Reputational corporate turnaround
“After chairman Guido Barilla rebuked gay families on national radio, his CEO spent five years cleaning up the company’s reputation.”
my notes:
“Because the bigger preoccupation for consumer brands tends to be cachet—an abstraction valued in the tens of billions of dollars on their balance sheets as “intangible assets”—
irrelevance can have worse financial consequences than brief buffers in a company’s revenue streams.”
“Colzani said that during his six years at the helm, he’s never had a conversation with the Barillas about boosting profit. Instead, discussions have revolved around environmental efforts, such as hiking the company’s costs by about €40 million ($45 million) a year to rid its supply chain of palm oil, which it did in 2017.
“Barilla is also working with the farmers who supply the durum wheat for its pasta to end their use of glyphosate-based herbicides, which the World Health Organization classifies as probably carcinogenic to humans.”
“We were simply trying to be a good citizen. Now, we’re trying to be a role model.”
“I got a lot of grief from the LGBT community when I agreed to help him out,” Mixner said. “But I told them that the purpose of a movement is to change minds.”