Your brand is your whole company...get real about business ethics

At what point do corporations get real about all the Happy Smiley stuff , and where does the responsibility lie for corporate ethics ? I certainly don't mean simply having a beautifully crafted tab about corporate social responsibility or similar "Feelgood of the day" on the corporate website .

Is there any joined up, corporate level evaluation of this stuff , should there need to be an Ethics Director on the board, or should everyone in positions of power be able to flag and stop " bad behaviour"?

Recently we all saw the video rant of the Boss of Uber;this week I read an article on the BBC about foreign Truckers working in the UK for months at a time away from home and on low wages based on pay rates in their home countries, which are insufficient for them to live decently on in the UK ...and it made me think of the behaviours of the companies using this type of working arrangements ,and that somewhere this has been sanctioned by bosses with apparently little or no regard for the welfare of their workers or sub contractors. Conditions for workers in developing economies is of course a similar issue,as are issues of animal welfare in countries with different standards....

I worked more than thirty years ago for a firm where every year,starting as a junior manager I had to sign an ethics policy document which meant that not only was I not allowed to do anything illegal or unethical or indeed ask anyone else to do similar , but that there was an anonymous phone number in Head Office to report any such attempts for any employees to use if necessary.

Let me just put a few contemporary Buzz words out there:

Purpose, Corporate social responsibility, inclusion/ diversity in the workplace,
Environmentally friendly( energy, bio environment ,emissions, recycling and waste reduction),the Gig economy, zero hours contracts...

What do they mean overall if your business behaves unethically in just one area ?

I'm not for instance suggesting closing down all factories in emerging economies as a panacea , but people up and down the supply chain need to be treated with fairness and dignity....and fairly rewarded.

I recently heard the UK managing director of a large fmcg firm complain for instance that standards of health and safety , quality assurance and employee conditions expected by UK retail customers from their private label suppliers simply didn't exist where his product raw materials came from,and that the cost of applying UK standards to his business model was culturally as well as economically unviable....with potential job losses in several countries.

Finally ,here's my "Brandbuilder" point....your brand is your whole company, your whole supply chain, how you treat your workers, your animals, your suppliers, local tax authorities...not just the shiny end product. Make sure this subject is on the agenda of every board meeting.....and on the objectives of every functional team.

The responsibility for good corporate governance should lie with each and every one of us, as employees,bosses and as consumers. It ultimately risks damaging not just people but also profits if businesses fail to properly address the wellbeing of their employees.

And just maybe for some it should be keeping them awake at night ...

Does m&a activity need more checks and balances?

In the current political economic and financial environment with continuing access to low interest debt there has been a recent spate of large merger projects, some of which have succeeded eg PSA takeover of Vauxhall/Open brands from GM, together with some that have failed like Kraft Heinz proposed takeover of Unilever.

It seems as if the underlying rationale behind these two projects which are not atypical highlights the current push to consolidation, cleaning up balance sheets eg offloading burdensome employee pension obligations and the pursuit of "synergies"...eg the inevitable loss of jobs as capacity is rationalised.


Within this it seems there is little talk of top line growth or even serving consumers better, and let's not even go near the notion of the Purpose Economy ..


To my mind these examples are pretty much pure financial transactions, and it seems to me like todays m&a might be the reincarnated persona of those Bad Boys ,the bankers who precipitated the global economic recession, the effects of which will be felt for a generation at least...

So should m&a be subject to closer scrutiny pre approval ( BHS refers)...?

Who's in charge here .?

Another boring blast from the past , or a call for pragmatism ?
During the early part of my career local brand managers were exhorted by their bosses to behave like business unit General Managers , and take overall ownership of every aspect of their brands, from sales forecasting and other supply chain disciplines through the four P's including advertising and promotion. Honesty requires me to say that particularly for multicountry brands this was the cause in some companies of brands with little or no consistency in brand identity, sometimes justified by different local consumer needs, often not.. In this era some companies practised a comparatively light touch approach to ensuring consistency of brand identity, with local teams still enjoying a good measure of input in all aspects of the marketing mix, albeit with some centralised coordination and oversight.

Critically a notion of the primacy of the local market still had meaning...

At some point in the 90's I think it became the custom to begin the increasing fragmentation of the job , with brand equity considerations and control transferred definitively from local teams to global or regional marketing teams.

At this point the local brand marketing teams were left essentially with local so called brand activation roles , eg picking from a menu of centrally prepared options for promotion, new products, and comms. The obvious benefits of a more centralised approach included subtantial cost synergies , as well as providing for greater consistency of international brand strategy and brand identity...

The consequences however unintended at the sharp end in the local market are the risk that the brand becomes further removed from the local consumer,lowest common denominator blandness, that success is more dependant on skilful internal relationship management between local and central teams;and finally for me personally the bigggest bugbear , that the appeal ,reward and role of local brand management is somehow diminished , with the reduced autonomy that comes if the local team no longer has full use of the marketing toolbox ......

Today I see the brand management role being fragmented further and further ,as new specialisations make their presence felt and new departments spring to life: Digital and Innovation being the most talked about...and don't start me on automation either please....

So my question is who's in charge nowadays, and does any one person actually have a holistic view of the brand in the local market?

p.s :My speciality subject is food , where local tastes and habits vary widely and do matter; there may be less of a local issue in other fmcg product categories of course...