All of this is leading up to an unavoidable conclusion: because your internal culture is now customer- facing, it’s an important part of your brand.

The opportunity here? In 2017, your internal culture could become the most powerful brand and marketing asset you have.

Think about the power of stories such as those told by Starbucks: how they have a program to help staff in London raise a deposit on a home, or how they opened a store in Kuala Lumpur dedicated to hiring deaf people. Or that told by US-based yoghurt brand Chobani, which instituted paid parental leave for all staff after the birth of CEO Hamdi Ulukaya’s first child.

The danger? Internal culture could also become your most powerful brand liability.

But what should you DO about all this? To answer that question, it pays to take a fast deep-dive into transparency and other underlying forces that are making this change more urgent than ever.

What’s Driving This?

Connectivity, job automation and the intensifying search for a more meaningful consumerism are all pushing the emergence of glass box brands.

CONNECTIVITY

The overarching driver here? It’s connectivity that has fueled the radical transparency that’s given rise to glass box brands.

We don’t need to spend long on a transformative force that you already know plenty about. But when it comes to the impact of connectivity on the emergence of glass box brands, three implications can be broken out.

Employees now expect to document and share their lives online. That includes their working lives! The culture of sexism at Uber was split open when an employee blog post went viral.

Ever-more of day-to-day life is being captured in real-time video or livestreamed. Increasingly, consumers don’t just expect to know what’s happening, they expect to see it! One glimpse? This smartphone video from July of unsupervised luggage crashing off a United Airlines conveyor belt ;)

Consumers now expect as standard to know – or be able to find out – pretty much everything about the brands they engage with. In a survey of over 10,000 consumers from around the world, 78% of consumers said it is ‘somewhat or very important for a company to be transparent.’ And 70% said that ‘these days I make it a point to know more about the companies I buy from’ (Havas, February 2016).

A MORE MEANINGFUL CONSUMERISM

It wouldn’t matter that consumers can look right inside your business if they didn’t care about what they saw. But in rising numbers, and with rising intensity, they do.

Millions around the world are searching for a more ethical, sustainable, meaningful consumerism. That’s a sweeping mega-trend that we’ve all been tracking for decades. So where is that mega-trend at now?

A connected world means it’s ever-harder to ignore the negative impacts that our consumption has on the planet, society and our own health. And now, expectations for a cleaner, healthier, just better consumerism are being heightened by a new wave of more ethical, sustainable startups. Think buy one give one shoe brand TOMS. Or even electric car makers Telsa.

Meanwhile, consumption choices are ever-more about creating a story of personal identity: I’m smart! I’m connected! I’m ethical! That means consumer need the brands they engage with to tell a positive, Instagram-ready story about their values. Want to glimpse this shift towards consumption as a story of personal identity? Just search #cleaneating on Instagram and spend some time with the 33 million posts (and rising!) that come back.

Put all that together and you get rising demand that when consumers look inside the glass box that is your brand, they like what they see. The processes you use, the people who use them, and the ethics and values that they reflect.

One snapshot of that? A full 70% of millennials are willing to spend more with brands that support causes they care about (Cone Communications, 2017).

GLOBALIZATION, INEQUALITY, AUTOMATION

In 2017 concerns over the values and ethics inside brands are acquiring a new dimension, and a new urgency.

Why? First, here’s global consulting firm McKinsey with a thunderbolt:

On a global scale, we calculate that the adaptation of currently demonstrated automation technologies could affect 50 percent of the world economy, or 1.2 billion employees and USD 14.6 trillion in wages. — McKinsey, May 2017

We’re used to the idea that consumers care about how brands treat vulnerable workers in emerging economies (think fair trade coffee). But recent headwinds — insecurity over a coming wave of job automation, rising inequality in many countries, and ruptures in the social fabric caused by globalization — are giving millions around the world new reasons to be concerned for the broader social good.

Those consumers are looking to brands to play their part when it comes minimizing negative impacts and building a better future. And they know that starts with an internal culture that prizes ethics and sustainability.

A Working Model

Thinking about the emergence of brands as glass boxes should spur powerful change.