When non-consenting companies find their brands adopted by white supremacists and neo-Nazis, how can they reclaim their brand?
Is quiet part of the essential value proposition of museums? Is an art museum, for example, meant to provide a kind of dampening field for the other senses so that sight can have free rein? Museums are indeed a very special kind of public space. Their likeness in the public sphere is rare and I agree that this should be cherished. But it should also be examined.
As an organization grows, there are inflection points that require urgent organizational alignment. Of these, organizational size is the simplest rough measure, but there are others.
What is your organization? Most clients struggle to answer the first question from the Brand Pyramid. You'd expect that any company would have a good answer, but they almost never do. Why is this?
There are three main reasons.
In our work with healthcare organizations, there are a few emergent challenges that are worth noting. This post relates only to healthcare service brands like hospitals and nursing services and is not meant to apply to healthcare product brands or pharma or medical device companies, which operate differently.
Keith Cartwright provides an analysis of how advertising agencies will need to move forward if they intend to reap the benefits of greater inclusivity.
“Sympathy is fine. Empathy is better. Sacrifice is hard.” he says.
This struck me as a very succinct—if on further consideration problematic—summation of the journey we will all need to go on if we are to overcome the racism that infects much of American business.
It is unnecessary to mention that a lot is happening in America right now. We are in the middle of both the pandemic and the national mobilization around Black Lives Matter. It is an act of will not to speak up, not to enter this conversation. But it is so easy to be thoughtless or to think of one's innocence in all this … only to be reminded not so quietly, “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963.
Empathy has become a management buzzword, but having facilitated its implementation and witnessed its power firsthand, we strongly advocate for its widespread adoption, and even more so in light of COVID-19. When elevated to a core value, empathy has the power to shape individual and team behaviors, improving workplace morale and overall well-being.
