FutureBrand news, views & insights: July 2023
“Make it better than it was before”
Those seven words of advice told me everything I needed to know about acquiring FutureBrand in Australia in 2020, and it’s those seven words that have motivated and guided our efforts to evolve and grow the company over the past three years.
Fast forward to today and I’m very happy to share that FutureBrand Australia is officially a better business.
We’re B Corp Certified.
A B Corp is a company verified to meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. The certification process is facilitated by B Lab, a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to make business a force for good.
In short, the B stands for ‘benefit’: for the benefit of people, communities and the planet.
By balancing purpose and profit, companies like ours can indeed make a positive impact. Our B Corp certification shows that we mean what we say and put our money where our mouth is.
I’m proud of the business we’ve become over these past three years.
What's best is that this is just the beginning: of the next evolution of our company and the kind of impact we can create for our team, our clients and the community at large.
From A to B Corp, via ESG
It’s a little difficult to pinpoint exactly what started us down the path towards B Corp certification.
While we might have officially started the process 18 months ago, the wheels were set in motion long before then.
By partnering with not-for-profits, including Bush Heritage Australia, Guide Dogs Australia, Olivia Newton-John Foundation and Orygen.
By working on ESG projects for clients.
By hosting ESG conference panels with those clients.
ESG: Untangling the riddle wrapped in a mystery hidden inside an acronym
Now and then, we like to pull back the curtain on some of the big issues facing brand and marketing teams – and the business world in general. One of those big issues is ESG. Environmental. Social. Governance. Three little words that ought to make the world of difference but all too often fall short for reasons ranging from the obvious to the oblique.
By rebranding B Corps like insurtech Open and their consumer brand Huddle.
By reimagining the employee experience for our team. Everything from Healthies – like a sickie, only better, quite literally – to a parental leave policy that gives secondary care givers the same benefits as primary care givers.
And, even by basing our decision to select another B Corp for our office space, namely Hub Australia.
Ultimately, there’s no better way to be part of the movement to make business a force for good than by joining it.
For us, our creativity and our culture come through the work, not the walls. Consequently, it’s all the more important that our work is purposeful and we’re committed to making our business better in ways that reimagine the kind of impact we can create.
‘The Say-Do Gap’
A brand is what a brand does. (Not simply what it says.)
That’s the basic premise of a new article that our Brand Experience Director, Sam Hughes, wrote for AdNews this month.
It provides an insightful, practical perspective on what it takes to turn strategy into reality.
I love what Sam had to say, but my favourite part has been the response from a range of people on all things CX – in particular, this response from Emily.
This kind of approach is essential. While successful brands are created with purpose, it’s ultimately the experience that defines them.
“Marketers are born leaders”
This year’s Mumbrella Finance Marketing Summit gave me the opportunity the other day to chat with Matthew Wong about the brand transformation and ongoing evolution of Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation (CSC).
Matthew is the Senior Manager, Brand, Marketing, Communications & Digital Engagement at CSC and, after six years of working together, what sticks with me is Matt’s daily emphasis on the importance of building brand advocates beyond the brand and marketing team, far and wide across the organisation as a whole.
Our session spanned everything from brand strategy and architecture to employee engagement and customer experience. After all, it’s been quite the transformation for the brand as the organisation has grown and evolved.
But one point we didn’t quite cover was this comment by Matt that he happened to make off-stage:
“Marketers are born leaders.”
And it’s true.
Because brand and marketing done properly is demand creation, so it’s only natural that brand and marketing teams can help lead the way for the business.
Building brands from the inside out
Last month, I shared the article I wrote for SmartCompany about marketing mistakes you can’t afford to make, and I concluded with this provocation: If your own people don’t believe in your brand, what makes you think your customers will?
It’s a sentiment that is gaining momentum, especially when measured in terms of the number of times it reveals itself in client conversations. Not least of all some feedback I received just last week about everything “from casual comments about the importance of interviewing and finding the right people to…internal engagement and values alignment” – it all comes back to building the brand from the inside out.
Over the past year or two, we’ve been spending more and more time with the non-marketers in our clients’ organisations, helping them to understand their role in delivering the brand experience. If you have a responsibility for serving a customer, directly or indirectly, you work in marketing by default.
There are many different ways to explain the value of branding, but I always come back to the concept of choice as the simplest, most practical explanation.
Any choice we make is a combination of decision drivers.
Cumulatively, they make up one hundred per cent of the decision, but discretely each decision driver might vary from one decision to the next. In the case of this professional services firm above, they might include price, expertise and so on – inevitably, they include the brand too.
The brand is not the whole of the decision, it might not even be the most important driver of the decision, but it is one of the decision drivers, more and less, and so there is an onus on any organisation or individual to understand how they can use the brand to help the customer choose their business, product or service.
That’s it for another month, I hope you’ve found our newsletter an interesting read with some valuable insights to apply to your own business and brand. As ever, happy to hear all and any feedback – please subscribe, comment and share.
Rich
thank you for sharing wonderful and thought provoking insights