Business on a Mission

How to Build a Sustainable Brand

Andy Last

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000469752
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Economia
• Categoría: Sviluppo sostenibile

Business on a Mission is a simple to follow guide for how organisations can adapt to the changing world and evolving expectations of stakeholders to build more purpose-led, sustainable businesses. It features proven models and case study examples of how to create a brand that talks to the emerging Gen Z consumer base; how to use social missions to drive sales in retail and with B2B customers; how to preserve reputation and licence to operate by working in partnership with not-for-profit organisations; and how to attract and retain the best talent by demonstrating a genuine social purpose.

As well as clear, applicable models and behind-the-scenes descriptions of how successful campaigns were built and sustainable change made, this book features candid interviews with change makers from the worlds of retail, professional services, consumer goods, and NGOs. This second edition looks at how businesses and brands like Dove are now linking social and environmental goals, with an exclusive interview with Unilever CEO, Alan Jope. It explores how investors are now driving a systemic change in focus in the boardroom towards the sustainability agenda, and how leaders can respond to this, featuring a new interview with Frank Cooper, Global Chief Marketing Officer and member of the Global Executive Committee at BlackRock. The impact of the pandemic on what it means to be a sustainable brand, including a focus on sustainable supply chains, the growing power of Gen Z, the growth of online purchasing, multi-stakeholder partnerships, increased regulation, and culture at work, is also explored.

This book has been read, enjoyed, and used by business leaders to identify models for change; by managers to create progressive campaigns; by NGOs to create stronger partnerships with the private sector; and by students to learn how theories of social purpose and sustainability can be applied in the real world. The first edition was Bronze winner of the AXIOM Business Book Award in the category of Philanthropy, Non-Profit, Sustainability.

1From West Kirby to Kibera … and back again

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176817-1

For most people in the world, 2020 was a year like no other. As the pandemic challenged governments to respond to a public health crisis and its repercussions across all elements of life, it accelerated the demands for action on climate change and social justice. It was also the year that this story and Lifebuoy soap came back to the UK, full circle from Kibera to West Kirby, as handwashing with soap became a topic of global importance.

***I grew up close to Port Sunlight on the Wirral, across the River Mersey from Liverpool. We lived in West Kirby, not far from the port that William Hesketh Lever had built in the late 19th century to take advantage of the trade routes in and out of Liverpool, then the busiest port in the world. Lever was the founder of Lever Brothers, later to become Unilever, and one of those public-minded industrialists of Victorian England whose approach to business was openly driven by a desire to make things better.

As children, we used to get taken to the Lady Lever Art Gallery on rainy Sundays, and to the village Lever had built to house his workforce. We got to know the stories of this man – how he built beautiful homes for his workers so that they might lead “more fulfilling, productive lives.” About the global business empire he built from the Wirral in the 19th century by “making cleanliness commonplace.” And how he created Lifebuoy, an affordable bar of soap that the poor in Liverpool could use literally to save their lives by handwashing with soap to protect themselves from cholera and other infectious diseases that were sweeping through the overcrowded slums of a rapidly expanding city. Selling soap then – as now – had a purpose.

Even as children it was easy to see the link between Lever doing good for society and doing well for his business. He built his workers decent homes so that he could have a more productive workforce. He created an affordable way for people to protect themselves from disease so that he could sell more soap. There was a plain-speaking logic that often seems to get lost today when business leaders talk about purpose and present “doing good” initiatives as driven by higher motives than merely making money.

Lever was open about his motives. There was no embarrassment, no pretence, no hiding what the business was about. He didn’t park “doing good” in philanthropy or corporate social responsibility. His purpose and business motives were one and the same: his business mission was a social one.

Fast-forward 30 years from those trips to Port Sunlight to 2006. I was asked by Unilever to visit a handwashing project being run in Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya. There, the company was using that same soap, Lifebuoy, to tackle those same diseases in similarly overcrowded slums. I’d been sent because this sounded like a “good PR story.” But I met some incredible people in Kibera, who helped change everything: in particular, Myriam Sidibe, who had recently joined Unilever from the development sector, and who is interviewed in this book, and Val Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a world expert in hygiene and behaviour change.¹

In Kibera I saw handwashing lessons in schools – Lifebuoy teaching children and parents how they could protect themselves from diseases. Each year over two million children fail to reach their fifth birthday because of diarrhoeal diseases and pneumonia.² The simple act of handwashing with soap at the appropriate time could cut this number in half, as William Lever knew. But Lever might also have pointed out that the story here was not one of Lifebuoy’s philanthropy nor Unilever’s corporate social responsibility, it was how the company was building its business in Africa by giving it a social mission. More people washing their hands more often meant more lives saved and more soap sold. The real Lifebuoy story was what it had always been: growing a business through a social mission.

When we got back to London, we set up an interview with the Financial Times, and the resulting story, “Unilever looks to clean up in Africa,” couldn’t have been clearer about the link between business and society and the business case for having a social mission.³

That straight-talking position was born in Port Sunlight and set the tone for how Lifebuoy went about its social mission to bring health and hygiene to a billion people. It has helped build more open, trusting partnerships with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics, governments, and charities; helped engage consumers in-store and on social media networks; helped put Unilever alongside Google and Apple as one of the most sought-after employers in the world⁴; and helped the Lifebuoy business more than double in value in the five years from 2008.

In doing so, Lifebuoy has helped over a billion people develop better handwashing habits and been described as having the “best social program ever” by David Aaker, professor emeritus at the Haas School of Business.⁵

This book tells not just the Lifebuoy story but the wider story of how business lost and then refound its social purpose and how different organisations have developed social missions. It includes interviews conducted specially for this book with leading figures who have transformed the way their companies do business, case studies illustrating how those companies and others have developed more sustainable brands, and research into the attitudes of the post-millennial Generation Z that will shape how business and society interact in the coming decades.

It offers practical guidance for those who want to build sustainable brands, with clear criteria for what makes a good social mission, a step-by-step process for building one, and guidelines for developing partnerships and communications strategies.

•••Not all businesses demonstrate their connection to society as obviously as William Lever did with his model village and brand names like Lifebuoy that called out the good they promised to do. But all businesses at their core do have to serve society. Businesses ultimately have to sell products or services to people, and people are society. Businesses have always had to have a social mission in that sense.

In a simple community, the connection between business and society is simple to see. The business can only find customers if it is providing something of value to that community. Investors will only lend capital to the business owner if they can see the future value of the business and what it does. And any harm caused by that business is quickly self-regulated by customers, suppliers, employees, and investors who know each other and can see all impacts clearly enough.

This belief, this close connection between business and society, drove the “Enlightened Entrepreneurs” (also the title of Ian Bradley’s book about Victorian business leaders like William Lever, George Cadbury, Joseph Rowntree, and Jesse Boot) to build enduring businesses that insisted this connection between business and society could not be broken.⁶ Their values and their businesses lasted so long in no small part because their founders and founding principles forced them never to forget that business and society were inextricably linked.

Today, these companies still talk about their principles in terms that link the way they do business to their wider role in society. Unilever’s stated vision, for example, is to “decouple growth from our environmental impact, while increasing our positive social impact” – an impact that was defined as helping a billion people improve their health and well-being by 2020, an appropriately sized target for a company whose products are used by more than two billion people a day, and a target still underpinned by handwashing with soap.⁷

Companies like these helped drive growth in 19th-century Great Britain after the first industrial revolution, and the same philosophical approach helped create some of the most successful and enduring businesses in other parts of Europe. J.C. Jacobsen founded Carlsberg in 1847 and felt a clear social obligation to his workers, providing them with medical aid, pension schemes, and funeral assistance, at a time when the state provided no social safety net.

Across the Atlantic, the second industrial revolution was built on the Puritan principles that had crossed on the Mayflower. The “moral outlook that subordinated the interests of the individual to the group,” the Puritan belief that drove the pilgrims in their journey towards the New World, laid the origins of American managerial culture, as described in The Puritan Gift, by Kenneth Hopper and William Hopper.⁸ These were translated into the Golden Age of Management in the US through the first half of the 20th century and when General MacArthur took these principles to Japan as he oversaw the occupation in the aftermath of the Second World War, they helped create the ingredients for the third industrial revolution, the electronics boom driven from Japan in the second half of the 20th century.

These three great leaps forward were each propelled by a clear connection between business and society. They happened because the owners and managers of businesses not only recognised the inherent connection between business and society but also geared their enterprises to progress in a way that benefited from that connection. They knew that their growth would be bigger and more enduring if they interwove it with society.

This is not corporate social responsibility. It is simply a recognition that businesses grow better and more sustainably when they are aligned to the goals of society. It is social opportunity, rather than responsibility.

Adam Smith’s most famous quote, from The Wealth of Nations – “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”⁹ – has often been taken as a killer point from the father of modern economics in the case against business engaging with society. Business has to be selfish, the argument goes, and this means focussing on commercial rather than societal benefits.

But Smith was also clear that human nature is not just selfish but, in fact, has a sympathy for the situation of others. The opening line of his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (a book he himself thought the better of the two works, and to which here turned shortly before his death with ongoing refinements and adjustments) reads: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”¹⁰ And he saw that inequality wasn’t sustainable: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” For Smith, the “commercial society” placed business firmly in the context of society.

Human beings are social animals with selfish genes and we flourish when the two work in tandem. Likewise for businesses – successful, sustainable growth is most easily achieved when a business’s selfish, competitive instincts are harnessed to the needs of the society in which it operates.

People like William Lever never talked about doing good or giving back to society. He was a businessman. He wouldn’t have disagreed with Milton Friedman’s argument that managers have one responsibility and one responsibility only: namely, to do the bidding of their employers, and ultimately the owners of the business.¹¹ That there is no such thing as a separate corporate social responsibility.

But Lever and others like him recognised that the sustained success of their businesses depended on the social context. That their businesses existed only in that context, and that the more opportunities they could harness for society the more successful their businesses would be.

They focussed not on the positive impact business could have on society, but on the positive impact society could have on business. Getting ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the second edition
• 1 From West Kirby to Kibera … and back again
• 2 Diverging agendas and the age of transparency
• 3 How sustainable brands are winning on Wall Street
• 4 The commercial benefits of a social mission
• 5 What makes a good social mission?
• 6 How to build a sustainable brand
• 7 Communications as a driver of change
• 8 Strange bedfellows
• 9 The year everything changed
• 10 The future
• Index