Ethics is on the agenda (as exemplified by the recent David Jones, Nike and James Hardie cases) and, according to 2009 reports from the Climate Change and Environment departments, 72 per cent of Australians ‘feel it is important for us to act now to protect Australia from the impact of climate change’. Smart CEOs and entrepreneurs know that sustainability is no longer a point of difference to get their brand noticed – it is a requirement most customers expect.

In this increasingly complex business environment where sustainability is the norm, how can you ensure your offering does not get lost in the clutter?

The way forward is to live your value proposition. This neat articulation of a brand’s heart and soul highlights only those customer benefits that your organisation can deliver better than its competitors. It is effective as a focal point to drive all business functions toward delivering consistent customer experiences readily identified as the brand’s own.

The new sustainability

If a business truly wishes to succeed, it must take on responsibility for something beyond its four walls.

The 21st century is a vastly different landscape to the 20th. In this year’s April issue of the Harvard Business Review, Chris Meyer and Julia Kirby warn organisations that they can no longer ignore the effects they have on a broader milieu. Demands for responsible commercial activity have grown, due to the ever-increasing scale of companies and their impacts, new abilities to measure these impacts, and the heightened sensibilities of stakeholders. What’s more, the rules of engagement have changed: no longer a passive recipient, the average consumer is just as likely to create culture through media as to consume it.

The upshot of this new order is that successful brands:

• Enjoy solid cash flow and steady profits, and sustain themselves as a result
• Understand they are a part of an ecosystem, and seek productive relationships with a broad set of stakeholders, including the target market
• Accept that they may be influenced by popular culture as much as influencing of it
• Have a blueprint for continually finding opportunities and capitalising on them
• Take the time to undertake a 360-degree view of stakeholders, the marketplace and company capabilities.

Clever brands articulate a value proposition because it:

• Ensures the business is forward-facing
• Is a checkpoint for producing quality offers that remain relevant and trigger customer lifetime value
• Acts as a compass to help navigate the brand in all its interactions with all stakeholders
• Is the foundation upon which all marketing strategy is built.

As Graeme Wood, wotif.com founder, says: ‘…focus on the value you are giving someone else.’

Next month I will explore the process for doing just that – delivering what modern consumers really want – by building a sustainable brand from the inside out.

Hannah McVean is a freelance marketer with a Master of Marketing from Melbourne Business School. Her mission is to uncover a brand’s mantra, its true unique expression, and to help that brand live it consistently.

In this video, he shows how good design can navigate information glut – and help change the way we see the world. I wonder how we could use his ideas to influence change in the sustainability space. I’d love to hear your thoughts …

Melissa Walsh is a designer at WellmarkPerspexa who believes in the power of spreading an idea.

According to Beyond Blue, undiagnosed depression in the workplace costs $4.3 billion in lost productivity and accounts for more than 12 million days of reduced productivity each year.

And presenteeism – Gary’s practice of showing up for work but running on empty – costs workplaces twice as much as absenteeism, according to The Economist.

When you consider that more than 3 million people in Australia reportedly experience depression, anxiety or related alcohol and drug problems each year, creating a culture that respects and protects mental wellbeing becomes a business imperative.

Early diagnosis and intervention can increase employee productivity and lead to a five-fold return on investment, according to Beyond Blue research.

And there can be flow-on benefits for your team and workplace culture … if it’s done right.

Talking about mental health

Discounted gym memberships and free fruit in the kitchen are common ways for employers to promote good physical health in the workplace, but many organisations are yet to talk as freely about mental health.

Companies as varied as BT and Rolls-Royce have now introduced mental-health programs, which include running wellbeing projects for employees and training managers to help staff deal with stress.

In general, organisations are not handling mental-health issues as well as they could; many current management practices, such as coercing people into taking leave, can even make matters worse.

There’s more to mental wellbeing than team meetings on happiness or a news alert on the intranet about the workplace counsellor.

Caring for your employees’ mental health means ensuring respect for human rights and balancing this with your business objectives.

Privacy, respect and protection

How many of your previous employers would you trust to respect information about your own mental wellbeing?

What if your private information got in the way of a promotion, or people started to gossip? And would you trust your boss to help you through a relationship breakdown?

Done carefully, corporate training programs can help staff deal with stress and can raise awareness about depression. But it’s a sensitive issue and must be treated as such.

Creating a culture where it’s implicitly safe to discuss mental health is one way to respect and protect your workers, particularly when it comes to their privacy.

With this kind of culture, it will gradually become easier to:

• recognise some of the causes of depression
• spot depression among colleagues
• understand the consequences of untreated depression on workplace performance
• act sensibly, sensitively and responsibly in managing people with depression
• know where to go for help and guidance
• draw a link between workplace mental health and business performance.

When employers create environments in which their people know how to respect and protect their own and their colleagues’ mental wellbeing at work, their organisational culture and performance improve.

For more information and tools to help you deal with depression in the workplace, visit En Masse. Other useful resources can be found at Beyond Blue and Lifeline.

Mark Dean is Managing Director of En Masse, a provider of human rights online education and training.

Not really. If you agree that integrating all the elements of a promotional mix can maximise cost-effectiveness and reinforce a consistent brand message or image, then you’ll also agree that the integration of these elements is wholly dependent on the ability of the brand team to coordinate multiple different communications tools and vehicles – often all at the same time. This, in turn, requires careful planning.

Unfortunately, it’s a rare brand manager who has the necessary foresight and organisational skills to pull off a truly integrated marketing communications campaign. Accordingly, the reputation of marketing is marred by brand managers who simply can’t complete (or think about) more than one element of the promotional mix at once. This means that many brands are missing out on the potential ROI that can be gained from enabling marketing communications to act synergistically.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was to develop marketing strategy with ‘ordinary mortals with average skills’ in mind. I would suggest that keeping in mind a specific brand manager – and the organisation’s internal processes and philosophy – is also useful. This approach will ensure that your recommendations play to the strengths of the product, the individual and the organisation. As Steve Waugh once said: ‘Your strategy revolves around the bowlers you’ve got.’

Or if you prefer the advice of a Prussian soldier and German military theorist to an Aussie cricketer, Carl von Clausewitz once said: ‘Effective strategy derives from tactics that are implementable.’ That doesn’t mean not setting stretch targets or proposing ideal-world, even ‘out of this world’, scenarios. It simply means taking the time to really understand your client, warts and all. After all, personal idiosyncrasies have led to the downfall of more than one great creative concept. So if your client or organisation is procedurally challenged (i.e. disorganised), show them the way by providing detailed timelines, prioritising tasks, and including recommendations such as ‘if you only do three things out of this entire document, do this, this and this’. To steal another line from Carl von Clausewitz: ‘If a strategy only works when it is superbly implemented, it is a flawed strategy.’

Some of the most positive feedback we get from clients is about our ability to ‘hold their hand’ throughout the life of a project and guide them from A to Z. This becomes particularly important with integrated campaigns, when you need to be able to think several steps ahead in order to see how all the pieces of the puzzle will work together. Clients may not always be able to see the bigger picture or be mindful of the need to do so. Some just won’t be capable of seeing it – ever. Others won’t have the time. Whatever the reason, you have a role to play in bringing your big ideas to fruition.

By not setting your clients up to fail, you’re much more likely to move their brand closer to what is really meant by ‘integrated marketing communications’. Do that and you’ll help rid the world of one-off direct-mail pieces that end up in the rubbish bin, advertising that’s off-message, sales aids that can’t be sold from, etc., etc. Do that and you’ll help say goodbye to inefficient and ineffective marketing communications, i.e. you’ll produce less crap and reduce a large part of the world’s waste. Need more convincing? Check out the following video by Melbourne-based agency GreenMonkeyDesign showcasing the very best and very worst of print advertising.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency where integrated means less is more (less waste, more ROI).

Because if we’re honest, most of us would probably admit that people with an entrepreneurial bent can actually be a bit on the anti-social side. Simon Cowell, for example, or that America’s Cup guy … you know, the one who rorted a whole state and then claimed illness at his court appearances … meh, I forget who he was now. (If he could get away with it, so can I.)

But what if – and you might want to sit down for this – what if people with an unusual degree of initiative and ambition and creativity were to apply those traits in the pursuit of something other than the almighty dollar? (Notwithstanding that most dollars are not exactly ‘almighty’ right now … more ‘formerly-almighty-but-now-a-bit-soft-around-the-middle-and-considering-retirement’ kind of dollars. Whatever. I figure you get the gist.)

Well, now, that would indeed be quite something – the kind of something that has the potential to change everything. And, let’s face it, most people just don’t have the wherewithal to carry through with a something that big. Hell, most people these days don’t have the wherewithal to carry through with a half-hour TV program.

And yet these big somethings are happening. What’s more, they are happening because of big somebodies. As the Ashoka Institute (a global association of social entrepreneurs), puts it:

Identifying and solving large-scale social problems requires a social entrepreneur because only the entrepreneur has the committed vision and inexhaustible determination to persist until they have transformed an entire system.

So it’s the old adage: when the going gets tough, call an entrepreneur. Or something.

Ryan Wallman is Senior Writer at WellmarkPerspexa, where he is always working towards something big.

So garbles Swedish pop star Kesha. No, I’m not at a concert singing along to what I consider to be a finely crafted piece of poetry. Instead, I’m at work and this delightful ring tone has alerted its owner, and the rest of the office, to the fact that she has an incoming call.

Luckily for me, I don’t mind hearing this catchy chorus pierce the room at random times throughout the day … yet. Actually, I admit (somewhat ashamedly) that I hum to the beat while my head shakes rhythmically. Or at least I like to think it does. And although highly unlikely, I also delight in imagining that the toes of my fellow office dwellers are tapping in unison across the whole room.

However, when the request goes out for some Barry Manilow to be played on the communal iPod, I have to draw the line. That’s right, there it is: a solid line right down the middle of our office. Take that.

Thus starts the debate over open versus closed. Office plans that is. Music and mobile phones are just two examples on a long list of things about which workmates may have wildly divergent views. As is the smell of last night’s Indian takeaway wafting through the room, enough to bring back to reality those who dare to daydream. Then there are the varying degrees of desk tidiness – a conversation favourite in our office, predictably resulting in those who are not bound by the laws of order and structure protesting that they are simply demonstrating the benefits of ‘creative’ organisation to the rest of us. Hmmm, I’m not quite sold on that one.

Interest in this topic was recently renewed when a study by Queensland University of Technology reported that open-plan offices are a health hazard. The findings included high stress levels, high staff absenteeism and turnover, increased workplace conflict, reduced concentration levels, lack of privacy, greater spread of infectious diseases and lowered productivity in 90 per cent of the research conducted. Despite the fact that the majority of offices are now open plan, the study recommended a return to the past. Back to those enclosed, small, private offices of yesteryear.

Of course, there are a number of reasons why open-plan offices became so popular in the first place. They can promote communication, teamwork, a communal work environment and improved workflow. Gone are the barriers separating senior management from junior employees. And having fewer walls is also kinder on that all-important bottom line, with cheaper office fit-outs, higher worker density and reduced energy bills.

But does it really need to be one or the other? Providing a safe, happy and productive office setting is definitely important. How a business reaches this ideal isn’t necessarily as obvious. Could it be possible that a mix of both open and closed is the way to go? There’s probably no right or wrong answer – it’s just a matter of getting the fit (and fit-out) right for the individual workplace.

My experience? Well, I’m happy to say that I’m firmly entrenched in the minority here. I thoroughly enjoy the open-plan office that I inhabit with others for hours each weekday. A great mix of personalities sees extroverts, introverts and those in between drawing out the best in each other. It doesn’t hurt that everyone seems to have a similar work ethic and knows what has to get done. But there’s also a lot of laughter and a genuine feeling of being part of a team. Nobody here is withering away in isolation. However, I will concede that not everything is perfect and in reality a few lessons on office etiquette wouldn’t go astray. So, any ideas on how to break it to a colleague that Barry Manilow is best appreciated in private?

Brandy Munro is a Writer at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency where diversity (displayed to its fullest in an open-plan space) breeds creativity.

But as careers progress and responsibilities grow, these instances of rest and reflection become increasingly infrequent. Add in a child or two and the care of an aging parent, and downtime can soon become the stuff of nostalgia.

Such a lifestyle has become accepted in our society, but is this norm really normal? With work commitments encroaching on our time, what else is being eroded?

Do Australian professionals have a problem with work-life balance?

Research by Beaton in collaboration with Linda Duxbury, a work-life balance expert, and Beyond Blue has found that Australian professionals are working harder than ever – and it’s not necessarily doing them any good. So how sustainable is our ‘workaholism’?

In this 2008 study, close to 12,000 professionals answered questions relating to work-life balance. The results showed that professionals in Australia are particularly time-poor. On average, they spend 9.5 hours at work each day. A large majority (70%) worked an average 6 hours of unpaid overtime each week.

Nearly half (42%) of respondents cited they felt overloaded within their role – that is, their workload was approaching or had surpassed a level with which they were comfortable. Not surprisingly, nearly a third (29%) of respondents felt their work was encroaching on their family life.

So why do we do it? Why would we willingly take on more work when we already feel overloaded? Prior research by Linda Duxbury found it was due to:

1. Downsizing
   • ‘Jackson was made redundant, now I have to do his work as well as mine.’
2. Corporate culture
   • ‘If I don’t work harder than the guy next to me, I won’t advance. If he does overtime, I have to do more, because I’m more committed and more loyal.’
3. Increased use of technology
   • ‘If you need me I’ll be contactable on my iPhone/Blackberry/laptop in the hotel lobby/plane/taxi /restaurant.’
4. Global competition
   • ‘It’s always happy hour somewhere in the world, and Johnson & Co. need their report by 9 am GMT + 10:00.’
5. Wanting to do a good job
   • ‘It’s not perfect yet. If I just spend a little more time on it, it’ll be perfect. Then I can go home.’

What these reasons boil down to are expectations – those of others or of ourselves. Just as opportunities multiply as they are seized, expectations increase as they are met. And to continually meet rising expectations, the relationship between work and life must inevitably be strained. So what effect does this have?

Depressing figures: the impact of work-life imbalance

In 2007, a collaborative study between Beaton and Beyond Blue of over 7,500 professionals in Australia found a significantly higher prevalence of depression within those working in professional service firms as compared to the general population. Lawyers in particular were the most prone to depression and were also more likely to use non-prescription drugs or alcohol to mitigate feelings of sadness.

Such a statistic begs the question of causality: ‘does working in the professions cause depressive symptoms or do the professions attract a typically more morose individual?’ Neither of the above studies intended to answer that question. However, four facts from the work-life study collectively highlight a grave concern for the Australian professional services industry:

1. Those overloaded within their role (49% of Australian professionals) are significantly more likely to express the view that they are not satisfied with their job.
2. Those who feel their work interferes with their family life (29%) are even more likely to be dissatisfied with their job.
3. One in four (25%) miss work due to physical or emotional fatigue.
4. Absenteeism due to physical or emotional fatigue is often a precursor to episodes of burnout.

Is it any surprise lawyers are the most prone to depression, when anecdotally we know they work some of the longest hours in the professions?

The link here is not between depression and hours spent at work per se; rather, it is between depression and a sense of not being in control, something often cited by those experiencing feelings of intense sadness. Growing expectations can make us feel trapped, especially when those expectations are rigidly defined. The work-life study found that, more than anything else, flexibility of work hours and location help Australian professionals balance their lives better. This relatively simple measure may drastically reduce mental health issues, absenteeism and burnout.

So is our ‘workaholism’ sustainable? For the sake of our collective mental health, is it not time to concede that the answer is a clear ‘no’? Surely the question to ask now is ‘how do we change our expectations?’

Phillip Sargeant is an Associate at Beaton, a research and consulting firm that works with professional service firms and has previously collaborated with Beyond Blue.

– The Royal Society, 350th anniversary celebrations

With the birth of the Royal Society came the birth of modern science – or so many say. As so eloquently put by The Economist earlier this year, ‘the ancient Babylonians had developed complex mathematical techniques to record the stars, the Greeks systemised the organisation of knowledge based on logic, Islamic scholars wrote astronomical and medical texts and Chinese inventors recorded recipes for gunpowder but none of these became self-sustaining in the way that science is today.’

The oldest scientific academy in existence, the Royal Society and the many men and women who have passed through its doors are responsible for what we understand as science today – the process of acquiring knowledge based on applying the scientific method and the body of knowledge gained through such research. Through this, the society and its vocational offspring, science, revolutionised the way people think about – even process – the world.

I had hoped to attend some of the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations in London – and many more things besides – but a little thing called a volcano (we’ll leave the naming at that) got in my way. But let’s not get bogged down by my holiday woes. Why, might you ask, would a tribute to the birth of science lure a marketer to the British Museum in the first place?

Well, as a marketer who once practised medicine, my CV is perhaps one of the best viewing platforms from which to appreciate the achievements of science. As a young medical scientist, I observed the ability of experimental science to make sense of the world’s mysteries, from why hot air rises to why what goes up must come down – albeit at a more sophisticated level than I’ve just articulated. Later, as a clinician, I would observe the life-changing (often life-saving) advancements delivered by scientific research, from new drugs with novel mechanisms of action to new-fangled procedures and devices that would revolutionise the way we treat disease. And now, even later still, as a marketer, I continue to observe how the application of science can satisfy human needs in a wholly different sense, via some of the most marketable products in the world – the Apple Mac (and every i-variant that followed), Windows XP, Intel’s Core Duo Processor and Toyota’s Prius, just to name a few.

From jet airliners to drugs to iPods, science continually endows society with ways to sustain itself (and arguably to consume). Surely, then, science will also endow us with the solutions to the current and emerging global crises brought about by overconsumption?

But what of the Royal Society’s own prediction for the future? According to its President, Lord Rees: ‘The sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more before the fuel runs out. Any creatures witnessing the sun’s demise 6 billion years hence, here on Earth or beyond, won’t be human – they’ll be as different from us as we are from bacteria.’ So if science is our seer, life will go on. We just don’t know yet what form it will take. Anyone else want to make a prediction of royal proportions?

Those interested in reading more about the history of the Royal Society can do so by getting their hands on a copy of Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson, HarperPress.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency specialising in complex brands and their audiences (we’d argue that it’s the perfect mix of science and magic!).

Some say things have improved for the better, others that this is the beginning of the end. And if you can’t be bothered reading the rest of this article because the internet has shortened your concentration span (as discussed by Nick Carr in his online article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’), in summary it doesn’t matter which corner you sit in because there is no turning back. Resistance is futile.

If you google ‘How much information is on the internet?’ 234,000,000 hits come up in 0.26 seconds. That’s a lot of zeroes. (In comparison, try ‘Internet information overload’ for a paltry 1,280,000 results.) Online information is ballooning at the seams like an overfed – albeit questionably nourished – sumo wrestler. And the quality of the web’s countless websites and links is, to put it mildly, heterogeneous; valuable and useful online content is girt by absolute rubbish. Want to see some examples of the latter? Try Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopaedia, or www.mostannoyingwebpage.com (honestly not worth your time but I know curiosity will get the better of you).

Further interesting facts about this information situation can be found at www.cartridgesave.co.uk. According to this website, it would take a single ink-jet printer 3,805 years to print everything on the internet and then you would have to spend 57,000 years (non-stop) to read through it all. Such figures are both amazing and frightening at the same time.

So why does it matter? Isn’t bigger better? Well, to put it in perspective, data gathered in the US by research firm Basex showed that information overload cost the country US$900 billion in lost productivity during 2008 – and the figure continues to rise. Tackle this issue effectively and the savings could be significant.

Ah, if only it were that simple.

Navigating the internet without getting bogged down or distracted can be hard. The signal-to-noise ratio is on an upward spiral. There’s so much stuff to surf, oops I mean, search, before you find what you are actually looking for. A number of resources are available that purport to help you take back control. Some of these cost an exorbitant amount but there is also plenty of free advice. The only thing is: who has the time to go through each of the 827,000 hits to see which ones are worth reading? I certainly don’t.

But if everybody could become just that little bit more efficient at using this ever-expanding database, the potential benefits are not hard to imagine – and they extend well beyond the office or the boardroom. People might be able to leave work on schedule, spend more time with the family, see a play, go out for dinner, read a book, bake a cake, take the dog for a walk and generally enjoy the little things in life. The human race might reconnect. Remember that?

The internet is both friend and foe, but the bottom line is it’s here to stay. So the question is do we grimace or rejoice at the information it provides? My approach? I throw my hands behind my head, lean back and enjoy the ride – especially when I’m booking a holiday with little more than a wave of my hand. I accept that I cannot and should not try to use everything on the internet, and instead appreciate what I can do with it. Finally, I repeat the following mantra: ‘viva la internet!’ If you’ve got a better idea, I’d love to hear it.

Brandy Munro is a vet turned writer at WellmarkPerspexa, with 142,000 Google hits to her name.