Honesty and integrity: Is this the edge businesses need in a stagnant economy?
In our Financial Statement blog, Victoria Clarke of Ipsos Loyalty talks about how honesty and integrity could be the key to competitive edge for businesses.
It should come as no surprise that at the end of 2012 business leaders thought the economic outlook for Britain wasn’t great. Although more leaders were optimistic about our economy than in 2011, levels of optimism were still low compared to the highs of the early 2000’s. There was a similar pattern among the general public, MPs and business and financial journalists (although they are all a little more pessimistic than business leaders).
However, at odds with the Chancellor’s statement that the economy is moving out of intensive care the consensus among our business leaders at the end of the year was that the economy is stagnant and would continue to be for at least the next two years. So, in these turbulent economic times what can businesses do to maintain their current customer base and attract those of their competitors?
This is a particularly difficult question to pose for the B2B market where organisations are seeing their business customers reduce their budgets, cut back their operations, or in extreme cases ceasing to trade. It’s not enough to simply maintain your current customers; organisations need to be winning more business to keep themselves afloat.
What is it that makes a business stand out from the crowd and causes their customers to judge them favourably? According to our recent Captains of Industry survey it’s the reputation or brand of the company - this was the factor most spontaneously mentioned as being important when making judgements about organisations. Values and ethics are also key, with a quarter spontaneously mentioning this.
Interestingly, ‘Acts with honesty and integrity’ is a characteristic that businesses picked out as being important when judging companies – in fact 95% of Captains rated this as ‘very important’ or ‘extremely important’. And it’s not just Captains who think this; their views are shared by MPs (in our bi-annual MPs survey) and financial journalists too. This isn’t something that is limited to big business – it underpins the way business works, and often isn’t something companies talk about.
The key challenge here is how can companies communicate that they are meeting this need? A lot of companies have something similar to honesty or integrity built into their company values, whether stated or not, but not many go so far as actually setting out what this means or communicating instances where they adhered to these values.
Technical note
Captains of Industry is an annual syndicated survey carried out amongst board members from the FTSE 350 and top 500 companies in the UK. Data referred to is from the 2012 survey where fieldwork ran from September to December 2012.
MPs Survey is a biannual syndicated survey. Data referred to is from the winter 2012 survey where 127 MPs were interviewed face-to-face during November to December 2012.
Financial journalists are interviewed in our biannual Business & Financial Journalists survey. A mix of national, regional, online and trade journalists are interviewed. Data referred to is from the winter 2012 survey where 83 journalists were interviewed face-to-face during November and December 2012.
