The most recent issue of Communication Director Magazine, “When the saints go marching in…” The facets of Corporate Social Responsibility handles the subject of CSR from many different angles. The recent interview with The Media Foundation’s founder Kalle Lasn however echoed the setiments exactly of the Edelman Trust Barometer, in which Richard Edelman states:
“Why does trust matter? Well, we find that, in fact, people are taking action against companies they do not trust. What do we mean by that? Well- hey don’t buy their products or services, they don’t what to invest in them, and- in fact- increasingly we find that people protest and demonstrate against them. So, we think that, in fact it is growing over time that people are expressing their displeasure.”
Quoted from Podcast Vol. II, Ep.3
In the CD interview, Kalle Lasn basically said the exact same thing:
“I think it is all about public pressure -and government pressure- I don’t have to tell you that corporations are basically set-up to make money for the shareholders, and that is the main drive of the whole corporate dynamic and they will only change their ways if there is some sort of pressure comes to bear on them, and lately many corporations have suddenly suffered because there has been a groundswell of bad feeling against them and their brands have, in a way, been ‘un-cool’ed, then of course they take it seriously. They have to. They are going to lose market share if their company is just playing cynical games and re-washing and playing this CSR game because ‘everybody else is, -so we might as well – we better get in on the action’ – that is sort of a ‘ha-hah’ attitude. The bottom line is making money for the shareholders, which is the dominant thing and everything else is just subterfuge- ultimately that corporation may actually suffer some major brand damage and eventually lose its market share, and down the road, basically go out of business.“
-PJT
