Partnerships: why asking ‘what’s in it for society?’ will matter more than ever in a post-COVID world
If COVID-19 has shown us anything, it is that purpose-driven partnerships can be convened at scale, at pace and with terrific effectiveness when the will is there. For example, New York-listed ventilator developer Medtronic is sharing product designs of its ventilators on an open source basis with Foxconn Technology Group of Taiwan, Vingroup a Vietnamese conglomerate and Canada’s Baylis Medical. Together, they want to try to increase ventilator production by five times current production. Consumer goods company Unilever is also partnering with NGOs and other organisations all over the world to get much-needed soap and sanitizers to people most in need.
But when this crisis is behind us, will partnerships continue to sit high on the corporate agenda? In the absence of an immediate public health threat, will the imperative be lost, or the business value of partnerships be overlooked? It’s unlikely. COVID-19 has not just shown the efficacy of partnerships from a public good perspective. The collateral damage of the pandemic has shown the significant commercial incentive businesses have to prevent future threats from emerging.
The pandemic, rather than reinventing the way we do things, has just accelerated trends and changes that were already in motion. It’s shone a light on the fact that partnerships now aren’t a question of “what’s in it for me?” but one of “how does this help society?”
If every government in the world were to meet the UN’s target of contributing 0.7% of their annual economic output to international aid efforts, we would still find ourselves more than $2.5 trillion short of the funding required each year to fulfil the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
By comparison, the total market value of the 500 biggest listed companies in the United States at the time of writing sits just below $25 trillion: more than twice the size of the US economy; nearly 4,000 times the size of the average emerging market economy excluding China. Clearly, the private sector has a significant role to play in generating the social and environmental impact required to meet the SDGs.
What COVID-19 has shown is that this effort shouldn’t be seen simply as charity, or corporate social responsibility. The fragility of our environment and ecosystems — the disruption of which is now understood to have caused the outbreak in the first place — the inequity and structural flaws of our economy, and ultimately the damage to many of the businesses who relied on them all show that the prevention of future threats isn’t only the right thing to do; it just makes business sense.
So the question is less one of whether brands will engage in partnerships when this disruption passes, but rather one of how they will make a success of them, and in doing so de-risk their own futures while contributing to global efforts to meet future challenges head on.
The challenge for brands who understand the long-term incentive of contributing to these global efforts through partnerships will be in finding a way to do it that is sustainable for them as revenue-generating entities while ensuring they are of genuine benefit to society and planet.
The old notion of a partnership that sees a business opening its chequebook to fund an NGO then walking away has rightly been dismissed as largely reputationally driven, and ultimately unsustainable. Equally partnerships that focus too much on the needs of the business, while sustainable, are not delivering the social and environmental change required.
Post-COVID-19, there will be a greater need for partnership opportunities to demonstrate value to all stakeholders: from corporate and public partners, through to employees, shareholders, end beneficiaries and society as a whole. Businesses will have to look beyond the immediate short-term benefits and look to the wider societal benefits such as building resilient supply chains and reducing climate change risk.
The COVID-19 pandemic will for some encourage and for many force the issue of partnerships for brands and businesses, drawing a clear thread between the long-term benefits of a safer and more sustainable world for all, and a de-risked and resilient future for the businesses who contribute positively to it.
As the emergence of multilateral partnerships, accelerated by the pandemic, continues to develop, the brands that make the best of this opportunity will be the ones who look beyond themselves and ask the question: ‘what’s in it for society?’
