While the fair trade movement has long recognised the benefits of end-to-end transparency (albeit with its attendant management systems challenges), we reckon 2008 will see many other process and principle-based standards-systems striving to become ‘Transparent Brands’.
The battleground for such industry marketing is not the emotive communication of promises, but the continual realignment of mutual expectations.
The risk for many trust-reliant brands (biofuels, fair trade, carbon neutral…) is that they will become ‘bubble brands’, selling dreams and benefits, without the brand assurance programmes to support them.
Enabling these sort of cross-industry branding initiatives is rapidly becoming our specialism here at Glasshouse. Our friends in the global cotton industry are already showing the way in thinking through these brand integrity questions and looking to provide proofs of socio-environmental impact, and equitable economics, transparently to end-users.
Of course, introducing information transparency into supply-chains will be a big help in these transparent marketing efforts, but building stakeholder-accountability into brand strategy is arguably a more critical challenge. Brand integrity demands so much more than audit programmes.
Just as ‘customer co-creation’ is the logical extension of relationship marketing, enabled by the social web, so the cultivation of ‘mutual assurance networks’ will become the next logical relationship model for building industry-wide value…dependent upon suites of distributed decision-flow tools that we have barely begun to explore…
PS. On another note, it’s always nice when friends hook up together…but even nicer when they do so unprompted. Working in remote locations and the spam-ridden nature of email - not to mention being free! - makes Skype the natural communications choice for diffused NGOs and Charities, not least the team at Organic Exchange…