Stake•hold•er

noun

1. a person who has an interest in the success of an organisation, product or service.

“Ticket designs for the London Olympics have been unveiled, as designed by the team @FutureBrand“ — Source: Creativity-Online.com

Scared? I think we should be.

Before the global crisis, in order to differentiate from overly saturated competitive markets, global corporations worked hard to identify their ‘unique positioning’ in the big-wide-world.

Focused on becoming category leaders, or ‘the next big thing’, many organisations invested heavily in trying to identify unique personality attributes (e.g. being bold, fun, dynamic, progressive, etc) but left little time, or consideration, towards maintaining focus on the necessary, basic fundamental principles needed to run a business ethically and responsibly.

These basics, or prerequisites if you will, e.g. trust, pride, honesty, transparency, ethics, prudence etc., appear to have been relegated to the lower tier of the sub-conscious — resulting in their being continually overlooked or massively taken for granted. For the majority of us we made a mistake too, assuming these basic values were inherent in all the brands we invested in.

As markets and countries around the world still recover, ‘brand prerequisites’ once again returned as an essential key message. ‘Ethical business practice’ was written back in to every CEO’s speech and contained within the boilerplate of almost every press release distributed.

For tomorrow’s company, being bold, fun and adventurous is meaningless without integrity, honesty and moral values being equally considered. Brand values — whether they belong to a product of an institution — are really no different to the values of a person. As such, should be respected accordingly.

Take yesterday for example: Were we really surprised to read about the lawsuits and actions following Facebook’s IPO? A young company, with an infamous 28 year old CEO, that has been the subject of multi-million dollar recriminations since its ‘dorm room days’.

Whilst Facebook is a benchmark, and an incredibly exciting and innovative product, let’s not forget this company has grown rapidly to become the custodian of more personal information than any other database held on the planet.

Facebook may have rewritten how we connect with our friends and family, and continues to reshape the advertising model but, our fascination with Facebook’s exciting but unknown future, shouldn’t let it’s ability to shrug its hoodie-clothed shoulders and ‘pay-off its past’, nor empower it in to thinking it can rewrite corporate governance.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook. But as ‘convenience’ and ‘accessibility’ grow stronger, fast becoming the digital platform’s ‘qualifying attributes’, in the long-run, I am a little fearful that we may be giving up more than we may realise.

Unlike me, if you’re not scared by this, at least evolve to a much higher level of cautiousness, increase your diligence and prepare for whatever is around the next digital corner. [DD]