As marketers, our role is to understand the brand, understand the customer and bring that perspective to the heart of business strategy. But it’s no longer just about generating awareness around a product or service.
Grazielle Parenti, pictured right, is an experienced marketer who’s spent the last 15 years exploring another increasingly important role of brands in the corporate space. As global VP corporate affairs and sustainability for the Brazilian food processing company BRF, she’s been one of the pioneers of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) agenda within business.
“I’ve been working on ESG before it was even known as ESG,” she says. “I’m in charge of the reputation of our business, not just among external stakeholders but among the employees that we depend on to be ambassadors for our brand.”
Marketers know all about the challenges of attaching a tangible value to brands and brand activity, but as Parenti explains, the challenges of quantifying reputation can be greater still. “Normally, people first realise the value of their corporate brand when they lose it,” she says. “It’s very rare that the board or the CEO stops to look at their corporate brand when everything is going well – but it’s actually very important to audit and measure your perceptions. It’s about risk management – and it’s an area that’s evolved very quickly. It’s not just investors that you’re building a reputation with. It’s the public: government, employees, partners, suppliers and consumers, among other audiences.”
A brand that drives new business models
Parenti has had plenty of first-hand experience of how the influence of corporate brands is growing – a trend that she saw confirmed on her recent visit to the COP26 summit in Glasgow. “One of the things that really impressed me is that this isn’t just a priority for Gen Z or Millennials – it’s a priority for everyone,” she says. “There is a huge opportunity to put sustainability at the core of your business – particularly a food business like ours that is closely connected to the planet. To take the opportunity, you have to be able to tell the story, and connect all of the different audiences and elements. The more we communicate as a corporate brand, the more we engage others in our journey. It’s not just about adding to your reputation, it’s about engaging others.”
This is the real power of an effective corporate brand: working less visibly, behind the scenes, to build partnerships and enable new types of business models. It’s a power that Parenti has helped to leverage recently, for the development of BRF’s new plant-based chicken products, which the business launched at COP26.
“There is no room for greenwash these days, so the launch of a new product like this has to be transparent and accountable,” she says. “We mapped and audited everything to demonstrate the carbon impact of production, and that opens up an avenue for others to follow. When a company makes public, transparent commitments, it engages their full supply chain, as well as communities, NGOs and employees. That’s an opportunity that businesses can often miss. The corporate brand shouldn’t just reflect what your own C-suite is interested in. You have to understand what’s critical and material for your key stakeholders.”
Building corporate brands one conversation at a time
The task of understanding audiences’ motivations and building a compelling narrative around them will feel familiar to many marketers. The big difference for corporate brand builders is that they have far less in the way of media budgets to help deliver on them. Parenti has used the power of organic, grassroots engagement and social media marketing to help fill the gap.
“Like other companies, we publish regular reports – and advertising has a role to play as well, however, we’ve found that our own social media pages can be a really important channel,” she says. “Over the last year, we’ve focused a great deal on organising public forums and summits where we can engage each audience with our narrative.”
Driving change through communication isn’t limited to sustainability. Parenti is passionately motivated by the need to advance gender equality within business – another key area of the ESG agenda. “I have two daughters in their early twenties and I really hope that the business environment will be more friendly for them than it was at the time I started,” she says. “When I was a young student at university, I knew that I wanted to be a businesswoman. The problem was that I’d never actually met one. A more gender-balanced world is an important target within our ESG agenda – and when you have real targets you can start to make real progress.”
From Parenti’s point of view, a growing interest in measurement and metrics has been one of the most significant shifts in the world of corporate branding. It’s one that she instinctively welcomes. “Over the last two years, the sustainability agenda has moved to the core of business,” she says. “It’s crucial to make the impact of this tangible and demonstrate the value that’s being created. It’s about purpose, but it’s about business as well.”
Defining and measuring the value of brands has been one of the great challenges of marketing. Doing the same for corporate brands could well be one of the most significant business stories of the next few years.
For more insights from visionary Marketing Leaders check out LinkedIn’s CMO Corner.
