ISSUE 11 FIFTYFOUR DEGREES Lancaster University Management School | the place to be 14Lack of diversity in private equity firms 10Love the place you live in Don’t bea bad influencer 26The keys to a sustainable future
Investors in Excellence Join us in building a better future. It is an honour to contribute to the LUMS Investors in Excellence initiative. I am confident that, together with my fellow alumni, we can make a great contribution to helping LUMS continue to attract the brightest students from all over the globe. David Ong’olo (MSc Industrial Economics, 1988) “ ” By becoming a LUMS Investor in Excellence, you can support the future success of Lancaster University Management School, our students and researchers. From just £10 a month, join alumni from around the world in helping us to assist students most in need, produce world-leading research, and provide the best facilities for our whole community. www.lancaster.ac.uk/investors-in-excellence
FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 3 Diversity pays There is awell-recognised problemwith a lack of diversity in private equity firms, which are renowned for beingmade up of a small group of homogenous – predominantlymale – individuals. 6 Don’t be a bad influencer Social media influencers can have audiences in the millions, and they use their sway over followers to promote and endorse products. In this issue... 38 Forget the free lunch As governments worldwide continue to grapple with the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gerry Steele sets policy response options within the context of a familiar refrain – There is no such thing as a free lunch. Learning to level up The Work Foundation’s Melanie Wilkes looks at changes needed to improve access to lifelong learning opportunities. As we progress through the roadmap out of lockdown, many of us our are turning our attention to the economic impacts the pandemic will likely have over the months and years to come. 42 4 Learning while leading Leaders can often find themselves in leadership roles with little prior experience or training to prepare them to take charge. Dr Paul Irvine explains how there is still much leaders can learn while leading. 18 Lovewhere you live, not just where you visit If you have an attachment to a place, then you are more likely to do more to protect it. 10 Be thebest brand that you canbe In the digital age, brandsmust approach the task of building their prestige in awhole newway. 14 In need of more than just entrepreneurial spirit Entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a potential vehicle for women’s liberation in the Global South. 34 The keys to a sustainable future Transnational corporationsoperateacross theglobe,with their connectionsand supplychains linkingorganisations indiversesectorsandmanycountries. 26 Parasites or a symbiotic relationship? The Australian government’s decision to introduce legislation that would force platforms to pay publishers for carrying their content made global news as Facebook blocked all news from its site in the country. 30 Foreword We pride ourselves in Lancaster UniversityManagement School on the depth andwide scope of our research and engagement activities, and this edition of Fifty Four Degrees once again showcases that breadth of expertise and its relevance to thewider world. 22
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Fromways to help encourage people to care more for their local environment and howmajor corporations can influence the sustainability practices of whole sectors, to the pitfalls of social media influencing and the challenges facing traditional news organisations in an age when social media provides an ever-increasing number of people with their information, we investigate issues very much of the now. None of this research would be possible without the talented, thought-leading, innovative researchers I am lucky enough to call my colleagues. Our Investors in Excellence programme provides us with a new avenue to ensure they continue to push boundaries and place us at the cutting-edge of impactful research. By asking for as little as £10 a month from Investors, we can open new doors, provide fresh opportunities and make a real difference in lives within and without the School. With your help we will inspire the next generation of these world-leading researchers, provide opportunities for students who might not otherwise be able to take them, increasing diversity and supporting those most in need, and build the facilities that enable all of them to thrive with us. You can find details in the early pages of this edition should you wish to discover more about becoming a member of this most valuable and inspirational group. The research you can read about within these pages includes that of Jan Bebbington, the new Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business. I look forward greatly to working with Jan over the next five years as she guides the important agenda of the centre, and her piece on keystone corporations and their influence provides real food for thought. That is something that Alistair Anderson would provide in spades for any of us who were lucky enough to work or engage with him over an illustrious career. Alistair’s piece in this edition – co-written with his PhD student Funmi Ojediran – was completed shortly before his sad, sudden death earlier this year. Alistair will be greatly missed by all of us in the Management School, by those who worked with him in Uppsala and Aberdeen, and many more to whom he proved an inspirational and thoughtful colleague. Fumni’s piece with him on the potential for entrepreneurship to empower women in the Global South demonstrates how he continued to touch upon important issues right to the end. Elsewhere in these pages, Juliana Sutanto looks as the influence of news aggregators in the wake of Facebook shutting down for time in Australia; Hayley Cocker discovers how social media influencersmust be careful not to upset those people they look to influence; and Ahmad Daryanto investigates how residents and tourists take different attitudes to looking after the places they love. We hear from Paul Irvine on the importance and potential of learning while leading, while picking up new skills is also the focus of the Work Foundation’s Melanie Wilkes, albeit in the context of the government’s investment in training for workers. I amdelighted that, for the first time, we can feature research fromone of our colleagues at Lancaster University Leipzig, as Benjamin Hammer discusses the impact of diversity on private equity firms. We are able to draw on a wide LUMS community for this publication. Gerald Steele is an Emeritus Professor in our Economics Department, and he turns his expertise to fiscal policy, and one of our alumni, JP Kuehlwein, graces us with a captivating piece on brand elevation. JP is one of many of our alumni who have gone on to successful careers across the world, and we are proud to welcome his contribution. Professor Angus Laing is Dean of Lancaster University Management School and Chair of the Academic Advisory Board at Nurture Higher Education Group. a.w.laing@lancaster.ac.uk Foreword Weprideourselves in LancasterUniversity ManagementSchool onthedepthand widescopeofour researchand engagement activities, andthis editionofFiftyFour Degreesonceagain showcasesthat breadthofexpertise and its relevanceto thewiderworld. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 5 SUBSCRIBE
6 | Don’t beaba
FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 7 Social media influencers can have audiences in the millions, and they use their sway over followers to promote and endorse products. But Dr Hayley Cocker finds that both brands and influencers face potential backlash if they fail to abide by community rules. ad influencer
The increasing popularity of social media has given rise to new breeds of celebrity – the social media influencer among them. It is hard to miss social media influencers (SMIs), even – perhaps especially – during Covid-19 and the resultant lockdowns. Some provoked ire with trips to Dubai and claims to be ‘key workers’. The media storm surrounding visits to sun-kissed beaches of the Arabian Peninsula saw SMIs claiming celebrity endorsements meant they ‘had’ to be there. The resultant negative publicity demonstrates the difficulties in promoting brands without damaging their own profile or that of the endorser. Companies are investing growing sums on these online influencers, looking to reach their large followings through endorsements on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or whichever social media platform they use to speak to often millions of followers. Their influence is especially great among younger generations of consumers – in February, it was revealed that British American Tobacco are planning to spend £1bn on influencers to help boost sales of e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches among younger users. Global expenditure on ‘influencer marketing’ is predicted to reach $15bn by 2022, be it through traditional celebrities whose fame transcends and predates their social media presence or through SMIs, whose fame derives entirely from that presence. SMIs regularly use their platforms to promote brands to followers – sometimes in return for free samples, sometimes for free trips to exotic destinations for product launches (the Maldives, anyone?), sometimes for plain old cash. Advertorial content, brand ambassador roles, gifts and experiences all contribute to brand exposure as SMIs become prominent and influential celebrity endorsers. But as the furore around lockdown trips to Dubai demonstrates, there are risks for both parties – for their image, for their sales, for their brand. Many SMIs started out in online communities, gaining celebrity status and exhibiting significant influence over the consumption behaviours of their large following. It is when they commercialise that influence with celebrity endorsements that difficulties arise. These activities are not something they can hide. Advertising Standards Authority regulations introduced in 2015 and 2019 require SMIs to disclose paid advertorials, brand partnerships or ambassadorships, as well as the receipt of complementary or discounted products and experiences. Initial concerns surrounded the contradictions between receiving incentives and providing unbiased product recommendations. SMIs were accused of ‘selling out’, putting their own interests and that of the endorser above the interests of the community, showing a lack of loyalty to fellow community members, provoking anger and contempt. But SMIs justified their actions by explaining they provided free video content and needed to monetise their activities to continue doing so. Communities became more open to endorsements, but bound SMIs to moral responsibilities – breaches of community norms are taken to heart, a personal betrayal to the community. We studied the YouTube beauty community (YTBC), which revolves around beauty vloggers, for three years. A large number of members have become SMIs and celebrity 8 |
endorsers, many with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, and some featuring on the covers of leading women’s magazines and on primetime TV shows. These SMIs have turned vlogging into a lucrative career, and a significant portion of their social media content includes celebrity endorsements – through paid advertorials, brand ambassador roles, or the inclusion of gifted PR products or experiences. Our YTBC study of 12 SMIs with a high number of followers, and a history of both celebrity endorsements and of YouTube uploads, revealed five recurring celebrity endorsement transgressions, with a range of consequences for both the SMIs and the brands, affecting the SMI’s credibility, how the brand is perceived and the purchase intentions of the community members to varying degrees. UNDERHAND ENDORSEMENTS These are endorsements made in a secretive or dishonest manner, with the SMI not disclosing its nature to the community. Community members would often cite UK regulations to justify their views, but their expectations often went beyond legal requirements, expecting SMIs to operate to their standards, not just within regulatory boundaries. OVER-ENDORSEMENT This is when the community sees the SMI as having amoral responsibility to ensure themajority of their content is organic (not featuring endorsements), thus continuing to provide unbiased reviews and comment. One SMI saw her credibility brought into question for posting too many endorsements. One community member said: “I feel like you have lost so much of that originality to brands taking over and you selling something video after video.” And another: “It makes us question which products you genuinely like.” In other media, whether a celebrity actually uses a product they promote is seen as relatively unimportant, here it is an important consideration. OVER-EMPHASIS SMIs have a moral responsibility to provide valuable content for the community and to ensure endorsements do not detract from audience enjoyment. Overly-scripted or staged endorsements, or videos where the endorsed product is the sole focus are quickly identified as transgressions. OVER-SATURATION When brands partner withmultiple SMIs, commissioning them to post similar endorsements in quick succession. OVER-INDULGENCE Communitymembersaccept that SMIs need toengage inendorsements, but they expect themtobe for products they genuinelyuseand like.When theyareseen ashaving receivedexcessive incentives, they risk theperceptionof bias. UK regulations mean the scale of gifts is more easily seen, and the allexpenses paid trips and PR packages – such as cosmetics brand Benefit flying SMIs to a luxury Maldives resort to launch a newmascara, and Nars taking them to Ibiza and Bora Bora for product launches – jeopardise SMIs’ perceived objectivity and credibility. Communitymembers engage in both situational attribution – reducing the responsibility of the SMI for breaches, instead placing blame on the endorsing brand – and dispositional attribution – blaming transgressions on the celebrity’s personality, character or disposition. While some transgressions – underhand endorsement, overendorsement – are blamed on the SMI, others are put squarely at the feet of the brand – over-emphasis, oversaturation, over-indulgence. If it is the former, the community often clarify their expectations in a polite, friendly manner – supporting the SMI and their content at the same time – and suggest the breaches were the result of a mistake or a misunderstanding of expectations. Repeatedbreaches lead toSMIs being brandedas ‘sly’, ‘greedy’, ‘dishonest’ and ‘inauthentic’, with communitymembers often saying theywill avoid the endorsements andonlywatchorganic content. This can still affect thebrand, as theSMI’s credibility is called intoquestion. For over-emphasis, over-saturation and over-indulgence, brands were often held responsible. Be it that theywereportrayedas having toohigh a level of control over videos (over-emphasis), or that the repetitionof their promotions is sees as ‘overkill’, with SMIs among the victims (over saturation), community userswereput off. Brands are not community members, but they are considered culpable for transgressions, even if the SMI is not, with the community often more forgiving of SMIs seen as being forced into transgressions. Consequences include brand fatigue, negative sentiment building towards the brand, or community members avoiding and not buying their products. NO EASY SOLUTIONS Sowhat canSMIs andbrands do toavoid these issues? Moreeffective communicationduring the planning stages – considering theeffects ofmultipleendorsements in a short time for bothparties, allowing theSMImore creative control, clearlydisclosing endorsements – and studying community expectations can lead tomore favourable reception toendorsements. Not all of this is easy, but it could help avoid the very audience you are trying to engage with from turning against you. Dr Hayley Cocker is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Marketing. The paper Social Media Influencers & Transgressive Celebrity Endorsement in Consumption Community Contexts, coauthored with Dr Rebecca Mardon and Professor Kate Daunt, of Cardiff University, is published in the European Journal of Marketing. h.cocker@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 9
10 | LOVEWHEREYOUL NOTJUSTWHEREY If you have an attachment to a place, then you aremore likely to domore to protect it. But, Dr Ahmad Daryanto finds that howmuch you do to preserve the environment depends onwhether you are a resident or a tourist.
FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 11 LIVE, YOUVISIT
Each of us have place we are attached to. Places we keep with us, sometimes far away in distance but tucked away in a cosy recess in the back of the mind; sometimes right on our doorstep and easily accessed. We form a bond with these places, be it that they bring back happy memories of times gone by, or that we have built a community connection over time. We foster a sense of belonging, one that grows through interactions with the place itself and social interactions that occur there, be it through the daily activities of a resident or the recreational and social experience of a tourist. This is ‘place attachment’, and place attachment theory posits that where people have an emotional bond with a place, it can generate positive behaviour to protect it, such as pro-environmental behaviour (PEB). But we wanted to quantify the effect and discover why it is not uniform, why some studies have found place attachment to have no – or even a negative – effect. We conducted a study that found that while place attachment does have a broadly positive effect on people’s PEB, cultural and individual factors affect how great this is. One factor appears to be counterintuitive: that where residents and tourists (from the same country, not international visitors with potentially different inherent cultures) are equally attached to a place, it is the tourists who will behave in a move proenvironment manner. Previous research has shown that tourists are less likely to be environmentally friendly through their indulgent activities, but their PEB is more complex. Tourists’ attachments are very often related to how a destination can serve their recreational purposes – they are on holiday to have fun, a good time, and anything that can improve that, such as caring for and improving the environment, boosts that experience. Activities such as trail hiking, rock climbing and museum visits can contribute to the development of an attachment to the place, and tourists are more likely to behave in environmentally friendly ways when this leads to better experiences. Tourists can anticipate a feeling of future nostalgia froma holiday – most of us will have memories of vacations from years and decades gone by, from childhood to adulthood – and they do not want those memories tainted by a damaged or polluted environment. Tourists and residents develop their sense of attachment in different ways, and thus their motives for behaving pro-environmentally differ. 12 |
Whereas a tourist may look to create positive memories from a short stay, for local residents, what matters is more likely to be the social bonds that evolve in the course of their daily life. They are part of the community, their activities in the place are more day-to-day, more mundane, they are not looking to create lifelong memories each and every day. Residents’ attachment to a place is longer-term and more stable. Place attachment can lead residents to stay in a place, regardless of its environmental quality. There can be a general feeling of satisfaction with the status quo, a lack of drive to change or improve an area with which people have no problem. Place attachment can generate a tendency to protect and improve the environment, but it can also engender an oversight of the need to behave in such a way. There is also the issue of residents needing to invest more time and effort in pro-environment activities over a longer period of time to maintain and improve the quality of the environment. For a tourist, they might be in a place a matter of weeks; for a resident, they can be there each and every day for years. But it is not just with tourists as opposed to residents where we find differences in behaviour. The culture you come fromplays a part. In collective cultures, people feel obliged to give priority to collective interest, but self-interest rules in individualist cultures. Andwe found that those from collectivist cultureswho are attached to a place aremore likely to engage in PEB than those from individualistic cultures. This result probably explainswhy the concept of ‘Gotong-Royong’ (working together) embedded in Indonesian culture could succeed in local communities in Indonesia. Generally, collectivists have the tendency to sacrifice personal interests for the interest of the place, such as looking after it environmentally, whereas individualists act in a pro-environment manner to serve personal goals or interests, and this is less likely to be through place attachment. Someone froma collectivist culturemay behave pro-environmentally to the benefit of a place even if that behaviour requires more time, effort or monetary input. These findings offer implications for public policy makers in how they can use place attachment to encourage PEB. Public authorities can use this place attachment, nurture and encourage it. Since residents who are attached to a place may feel satisfied with the existing environmental state, and overlook the need to protect or improve it, the severity of the problem needs to be driven home. Policymakers could design campaign messages highlighting such issues, telling individuals they need to act to protect their well-loved places. For tourists, our findings underscore the importance of creating and strengthening a sense of attachment towards tourist destinations. Given their tendency to protect their recreational environment, authorities could emphasise the important role tourists play inmaintaining and improving the environment – creating beautiful memories of their beloved destination. In collective cultures where groups or communities are more valued, improving place attachment could generate higher environmental returns as people look to protect places not just for themselves but for the good of the larger population. Again, authorities could use this in their marketing messages, communicating the shared community values of a place. This has been done in Indonesia with its cultural concept of ‘Gotong-Royong’, and in China, where one pro-environment campaign used a slogan that can be translated literally as ‘the district is our home, and its environment depends on every one of us’. Dr Ahmad Daryanto is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Marketing. His paper, Ameta-analysis of the relationship between place attachment and proenvironmental behaviour, co-authored with Dr Zening Song, of Beijing Foreign Studies University, is published in the Journal of Business Research. a.daryanto@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 13 Since residents who are attached to a place may feel satisfied with the existing environmental state, and overlook the need to protect or improve it, the severity of the problem needs to be driven home. ʻʻ ʼʼ
14 | DIVERSIT PAYS
FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 15 TY There is awell-recognised problemwith a lack of diversity in private equity firms, which are renowned for beingmade up of a small group of homogenous – predominantlymale – individuals. Dr BenjaminHammer shows that increasing diversity can result in better results and buyout performance – key factors in a numbers-based business.
Diversity is a big issue for big business – and it is only growing more important. Increasingly, firms large and small around the world are recognising the importance – and the benefits – of reflecting the views and needs of minority groups when it comes to their operations and strategies. All strategic choices at the apex of a corporation – and thus a company’s performance – result from how managers filter and use information. To do this, they use their cognitive bases and value sets, and if you have a homogeneous group with similar characteristics making these decisions, you are missing out on different perspectives and potential choices. There are recognised benefits to diversifying boards, and there is already evidence that increased gender diversity delivers better firm performance. Studies have shown that more diverse boards are less prone to financial restatements and fraud, and that female board representation is linked to improved governance, environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility, though it needs to be more than a token presence. Further research shows that Fortune 500 boards with female directors have higher returns on sales and invested capital than their all-male counterparts; and Goldman Sachs CEODavid Solomon has announced his firmwould not take a company public unless it has at least one ‘diverse’ boardmember. The Alternative Investment (AI) industry is one area where diversity is much needed. The industry, including hedge funds, private equity funds (PE) and venture capital, is a cornerstone of global wealth management, with around $12tn in assets under management (AuM), 16%of global AuM. Yet it is dominated by a homogeneous group of people – white men who attended elite business schools and came from investment banking or consulting. Women make up only 20%of AI professionals, represent less than 12% of senior positions globally, and in the USA own only 5%of PE firms, 16 |
accounting for 3%of the industry’s AuM. Among VC investors in the USA, only 2% are Hispanic and 1% are Black. There is a clear lack of diversity across the industry, but our research into the effects of diversity of Lead Partner Teams (LPTs) of PE funds on buyout performance shows that more sociodemographic diversity – of age, gender and nationality – leads to higher deal returns. The PE industry is a resultsdriven game, where there are powerful incentives for LPTs to maximise their portfolio company’s value in a short holding period, as large parts of their compensation are tied to deal performance, so there is much to be said for increasing diversity to boost performance – and profits. All diversity can disrupt group processes while simultaneously creating synergistic performance benefits; for a long time, there has been a debate over the ‘bright side’ and the ‘dark side’. On the bright side, diversity is thought to offer improved, more nuanced decision-making due to a broader set of perspectives; on the dark side, the belief is that there will be deteriorated decision-making due to the potential for clashes and a lack of cooperation. Our research took in 241 buyouts between 1997 and 2015 – the vast majority (95.4%) from Europe and North America. Among those buyouts, there were 547 partners, of whom only 27 were female, and 42.8% fell into the 10-year age-group between 35 and 45, the figures demonstrating the lack of diversity, but the results showed the benefits of socio-demographic diversity where it does exist. There are different perspectives when this diversity occurs, but because the different perspectives are not the result of deliberate career choices, these differences are beneficial. Differences in gender, age or nationality do not mean that members do not still share large parts of their cognitive bases and values, reflected in common life choices around work experience and education. This diversity creates a broad pool of opinions with few of the diversity costs that create arguments and a lack of communication and cooperation. The bright side of diversity becomes even more important in complex deals and uncertain deal environments. Large or cross-border deals, as well as inorganic deal strategies, increase the complexity for PE firms, and distinct perspectives, holistic assessments and adaptive thinking are helpful in mastering the deal environment and removing additional transaction costs. The ability to be flexible is critical during times of environmental uncertainty, so LPTs with diverse backgrounds benefit from superior information assessment, with these diverse perspectives, skills and backgrounds becoming more valuable. The same here is true for occupational diversity – LPTmembers from across different departments and areas of business expertise – but that is not generally the case for PE deals, which tend to suffer worse results as a consequence of this form of diversity. Generally, an increase in occupational diversity can cause communication issues, and this highlights that specialisation in a particular field can be more valuable than occupational diversification. Unlike gender, nationality, or age, the diversity factors around professional skills and attributes gained throughout a career are voluntary and can lead to people with distinct values and cognitive bases – marketing vs finance perspectives, for instance. This creates a lack of common ground, putting up barriers to communication and cooperation, outweighing the potential benefits of additional perspectives. These issues around occupational diversity should not obscure the benefits of socio-demographic diversity, but rather can help PE firms find an adequate balance between too little and too much diversity in their hiring and staffing policies. There can be too much of a good thing when it comes to diversity, when it leads to a lack of a ‘common language’ or a shared value-set owing to differing fields of expertise, but it is beneficial to have as much socio-demographic diversity as possible in the workforce. Hopefully, these results can help to convince more PE firms that it pays to employ such a diverse workforce, and support the drive by non-profit initiatives such as Level 20 to increase diversity in the notoriously homogeneous PE industry. That can only be a good thing. Dr Benjamin Hammer is a Lecturer in Accounting and Finance at Lancaster University Leipzig, and a member of the Accounting and Finance Department in Lancaster University Management School. The paper TheMore theMerrier? Diversity and Private Equity Performance is co-authored by Silke Pettkus and Norbert Wünsche, of HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, and Professor Denis Schweizer, of the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, Montreal. It is published in the British Journal of Management. b.hammer@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 17
18 | Inneedofmoreth entrepreneurial s
hanjust spirit FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 19 Entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a potential vehicle for women’s liberation in theGlobal South. But Professor Alistair Anderson and Funmi Ojediran say there are large cultural and societal obstacles thatmust be overcome to achieve the goal.
Across the Global South – those parts of the globe made up of poor regions outside Europe and North America, most with low-income and with less-developed economies – many women find themselves treated as second-class citizens and secondrate entrepreneurs. They enjoy fewer opportunities with regards to education, to employment, to controlling their own destiny, and there is a widespread desire for those circumstances to change. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as a possible emancipatory instrument for women’s liberation and empowerment from endemic poverty, overt discrimination, and patriarchal restrictions; indeed, it is held up almost as a universal ‘solution’ for numerous problems in the Global South. The benefits of entrepreneurship are many-fold: it creates wealth and jobs, offers welfare, can build confidence and status. Governments, policymakers, and international donor organisations see it as a strategic tool for economic growth and social advancement – a mechanism for emancipation and independence. The World Economic Forum suggested in 2018 that empowering women to engage in the global economy would add US$28tn in GDP growth by 2025. This empowerment is a multidimensional process where women emerge as self-reliant and confident in their independence to make choices and control their own resources. It includes access to economic power and income generation, education, rights, and political participation. It is this empowerment that challenges female subordination in a society. Much emphasis on women’s entrepreneurship in the Global South centres around the economic issues, thus failing to address key societal aspects. It supposes all men and women, rich and poor, can achieve their potential if they try hard enough. Questions of empowerment must take into account the full social context in which entrepreneurship takes place. Both formal and informal institutions – cultural, social, and political – shape the ways in which women’s entrepreneurship is treated both across the geography and in specific areas. Women entrepreneurs encounter many impediments that shape and stunt their practice, as the interplay of tradition, culture, and patriarchy conspire to subordinate their efforts. Their entrepreneurial agency – the ability to make things happen – is constricted. Women desire to be liberated from the status quo, from poverty and subordination, through the empowerment of entrepreneurship – it is seen as a gateway out of imprisonment to allow them to achieve more as individuals. Some strive to involve other women, and thus alter the societal status quo and rectify women’s subjugation. In many countries and societies, this is because women have much lower prospects of controlling their lives and careers, or of making economic 20 |
decisions, and the dual demands of family – where they are often expected to be wives and mothers first and foremost – and business can be the opposite of liberating. In general, the impediment to women’s empowerment is the fact they are women, and this manifests itself across the Global South in different ways. MANY DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF THE SAME PROBLEM The picture is non-uniform: 15%of businesses in Jordan are femaleowned; in Saudi Arabia the figure is 4%. Yet in Sub-Saharan Africa, half of entrepreneurs are female; and in Latin America and the Caribbean, 50%of businesses are owned by women, with female entrepreneurship wide-ranging. But look closer and you see that more than 54%of those women’s businesses in Latin America and 48% in the Caribbean are informal – even where there appear to be positive aspects, it is not always so clear-cut. In some Islamic countries, conservative interpretations of Sharia Laws act against them, yet some women are inspired by Islamic precepts: Prophet Mohammed’s first wife, Khadija, was a successful business owner. Likewise, issues arguably emanating from Confucianism leads to female subordination in countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. In contrast, in many Global South nations, women are constitutionally equal – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Paraguay are among those with anti-discriminatory legislation – yet, the number of women entrepreneurs trail behind that of men. They may not encounter legal blocks on their ability to enter business, but they come across restrictive cultural practices – in Saudi Arabia, women must have permission from a familial male authority to start a business, and they are often compelled to engage in family business rather than sole proprietorship; in parts of India and Africa, women are considered their husband’s property once married, and husbands can instruct them to close their businesses. Conservative social structures, patriarchal norms, political and religious systems accentuate male dominance, and choices must often be made to respect traditional gender norms and religious guidelines. There are problems with the social acceptance of women entrepreneurs, male chauvinism or machismo cultures are prevalent, and poverty in some countries – such as India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka – is explicitly feminised. Across the sphere, there are gendered biases in lending models – financial institutions are often unwilling to lend to women, and more than 70%of women entrepreneurs in developing countries lack access to suitable finance. Access to microfinance is a key enabling factors, which can reinforce confidence and provide empowerment. Without this, attempts to use women’s entrepreneurship as a key to empowerment and emancipation are weakened. CAUSE FOR HOPE There are reasons for optimism throughout the Global South. In India, women high in the Hindu caste system engage in training and empowering women in rural communities. In countries that formed part of the former Soviet Union, Soviet ideology had a progressive effect on women’s lives, though the demise of communism saw a rebirth of the patriarchy and strengthened male guardianship. Entrepreneurship has some power to challenge male hegemony, oppression, power imbalance and deeply entrenched cultures that marginalise women’s enterprises and make it much harder for women to seize the power to reshape their futures and improve their wellbeing. However, the process is slow, and progress is modest. Most women’s entrepreneurship is at the micro level, informal, and unlikely to grow; liberation is limited, and the dynamics of cultures, institutions, regions, and individuals mean it may be impossible to arrive at a universal solution for the Global South. The liberating powers of entrepreneurship are overstated; it may create the ability to make decisions, but it does not necessarily mean women will make them. Those women who venture into the sphere do gain some independence and have begun to erode those cultural bastions, chipping away at the social order. They serve as role models for change, demonstrate how things can and should be done, open doors for others to follow, and undermine the patriarchy; but total emancipation is a long, slow game. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 21 Funmi Ojediran is a PhD student in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, studying how Black women become established as wine entrepreneurs in South Africa. Alistair Anderson was a Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy until his sudden death following a short illness shortly after the submission of this article. He will bemissed across theManagement School as a friend, a kind and generous colleague, and an inspirational and world-leading researcher. Their paper, Women’s entrepreneurship in theGlobal South; Empowering and emancipating? is published in Administrative Sciences. f.ojediran@lancaster.ac.uk
22 | Bethebestbrand In the digital age, brandsmust approach the task of building their prestige in awhole newway. Lancaster UniversityManagement School alumnus JP Kuehlwein andWolf Schaefer, co-authors of BrandElevation explain the challenges companies face, and how they can overcome them.
FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 23 dthatyoucanbe
The newmillennium brought a major shift to the world of brand building. Brands, especially prestige or luxury brands – ‘Ueber-Brands’ – are no longer just marketing instruments for attracting customers; they are embraced as guiding the enterprise overall, inspiring and engaging internal and external stakeholders. Two big drivers that pushed this shift – technology and people. Technology: Digitisation has brought transparency and accessibility. The first forces brands and companies to practice what they preach; the second empowers and commands direct brand-consumer interaction. Together they have made brands as a purely external ‘image’ or ‘label’ impossible: it must be lived. People: We have all been overmarketed to. ‘Hidden persuaders’ are now pretty obvious to almost everyone, and we have become more critical of crude commercialism, expecting reflection and responsibility, even as we still run for the sale. We want to shop ourselves a better world. There has also been a general trend towards independent ‘company brands’, following the tradition of highend designer labels in fashion, the ‘grandes maisons’, where the brand is the sign over the door and sales are done directly to consumers: My name. My work. My reputation. This led us in 2015 to revisit the way Ueber-Brands are built, brands that appear above and beyond their competition, peerless and priceless. Our latest work translates the theory into action, with our Ueber-Brand Program™ presenting four things you need to understand if you want to build a modern prestige brand. STARTWITH YOURSELF This is nothing less than turning the traditional brand strategy model on its head: Don’t start with market or consumer research, start with your ideas and ideals. Of course, customer and business realities still matter, but only once you are clear about what you want to dedicate your brand to and why. Then you will use them to validate your concept, adjust, find the right target, ensure profitability etc. If you start out by looking for market gaps, you will never be anything but opportunistic, rather than leading with a sense of mission. Youmust inspire what could be, not be defined by what is. Brands today are, first and foremost, agents of change. Their job is not tomake overblown promises, but to give us hope for a slightly brighter, better tomorrow, to help us becomewhowewant to be. There aremany good examples, including Airbnb, who not only revolutionised the hospitality industry but gave us away to feel we ‘BelongAnywhere’. DON’T LET DATA DRIVE YOUR DREAM, BUT SHARE IT Marc Pritchard, CMO of P&G, was one of the first to kick-off a more mature and balanced assessment of our shiny new digital world when he declared that the days of all-digital are numbered in 2017. This attitude is gaining ground, with adidas one of the latest to announce a shifting in focus from performance marketing back to including more traditional brand building communication. The BurningMan festival does not spend a penny on social media campaigns. Theirmagic lies in keeping all ‘shut’, disabling live posts and feeds, for example, and instead creating thousands of personal experiences that participants share organically and personally. None of these big players are rejecting the possibilities of online communication, datamining, re-targeting, individualised interaction etc, but they are recognising and utilising these possibilitieswhile being aware of their limitations. There is a difference between tactical communication and strategic brand building. Quantity and quality are often opposing goals; efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. Individual marketing fulfils other functions than public campaigns, thus, it can never be either or, itmust always be “aswell as”. The big data party is not over, but it seemswe are coming back toour senses. Data and performance marketing can be helpful in connecting with targets, but they should not take over. ELEVATE THE TANGIBLE BY REACHING FOR THE INTANGIBLE “The mystery and the protocol, it’s not there to keep us apart; it’s there to keep us alive,” says Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. The same holds true for Ueber-Brands. 24 | If you start out by looking for market gaps, you will never be anything but opportunistic, rather than leading with a sense of mission. You must inspire what could be, not be defined by what is. ʻʻ ʼʼ
You need proper context and entourage to elevate yourself, but above all you need mystery and myth. To transcend the everyday, you must rise to a higher level. Just associating emotions with your brand is not enough. You need to lift people and connect themwith what they want to be, what could be: it is about aspiration. This is why we made Writing Your Myth the second step to create an UeberBrand, right after Setting Your Mission. A brand narrative is not just a means to structure and integrate communications and interactions, it’s primarily a way to shine brighter and lead higher, to hold meaning and have cultural significance, to inspire followers and all of us to move up and on. For the same reason, not just any story will do, you need one with mythical qualities Myths talk about our “collective dreams”, as Joseph Campbell put it. They hold us together as societies, connect groups and inspire movements, and help us individually figure out who we are, what we want to be and where we want to go. Just look at Tesla, which is much more than a story of technological advance. It is the myth of a maverick breaking boundaries, taking us higher and further than we thought possible. That’s what makes the brand take such a strong Ueber-Position. DON’T DECLARE. DO We are living in an experience economy. People are sick and tired of dull, selfcongratulatory brand promotions, even if they’re just watching some tacky ‘unboxing’ on YouTube. They want brands to add value when they pop up, not just promise it. Ueber-Brands thrive on ‘ideas that do’. The whole content and community craze in marketing has certainly led to some excess – not every shampoo needs to come with a tutorial in female equality. But there is no way back. The “podcast class” as The New York Times called it, prefers entertainment and education, advice, support, connections and experiences over unrequested and uninteresting brand declarations or irrelevant messages. Who can blame them? One of the biggest advantages of the digital revolution is that brands have many more (often more economic and effective) opportunities to engage with people directly. Let us use them and think twice before we resort to shouting or retarget themwith the 20th offer on Venice flights they booked three months ago. Creativity no longer means sugarcoating the “bitter” brand message. The challenge we all face it to constantly develop new, surprising ways for our brand to positively impact people’s lives and societies as a whole. Gucci did a stellar job surprising and entertaining us in a pandemic year. And so did Louis Vuitton and their ‘Zoom with friends adventures’. Hublot introduced a Digital Boutique, allowing customer to connect with the store for a real-life consultation online. But ‘doing’ is not just the imperative in engaging and interacting with your targets. It is the rule for brand-building overall. This is why doing comes before brands start talking and daring. Youmust live your brandmission andmyth in all you do. Declaring without doing is not good, but not doing as declared is worse. JP Kuehlwein (left) is the co-founder and principal at UeberBrands, an advisory firm helping ‘elevate brands to make brands priceless’ and adjunct Professor of Marketing at Columbia University. He earned a postgraduate degree in Business Analysis from Lancaster University Management School in 1992. This article is based on his book, Brand Elevation – Lessons in UeberBranding, co-authored with Wolf Schaefer (right). It features input frommarketing leaders from Starbucks, Acqua di Parma, YouTube and Airbnb, among others. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 25 One of the biggest advantages of the digital revolution is that brands have many more (often more economic and effective) opportunities to engage with people directly. ʻʻ ʼʼ
26 | THEKEYS TOA SUSTAINABLE FUTURE Transnational corporations operate across the globe, with their connections and supply chains linking organisations in diverse sectors andmany countries. Professor Jan Bebbington, Director of the PentlandCentre for Sustainability in Business, explains how these ‘keystone actors’ can forge the path for others to follow, and have amajor impact on protecting the planet.
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Concerns about the adverse environmental (and social) impact of organisations have a longstanding history. Transnational corporations have a bigger impact than most – but also the opportunity to bring about and influence change beyond the realms of their own activity. They are ‘keystone actors’, where the effects of human activity on global change are manifest, and they have the capability to drive global levels of change. Accountingmay not be the first area that springs tomind when it comes to producing positive change in these problemareas, but accountants are critical to connecting organisations and ecology, and two core functions of the accounting craft can be effective. Firstly, accounting techniques can be used to establish organisational control over impacts. Secondly, information about organisational impacts plays a role in discharging accountability to external parties (including shareholders, capital market participants, funders, regulators and other stakeholder groups who affect or are affected by organisations). While social and environmental accounting was considered a ‘fringe’ activity 30 years ago, it has increasingly become mainstream as the nature of environmental problems have become better understood. It is nowmore widely appreciated that environmental problems such as biodiversity loss and climate change pose significant risks to the ecological integrity of ecosystems that themselves underpin human wellbeing. Likewise, focus on the environmental effects of organisations has expanded to include how ongoing organisational functions depend on natural systems: itself linked to risk assessment. As a result, rather than environmental effects constituting an unexpected and relatively minor side effect of organisational activity, they have become a central focus of science, policy and practice worlds. Our work at the PentlandCentre, andmy own research as part of the SeaBOS (SeafoodBusiness forOcean Stewardship) project, emerges fromthis context, shaping howour work as researchers and scientistsmight be brought to bear for impact on practice and policy. At the same time, we seek to respond to the ‘grand societal challenges’ presented by global environmental change, and the attendant social and economic dimensions, by using the ‘keystoneactor’ approach, illustrated by the SeaBOSproject focused on global seafood providers. Transnational corporations shape the context in which organisations operate, the rules they are subject to, and the flow of goods and services across the world. They also connect production and consumption through their global supply chains and link all aspects of the global economy. These connections might include common shareholders, lenders and insurers, or they might be listed on common stock exchanges. We use the language of ‘tele-coupling’ to describe how these companies connect physical spaces across the planet and span economic entities in the global economy, and how actions in one part of the system can have outcomes in other parts of the system. These effects can be quite devious and hard to track, but we know fromdecades of research that tele-coupling occurs both positively and negatively – if a contract is poorly worded, then in another part of the world workers can be exploited in labour terms; conversely, well-designed 28 |
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