Simon's an advocate for social good in branding. Basically, he believes that it's not only globally important for brands and companies to start building sustainable practices into their core values, but it's also good business, because it's what consumers want. You'll be improving the planet and your bottom line at the same time. So, we can convince companies to improve the planet because if they do they'll have a better relationship with their consumers. Nobody wins if the economy collapses and the planet goes dark.
He likes to trumpet the social responsibility some major brands are already assuming, and the criticism he receives goes like this: "Sure, Coca Cola's working to save the polar bears (they are), but they still manufacture brown sugar water and cause obesity. They're still bad for us and the world."
The way Simon's been approaching this criticism is to encourage people not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He says that this is a slow transitional process, and that we shouldn't ignore the good work these companies are doing to focus on their persisting flaws, because that won't accomplish the change that we want.
I think he's basically right, but I think there's a better way to approach the question, and it's hiding in plain sight in We First's core ideas.
In his presentation, Simon emphasized that Nike is no longer in the shoe business, and Coke isn't in the soda business anymore-- now, we're all in the data business. It's the era of Big Data, and if we properly digest this avalanche of aggregated social information, we can listen to what consumers want, and we can give it to them. The whole We First idea is about companies listening to their consumers, through social media and other channels, and responding.
This is precisely the point the questioner fails to understand: we're in the data business. The relationship between a brand and a product is now entirely incidental.
A brand is a culture that surrounds the marketing of a product, sure, but is there any kind of one-to-one correlation? Do polar bears and "open happiness" have any direct relationship to brown sugar-water? No. Clearly not. Have the ingredients in Coke remained the same for the last 100 years? No. Clearly not.
How important is it to Coke that the ingredients in their product remain the same, do you think? You think it's more important to them than making money?
My point to Simon's interrogator would be this: oh, you don't like the fact that Coke makes brown sugar water? Well, GET ENOUGH PEOPLE TO AGREE WITH YOU, AND THEY'LL STOP.
Coke will make whatever you want. Maybe someday they'll make nothing but health drinks. Because Coke is a brand, and a brand is a culture, not a product. It doesn't matter to them what they make. It matters who buys it. There are limits to this, in terms of the manufactured item staying connected to the brand culture, especially in artistic products, but not as many as people think, certainly not in basic food, beverage, or appliance brands. They developed branding in the first place BECAUSE THE PRODUCTS WERE ALL THE SAME AND THEY NEEDED TO DIFFERENTIATE THEMSELVES. Branding was a direct reaction AGAINST simply describing a product that's like 10 others on the market. That's where brands like Coke, with their culture of happiness, came from.
Apple evolved their product lines completely over the course of their corporate existence, and they'll evolve them again. The culture has remained. The same can be true of any brand. And if the new role of these brands is to listen to consumer demand and respond, as Simon suggests, then it follows that the criticism he received is entirely off the mark. Focusing on the product makes absolutely no sense. The product is entirely incidental. It's all about the culture. It's all about the brand.
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