Marketing ploy cemetery

 

“I am an engaged employee”, says the mug in front of me, says Gerold Permoser, Chief

Investment Officer (CIO) and Chief Sustainable Investment Officer (CSIO) of Erste Asset

Management.

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It is both the linguistically dubious fruit of an internal motivation programme and a legend in our company.

This mug* represents a memento mori at the cemetery of marketing ideas.

 

To be clear about it: I like my mug, and I like double-entendres. They force us to get to grips with the meaning of

words. And our mug asks the crucial question in a charming way: is engagement only a marketing ploy that will

soon be obsolete? Let me approach this issue from three angles.

 

Does talking make sense? A question that presumably only a man can ask. Every time people have faced off

antagonistically the question whether dialogue is still an avenue worth pursuing comes up. 70 years ago WWII

ended, morphing into the Cold War, which in the 1970s generated a form of dialogue that was expected to bring

about a rapprochement. Comparing these two forms of war with each other, how could one ever think that

dialogue does not make sense?

 

“And we keep gettin‘ richer but we can‘t get our picture on the cover of the Rollin‘ Stone”, as Dr. Hook lamented

in a well-known song from the 1970s. What the band did not know back then: when an investment company

excludes a company from the investment universe for reasons of an unsatisfactory engagement process, it

actually helps the former tremendously in creating cover lines.

 

Engagement produces publicity. Companies know that, and therefore engagement is often not a visit to the

Wailing Wall, but an eye-to-eye dialogue.

 

Lastly, the question of sense is, much like in real life, an empirical rather than a theoretical one. Here the result

is very straightforward: our engagements cause change. Of course companies do not comply with all our ideas

and wishes in every single engagement project. It would be naïve to set that sort of goal. But it can be empirically

verified that companies do react and that engagement processes do lead to concrete improvements as far as

ESG factors are concerned. Engagement is more than a marketing ploy and will not end up on the cemetery

of bad marketing ideas any time soon.

 

* In the case of the mug, the German „engagiert“ (hardworking, committed) was brutally translated to the English „engaged“, which made some

300 employees of Erste Asset Management think they were about to get married.