I've a lot of time for the Howies brand. They do interesting and sound things, which is a good thing to have around in a 'buy-me' world saturated with self-interested sales messages. It's also good to have in a society that increasingly looks to brands to signpost, and hold our hopes for, a better world - a world with better corporate social responsibility.
Howies is an active life clothing brand from Wales (skate and bikes with lots of mud, concrete and the great outdoors), that is arguably fast becoming an icon of world class corporate social responsibility. They have grown from tiny to highly influential amongst a growing and committed group of consumers, to become an exemplar of innovative behaviour and ideas.
It feels like momentum on green issues is about to go through an inertia barrier. In Australia, Earth Hour is getting lots of media attention and intentions to do good by a big idea from the media industry itself. In Monterey, California this talk by John Doerr (filmed in March 07 and posted in May 07) on TED.com, is powerfully cogent and emotional. He talks about how companies are making money from greentech, and it is one of the most moving talks I have seen on this issue.
Meanwhile on the more populist end of the scale, videos like this one I got sent the other day are getting passed around on facebook funwalls, simplistically putting the case for doing something about global warming.
Howies may already be a world class case study of 'innovation and creativity, meets sustainable and substantial revenue generation, from networked communities with a conscience'. They have recently opened their first shop in London's Carnaby Street and they are making corporate social responsibility work for their business.
This brand is about as integrity as integrity gets. A visit to their site is a breath of corporate social responsibility freshness that is modern, entirely optimistic and extremely authentic. I think if there was an epitome of 'Slow branding', like the slow food movement, this brand would be pretty much the standard. Howies has over a number of years been a patient and great grower of a brand. An ideas company that says it's a clothing company.
From a marketer's point of view, they are interesting too. The founders, Clare and David, are both from the creative industries in London, Clare was a writer at brand experience company, Imagination, and David was a creative at the ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and the people that work for them are classic Pro-ams, as Charles Leadbeater would describe them (amateur enthusiasts who are serious about a pursuit like the enthusiastic consumer groups that made 'clunkers' the forerunners to mountain bikes of California).
An activity they did recently involving a blackboard paint covered van is a typically engaging and inspiring Howies piece of brand behaviour that combines corporate social responsibility with marketing ingenuity. They asked for ten cheap ideas to promote the brand and this was one. A skate tour in a white van, painted grey with blackboard paint (cost 120 pounds), with a question on the front about Nuclear Power. One side of the bus was the 'Is it green?' side, and on the other, 'Is it dumb?' and they toured the bus around skate parks where people wrote their views on the bus .
From a marketing point of view again, this is high brand engagement, non-traditional, brilliant blog fodder, no media budget, highly imaginative, hopeful and fresh - completely 'let's do something interesting and positive' thinking. It was a good idea, from an idea led challenger brand, a cause brand, not consumer insight driven, but high ideal driven. Not done before, not part of a campaign with a strapline, no key visual, no functional rtb emphasis, but a definite signature tone of the Howies brand throughout, a rapid low-cost prototype activity that wonderfully exemplifies a 'try stuff often, and always be true to ourselves' culture that has faith in the idea that good business comes from positive and ambitious thinking and doing.
In more product oriented behaviour they are equally as innovative. Good examples being a collaboration with Honda to use metal from old Honda cars to make rivets in Howies jeans. Also Howies sells certain items of clothing where they keep separate bits of the clothing items in stock, so that consumers can replace the bits that wear out as and when they need to, without having to buy a whole new garment. If your jacket has a hole in its elbow, you send it back and get the arm replaced.
In his moving talk, John Doerr talks about his fifteen year old daughter turning to him and blaming his generation for the mess we are in on global warming. Howies embodies a sense of hope that consumers of the solution seeking generation, like John's daughter, might relate to> I think corporations interested in making money whilst doing the right things might learn a lot from this small brand with a big, and very timely, point of view.
If there is a core trait that enables it to trailblaze a fresh way of doing things, I think its their appetite for doing something special and being very open to ambitious and big thinking collaborations with like minded partners. Other brands that have created cultural phenomena and step changes in their competitive sets have also been compulsive big thinking collaborators. Nike+ is a good example of collaboration raising the game.
Like the blackboard paint van with Tom Seymour, and the rivets with Honda UK, other brands that do CSR and social comment well are often at their best when they are in coalitions of high principles and like-mindedness. I think the power of good collaboration is underated by most brands - the constructing a partnerships of rapid prototyping, to coin Michael Schrage, is highly risky, difficult to measure and so it gets the too hard to do tag in more traditional marketer and agency company cultures.
Successful collaborators like Howies though, show that having an appetite for chancing frequent connections with people, who are in sync with your point of view, in the spirit of doing something special, can be inspiring, good for society, and good for business. They embrace the open-endedness of things because it is their very nature to pioneer and explore, which is perhaps why the brand works well in the CSR context as a great brand people can believe in for the long haul, and when times get tough or uncertain.
Brilliant read.
You write very evocatively.
However, I think the reason Howies can take the risks it does is because it cares so much that it doesn't care.
In other words, the emphasis isn't on the bottom line which is very often the case with big brand CSR campaigns.
Right on in every other respect.
Posted by: Chi-chi Ekweozor | February 29, 2008 at 11:22 AM