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Putting the Social in Social Responsibility

October 19th, 2010 | by Marian Salzman, , President, Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America

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Corporate social responsibility looks a whole lot different now than it did a few years ago. Back then, the emphasis was on responsibility—look at all the good things we’re doing!—and on corporate, since so much of its DNA was based on business practices and funded by corporate largess. Lavish one-off benefit events with five-figure price tags paid for by sponsors such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers? That feels as 2007 as that bright, shiny new skyscraper sitting empty in Dubai.
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Designing Happiness

September 25th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

Of the 5,700 adults Euro RSCG surveyed in seven countries for our New Consumer study, exactly half said they are actively trying to figure out what makes them happy. One of the ways in which people are seeking happiness is by uniting in common cause, investing time in something more substantive and significant than can fit neatly within a shopping bag. They are looking to replace materialism with meaning, spending with substance.

This post originally appeared on The Dragonfly Effect and is reprinted with the permission of Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, authors of the new book by the same name.

How do you design for happiness?

A first step in tackling this question is to understand what happiness means. But herein lies the problem. Our understanding of what happiness is (and how to get it) is often misaligned with what really drives happiness. Indeed, research by Dan Gilbert and his colleagues show that we tend to go looking for happiness in a lot of the wrong places. If you disagree, you can check out the lead story on Entertainment Tonight on any given day. What people think will make them happy is not in fact what actually makes them happy.
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Can the Food and Beverage Industry Come Clean?

September 10th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

Euro RSCG global research shows that three-quarters of consumers believe businesses must be completely open and transparent, and seven in ten are much more aware these days of the nutritional/health value of the foods they eat—and yet only one-third actually trust the food industry to provide them with healthful products. A good first step in building trust would be to make it easy for shoppers to know what they’re really buying.

This post originally appeared on Co.Design and is reprinted with permission.

Infographic of the Day: Food Packaging Tells You Exactly What’s Inside

Ingredient lists make no sense. Infographics, to the rescue!

Ingredient lists on food, once thought to be a benefit to consumers, are a joke these days. Take the Gatorade sitting on my desk. Just some sugar water, right? It contains monopotassium phosphate, glycerol ester of rosin, and sodium citrate. Huh?
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| Tags: accountability, Anne Dahlin, Cliff Kuang, Co.Design, conscious consumption, Euro RSCG, Fast Company, food, ingredients, labels, mindful consumption, New Consumer, packaging, transparency
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Rethinking the Role of the Corporation

September 8th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

The following is adapted from Good for Business: The Rise of the Conscious Corporation (Palgrave Macmillan), written by Andrew Benett, Cavas Gobhai, Ann O’Reilly, and Greg Welch and drawing on findings from the Euro RSCG Future of the Corporate Brand study:

Throughout the course of this decade, it has been virtually impossible to tune out negative news of the business world. Our fears of the global recession and mortgage foreclosures were interrupted by massive recalls of contaminated pet food and children’s toys. Gas prices fell, but then banks began to fail. We couldn’t even escape by putting in a DVD: Tales of corporate scandal and immorality were fed to us through a steady slate of films exposing the dark sides of industries ranging from pharmaceuticals (The Constant Gardener) to health care (Sicko), from weapons dealing (Lord of War) to the diamond trade (Blood Diamond), and from Big Oil (Syriana) to corporate law (Michael Clayton).
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| Tags: accountability, Andrew Benett, Ann O'Reilly, Cavas Gobhai, corporations, Euro RSCG, financial crisis, globalization, Good for Business, Greg Welch, Havas, New Consumer, Recession, reputation
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Mindfulness Sightings in the Food & Beverage Category

August 13th, 2010 | by Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange,

Look around you. Signs of the shift toward more-mindful consumption are everywhere, in every industry. Today, we spotlight innovators in the food and beverage category.

Rightsizing

o Australia is home to at least one restaurant at the forefront of the rightsizing movement: At Wafu in Sydney, chef Yukako Ichikawa is serious about diners cleaning their plates. (Who knows best? Mom knows best.) If you order more than you’re able to eat on premise, you have to pay a surcharge of 30 percent. Eat up!

o In New York and London, Otarian is billing itself as “the first ever low-carbon restaurant chain, using a cradle-to-grave analysis in the carbon footprinting of every menu item.” Springwise reports the restaurants are powered by wind, water, and/or sun, water use is minimized, and the furnishings are made from recycled materials. Diners get to see the difference in the carbon footprint of their veggie meal in comparison to a meat-based equivalent and earn “Carbon Karma” credits that eventually reward them with a free Choco Treat.
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| Tags: accountability, conscious consumption, consumer consciousness, consumers, consumption, Euro RSCG, food, green, mindful consumption, New Consumer, provenance, Sustainability, transparency, waste
Comments Off | in New Consumer

Value Comes from Behind: A Perspective from the Netherlands

August 6th, 2010 | by Remko Herremans, Director of Strategy, Euro RSCG Amsterdam

Are you sure the cheese on your pizza came from cows? How hygienic is the kitchen in that snack bar around the corner? Exactly how Italian were the olives that went into making your olive oil? And what about those tinned tangerines; how do they peel them, anyway? It is questions such as these that have been behind two of the most successful TV programs in the Netherlands in recent years: Keuringsdienst van Waarde (“Inspectorate of Value”) and De Smaakpolitie (“The Taste Police”). They give us that ever-so-desired look behind the scenes. And tomorrow’s mindful consumer will only be more interested in the story behind the product. Offering transparency will become more than a defensive move to head off potential complaints. In the age of the New Consumer, marketers can turn the process behind their products into a powerful weapon capable of creating brand preference.

The urge to double-check the facts increases as people lose faith in a company, product, or brand. And this is just what the credit crisis was all about: loss of confidence. So we need not be surprised to see in the New Consumer survey that 45 percent of Dutch Prosumers say they now set more store by how and where products are made. Their interests may range from the safety of the food they feed their children to the fees and commissions they pay for financial products. Already, we know that around half of Prosumers in the Netherlands (49 percent) are paying more attention than in the past to the environmental impact of the products they buy, and three-quarters (74 percent) are keeping a closer eye on the quality and freshness of the food they buy. The motives may vary, but the consequence is the same: People want to know more about the products they are consuming, and they will continue to dig deeper.
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It’s Not Just the Economy, Stupid: Why the recession isn’t the only thing influencing a consumer’s mindfulness

July 26th, 2010 | by Andrew Benett, CEO, Arnold Worldwide, and Ann O'Reilly, Content Director, Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange

There are those who say the trend toward “mindful consumption”—people thinking more carefully about what and why they buy—will sputter out just as soon as the economy fully rebounds. They’re wrong, and for a number of reasons. As appealing as it may be for marketers to anticipate a return to hyperconsumerism and mindless excess, there are simply too many factors making that not just unlikely but virtually impossible.
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The Consumers’ New Clothes (Sarah Ferguson, Take Note)

July 15th, 2010 | by Marian Salzman, President, Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America

A version of this piece originally ran in The Huffington Post.

I don’t need to tell you that the world has seen its share of change lately. We used to embrace change and make it happen (which entails pretty much everything before Sept. 11, 2001). Then we watched it from the sidelines (the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the various financial crises), craved it (the 2008 U.S. presidential election), and, although we’re again watching, helplessly it seems (losing patience with President Obama, the BP oil leak), we’re now creating change again.
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| Tags: accountability, conscious consumption, consumption, delayed adulthood, Euro RSCG, excess, financial crisis, Marian Salzman, mindful consumption, New Consumer, Recession, simplification, Sustainability
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POV: Peter Pan(ics)

June 10th, 2010 | by Ann O'Reilly, Content Director, Euro RSCG Knowledge Exchange

In the 1960s The Who sang defiantly, “I hope I die before I get old.” That lyric reflected the aspirations voiced by generations of pop culture icons to “live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse”—a sentiment expressed in one form or another by such marquee names as Bonnie and Clyde, James Dean, and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. For decades following World War II, the glamour of devil-may-care youth has been the brightest beacon on the horizon, guiding the quest to remain forever young.
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| Tags: accountability, Ann O'Reilly, consumers, consumption, delayed adulthood, Euro RSCG, Peter Pan, youth
Post a Comment | 3 Comments | in New Consumer

Signs of Change: Sam Gets Sustainable

June 7th, 2010 | by Ann O'Reilly, Content Director, Euro RSCG Worldwide Knowledge Exchange

Let’s face it: If global retail were a western movie, Walmart would be the guy in the black hat. The enormity of the megaretailer is such that if it were a country, it would be the thirty-first largest in the world, ranked by GDP. With some 2.1 million employees, it is the biggest employer in Mexico and one of the biggest in the U.S. and Canada. Add to that brawn a reputation for bullying suppliers, destroying Main Streets, and stiffing employees on healthcare and other benefits, and you have a company that’s catnip for critics. And so it was no surprise in 2005 when the public reacted skeptically (to put it mildly) to Walmart’s announced plans to become a positive force for environmental and social change. Yet five years down the road—under CEO Lee Scott and his successor, Mike Duke—the company has emerged as a bona fide leader in sustainability. It has reduced both its own carbon footprint (redirecting 57% of waste in its Walmart and Sam’s Club locations in the U.S., for instance) and the footprints of many of its customers (for starters, by selling them 350 million CFL light bulbs and stocking only concentrated laundry detergents to cut down on packaging). And it has been a perhaps unlikely proponent of transparency, applying pressure for clearer sourcing of goods ranging from gold to cotton.
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| Tags: accountability, Ann O'Reilly, conscious consumption, Euro RSCG, green, LED, lighting, mindful consumption, provenance, recycling, reputation, sourcing, Sustainability, transparency, Walmart
Post a Comment | 6 Comments | in New Consumer

Posts Tagged ‘accountability’

Can the Food and Beverage Industry Come Clean?

Rethinking the Role of the Corporation

Mindfulness Sightings in the Food & Beverage Category

Value Comes from Behind: A Perspective from the Netherlands

It’s Not Just the Economy, Stupid: Why the recession isn’t the only thing influencing a consumer’s mindfulness

The Consumers’ New Clothes (Sarah Ferguson, Take Note)

POV: Peter Pan(ics)

Signs of Change: Sam Gets Sustainable

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