Good branding

Brands you can believe in

Over the years ‘brand’ has become a word almost as dirty as ‘banker’ is in today’s climate. But while consumer spending may be shrinking, our consumer culture - Charlotte Borger argues - is here to stay. So is it time we start re-evaluating the concept of ‘brand’ and consider how it can overcome its negative connotations to create value for all?

Chocolate brands in the UK and USA were born of philanthropy – visionary people putting business to good use trying to improve and solve social problems and ploughing the proceeds back into that mission.  Other industry brands – Clarks shoes and Kellogg’s, for example – also started this way. Over the nearly two centuries since then, most brands have become beholden to the demand to create shareholder value, and that value is measured in £millions, not in degree of social or environmental responsibility and impact. As the ‘perfect lifestyle’ claims of too many brands have started to ring hollow, food health claims questioned, and exploitation exposed, it’s no longer just a few noisy political activists that are questioning the dominance of brands today.  Internet interactivity has quickly spread anger and suspicion about misleading brand claims and bad business practice to a much wider audience, with brands being forced into greater transparency and many being pilloried in public. There has been a shift among more questioning and cynical circles, to view brands as de facto guilty as charged – the concept of a brand has come to imply manipulation, superficiality, and greed.

However, in a world arguably dominated for the foreseeable future by consumer culture, branding is still without doubt the most powerful and effective communication tool. So can brands regain their good name and come to represent an asset to society?

At a recent Fairtrade conference that brought together smallholder farmers from around the world, I heard Delmar Lopez, a Mexican coffee producer, give a ringing endorsement for the power of the brand. He saw creating a brand as the “opportunity for the producer to have a face in the market place” and in turn the brand would be, for the consumer, “a window on our world”.  Addressing his fellow producers he became a brand evangelist. “The brand can protect and reflect our work and our labours, the brand can generate value for us and in turn reflect what the consumer demands – the feedback we get from the reaction to our brand is valuable to us.”

While the Fairtrade Mark gave the consumer a guarantee of a fairer deal for the farmers, it was their brand of coffee (or nuts, or tea, or chocolate) that gave the product its unique value amongst other Fairtrade and non-Fairtrade competitors. In this scenario, the brand represents real people wanting a genuine relationship with the consumer in order to deliver a good product, not faceless thousands in a far away country with little sense of who buys their produce at the end of the chain.

I imagined this was a rather different eulogy on the power of branding than is commonly heard in marketing meetings and corporate seminars around the world. It sounded like a rationale for building brands that created value for all the people involved, not just a few.  Is that a good starting point for how to give brands their good reputation back for the 21st century?

Charlotte Borger is head of communications for Divine Chocolate Ltd