Delivering Returns from Brand Responsibility

The first Good Values ‘Big Thinkers’ Round Table for CR and Sustainability leaders focused on the increasing importance for companies to deliver reputation and business return from linking their corporate brands to their corporate responsibility and sustainability agendas.

Such was the level of interest in this topic, that the initial session was repeated to enable more CR leaders to participate – a total of 25 across the two events.

Sally Shire, previously Aviva’s Global Brand Director and now CEO at the Consortium for Street Children, opened each evening by sharing the successful launch of Aviva’s inspirational ‘Street to School’ global community programme, detailing their journey, the elements of the programme and its full integration into their new global brand campaign, ‘You are the Big Picture’.

After a Q&A session on Aviva’s programme, Good Values facilitated a general discussion about how best to deliver returns from CR. The ‘Big Thinkers’ believed the next big thing for CR as a discipline, was to help companies and brands move from ‘value’ to ‘values’. This unsurprisingly quickly focused on the need for CR departments to build stronger links with brand/marketing and product development functions if a company/brand is to be truly aligned with its CR agenda and be seen to live its values. It was also noted that success relies on managing expectations, agreeing the right objectives and jointly planning the measurement metrics which will demonstrate the impact of the investment.

The ‘Big Thinkers’ also debated the need for CR to strike a balance between a single focused cause, and a range of ‘local’ causes that resonate with employees.

Finally, there was discussion about the difficulties in finding a meaningful measurement framework that meets the needs of different stakeholders and includes hard numbers as well as stories. It was noted that a comprehensive framework can give local flexibility whilst ensuring a clear global focus , providing the ability to quickly and simply gather data for CR reports at a global level.

This is only a short summary of the full discussion. If you would like to know more about this ‘Big Thinkers’ discussion, please contact us at sue@goodvalues.co.uk

Our next CR ‘Big Thinkers’ Round Table will be in June 2011. If you would like to attend, and/or have any suggestions for future discussion topics please let us know.