What Shipped, Issue 6
Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.
In this issue:
- Virtual office trial on Gather Town
- Riffs on fatigue and action for purpose-driven brands in a maybe, kind-of post COVID world
2 Days In: Gather Town
Cue last Wednesday. We’re mid-way through How We Work, the hour long retrospective we do as a team every 6 weeks. Someone in the room says: I’d love to get you know you all more.
Someone else: Yeah, we need some banter. Like a water cooler…but virtual.
One thing turns into another and we’re now 2 days in to testing Gather Town. Gather Town describes itself as virtual spaces for more meaningful human connections. I describe it as Sim City for the 2021 office.
This week we’re trying it out to see if we can get the teamie vibes of an office without tying ourselves to a single geographical location.
Here’s our reflections as at 5:08pm on Wednesday:
Also Danny, if you’re reading this, now that I know our office could be in a forest I would like to apply for our lease change.
— Grace
Crisis fatigue
A year and a half on from the Global Climate Strike, the climate crisis is out of the zeitgeist. What is business’ role in the climate crisis, in light of a public health and an economic crisis?
On May 21, we’ll have had 609 days between climate strikes. In that time, 2500 homes have been lost to bushfires. $240m generated in insurance claims, and 35,845 flood insurance claims totaling $537m.
The environment in which we operate today feels very different to late 2019, in the lead up to the first Global Climate Strike.
In 2019, Future Super got involved in the climate strike along with a handful of other businesses; which quickly snowballed into large scale support from the business sector for the climate strike. The mood in 2019 from business leaders was: if we can support students, climate action and hold government to meaningful action by letting our workers attend the strike? Sign us up.
Today, the backdrop to the climate crisis is different. Government aid for businesses and individuals has stopped, and the task force accountable to delivering an economic recovery is pushing to fund a gas-fired recovery.
We’re hearing hesitation from businesses who are concerned about supporting an event that could be deemed a ‘superspreader’ (See: Will Protests Set Off a Second Viral Wave? The answer, it seems, is that the media chooses narrative over facts, and this particular narrative was highly spreadable). But — in branding, in marketing — we deal in narratives. And you can’t fight narratives with facts: you need to fight them with a better story, and alternative action. That’s what we’re working on.
Questions we’re thinking about as a business who supports climate action:
- What do our commitments to climate action as a business look like in the midst of a pandemic?
- How can businesses affect meaningful change while also dealing with very real concerns about COVID-19?
- How can organisations use their strengths and where they’re at — to affect change in this moment?
A few observations:
- Many Australian businesses have taken a huge hit this year. They’re hurting. But the climate crisis, the pandemic, and the economic crisis — are all intertwined — but it can be hard to think about the mid and long term in comparison to the short term need to keep business afloat.
- Trust in institutions is at an all time low, but people expect more, not less of brands. Brand action (how an org treats its employees, whether or not a product is made sustainably, where products are manufactured) has become more important during the pandemic, even over brand expression (the brand communicates that I am successful, a tastemaker etc).
- The stakes are high: businesses are often penalised for performative action or fence-sitting (see Gap’s ‘Unity’ hoodie, or that Burger King tweet). There’s a very real fear of ‘misstep’ from business. But, businesses are more likely to gain customer’s trust than lose it when they take action on social issues.
At the end of the day, taking positions on social issues can be as shallow or as deep as a business wants to take them: but it does have very real implications for your brand — so ideally, it shouldn’t come from a marketing standpoint. It should come from the point of view a business has on the world. I come down fairly hard on business, and tend to take a ‘put your money where your mouth is’ approach to things. I like Ad Contrarian’s take on this: the only true test of brand purpose is whether you pay your taxes. When the rubber meets the road though, if you know why your business exists and you know your customers, this shouldn’t feel like that much of a gamble: it should feel like a natural extension of what you’re already doing.
With 100 companies responsible for 71% of the world’s carbon emissions, business has an important role to play on climate action, especially when government won’t. If organisations want to be around in 50 years — they have to factor in the effects of climate change.. 2019 marked the year that businesses began to brace for the real effects of climate change and factor in the effects of the climate crisis to the bottom line.
For Future Super, taking a position on climate is integral to who we are: but it’s also becoming integral to simply doing business and thinking for the long term. Considering the public health risks, and brand risk (to companies who are more conservative than FS) are important for us to consider as we ask other business to take a stand, but ultimately: we want to amplify the message that we hear consistently from other businesses. Business will no longer be an excuse for the climate crisis — now is the time for leadership.
— Amanda
