Creativity can be a source for growth and for good. When it comes to leading the creativity of the biggest brands and businesses in our society, we have the distinguished opportunity and privilege to be able to shape culture and set trends. However, with great power comes much responsibility.
The isolation, loss, and economic shifts of the past two years has made the world take stock of what truly matters. As creative leaders, we need to take stock of how our creativity shows up and what it does for the world around us. While we are still under the same pressure to deliver with cultural relevance and universal resonance it critical that, in our desire to move back to normal or even a new normal, we don’t leave our audiences and their communities behind.
To quote the old rugby scrum adage what we need to do is: touch, pause and engage.
- When we touch, we need to be aware of societal shifts and nuances that may not have existed before that cause our audiences and society to evolve.
- When we pause, we need to pause to allow data and meaningful empathy to drive our creative processes in order to deliver data-driven creativity that reads the room.
- Finally, when we engage, we need to engage with the kind of intention that sees us move beyond a ‘campaign to campaign’ mentality and truly leverage the power of our brands and creative to drive societal change.
Very few can realise the significance of this approach, like my industry or be under as much pressure to demonstrate exactly how significant it has been to drive a reappraisal of who we are and how we show up in society.
At the South African Breweries (SAB), we have over 7 000 employees, a value chain that supports over 250 000 people in an industry that fuels more than 1 000 000 livelihoods. In the last two years, we have dealt with alcohol bans which made us unable to trade for 168 days, took the government to court, endured civil unrest that put many of those livelihoods at risk, and most recently, unexpected flooding in my hometown of Durban where our Prospecton brewery was damaged. All of these challenges have caused us to touch, pause and re-engage with the nation differently.
After we did what we could in these crises by responding with action rather than adverts, we turned to look at how we could saliently communicate how we are growing our category while championing responsibility. Our first job was to tell the country that responsibility was more than just a footnote.
While our responsibility campaign was busy winning us an Effie for corporate reputation, we still had to address a challenging relationship with government. We did this not by being a typical corporate Karen, but rather by shining a spotlight on lives, livelihoods and the beer economics that underpin our contribution to the very necessary economic recovery that our country so desperately needed (and still does).
Finally, we sought to further drive this reappraisal of our brand by building an evidence-based platform which spoke accentuated our commitment to dealing with the harmful consumption of alcohol.
Through strategic partnerships with government and other stakeholders, we sought to invest multiples of millions of rands into how we fought the issues stemming from the harmful consumption of alcohol across four categories:
- Sell Sharp
- Drive Sharp
- Live Sharp
- Talk Sharp
Thus SAB Sharp was born and we couldn’t be prouder and more energised to champion responsibility in our industry and in society.
It is my conviction that behavioural change leads to societal change and we did all of this while delivering SAB’s highest reputation score to date. This is the power of branding done right, where our platforms can wield their power and influence for the greater good.
I believe that the true power of brands lies in the positive impact it makes in society with creativity being the fuel that elevates the impact. By prioritising sustainable partnerships, programmes that can activate our creative campaigns to transform society, together with the measurement and evaluation of impact, we can, and should, move our creative industry beyond self-serving fluff, and gain the credibility that will empower us to show up in the world as we are meant to.
Don’t just think through the line. Think through to society.
Sphe Vundla is brand director: SAB Corporate. He is an international award-winning skilled marketing executive, speaker and MC with extensive multi-industry and multi-discipline experience in delivering strategic and creative solutions, elevating brands across Africa.
