Oliver Reichardt

I went to a talk the other day by Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi. His theme, Lovemarks , was that organisations should strive for ‘love’ as well as respect (odd to hear such a driven corporation talking about love). He suggested a graph with Respect on one axis and Love on the other. This leads to four boxes.
Low Love, Low Respect: Commodity items e.g. salt
High Love, Low Respect: Fads e.g. Rubik’s cube
Low Love, High Respect: Brands e.g. Intel
High Love, High Respect: Lovemarks e.g. Apple

He suggested that many organisations strive for respect because they think that’s what is needed and do not understand that ‘love’ is also required. In other words there is no emotional connection between the person and the organisation.
Perhaps some charities hover in this box, but others might be too much in the high love, low respect box? In other words the emotional connection is there but is transitory and could easily migrate to another organisation.
A useful planning exercise he suggests is to plot where your organisation is on this graph, along with your competitors, and then work out where you want to be and how you will get there.
You can also play around trying to position everything from celebrities to countries.

Surely the media has always been extremely powerful in this regard. 2 things have changed – firstly the rise in the number of negative stories to positive stories. I can’t remember the figures exactly but it was something like 2.5 negative stories to 1 positive story in the seventies and is now around 7 negative stories to every 1 positive story. This is a shift not in trying to gain influence (which has always been there), but a shift in the way they are trying to gain influence by keeping people in a perpetual state of moral outrage.
So what’s the solution? It lies in the second change – the rise in the internet. The internet has supposedly ‘democratised’ media. Yet if you look at the sites most people read for news, they read traditional media sites on-line so at the moment using the internet to bring about this change has, quite simply, failed. (and if you are reading this on this website you are not ‘most people’). Of course this is not true of social networking sites which are different. Or of a few big campaigns which have taken off helped by the internet – but big, modern campaigns have been around since at least 1971 and the first big charity concert (for Bangladesh, led by George Harrison), long before the internet.

CSR has been going for years now (10+) and never got close to binding regulation, is there any evidence that it is going to happen any time soon (apart from isolated pockets like carbon trading)?
Why are private companies like M&S going carbon neutral and doing other CSR initiatives – because they care or because it’s a PR exercise?
Surely CSR is the lifeblood of the sector (substituting ‘corporate’ for ‘organisational’). Therefore is there any need to get caught up in a ‘we’re more engaged with social responsibility than you’ game with the private sector – by definition we should be far ahead. If we’re not, the sector’s seriously in trouble!