Leadership and…Ethical Brand Value

Brand Value is more important than ever, and ethical leadership is an important part of it. Trendwatching.com’s April free briefing (so check it out soon!) is called “Brand Butlers: Why Serving is the New Selling.” Here is an excerpt:

With pragmatic, convenience-loving consumers enjoying instant access to an ever-growing number of supporting services and tools (both offline and online), brands urgently need to hone their ‘butlering skills’*, focusing on assisting consumers to make the most of their daily lives, versus the old model of selling them a lifestyle if not identity. Brand Butlers: Why Serving is the New Selling, Trendwatching.com Briefing, April 2010

Ethisphere has posted an article about how your business ethics will impact your brand value. It includes enough information to use for corporate discussions about how ethics can impact your organization’s long-term success.

The way in which corporations conduct business has changed dramatically in recent decades. The industrial complex, traditionally based on hard assets, has evolved. Three decades ago, according to a report published by Thomson Reuters and Interbrand, 95 percent of the average corporation’s value was composed of tangible assets. Today, 75 percent of the average corporation’s value is now intangible.

Accordingly, the most valuable asset for most corporations is their good name, or their brand and reputation. According to a recent report published jointly by the World Economic Forum and Fleishman-Hillard, three-fifths of CEOs surveyed believe that corporate brand and reputation represents over 40 percent of a company’s market capitalization.

Brand Promise: What’s Your Ethical Brand Value? , Ethisphere.com, November, 2009.

The article also includes information about the “Ethical Business Value Metric (EBVM):”

The value that an ethics program brings to a company’s Brand Reputational Value is a company’s Ethical Business Value Metric (EBVM). EBVM is the ethical underpinning of a business operation and generally, as a ratio, contributes between 20 and 65 percent of the overall Brand Reputational Value of an enterprise. EBVM will vary widely depending on specific industries and companies. In simple terms, what it calculates to is what business ethics is worth to a business.

Brand Promise: What’s Your Ethical Brand Value? , Ethisphere.com, November, 2009.

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