When COP15 became COP-OUT…

Well, probably not the most elegant or amusing titles for a blog entry. But then there was little that was elegant about the last 2 weeks.

So COP15 is over, and the ‘accord’ is such a flimsy piece of paper, I think most 14 year olds would be embarrassed to hand that in as an essay, let alone the basis for a new global commitment to a low-carbon future. What I clearly missed, is someone standing up and explaining that someone else’s dog ate the fuller document just moments before delivery. Or that someone else had forgotten their PE kit. Or had to go to the dentist. Or some other sorry, feeble excuse that seems colossal in its smallness, against a backdrop of 52,000 negotiators with arguably the most important task in their careers.

But where does that leave business?

In the last post, I mentioned the tricky squeeze now facing firms and their brands, between no clear policy architecture on the one hand, and an increasingly demanding consumer and stakeholder base on the other. Tricky indeed. But then maybe this will be the making of the most progressive and innovative companies? If we look back, those companies that have launched the most compelling and innovative products and services, have done so without policy incentives. If anything, they have led policy towards establishing new structures around their innovation. So maybe the same will happen here. Truly innovative companies do not wait for an invitation - they don’t need someone to confirm the temperature and acidity of the water before jumping in (or the depth of the pool…). They just jump in.

This has always been an issue for me, when commentators bang on about sustainability being all about innovation and new markets. It’s as if someone is trying to sell the elixir of corporate life from a caravan - and all you have to do is take a tiny sip of it with your tea and all your business woes will vanish. Sustainability, the silver bullet, the one-size-fits-all, the all-you-can-eat buffet, the cure for everything. Or your money back.

It cannot work like that. No corporate device can. People have argued with me that sustainability strategies do not always work. Well, I say back, there are plenty of occasions when marketing strategies, HR strategies, corporate strategies do not work, but should we abandon all those as well? No, I didn’t think so.

This issue of sustainability being all things to all companies, and the demand for utter clarity around policy at COP 15, could well be two sides of the same coin - a desire to remove all risk from the innovation process. To look for blanket assurances that naively offer a template for innovation. But of course it cannot work that way. Innovation seeds best in broken, abandoned, dysfunctional environments.

This may well be a case of grasping for shadows of straws in the dark, but maybe it could be the making of some firms. Firms that see this really as a chance to genuinely trail-blaze and lock in long-term value through radical differentiation, that nervous competitors dare not emulate.

Classical strategy theory (from MBA days) talks of the attractiveness of a market partly determined by barriers to entry - the logic being the harder it is to enter and copy, the longer you can enjoy some form of exclusivity of course. Well, if that still holds true, then in a world where barriers to entry are falling at a rate of knots, innovation around climate change could represent the single-most exciting market opportunity precisely because of the splutter that has been COP15. With no firm roadmap in place, with no assurances and guarantees of policy support, the market has become volatile, uncertain, and unclear. So marvel at these towering barriers to entry, that will scare the life out of all businesses except those with the fire and foresight to get stuck in.

So maybe Copenhagen, in a way no-one saw coming, has indeed delivered on  being all about Hopenhagen. For a select, brave few, who will end up ruling the world.

Guy

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Caught between a rock and a hard (hot) place…

So COP15 is nearly over. And business - and its brands - finds itself in between a rock and a hard place - which looks likely to be a hot place too.

With no clear architecture emerging, business is now stuck with no clear route to establish new technologies and business models based on solid frameworks and policy commitments. And on the other side, has a sea of frustrated consumers, looking for guidance and options through which to demonstrate their increasing desires for more sustainable choices. Add to this the pressure so many brands are now under to justify their worth in a transparent, fragmented and splinteringly fast world, and it all looks very difficult.

Only two Fortune 500 company CEOs made it to COP15, I read. One of those was Coca Cola. Their ambition seems pretty obvious:

“It is absolutely imperative that our commitment to a low-carbon future be fully understood. We’re here to lend a Coca-Cola voice to the public and political debate on getting to a fair framework, an inclusive framework, an effective framework so that we can achieve climate protection”

That was Muhtar Kent, speaking to Marc Gunther at GreenBiz.com. The need for a solid, dependable, long term framework is clear. But it’s not there.

How corporates and their brands deal with this, is a challenge. Respecting duties to shareholders in terms of compliance, risk and core business excellence on the one hand, and yet guiding consumers towards the clearly-wanted sustainable choices on the other, is a juggling act that will define which brands succeed and which fail.

The role of the strong, consistent, and authentic corporate brand offers a glimmer of hope. Not because it will provide all of the answers, but because it will allow companies and their brands to legitimately and confidently say they do not have all the answers - but are going to look very hard for them, from today. A strong corporate brand can define a character of substance - and that is exactly the type of character consumers want near them, as we all make this journey.

This starts to move again towards the notion of less transparency, and more faith. But not blind faith, rather 20:20 faith. Again, it will be those companies that engender this 20:20 faith with strong corporate brands, that will emerge the leaders from this challenging chapter.

To quote Kent again:

“Consumers - they increasingly vote for products based on a company’s character.”

Guy

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Copenhagen and the irony of cap and trade

Have just seen an interesting piece that shows on this, the last day of COP15, the business community has been denied access to the conference because of a change in conference policy, that is beautifully and ludicrously ironic.

Up until today, businesses have established an informal system to share (trade) the very limited (capped) number of invites. What this has allowed, until today, is an efficient allocation of scarce resources, extracting the greatest utility at the lowest cost. Just what business is good at.

Except today, when everything comes to an end. The day when business needs to be involved in order to hear and shape any template for policy - policy that has to leverage cap and trade mechanisms - the organisers of COP15 have decided cap and trade is not an efficient or acceptable way to operate.

As if the conference hadn’t been frustrating enough….

Guy

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Should Copenhagen really be about Hopenhagen…?

I know our group has been responsible for some of the excellent creative work around this campaign - to temporarily rebrand COP15 as Hopenhagen - but I cannot help wondering if it’s not such a good idea after all.

As an advertising group, Havas is great (as are all our peers) at identifying and using the right emotional tags in any context. And there’s no doubt emotion plays a crucial part in the wider climate change debate, as well the negotiations currently playing out in Copenhagen.

But the focus on the emotional, on the leap of faith, on the notion of hope, suggests it’s this or nothing else. And it really does need to be something else.

It needs to be hard-edged plans and objectives, that give rise to steely unambiguous frameworks and mechanisms that allow a very important thing to happen: that business steps in and populates these frameworks in a way only it can do, unlocking value and prosperity via innovation and social capital construction. Like it or not, business remains the crucial engine in bringing around change within society: business helps codify emerging social trends and wants, into structured policy. OK, so this has worked in quite a perverse way in the last 18 months, with changes to society and government reaction that no-one is that keen on (and of course, Umair writes about this to great effect on this and his Harvard blog). But the fact remains: business is key. No matter which way you slice it.

But whilst business is contemplating (and in some progressive cases celebrating) this re-birth, another immutable fact remains: business needs investment. And investors expect a return. There’s no point pouring cooking oil into a decent engine, hoping it’ll run as well. In other words, if business is the engine of prosperity, then investors are the engine oil: the engine needs it, and needs good grade stuff to boot. And before anyone gets on their high horse and starts lambasting investors for short-termism and value destruction, we need to remember we are all investors. I agree that the term investor can be a strange way to describe the behaviour of certain institutions - akin to calling the Vikings in the 800s as ‘investors’ in our community life - but we need to stop seeing business and sustainable activity as polar opposites: James Cameron from the CCC makes this argument very well.

So if business is key, and investors in business are key, then do we really think a whole movement based on hope is a good one? I don’t.

Hope has its place, and as someone once said, when man loses his ability to hope, he loses the will to live. But does business enter markets on hope? Do investors invest on hope? Nope. Well, not the sort of investors that are worth having (the good engine oil…).

Copenhagen is not the right place for hope. It is literally a ‘once-in-our-and-our-children’s-lifetime’ chance to build gleaming, defined structures: agreements and frameworks that are so hard-edged, you need to wear a hard-hat just to go near them. And yes, all constituencies should appreciate this, not just ‘professional players’ in this debate.

So let’s not go so heavy on the Hopenhagen idea, as it risks rendering what has all the potential of being a landmark process in the minds of millions, into nothing more than a lighter-waiving vigil for intervention, with no-one quite sure what it is we’re looking for (let’s not forget that hope and naivity are often bedfellows). The result would be us all remaining in the dark (bar the lighters in the air, of course) fumbling for guides and cues.

And our children would remember Copenhagen less as Hopenhagen, and more as Gropenhagen.

Guy

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As my grandfather used to say, a good photo is 90% in the cropping and framing…

And I couldn’t agree more. As a keen snapper, I have often managed to turn a mediocre picture into something approaching a little more than OK, with a good crop, border and frame.

But if there’s one picture that is terribly cropped, it has to be the whole climate change debate. I’m talking about the ‘normal’ person who attempts to engage with the subject, not a specialist, expert or relative of someone who knows someone who sits on the IPCC. It feels as if in trying to create a picture, or narrative, around climate change, we have consistently tried to cram everything into the frame. Every terrible detail. The result is a sea of information that is stultifying at best, utterly debilitating at worst.

When corporate players try to assuage consumer fears over climate change, we see this splurge of transparency, in an attempt to vindicate the company. It’s the corporate equivalent of ‘I didn’t touch the ball before it broke the window - I wasn’t even near the ball’ defence of a panicked 8-year old. Even better if there’s CCTV footage to pour over.

But isn’t this a lousy way to tell a story? A missed opportunity to engage people in a real, compelling narrative? Shouldn’t we frame it better? And shouldn’t we be brave enough to try to rebuild faith and trust, rather than just blanket transparency? If we are, then it needs less transparency, and more selective framing. Or cropping. Because at the end of the day, what we need to see is widescale, permanent, aspirational behaviour change - from everyone. And with the picture, in all its dismal detail, in front of us, a great bit of cropping and framing may be what we need to engage and be inspired.

This will require real bravery - trust and faith are weighty concepts and the abuse of either can be disastrous. But I really do not think there is a choice. Transparency is a knee-jerk reaction to a lack of trust, but it does not build trust. It simply assuages the frustration of distrust.

Faith, on the other hand, requires less than complete information - and an understanding that this is OK. We do not need to know everything - and actually do not want to. And as emotional, irrational creatures, we crave the comfort of well-placed faith.

So if the brands of tomorrow are to be built within communities, as parts of communities, and by communities, then these manifestations of corporate entities have to reflect a key component of community - to be trusted and to be rewarded with faith.

But you cannot build faith by overwhelming people with information,  hoping that utter disclosure will garner trust. It may earn respect in the short term, but faith? No, this is where that large tricky picture needs to be carefully framed - framed to show the right story, to the right constituencies at the right time.

So my grandfather was maybe more right than he thought. He also said you should never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie. But that has to be a separate post…

G

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