.co.uk/
Contact him at: steve@goodbusiness.co.uk
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