Corporate Responsibility: Marketplace

Overview

• We have chosen to focus all our work on social change
• Our ambition is to be a world leader in social marketing
• We have combined achievements in social impact with commercial success; revenue is up 66% and profits up over 250% from 2005 to 2007

Contributing to forward thinking in our markets

• We initiated original research on Customer Trust with international research company Globescan to get under the skin of customer trust; it was a loss leader to help develop thinking on customer trust and was bought in by people like Microsoft, BT and the Body Shop
• Our leaders participate in initiatives to drive forward the social impact agenda: eg our CEO John Drummond is working voluntarily on a government initiative to define new national occupational standards in social marketing; Ashley Sweetland, our Youth Strategy Director is on David Cameron’s national citizenship service policy group

Helping clients act on causes and following through within our business

We campaign on causes linked to the environment, health and young people and we follow through our campaigning work with action in the workplace.

Environment

• We are the architects behind the RecycleNow campaign to increase home recycling which has led to over 5 million more committed recyclers and the iconography is used by 75% of local authorities in England and by the vast majority of retailers
• This is followed through by our own commitment to recycling and waste reduction (see following section on the environment)

Health

• We run a portfolio of health campaigns (including campaigns linked to Chlamydia, teenage snacking, cancer and selecting the right route into the NHS)
• Again, our commitment to health is seen through in our practices. We provide free Private Health Cover to employees - taken up by 94% of qualifying employees - and free healthy lunches

Young People

• We are the strategists and lead project managers on the award winning BT Better World Campaign to give young people a voice
• Again, this is seen through in our own actions in support of the campaign (colleagues have been on three ChildLine fundraising walking tours; we recruited a youth team to work on the campaign; one of our directors is a trustee on the board of the UK Youth Parliament)