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Guest Blog by Justin Gauvin, Executive Director of Verego

 Part 3 of 4 of Blog series from Verego

Who is the Aspirational Consumer?

The voice of the customer is transforming, and the resounding call from the “Aspirational Consumer” is here to stay. No longer can marketer’s think of the customer segment that wants to “do the right thing” tree-huggers because “doing the right thing” is now becoming the “cool thing to do.” The rise of this customer segment is redefining consumerism by blending style, status, and sustainability. The identity of the Aspirational Consumer is defined by their infatuation with shopping, their commitment for responsible consumption, and their loyalty to brands that work in the best interest of society. The reason this brand-hugging consumer segment is gaining the attention of marketers is because Aspirationals are some of the most materialistic consumers, yet at the same time are the most driven to purchase products that connect to their personal aspirations of creating a brighter future for society and future generations.
There is a profound opportunity for consumer brands to appeal to Aspirational Consumers, because market studies have estimated this group to make up over 1/3 of today’s market and have highlighted the fact that Aspirationals are some of the most brand loyal customers possible. Similar to how the car was once an external expression of your inner-self; aspirational consumers are expressing their interval values to the world through the brands they loyally love and frequently purchase. The companies that understand this opportunity the most are focused on creating a meaningful and authentic purpose for their companies that expands the customer experience to involve the customer in the collective achievement of the brand’s higher-purpose.

Aspirational Consumers – Socially Responsible Materialists

Source: The Aspirational Consumer Index Report- Globescan

Aspirational Consumers want to embrace brands creating a brighter future

Brands that have an aim to make a brighter future are winning the hearts of customers, and it’s hard to find a brand aiming to win over the hearts of socially minded customer’s more than Unilever. Embracing Unilever’s goals of social responsibility, the multinational company has launched Unilever’s Project Sunlight with the goal of creating a brighter future. Project Sunlight embodies Unilever’s purpose of building a #brightfuture for the world by creating an inspirationally engaging online and offline community where Unilever’s brand-hugging consumers can connect and be a part of the brand’s higher purpose.

The Future of the Customer Experience

The companies that are getting customers to love their brands the most are utilizing people’s natural inclination to reach towards being a part of something bigger than themselves, thus enabling the customer to be more engaged, inspired, connected, and proud while collectively achieving the brand’s higher-purpose during their customer experience. This new insight is expanding marketer’s view of what the customer experience is really all about, much more than customer service, pleasant store atmospheres, quality products, and user-friendly software, it is about meaningfully connecting with the values and ideals of the consumer. The brand’s higher-purpose is now an integral part of the process for designing the customer experience, and for up to 1/3 of the market, it is one of the only ways to get consumers to truly love your brand in today’s ever-increasing competitive environment.
When getting consumers to truly embrace your brand, the purpose and brand promise must be so authentic that it is embedded in the brand’s DNA. To do this, the brand promise and purpose must be baked into every level or people will smell it from a mile away. For example, if you think of the customer’s brand loyalty like a relationship, how can a customer truly love a brand that breaks the promise or lies to their face? If your brand is dependent on repeat customers, maintaining a strong brand promise that builds life-long customer relationships is critical to long-term business success, otherwise the customer may just purchase your product for a while as they keep an eye out for something better. This means that if you contribute to the design of the customer experience, your goal must be to transition brand-purchasers into brand-huggers because if you can do that, you have just found yourself a lifelong customer.

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From the surface, sustainability and social responsibility are synonymous terms, two sides of the same coin. It is only when one looks deeper into their meanings that the subtle differences raise to the surface. The idea of sustainability comes from the fundamental concept of sustainable development: meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainability looks through the lense of the triple bottom line: people, planet, and profits. The notion of the triple bottom line aims at accounting for all the impacts of an organization into a common set of bottom-line metrics that determine the value of investments based the long-term sustainment of economic, social, and environmental capital. Aiming to sustain the long-term economic, social, and environmental capital over generations is a worthy and important objective for any organization to aspire to, yet many organizations are struggling to put this into action because for many people the concept is hard to grasp and the metrics these market-based organizations are using to make decisions are conflicting with each other.

Making it simple: Social Responsibility as the “how” and Sustainability as the “why”

At Verego, we believe looking at an organization as a living person with morals, ethics, values, and responsibilities is a more approachable and useful lense to look at an organization than a long-term development of economic, social, and environmental capital. At the end of the day, any organization is made of people and all people understand that acting responsibly is something all of us aim to do everyday. That is why at Verego, we have found many organizations resonate with the idea of Social Responsibility because it turns the language of sustainability into a something that is naturally intuitive for humans rather than a language that is based off of capital and long-term development. Everyone deals with responsibility everyday; it’s a fact of life. If we view organizations as human systems, instilling the values of acting responsibly in ways that benefit the lives of people, communities, and local environments, enables the human side of any enterprise to adopt an approachable roadmap for ethically conducting business and ultimately creating a better future. Most importantly, Social Responsibility transcends the conflict of balancing competing bottom lines by providing an easy to put into action, approachable mindset that emphasizes the commitment to responsibly lead, manage employees, communities, environmental impacts, as well as upholding a corporate ethic that addresses the interests of all stakeholders

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Guest post written by Justin Gauvin, Executive Director of Verego

What does Social Media have to do with Social Responsibility?

As more and more organizations aim to build purpose-driven and meaningful brands, there is a profound opportunity for brands to combine their social media efforts with their ongoing efforts to become a more socially responsible and sustainable brand. The power of social media is continuing to become a critical engagement tool for monitoring conversations about the world’s largest brands, giving companies the ability to create a new channel for customer-driven innovation and online reputation management. Although brands are using social media to engage customers, are brands being proactive about improving their social responsibility in the eyes of the global customer?
This question drives us everyday at Verego, a Corporate Social Responsibility Solution Provider aiming to unite the global economy to promote the responsibility movement. Verego believes there is a massive opportunity for brands to improve their performance as responsible companies in order to proactively manage their reputations with customers and beyond.

Everyday at the world’s leading companies, advanced CRM technologies are deployed across social networks as a means of understanding the voice of the customer. Getting to know what the customer says about your products and services is the critical feedback required by nearly every department of the organization, but one in particular has been disconnected from the power of social media: The Corporate Social Responsibility department.

This disconnection is fading as many big brands like Office Depot and Generals Mills are no longer leaving out their Social Responsibility teams from their company’s social media presence. These once left out departments are now actively embracing social media as their tool of choice for gaining feedback to support the brand’s big bets into becoming the world’s leading, socially responsible companies. Office Depot and General Mills are looking to take advantage the strategic opportunities inherent in becoming a best in class responsible brand, and are some of the first big bands to create specialized Twitter Chats focused on collecting feedback on their social and environmental goals.

On April 23rd, General Mills is launching a live Twitter Chat to discuss their commitment to responsibly source 100% of their 10 most important ingredients by 2020. Social media chats like these are designed as facilitated conversations that engage the broader Online Community. Most notably, these interactive Social Responsibility focused Twitter Chats move beyond the boundaries of normal online customer engagement, to social media enhanced stakeholder engagement, a concept we at Verego like to call #socialsquared: the intersection of powerful social media tools with social responsibility strategies. Like in any form of engagement, the magic comes from using feedback to improve your business, and now, with more and more Social Responsibility teams utilizing social media, we are beginning to witness the growth of the #socialsquared responsibility movement.

What is #socialsquared?

#socialsquared generates a new source for social innovation and environmental improvement by enabling stakeholder dialogue at a scale never before possible. This concept harnesses the power of engaging stakeholders through social media in order to improve the design of products, services, and even the overall operation of the entire organization. Right now, impact-driven brands have the opportunity to go beyond normal customer relationship management, to the new frontier of stakeholder relationship management.

What’s the future of #socialsquared look like?

The future of the #socialsquared movement will involve expanding the notion of the ‘voice of the customer’ to the ‘voice of the stakeholder.’ With this expanded perspective of the brand’s influence, Social Responsibility departments will be able to extract value from the collective ‘voice of the stakeholder’ with powerful social media tools that can generate actionable insights from the vast amounts of data created online everyday.

Digitals Roots, one of the world’s leading CRM innovators is Verego’s partner for bringing the next generation of the #socialsquared responsibility movement to the world’s leading brands. For the past 5 years, Digital Roots has led the way with their “smarter” Social CRM software and with the help of Verego, we are together poised to enable brands to manage the entire spectrum of the online stakeholder experience. Through this partnership, we are looking to the future in order to define what the unfolding world of stakeholder relationship management will look like.

When you think of the opportunities at hand as the #socialsquared responsibility movement evolves, more and more thought leading companies will expand the perspective of their brand beyond just their customer, to the greater stakeholder community, in order to gain the feedback necessary for profound community-generated innovation.

Verego is Uniting theGlobal Economy to promote the Responsibility Movement in collaboration with theVerego Steering Committee who is a group of executive thought leaderscontinuously evolving the open source framework known as The Verego Social
Responsibility Standard (Verego SRS) which is free to all

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