Hope your Easter break was great. I am currently reading Gandhi’s autobiography at the moment…as we get Good Friday and Monday off, Easter turned out to be a good time for reflection. In that vein, I did some reflecting on the heart. Gandhi talks a lot about purity of heart and his quest to achieve this, so I started searching for more material around this topic. One guy who had a lot to say about the heart was King Solomon, one of the wisest men the ancient world had ever known. Solomon wrote a couple of books of the Old Testament Bible (Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, etc.). Interestingly, the thing that he said to do above all else…(meaning please remember this if you forget all of the other wise things I said) was to guard your Heart for out of it spring the issues of life.
So what exactly is my Heart & how do I guard it? Do organizations really have hearts? Steven Covey has a great model that is pretty basic & it can be applied from the individual to the organization. It puts the spirit at the center. Out of the spirit flows conscience. The heart, mind, and body surround the spirit based center. The heart is that strange place where emotion, passion, self-awareness, social sensitivity, empathy live…that right brain area where argueably our “secret thoughts” reside. I like Steven Covey’s material because he draws a lot of graphs and charts…making vague concepts more explicit. So I recommend picking up the 7 habits and the 8th habit if you want to get his views on the heart (what he calls emotional intelligence or EQ).
From a brand perspective, big companies are looking at the data and discovering that “the hearts” of a companies matter more than ever. I was just in a presentation at P&G recently where a consultancy even called out that heart/spirit/ethics all played a major role in the performance of the top 25 brands over the last 10 years. This is the idea behind Hamish Pringle and Marjorie Thompson’s book Brand Spirit…both authors highlight the third wave of branding as being “spiritual.” It is clear that marketers and brand folks are paying much more attention to the heart/spirit/ethics of their brands today.
I will try to release more info on this study, once I understand if/when it can be opened for public use.
It is still cold in Geneva! We even had snow on Easter…which was strange for this region.
Ryan Jones is interested in marketing and good causes. He currently works in Global Brand Management at Procter & Gamble and resides in Geneva, Switzerland.
3 Comments
Interesting. One doesn’t usually think of these concepts as being connected.
ahahah.
I found you.
Dear Ryan,
I did appreciate you refering to ‘Brand Spirit’ which I co-authored with Marjorie Thompson who introduced me to the whole concept of cause related marketing or CRM in 1998.
With time the marketing communications industry has increasingly talked about corporate social responsibility and CRM has less currency. But I still believe that it remains one of the best practical ways for a company to show its ‘Heart’.
With best wishes,
Hamish Pringle