Introduction: Who is Medinge Group and "Brands with a conscience"

Nicholas Ind and Sandra Hollings, they are the editors of the book which is part of the reason that we're here which is we want to spread the idea of brands with a conscience and the idea that brands can do good in the world. So Nicholas and Sandra, will you tell us a bit about what is Medinge and tell us about the book that we've just published? Is it working now? Yes? Okay. Well, Nicholas, come join me. We've got roles today, we did this the other way around yesterday, so now we don't know what we're doing. Now, that's good, isn't it? Improvise. But I was asked to tell you something about our group. So that's better. And Nicholas is actually one of the founders and he's been with Medinge Group for over 16 years now, Nicholas. And the first meeting was in Medinge in Sweden which is why we are called Medinge. It was a gathering of people from around the world trying to understand more about branding and sharing ideas and influencing each other in their thinking and maybe even challenging themselves in their thinking. So what Nikolai was saying, it's about the debate on branding and how branding can be also a force for good. Because initially the group came together as kind of like a movement against the book from Naomi Klein on No Logo. Saying, okay, No Logo, Yo Logo. Well, I'm not quite sure if you said it like that 16 years ago. No, that's probably my interpretation. Five years ago I joined the group and ever since I joined these half year meetings just to help myself understand the broad field of branding. Because we come from different backgrounds, we come from different cultures, we come from different specialisms within branding. We all share the belief that brands can be a force for good. So that's where we find each other. But in the variety, I always get surprised by new insights or new thinking or ways that I haven't looked at things before. So that's what Medinge is and hopefully we'll bring that to you today as well. As well as meeting twice a year in nice places like Copenhagen, what we've also done over the years is try to put forward our views through our publishing activity. So we ran an online journal for many years. We published special editions of academic journals. We wrote a book back in the early days of Medinge called Beyond Branding. Two years ago we were sitting in Medinge in Sweden and we were talking about the need to come up with a new, doable initiative. And the doable point is important because when you're a sort of group that comes together occasionally it's very easy to come up with lots of ideas about the things you could do. But the reality is we all have busy lives and careers and actually having a lot of ideas and ideas that we can come up with is very important. So we're all busy lives and careers and actually having ideas is the easy bit. Doing them is the hard thing. So Sandra was tasked to go and sit in the garden at Medinge with a group of people and come up with this idea. And she came back and said, let's do a book which we can do on brands with a conscience, which was the title of an award scheme we ran for several years. So we sat down and planned the book. And the idea was to bring together good examples of organisations who really live their brands day in, day out. And have a very responsible approach to the way they interact with their different stakeholders. So we invited the members of the Medinge group to write chapters. And this is the book which came out, well we launched it in... March? End of March? 1st of April, wasn't it? In Amsterdam. Well, it's now Fool's Day, so it was the end of March. So we launched it 1st of April. And it comprises 17 cases. And I think the important thing about the cases is they're unified by this belief, as Sandra says, about brands can do good. But in another sense they're very diverse. When we talked about this with the publishers, they said, you need to make sure that you represent as many different categories and geographies as you can. So the cases come from Sri Lanka, from India, from Spain, Holland, Denmark of course, Norway, Sweden. There's a great diversity there. But there's also a diversity of category in terms of where we're talking about places. We have business to business examples. We have small businesses, we have large businesses. So we want to reflect through these different examples the totality of the way the organisations actually approach these issues. So I think, I mean you can obviously read the book cover to cover, but I think what's also quite valuable is to dip in and dip out and find the things you think are interesting. So it was a very fun project to do. Sandra was a really good co-editor. She made people deliver. I'm sort of English and a bit wishy-washy and say, you know, well when you like you can do it. Sandra says, no, you do it now. And you definitely need that if you're doing a book. So it was a nice partnership I feel. Fun to do. It was. Thank you. So that's why we have introduction to both Medinger and the context of the book. I mean we're not going to talk in detail about the book today, but it sort of forms the basis of the way we think. So maybe we'll reflect back on some of the issues that we learned from the book. I will take some of the learnings in my workshop on circular business. Is that okay? Very good. Yeah, it's perfect. That's exactly what we needed. Thank you. So now everybody has an idea of what Medinger is and the new book that's just come out.