How to build transparency into your brand culture

At Intrepid, our business is all about adventure and trying new experiences.?

Our mission is to create positive change through the joy of travel.??

Let me show you what I mean.??

That’s a snippet of our latest global brand campaign, Good Trips Only.??

I’ve been lucky to experience plenty of ‘good trips’ in my career, but I haven't always nailed every piece of communication I’ve put out into the wild.?

So to kick things off and to be extra vulnerable, I thought I'd share with you one of my biggest professional stuff ups!??

15 years ago I ran a campaign for a completely different travel brand.?I loved the creativity, the rawness and how bold it was. It was fun, it was real and it even came with some in your face, maybe not so cool and not so edgy swearing.???

In retrospect, I was probably high on my own supply and how much I loved the work.??

But it went bad. Embarrassingly bad! Like lucky to keep my job bad…??

Now why am I telling you this???

It isn’t because my favorite thing to talk about is myself (despite what my family might tell you).??

It’s because I’m here today to talk about transparency, and what better way to dive into a topic all about honesty than by being honest about myself, even if it’s a bit embarrassing.???

And to be even more honest, this is a tough topic to get right, as it’s hard to strike the balance between being real about what we’ve learned and humble about what we’ve gotten right.??

But I’m going to give it my best shot.???

Now, before I mentioned that Intrepid is a company all about adventure and experience.??

But we’re also a B Corp.??

For those of you not familiar with the ‘business for good’ movement, B Corps are businesses that meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance and public transparency, and that have made a commitment to balancing purpose and profit.???

That is the corporate definition.?

Now in everyday language. Being a B Corp is basically a way to make your business better every day.??

Intrepid has been a B Corp since 2018, a process that involved:?

• Auditing our entire global supply chain??

• Improving transparency and diversity??

• Reporting our carbon footprint??

• And basically scrutinising every tiny, moving piece of the Intrepid machine, from office supplies in Nepal to the fuel in our Tanzanian safari trucks???

While this journey hasn’t always been easy, we’ve learnt a lot about why transparency matters along the way.?

Why it matters to our customers, why it matters to our people, and why being transparent is actually good for business.??

I’m going to explain the power of transparency and accountability through some real case studies that happened at Intrepid. You’ll hear about:?

• A stuff up?

• A big win??

• And a happy accident??

A stuff up?

Let’s start with a colossal stuff up.???

I’ll set the scene.?

It was 4am on a crisp Melbourne morning in May last year when I received a call from our Head of PR and Communications in the UK, Chloe Berman.??

She told me the UK Advertising Standards Authority there had received a complaint about one of our ads shown on the London Underground.??

So not wanting to jump to the worst-case scenario, I cracked an awkward joke.??

Something along the lines of: “Well if the ad’s underground, maybe no one has seen it ha ha!”??

...Chloe didn’t laugh.??

Safe to say I quickly realised this was serious.??

I was waking up to a bit of a nightmare, as we had been accused of greenwashing.??

This was less than ideal for a company that prides itself on being a purpose leader and doing everything we can to fight the climate crisis.??

My wife was pregnant at the time, so not wanting to disturb her, I decided I should take my panic outside of the house and proceeded to pace the streets of Footscray for an hour or two.??

I probably looked a bit weird wandering the streets at 4am, AirPods in, muttering to myself!?

But like every other day, the sun came up and I knew I had to go home and face the music.?

Turned out the problem was with the use of the phrase ‘planet-friendly’, which featured front and center on the advertisement.?

By using the phrase ‘planet-friendly,’ we were trying to convey that:?

• Our trips are designed to minimise their impact on the environment?

• Support grassroots charities and enterprises?

• Empower local communities?

Principles which are all fundamental to Intrepid’s brand ethos as a responsible business.??

Mind you, we’d also been using this phrase in our advertising for years.??

But in keeping with that ethos, we knew we had to respect the decision and be upfront with our customers about what had happened, knowing that trust and reputation is built by owning where we’ve made mistakes.??

We issued a public statement and launched a global review into our sustainability marketing and communications.?

We immediately stopped using the phrase ‘planet-friendly’ and made a commitment to do better.??

And because we owned it, we contained the fallout and saw our competitors and the broader industry rally around us.??

I even started to see LinkedIn posts from our competitors backing the way we’d handled it.??

That's pretty unusual.?

Our customers did too, sharing feedback that they trusted us and the genuine impact we were creating because of it.???

I think back to my wandering aimlessly and panicking around the neighbourhood.??

I was weighing up the right thing to do and the easy thing to do. I could’ve decided to deal with the issue behind the scenes - leave the lawyers to clean up the damage.??

But being transparent and accountable isn’t always easy.??

It might be uncomfortable – and that’s okay.??

A big win??

Let me share a lesson in uncomfortable accountability that actually turned into a big win.??

Back during our last B Corp recertification in 2021, we received feedback from B Corp that our marketing could be more diverse, and to be honest, at first I turned my nose up.??

We’d been prioritising diversity in our marketing and advertising for a long time, and I knew our teams were genuinely trying to do the right thing.??

I sulked about it for a while – I swear this doesn’t always happen! - but I realised I was being arrogant.??

When it came down to it, I had no tangible way to show or prove we were doing the right thing. More importantly, if it wasn’t happening, we had no way to manage it.??

This was an uncomfortable realisation, but ultimately, it spurred action.??

We followed up by introducing our Ethical Marketing and Communications Guidelines containing five core commitments and 25 measurable actions to hold ourselves to account in better representing the diversity of our customers.???

We developed them in partnership with a passionate group of consultants, and we committed to report on our progress each year in our Integrated Annual Report .??

Now, I can look at these results and actually understand where we’re not doing enough work, like with Indigenous content creators.??

In 2023, we fell short on our goal by 2%.?

That’s not good enough.??

So this year, we’ve already accelerated our hiring and we’re now on track to meet our 10% goal of First Nations content creators hired.??

That’s a win.??

Of course, we’re committed to continually evolving these guidelines over time as we learn more, but they provide us with a fundamental foundation for accountability.?

And the great thing about them is now our team have a north star to work towards and they own this themselves.??

And we publish this report so our customers keep us accountable.??

When I recently spoke to one of our consultants about our progress, she told me that she thought the biggest missed opportunity for other businesses in the DEI space was that they’re waiting to be told what to do.??

And she’s bang on.??

Sometimes, being accountable is about not being afraid to go first.??

It’s about showing up, owning where you can better and committing to the journey.???

A happy accident??

And the fact is, accountability and transparency can actually be great for business.??

Last year, we introduced carbon labels on over 800 of our itineraries as a way to better inform our customers about the environmental impact of travel.??

Sounds cool right???

Well, we actually had to fight hard to get this over the line.??

In our leadership meetings, we had tension and concerns the length of a Coles receipt over whether this was too much, too transparent about our impact on the environment.??

But ultimately we decided to give it a go, knowing like anything, it might backfire.?

The reception has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly from our customers who can look at itineraries and compare the carbon emissions like they would two meals on a menu.??

Everything from the footprint of their accommodation, flight, transport, meals and activities is transparently on display.??

This month, the initiative saw us accept an award for transparency at Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies for 2024 event, alongside business and tech heavyweights like Google, Open AI and Taco Bell.??

I wanted to highlight this one because it’s a happy accident.??

We never did this to win an innovation award.??

We did it because we believed it would genuinely drive impact for our business and our customers.??

The byproduct is that being honest about our impact – even the negative – has led to recognition and helped set a precedent for others in our industry to become more transparent too.??

We’re marketing and communicating to humans – too often that gets forgotten. Not to go back to my old swearing days, but they can see through the BS!?

My favourite example of this is a customer who left feedback last year after taking one of our Australia trips.??

To act on our commitment to better represent and amplify the stories of First Nations people, we increased the number of Indigenous-led experiences on our trips in 2023 by almost 100 around the world.??

This particular customer believed some really harmful stereotypes about our First Nations people prior to going on the trip.??

After returning, he said: “I have come to realise, that I have been very disrespectful of Aboriginal people. I had just never met one before in my life until now. Terrence was such a nice man. This whole experience has been life-changing for me and it has changed the way I see things."?

Quite literally changing the way people see the world through transparency and accountability.??

That’s what it’s all about.?

At the beginning of this session, I showed off our brand campaign, Good Trips Only.??

For us, the concept of ‘good trips’ extends beyond taking people on the trip of a lifetime to doing good work that’s real, honest and accountable.??

All of our work to be a better business is voluntarily shared in our Integrated Annual Report.??

So if you take anything away from this session today, I hope it’s that:?

• Mistakes are going to happen. Own them. Share them.?

• Transparency and accountability can be uncomfortable. Get used to that.??

• And being raw and real doesn’t have to be at the cost of business outcomes – there's power in getting it right.??

We introduced an accountability email as part of our ethical marketing and communications commitments as a way for people to regularly get in touch.??

I’d love to hear any feedback on how we can continue improving. Contact us at [email protected]

Delivered at Mumbrella Comms Con - 27th March 2024?