filter by author: Ziba Cranmer

The Naked Corporation was written over a decade ago, but there are signs all around us the prophesy is finally coming true. This was the topic of last week’s What’s In Your Stuff event, a panel discussion hosted by Cone Communications, on the topic of transparency, technology, and consumer behavior. As Dara O’Rourke, one of our panelists and the founder of the Good Guide put it, “The age of companies telling us what to believe about their products is going away.” At the same time, Dara acknowledged that this shift is more complex than simply releasing information about the footprint of products because consumer decisions are driven by “habit, status, and manipulation.”

So how are these emotional and functional needs of consumers being “manipulated” for a better world? We are seeing that linking values to both a consumer’s status and their need to belong is working. Celebrities like Leonardo diCaprio and Cameron Diaz who choose sustainability over glitz have helped make the Prius cool. Similarly, the trend of social shopping is making it possible for people to “belong” to groups who are wearing their values on their sleeves, Facebook pages, or wristbands. On the more functional side, according to Julie Wittes Schlack, another panelist and VP of Innovation and Design at Communispace, people are fulfilling their need for frugality by leveraging apps like the Find to help them find the cheapest prices or Good Guide to make sure there are no carcinogens in their sunscreen or lead in their children’s toys.

Companies and the PR agencies that advise them must prepare for this new reality because it means much more than communicating to your consumers, it means disclosing your impacts and engaging them in an authentic dialogue. Timberland, another one of our panelists, is one of the few companies that have embraced the new, naked, reality. Timberland has gone further than most companies by applying transparency at the product level and making it possible for consumers to see the environmental footprint of their shoes on their environmental ‘nutrition labels’.

The final piece of this puzzle, the piece that is fueling the entire phenomenon is technology and design. As Theo Forbath, the VP of strategy innovation at Frog design pointed out, whether its crowdsourcing, smart phone apps, QR codes, or the underlying open-source nature of the internet, all of these are major factors in enabling information to be collected and shared. Design is the icing on the cake that is making complex information accessible in simplified formats.

In coming weeks, Cone’s account staff will be digging deeper into the issues discussed at What’s In Your Stuff and the driving forces behind transparency. We will be posting clips from the panel on the blog and look forward to hearing your feedback!

-Ziba Cranmer, Vice President, Cause Branding and Nonprofit Marketing

I am an athlete, I am a fan, and I am a woman.

As an athlete, I celebrate. I celebrate the skills and lessons I learned on the field (and truth be told, sitting on the bench).

As a fan, I cheer. I cheer because I love the feeling of solidarity and community that comes from a shared commitment to a local or professional sports team.

But as a woman, I cringe. I cringe because I know that some of our most celebrated sporting events, from the Super Bowl to the World Cup, are also the occasion of a terrible crime: the sex trafficking of tens of thousands of women and children.

Experts estimated that as many as 10,000 prostitutes descended on last year’s Super Bowl in Miami, many of whom were trafficked. And it’s not just American football. Tekla Roberts, a trafficking survivor and anti-trafficking activist, spoke of her first-hand experience at NASCAR races and golf tournaments.

A study by the Future Group noted that during the year of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the number of known human trafficking victims nearly doubled. With more than 2 million people trafficked each year globally, most of whom are women and girls, the problem is obviously larger than sporting events. But because of its high profile, the sports industry has a unique opportunity to address this issue.

So what are the changemakeHERS among us doing to tackle this problem? Experts in this field often point to the 4P approach to combating trafficking: prevention, protection, prosecution and policy.

There are a few interesting examples involving individual Changemakers from the sports and airline sectors. One such example is Trafficking911, which launched its “I’m not buying it” campaign around the 2010 Super Bowl. Several athletes, including Dallas Cowboy Jay Ratliffe, got behind the effort and recorded a compelling video stating “real men don’t buy sex.”

The Airline Ambassadors, the industry’s relief and development organization, partnered with the nonprofit Innocents at Risk to educate airline personnel and issue procedural guidelines for addressing suspects of trafficking on flights. Free Generation International launched its “RED Card against Trafficking” campaign in conjunction with the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, but it struggled to find corporate partnerships willing to associate their brands with this important but difficult issue.

These efforts are commendable, but to really make change in an issue that crosses sports and countries, companies need to get involved. Having worked for the past seven years in corporate responsibility at Nike, I was incredibly fortunate to broker partnerships between my company and nonprofits around the world. We focused on supporting programs that leveraged the power of sport to bring about positive social change, from women’s empowerment to conflict resolution. But it is time for us to also work with this industry to address the dark underbelly of its own events.

I look forward to hearing ideas and solutions from the community of ChangemakeHERS about how to help the sports industry realize its full potential when it comes to empowering and protecting women.


- Ziba Cranmer, Vice President

This post was written for and posted by Ashoka's Changemakers Idea ExChange Blog as part of its 2011 HERS Campaign in celebration of International Women's Day.