This was the unfortunate mini-crisis Telenor had to hear about from Bloggers and others recently - apparently an overzealous sales decision caused them to paint a brick-laying chimney without stopping to think what image it actually created. The pressure and outburst made Telenor reverse this action within a few days, but people had already related this to a CSR effort by that time.

For that sales sub-contractor who made the call, “branding” is probably literally the act of putting a logo on anything that moves, but we already know they’re a lot more than that.

There have been other such cases in the past by other companies - personally I’m highly against painting the walls of rural homes - wouldnt it much better instead to help those people by building better, stable pre-fabricated homes for them? Why not declare that there’s some community of these special homes beign created and sure have a logo on the side of the motorway pointing to that - thats good branding, because people would want to recognize the company behind good behavior… “oh hey! Those are Pepsi’s model rural outfits, lets go check them out!”.

The other question this type of events beg us to ask is that why arent such decisions run by teh CSR heads or CSR departments internally - just like most external communication, advertisements etc would be run by legal and regulatory depts to ensure they comply with regulation, shouldnt all ads, branding activities and other such decisions be run and approved by the CSR depts?

Is that happening inside of companies industry-wide? I would be surprised if it is.

Just some food for thought - has anyone seen internal operational models or processes which help to prevent things like these? If so please share your experience.

Share This