Simon Mainwaring

We First provides consulting and training to help companies tell the story of their good work in ways that build their business

Future

by

It’s never been easier for large corporations to kill their brands quickly. Emboldened by examples as far ranging as Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks – and armed with connective technology that allows them to communicate and organize themselves in unprecedented ways – customers now demand greater transparency, authenticity and accountability from brands in return for […]

It’s never been easier for large corporations to kill their brands quickly. Emboldened by examples as far ranging as Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks – and armed with connective technology that allows them to communicate and organize themselves in unprecedented ways – customers now demand greater transparency, authenticity and accountability from brands in return for …

Read More

by

It’s that time of year again: the SXSW Panel Picker is live and the session I look forward to presenting is called “The New Breed of Brands That Will Lead the Future.” With companies of all types facing a perfect storm of social crises, social technologies and customer activism, this session will come at the …

Read More

by

The future of profit is purpose. We say this often at We First, but this is something Steve Jobs understood so well, almost 20 years ago. Always a visionary, Jobs was already living in Marketing 3.0 where marketing is about meaning, values, and legacy. In this classic video, Jobs talks about his experience of how …

Read More

by

Welcome to the customer-driven economy, where the good a company does is increasingly becoming its defining competitive advantage. While CSR, cause-marketing, and sustainability might have seemed like nice-to-dos just a few years ago, articulating how your brand brings its core values to life is now critical in terms of the reputational, employee productivity and bottom …

Read More

by

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at Sustainable Brands Istanbul, and I wanted to share some of the insights from the event. We heard several fascinating presentations from speakers such as Marc Mathieu at Unilever (lower image) and Christiaan Maats, the founder of OATS shoes that both highlighted how sustainability has become a …

Read More

by

Last month, the United Nations marked 1000 days until the 2015 deadline of the “Millennium Development Goals,” a program started in 2000 with the goal of eliminating the worst impacts of human poverty within 15 years. This countdown was, in part, a response to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that countries …

Read More