Point of view blog

05.05.2011

Hannah’s point of view

Recently a number of things have been coming to light around community values vs corporate values. Having had a fairly strong stance against corporate culture my whole life I am interested to see a trend emerging of communities adopting corporate branding tactics.

First I came across a project by Designed by Good People which excited me in it’s directness; ‘What If: Sydenenham’ aims to regenerate the area and draw in new investment by redesigning the high street shop fronts in collaboration with the shop owners. Designed by Good People want to inspire local people, businesses and the council with the potential of quality design which they believe will bring pride and ownership back to the area. I love this straightforward approach to lend independent shop owners the same trust and respect offered to chain shops and their sparkly exteriors, and what’s more those Good People do it all for free!

The second project has taken this idea one step further. Coming from a traditional background in commercial branding the creators of the first collaborative brand ‘Common’ aim to provide the local community with all that they had been wildly successful at creating in the corporate sector; a brand into which the collective can embed their own community values in order to compete with the big corporate brands. They call this community the New Capitalist Community, which is already making me wince, but is in fact the most honest name for what they propose. They are imagining a community which uses capitalist systems to raise the value of those things that the community holds dear, hopefully shifting the emphasis from things such as the perfect shaped fruit to where the fruit has been grown and how.

What finally came to mind when I was thinking these projects over, were the recent riots in Bristol focused on the opening of a Tescos store. I’m from Bristol so I have been closely following the year long protest against Tesco’s opening in this vibrantly independent area of the city. After a creatively peaceful protest, which saw 96% of the local population against the store opening, Tesco’s have opened to frustration and anger that community voices have not been listened to.

And so I wonder, should communities learn how to utilise the capitalist system to compete with their corporate counterparts, and if they do, how much chance have they got of winning? In Stokes Croft, Bristol, the strong network of local independent shops might have benefited from the Common brand. But I question, under the Common brand would we still value these shops as independent? Surely there is a risk that without proper management the brand might grow to resemble it’s monstrous corporate counterparts.

However, with corporations such as Tesco far larger than governments these days I think it is pointless to look to Local Authorities for support to protect our independent communities and Bristol is a case in point. There have always been co-operatives, the ubiquitous Co-op being one, so perhaps a new collaborative model might provide communities with the coherence and empowerment they need to prosper.