Last week, bank CEOs were flogged for not providing enough of it. Tomorrow, U.S. automakers have a deadline to provide more of it. The government, trying to fix the problems caused by not having enough of it, is now being criticized for not providing enough of it themselves. Whereever news and criticism turns to the economic recession and corporate ethics, "transparency" is part of the conversation.

Brand communicators, whether of the marketing or public relations variety, continue to focus their messages on how relevant their products are -- or worse, communicating reactively to the problems after they have already developed. Transparency is, for many of them, at best a frightening prospect and at worst the antithesis of what they are used to doing as communicators. As a trend, the call for transparency that started with the financial crisis is going to impact nearly ever arena of corporate communication. As Marc Brownstein put it recently in AdAge, "What they did as an industry is instill a whole new era of mistrust in consumers."

These concepts of transparency and appropriate tools for expanding it have been at the heart of a number of GMD Studios' projects over the last decade. Frequently, moments of crisis and brand challenge are what finally open up a corporation to look to these solutions (since only brands in pain innovate beyond what they've been doing in the past.) For GMD Studios' first public white paper in an ongoing series, we tackle the questions of what transparency means for brand communicators: the essential elements of legitimacy theory, in-depth case studies of how that was applied to the brand challenges of both McDonalds and Ford Motor Company, and detailed recommendations on how increased transparency can be nurtured and managed using brand journalism.

"Transparency, Ethics and the Future of Brand Communications" (697KB PDF)

Posted by Brian on February 16, 2009

All good things must (eventually) come to an end, even a web design that works. We really did love our "mad messy scientist" phase, which taught us the joys of embracing our odd duck nature and the benefits of playing hard-to-get as a sales technique. After more than three years, we've retired the sixth incarnation of the GMD Studios website and given ourselves a digital haircut, but it made us think about some of the other hairstyles we've had over the years (some of which pre-date even archive.org and involved frames and shoulder pads!) We had our nuclear orange minimalist phase and our baby blue with buttons explosion before settling into that inkblot madness in 2005.

Which means we'll probably be living with this haircut until 2011, eh? By then we'll have added at least one more page to our new History section.

Posted by Brian on November 21, 2008

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