What Do Premier League Football And Apple Have In Common?

New report says UK football CSR is maturing but needs to train harder and play as a team.

The defences are well and truly warmed up at Cupertino at the moment ahead of the iPhone 5 launch event next week but Daniel Agger isn’t part of the team.

Both brands have an almost religious like appeal to their audiences. Huge queues for product, tattoos and media saturation are just a couple of examples of the more obvious cultural similarities.

Both brands also have long journeys ahead of them on the CSR road and neither showing signs of ticking the leadership box any time soon.

I’ve just finished reading “It’s Not Just A Game: Community Work In The UK Football Industry And Approaches To Corporate Social Responsibility” by Heledd Jenkins and Laura James from the ESRC Centre at BRASS.

If you are into football, sport and all things CSR / sustainability go and take a read. It’s a comprehensive, intelligent and open report that provides a useful stick in the ground for the current state of social responsibility in UK football.

In short, all the clubs deliver effective community work locally with some reaching further afield across international boundaries, many through independent Community Trust models, but fall short on embedded strategic approaches, innovation, leadership and transparency.

Apple’s Ethical Watershed?

A window of opportunity and an open letter to CEO Tim Cook.

Is it me or is the current focus on Apple’s supply chain a different tune than we’ve heard before?

For years now many from responsible business community have rumbled in frustration at Apple’s lack of commitment and often blatant avoidance of sustainability issues.  Most of these professionals have ironically also either converted to Apple Macbooks / iPhones / iPad or continued their use throughout the regular ethical issues arising. I go to a few industry conferences and they’re often more like a Halloween orchard with the amount of glowing Apple logos on show.

Let’s be honest Apple products look damn good, mostly do the job you’d expect and you can’t argue with the almost religion-like power of the brand they’ve created under the stewardship of the recently departed Steve Jobs. For full disclosure I was once an Apple fan, during my days producing copious amounts writing, media materials and marketing documents at Everton FC, before I knew better about the details of the business operation and products themselves.  I adored their fanatical ethos about providing the most simple, usable interface which is pure beauty at times, especially compared to Windows Vista and earlier incarnations. I had the usual file format sharing problems but that was nearly ten years ago and much has changed.

I am beginning to sense the sustainability sharks circling.

An Apple a Day

Over the past couple of months I’ve attended a fair few CSR related events which are great for garnering the latest best practice or meeting interesting people.

One particular unspoken theme keeps quietly nagging at me. We are constantly preaching to the converted, albeit a painfully slowly growing audience.

How do we as a collection of practitioners, champions, academics, business leaders and consumers take the next and toughest step to begin to win over more naysayers who unfortunately occupy the majority?

We (those who know) are more than aware of the tangibly empowering benefits of having the wider vision that CSR / sustainability lenses give and have increasingly credible data to back up our position, but I still feel we’re still desperately clawing to get to any genuine tipping point. The explosion in social media is helping our cause by exponentially generating the sharing of information but something tells me we need something else.

Is CSR the management equivalent of fruit and vegetables in our diets? Everybody knows how nutritious oranges, pears, cucumbers, carrots etc are for us but how many really eat enough of what we should? If we had the marketing creativity of a global agency and the resources to push our humble fuuit & veg in the same way they do for say Nike trainers, Apple for iPhones or Coca-Cola would we eat more healthily? Does the responsibility / ethics agenda need a innovative and sustained marketing campaign?

We need somebody new to shake up the language and attitude to enthuse a new audience.

Imagine a world where Apple branched out into management consultancy…

Who would you want to market a new and improved CSR?