Consumers listen when brands talk, and this trust gives corporations a readymade tool for social leadership. Consumer trust in brands can become a valuable asset in campaigns for social change, and campaigning for social change can become an additional source of value for the corporations behind the brands.

Many of the social issues that governments and not-for-profit organisations wrestle with on a daily basis are hard to deal with using the conventional tools of passing laws and spending money. For example, in rich societies the greatest barrier to improving literacy is not a lack of books, but a lack of parents reading with their children from an early age. The social policy requirement is for a change of attitude and a change of behaviour.

It is the same in the developing world: governments and aid agencies can pump billions of dollars into disease-eradication programmes, but these will work only if attitudes and behaviour also change.

It is brands that are best placed to help change people’s attitudes and behaviour. This is why brands’ cultural power, as well as their economic power, is potentially such a huge component of their social value. Using their brands to bring about social change is one of the most effective ways in which corporations can quickly move beyond corporate responsibility to demonstrate real leadership.

This is emphatically not the same as brands linking up with charities or good causes for mutually beneficial promotional campaigns. This is about a corporation using its brand’s ability to change consumer behaviour as a way of changing social behaviour, thereby strengthening that brand’s reputation.

Changing attitudes

Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty did just that. In 2004 Unilever began using Dove’s powerful position as a trusted, widely used brand to tackle the issue of self-esteem among women. The campaign arose from market research that showed that 90% of women were unhappy with the way they looked. Dove used powerful advertising campaigns to challenge narrow perceptions of beauty, and railed against the way the media and conventional advertising portrayed women.

And it went further than marketing. The company launched the Dove Self-Esteem Fund to provide educational materials for young women and tied the campaigns to product ranges such as Pro-Age and Firming, which used real women, with normal body shapes, in their advertising, in place of models.

The campaign, and its impact on the brand’s reputation, was hugely successful. Sales of Dove products increased by about 600% in the first two months, with an overall sales increase across the entire brand of 20% in the year after the campaign began.

A marketing campaign that packs a strong social punch is a powerful tool. But a brand that can take a new or existing product or innovation and build a campaign around the social or environmental benefits of this product can go further still.

Fiat has done much to reduce its carbon footprint. It has cut the carbon emissions from its manufacturing process and developed the lowest average emission fleet in Europe. Its new eco:Drive initiative, launched in 2008, seeks to go further and change the way that people drive. This is not just about telling people to drive in a more fuel-efficient way: in-car eco:Drive technology gives personal feedback on Fiat drivers’ driving style and helps them improve their efficiency and reduce CO₂ emissions. Eco:Drive is about Fiat using its position to help change the way people think about how they drive, rather than just what they drive.

Bridging the divide

As social campaigners, brands can have far-reaching impacts by helping to spread the positive benefits of globalisation. Brands are well placed to help tackle the challenge of reducing this division between the formal and informal sectors, since they are often the only institutions present on both sides of the divide. Coca-Cola, for example, is as much a part of life in the slums as in the skyscrapers.

Brands could use their grassroots presence to foster local institutions that start to break down the barriers between these divided worlds. They could use their media and cultural power to argue more firmly and more publicly for good governance and commercial infrastructure. Most of all, brands could take on a campaigning role: raising awareness, mobilising opinion and forcing the pace of change.

These dimensions of corporate social campaigning – harnessing cultural power and campaigning for social change – are often best demonstrated by the brands that have used a social or environmental platform to define and differentiate themselves in the marketplace. For example, the Co-operative Bank has raised awareness of ethical investment, and Café Direct has demonstrated through fair trade that an inclusive global business model is achievable.

With consumers increasingly interested in the social and environmental consequences of their purchasing decisions, the most successful brands of the future are likely to be those that embrace social leadership as a core component of their strategy.

This is an edited chapter from The Social Value of Brands by Giles Gibbons, founder and CEO of Good Business, which is taken from the second edition of The Economist’s Brands and Branding, published by Profile Books in March 2009.