about building brands and
how important it is because
people make buying decisions,
whether it be a product or an
employment decision—even
an investment decision. So
here’s the $64,000 question:
How do you build your brand?
people and hear us talk about the
experience at the company, that’s
when people become convinced
and become ambassadors and
advocates for us.
of community organizations that
are already trusted. If we try to
go in on our own, we’re a huge
organization, and inherently underbanked, underserved, subordinated
individuals in our world are going
to have an inherent distrust of a
huge organization that makes a
lot of money every year and has
historically been run by white men.
GIRAULT: What we’ve done is
make a $5-billion commitment
over the next three years to [reach]
African-American high-school
students who might not have
had exposure to accounting or
professional-services firms, and
work with them on a rigorous
program of providing them
exposure to education. So, we’re
helping the community, we’re
getting our name out in the
community, and what it’s doing is
helping us build that pipeline of
talent, so it’s a win-win situation.
NELSON: Transparency
in all that you do, in
your communications to
your internal/external
stakeholders. All of
them, be they from a
procurement perspective,
employee recruitment/
retention perspective,
need transparency. We have an
annual diversity report where
we report our performance in
human resources, in construction,
in marketing, in philanthropy,
in purchasing, and we invite in
excess of 5,000 people from all
over the U.S.—and about 3,000
people come—and they’re all
suppliers, employees, strategic
diversity partners, they’re all a
host of stakeholders that come to
hear from our chairman about our
performance.
CESPEDES: Externally, we
communicate mostly through
interactions with our members,
with our shareholders, through
our relationships, and we’ve done
a diversity annual report, which
sort of concisely describes what
we’ve done throughout the year
with respect to diversity. We also
use print ads, which highlight
diversity accomplishments and our
philosophy. So it’s a combination
of things.
GOLDEN: For Turner, it’s the
programming; when you turn
on the TV, whether it’s the
Cartoon Network or one of our
entertainment programs, whether
it’s TNT or TBS, the shows that
you’re watching are reflective
of our diversity brand. That’s
probably the most powerful
way for us to demonstrate our
commitment.
PART VII
HOW DO YOU BUILD
YOUR BRAND?
PEACOCK: We’ve been talking
SPIVEY: Holding leaders
accountable through the whole
organization to create and sustain
the diversity brand is absolutely
the thing that’s going to make
the biggest difference for us.
Having the inside reflect what
we’re saying on the outside is
the most important thing, and
so we work on that first. We use
media channels; we use a lot
of communication. I’d say the
most effective thing for us is our
relationships with our customers,
how we show up at conferences.
When our customers and our
employers interact with our
GIRAULT: Awards are very
important to us because we don’t
do a lot of advertising, because
we’re really a consumer-products
company, so it’s harder for us
to do that ... there’s a lot of
relationship building on being
out there, but the awards are an
external validation. They help us
internally [and help] our people to
recognize that we’re actually doing
pretty good. But then, we get a lot
of calls from the media as a result
who say, “We’re looking for the
best practice, and we see you on
the list,” and that’s the external
independent validation that is
really valuable to get.
