We lost a pitch this week. A tiny one, financially, but a very important one in global environmental terms. We don’t have to pitch very often, so when we do we play to win. I was genuinely gutted.
There were extenuating circumstances, but still, losing it forces me to reflect on our approach.
We advocated a distinctive corporate marketing approach. The winners were proposing a corporate selling approach. We wanted to develop a strategy to evolve reputation; they wanted to define a new brand proposition. They wanted to create a new dream. We wanted to create a new reality. Losing is, at many levels, depressing.
On reflection I am now worried that many corporations and civil society organisations have not moved on beyond branding. Back in the 70s and 80s, organisations used to really believe in basic marketing principles — designing products to fulfil customers’ needs, and then configuring themselves behind those needs. Then along came the brand bunnies and decided you didn’t need to meet needs any more, you just needed to manage your brand. The Chairman’s wife would decide what the organisation should stand for, and that would be it. Then all you just needed to persuade the entire universe to think the same way as the Chairman’s wife through some sort of brand engagement or employee mindwashing exercise. This is the brand narcissism that Alan Mitchell speaks of. We hate it.
We are not PR people. We do not do corporate selling. We do corporate marketing. We help design and evolve organisations which meet actual stakeholders needs. We advocate changes that should leverage existing relationship systems as a source of competitive advantage. We try very hard to suggest changes that may actually be deliverable and may actually have an impact. We want strategies that multiply; not divide.
Glasshouse Partnership asks first and foremost:
“What does the stakeholder want to achieve? And how can you best help them achieve it?”
That is the only way we know to build brand integrity. And brand integrity demands sustainable relationships, built not on ethereal trust, but on trustworthiness.
The only viable way we know to do this is through Stakeholder Collaboration. It’s the only way that works in an age of transparency.
As customer co-innovation and true customer participation supersede the iniquities of CRM, so Stakeholder Collaboration will gradually replace self-interested stakeholder engagement and empty corporate reporting…enlightened strategy directors and CEOs must ask themselves:
“How can we collaborate better with stakeholders to achieve common aims?”
This is not philanthropy; it’s survival. And answering this question will finally require them to understand relationship networks as their most elastic asset, and the heart of their sustainability. The real pioneers get this, at least at leadership level: Nike, IBM, Cisco, GE are getting this…and most of our clients get it - de facto. In fact many have already got this ‘right side up’ thinking hardwired into their organisation - they recognise their dependency upon their stakeholders and work with them to drive corporate innovation and renewal. But this thinking is still not embedded in the thinking of marketing and communications and CSR communities - where arguably, it matters most.
Maybe for a while corporate narcissism worked. But no longer. The world is not a mirror any more; it’s a whirlpool.
We lost. I am sad, but unrepentant.
1. John Caswell | 16th February 2008 at 1:01 pm
Hmm…well I would say you won.
The ‘brandwashing’ businesses are a sad place to work and ‘live’. There success will be short lived and hopefully the client will see its mistake relatively quickly and you will have stayed friends and will be there to help when they realsie it.As they typically do.
Tim, you have been here before and we all know why they will have been suckered into the compelling sales trap. Because they are thinking short term, because they have a limited context within which to think, because they don’t know better - all of the above.
I left, as you did, the corporate selling school of thinking, to make personal choices that would mean you didn’t have to be part of the problem. Whilst you have invested willingly in trying to educate a client the occasional loss reminds us all why we made the decision in the first place.
Tim, you won and your ethics and morality remain undimmed, so you won twice.
Warmest regards as always
John