The consultancy helping brands to carve out a more responsible role in society

The demand for a more ethical approach to business, one that does not place the importance of profit above all else, has been building for some time, and businesses are being forced to rethink their place in society.

A report published last year by consultancy firm Accenture found that six in 10 consumers under 30 give close consideration to a company’s ethical values before buying its products. In the past, this could have been ignored or papered over with a veneer of ethics, but in a digital, information-rich age where hiding places are hard to come by, the impetus to be genuine is stronger than ever.

And it seems that the corporate world is taking note. In August this year, the Business Roundtable, made up of CEOs from about 200 of the world’s biggest brands, including Apple, Pepsi and JP Morgan Chase, announced that shareholder value is no longer the be-all and end-all. It appears to have dawned on them that the purpose of a corporation must also include employees, environmental impact and ethics.

For some, however, this realisation has been a long time coming.

“I’ve never understood why it has taken so long for this to happen,” says Giles Gibbons, co-founder and CEO of Good Business, a corporate responsibility consultancy. “So much resistance has been based on a belief that it has to cost more money to be good, but not everything costs more.”

Gibbons has worked with such major brands as Nike, Microsoft, O2 and McDonald’s, helping them carve out a more responsible role in society.

The idea came about in the mid-Nineties when he was working at advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi. While running an anti-racism campaign for the Commission for Racial Equality, he found that consumers responded best to the campaign when a brand, Nike in that case, was used to convey the message.

“Consumers had an understanding with that brand that they didn’t have with the commission,” he explains. “What we realised was that incredibly powerful brands have an ability to change attitudes that government lacks. But they weren’t using that power in any way.”

And so Good Business was born in 1996 with the stated aim of “driving positive change for organisations and the society of which they are part”.

In the beginning, Giles says there was very little corporate appetite to actually change the way they did business; they were more interested in finding out what people thought about them and whether or not they were “OK”.

“What we are seeing is those mental barriers to change coming down. It is just a way of doing business now,” he says.

Are organisations truly embracing this new way of doing business, placing purpose and ethics alongside profitability? Or is it just part of their marketing and PR efforts? “It doesn’t really matter if they mean it, in some respects; but if they do mean it, the impact is far greater and far more comes from it,” he says.

“If you keep peeling back the onion of John Lewis, for example, no matter how deep you go, you find someone with a strong set of values. You could say that is why they are successful. Would they be Debenhams if it was not for their approach to business? You have a warmer feeling towards that organisation, which is why it is worth being a believer,” he says.

For Gibbons, being a true believer not only satisfies modern-day ethical requirements, it also keeps businesses evolving and questioning what it is they are here for. A project with Ribena to reduce sugar content, quickly morphed into a conversation about what the company was selling and what its core purpose was.

“The soft-drinks industry is fascinating,” he says. “It has thought for a long time that it is an industry based on sugary water and that is what it is selling. But if you take the sugar out, what are you left with?”

He explains that the process of self-examination allowed the company to explore how its offering could be much broader than the existing mindset permitted. That exploration led to Ribena moving into the world of fermented drinks, with a focus on flavour and variety over sugar – not dissimilar, Gibbons argues, to what has taken place in the beer market. Where once there was a choice of four lagers, most pubs now have a huge array of styles, flavours and breweries, satisfying a growing consumer desire for experimentation.

“[Ribena] is still a big, growing business, but they are no longer the business they thought they were.”

It is by shifting the mindset of the large corporations that Gibbons believes real change in the wider business community will come about.

“With 99 per cent of businesses, nobody knows their name, nobody is being held to account, and you have to ask whether there are a huge number of businesses that aren’t being responsible,” he says.

“But there is a trickle down from large business. If you are supplying a big company, you have to sign up to [the same] sustainable or ethical standards. These big companies can’t say they support the Slavery Act if the businesses down the chain aren’t committing to that.”

However, trickle-down takes time, a luxury that Gibbons argues business does not have. It’s moving in the right direction, but not nearly fast enough.

“The populist rise in politics is driven by disaffected communities, and business needs to recognise that they have been part of making people feel that way,” he says.

The business world must rise to this challenge or, Gibbons believes, the existence of capitalism as we know it will be under threat.

“If businesses just evolve towards addressing those issues, it will fall apart. Sustainability and capitalism will fall apart if they don’t move more quickly.

“We know what to do, how to do it and all stakeholders get it, so let’s solve these problems. If we just flail around the edges, we will have failed.”