Top 60 Simon Mainwaring Quotes

The social business marketplace is effectively forcing brands to engage with consumers on the basis of something that is meaningful to them. More often than not, this takes the form of some core value that finds expression in a non-profit cause.

How much do you as a consumer value a positive experience with a brand or its customer service department? How willing are you to share that with your friends? How inclined are you to let that person know that you’re interaction with them was positive?

As any speaker will tell you, when you address a large number of people from a stage, you try to make eye contact with people in the audience to communicate that you’re accessible and interested in them.

What today’s business reality makes clear is that brands cannot survive in a society that is failing economically, socially, ethically, and morally.

Any institution faces two basic choices if they hope to spark new ideas. One is to leverage the brains trust within their organization by creating a special event dedicated to new thinking. The other is to look outside themselves to stimulate solutions.

Creating a better world requires teamwork, partnerships, and collaboration, as we need an entire army of companies to work together to build a better world within the next few decades. This means corporations must embrace the benefits of cooperating with one another.

Your computer needn’t be the first thing your see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.

Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.

Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

Non-profits must become deeply engaged in the ways that their donor communities are using social technology.

No one doubts the enormity of the social challenges we face around the world but one critical element of our response must be the generation of new thinking and ideas. Yet creating the conditions that make this possible is not simple.

Find the human in the technology. The currency marketers trade in has not changed even if the methods have. Emotion is what we exchange.

The way customers relate to brands and how profit is generated has changed so dramatically almost every professional is being challenged to reconsider what they do in order to stay relevant.

Ensure your employees understand what your brand stands for so they can be your first line of word-of-mouth advertising.

Technology is teaching us to be human again.

The currency of universal values make brands innately sharable.

If a brand genuinely wants to make a social contribution, it should start with who they are, not what they do. For only when a brand has defined itself and its core values can it identify causes or social responsibility initiatives that are in alignment with its authentic brand story.

However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.

Transforming a brand into a socially responsible leader doesn’t happen overnight by simply writing new marketing and advertising strategies. It takes effort to identify a vision that your customers will find credible and aligned with their values.

CEOs must embrace the role of serving as the public face of the company to their customer community and the marketplace at large.

Often motivated by a desire to maintain the existing status quo, sloth almost cost the U.S. its auto industry, as it refused for decades to build fuel-efficient cars to compete with Japanese, Korean and European imports.

In the social business marketplace, brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it.

What is sure is that technological change is accelerating in all directions and, like children playing in a fountain, consumers are reveling in the experience.

When something works for you or another brand, ask yourself, ‘Why?’ Then don’t copy it but think about what you can do that’s unique to you and better.

Brands are facing a new competitive landscape in which self-definition, core values and purpose will increasingly define their ability to reach customers that only allow what is meaningful in their lives to pass through their filter.

Like all technology, social media is neutral but is best put to work in the service of building a better world.

A social contract is the way out of this dilemma for corporations that want to lead in the 21st century by showing consumers how seriously they take customer loyalty and goodwill.

Social media companies must combine their mastery of the latest in real-time, location based or augmented reality technologies in the service of clear and consistent storytelling.

Without question, CEOs, executives and employees in companies in the United States and around the world have rallied to face the challenge of a social media marketplace.

Effectively, change is almost impossible without industry-wide collaboration, cooperation and consensus.

As we all know, lasting relationships can’t be rushed.

Since most corporate competitors have the same problems with sustainability and social reputation, it’s worth trying to solve them together.

Business practices and how we treat the planet are also in desperate need of re-humanization.

More brands are waking up to their social responsibility and doing good work through cause marketing campaigns. Yet too many still go about it the wrong way. I mean ‘wrong’ in two senses. Firstly, they are marketing ineffectively, and secondly, as a consequence their positive social impact is not maximized.

More than ever before, consumers have the ability to unify their voices and coalesce their buying power to influence corporate behaviors.

There is a growing awareness among brands that in order to participate in conversations that are taking place across social networks, they must join these discussions on the basis of something that is meaningful to their customers.

The creative destruction that social media is currently unleashing will change more than technology or the leader board of the Fortune 100. It is driving a qualitative shift in the nature of relationships between brands and their customers.

By linking with friends and ultimately strangers and building those relationships, social media is reweaving the social fabric that can then be used to scale your non-profit efforts.

Work with your competitors when the interest of the community and planet are at stake.

Companies and their brands need to reach out and speak directly to consumers, to honor their values, and to form meaningful relationships with them. They must become architects of community, consistently demonstrating the values that their customer community expects in exchange for their loyalty and purchases.

More and more companies are reaching out to their suppliers and contractors to work jointly on issues of sustainability, environmental responsibility, ethics, and compliance.

Social technology gives leaders a vital new platform with which to connect their companies to the myriad stakeholders who have an interest in their well being.

Consumers around the world are more aware of the multiple global crises we face than ever before, thanks to information found on the Internet.

Gluttony might be innocuous were it not for the fact that gluttons tend to disregard whether their self-serving behaviors harm anyone else. We don’t need to look far and wide to find examples of gluttonous behavior, as they are numerous throughout the history of capitalism.

Executives can no longer hide behind the corporate veil. They need to be accountable for what their companies do, because entities are responsible for socially irresponsible behavior.

Through their own actions, customers can hold companies responsible to higher standards of social responsibility. Through collective action, they can leverage their dollars to combat the force of those investors who myopically pursue profits at the expense of the rest of society.

When a positive exchange between a brand and customers becomes quantifiable metrics, it encourages brand to provide better service, customer service to do a better job, and consumers to actively show their gratitude.

There’s an adage that is an apt description of the new dynamic at work between brands and consumers connected through social media: People support what they help to build. But now that many brands are launching community-driven cause marketing campaigns, the challenge becomes what to do next?

Done correctly, everyone from individual speakers to large organizations can inspire citizens and customers to spread a message using their own social channels, and in so doing, inspire countless supporters to build their reputation, profits and social impact.