After the Mayas, we should keep in mind our real deadline: 2050!

By Tina Ly.

What better than the beginning of a year to have a fresh restart and initiate new project and resolutions? Although all the world population is not concentrated in Şirince (Turkey) or Bugarach (France), the world and its people are still going on with their life. However, 21 December 2012 marked the spirits of… everyone! Around you, how many people talked about it over the last months? How many facebook and twitter feeds could you read or probably shared yourself? A lot right? So these thoughts have made probably people around you and actually yourself rethink, more than once, your future and things you want to accomplish. The Mayas predicted the end of an era long ago – the “doomsday” as we heard – but it did not happen (fortunately). What if, this deadline was reconsidered and taken as a starting point for organizations to launch new projects and new resolutions, to reach 2050 with better consideration of our surroundings?

For a fresh start: acknowledge your mistakes

When you undermine your brand reputation, it is your whole company that get touched and harmed. The employees of an organization are the best representative of the organization’s brand: they are the full reflection of the corporate image a company wants to convey. They carry it through what they say, wear, act or communicate with clients, other employees and competitors. They reflect it.

Forget or neglect its main stakeholders – usually consumers, but also employees – is a critical mistake.

To keep it well in mind, some quotes could be considered as major principles:

1.  “A loss of goodwill from employees and customers becomes draining on a company. […] this idea that marketing can act divorced from what the rest of the company is doing is completely wrong; there is no difference between the company and its brand. If there is, you will be found out.” (Guy Esnouf, Head of Public Affairs, E.ON).
2. “The power of forgiveness is very strong when you repent. You’ve got to embrace the situation, confront it fast, and show you’re dealing with it. The longer you say nothing, the more damage you do.” (Chris Arnold, Ethical Marketing and the New Consumer, 2009, and founder of Creative Orchestra).
3. “In the end, people want to know who is the company behind the brands they like; it is critical. We have made the Unilever brand much more of a visible trust mark, using it on bags [and] ads, creating programs and making it a trust mark for sustainable living. It’s an idea of the past to think that a corporation can be isolated from a brand.” (Marc Mathieu, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Unilever).

The expected trend: more transparency

More transparency; more sustainability issues related to brands

But by more transparency, what does that mean for an organization?

1. Be authentic: “People outside our industry say surely advertising’s task is to not tell the truth but to disguise the truth? I always talk about truth as the most powerful strategic position a brand can take. You can look at the history of advertising and virtually all the successful campaigns were about finding some way of getting to the truth. If you look at our successes from Levis to Audi to Phileas Fogg and all those brands we work on, we try to find ways of getting to the truth.” (Sir John Hegarty / BBH founder)
2. Reputation is key:  “In an age where transparency is the norm, what matters perhaps more than your wealth is your reputation. In an era of collaborative consumption, where we are increasingly sharing, it is more important to be trustworthy than rich.” (Ajaz Ahmed, AKQA founder, Velocity, 2012).
3. Double check principle: what a communication is saying is double checked on the Internet by most consumers.
4. Buzz spreads like wildfire: as a general rule, negative opinion is spread to a larger audience than positive ones. With digital media, anything spreads even faster; just look at the recent Justin Bieber hoax (#BaldForBieber)!
5. Team-up: in crisis time, consumers are more incline to be more careful to what they consume, and thus fully supportive to brands – if they relate to them – or at the opposite, against them.

Because it is never too late…

We have survived the Maya prophecy, so let’s try to make good but feasible resolutions to make them become real.