Brand Valued: How socially valued brands hold the key to a sustainable future and business success

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Where the first part of this book rattled through the briefest history of brands in an attempt to highlight how social capital and these alleviators of ‘provenance costs’ were inextricably linked from the off, this second part has attempted to focus on how that heritage is still in play today, shaping how brands interact with the audiences and how they attempt to ‘guide’ us in the myriad purchasing decisions we seem to face every day.

In the context of sustainability, we’ve argued that brands seem, in the main at least, hell-bent on reaching out to their constituents with a message predicated on transparency and data: that accountability is everything and the brand needs to step up to this responsible role, as faithful interpreter of its guardian’s endeavours.

The result is a sea of conflicting, ambiguous and often unfathomable information, which fills us with dread and concern at the mountain of trade-offs and opportunity costs that loom with what will undoubtedly be the wrong decision made. This current approach from brands is cracking open the scale and complexity of the issues to the point that we consumers literally cannot make the right choice.

And as we have shown, when faced with these sorts of dilemmas, we prefer to walk away, making our choices on more palatable, simpler and emotional criteria. It seems there could be almost no more ineffective a way for brands to be trying to engage us around these issues. We’ve built the most perfectly unsustainable ...