Posts from — June 2007

Sometimes a fact crosses your path, and you wonder why you have lived so long without knowledge of it !

I’ve always had an interest in Wales; my name is Welsh, Gwenhwyvar, my great grandmother enchanted me with stories of her St Davids childhood, and another much loved grandmother had the surname Dyas. However, not until this week did I know that the word Wales means land of strangers or foreigners.

Apparently, when the Celts were pushed back to the west of Britain by invading European tribes they called themselves Brythoniaid or Britons . But as they battled constantly with their neighbours they began to refer to themselves as Y Cymry - or compatriots. Meanwhile the Anglo Saxons and Normans called them Welisc or ’strangers’, and the country Wealas.

Compatriots - fellow countrymen, people you can rely on, people who are not strangers or foreigners. What can this teach us today about community building?

Great article by Alice Thomson in the Daily Telegraph this week on the fact that our parents, of WW II generation, have always had a green tinge; although they would be the last to say so.

But how has this passed down the generations? (Looking at generational influences in customer behaviour is both fascinating and important.) I, like my mother, religiously save left-overs; my fridge is full of them, and my husband constantly throws out mould covered pots, whose contents I can no longer identify! So although I’ve learnt a behaviour, I haven’t quite got the same ethos as my mother who once a week cooks up her bubble and squeak.

In her article Alice quotes her children going to school chanting “recycle, regenerate, rebuild” - all well and good, but are we teaching our children to chant mantras, or are we teaching them to think about what they do?

We recently went to Hong Kong on a research project, to find out if businesses there are taking corporate social responsibility into account in their marketing strategies.

Two things struck me very strongly. Firstly, the environment is of much less interest to Chinese business and public than the West: their great concern is working conditions particularly in manufacturing. So when West meets East in the business world we will have to know more about each others’ issues and concerns.

Secondly, this is a picture of Hong Kong taken in the afternoon - the ‘pollution’ in the air is there constantly - rolling in from the Chinese mainland; we never saw a clear blue sky. On a 2 hour flight to Shanghi, we flew above this pollution cloud the whole way.

Whether you believe that climate change is man made or not, I don’t believe that unilateral action to turn my standby off is going to make any real difference to saving the planet. However, being economical with scarce resources is a good discipline - which brings us back to Mutual Marketing ;-))

We’ve recently been attending some Government workshops looking at ideas for building, or should that be rebuilding, communities. This reminds me of what a community is all about - an open gate inviting you in, and an open door of trust.

The picture is from an open garden event I went to on Sunday in the Yorkshire Dales. A local landscape gardener had organized for a number of people to open up their gardens to who ever wanted to come and look. Most people said yes, but thought it was going to be rather tiresome. In the end they loved it, they met up with neighbours they had not spent time with for ages, as well as meeting new folk. Every garden was different, and every one entertained in a different way.

Great day out, and great contribution to community building.