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

Part III

The Elixir of Life – Literally. Why We Depend on Social Capital

This whole book is about the importance of social capital – its importance for our general successful functioning and, more specifically, in the very near future for the successful functioning of brands.

We’ve argued that the myriad problems we currently face – problems that are lumped together under the catch-all of sustainability – are as a direct result of a prolonged period of low social capital. This is the period we’ve labelled the Era of Social Capital Waning. We’ve tried to build the argument that ‘unsustainability’ is a symptom – albeit chronic – of a deeper malaise, and that the denudation of social capital lies at the root of the problem.

The sustainability debate has, pretty much up until this point, focused on communicating the technicalities of the issues to consumers and nonspecialist audiences. These technicalities may be about the actual science of climate change, such as apocalyptic messages around ppm of CO₂, frozen methane in Siberia or the loss of biodiversity, or numbingly dull (to most) accounts around issues such as waste and recycling challenges and the minutiae of what the business is actually doing to address these issues.

So the debate is focused on either impending apocalypse on such a grand scale as to be almost too large to comprehend, or on the little detail, so fine and fiddly as to be almost too granular to make a meaningful difference.

To us, both routes are flawed in terms ...