Julian Borra
Julian Borra is a creative writer and strategist, based in London.
Julian Borra is tagged in 11 stories.
Organizational Change /
As you gather tools to help you and your team get your heads around our current and future reality, DBS&C gives teams new insights into themselves and helps
renew focus on your company’s collective purpose.
- 3 years ago
Marketing and Comms /
Doing good does not require everyone to be insufferably ‘good’; re-engineering narratives and characters to remove friction, discomfort, distaste — the inappropriate and the sometimes highly imperfect humanity of them — leaves a massive hole in the realm of sustainability communications.
- 5 years ago
Marketing and Comms /
LAG:A period of time: a noticeable delay between action and reaction – Failing to keep up with another or others in movement or developmentJAG: A short period of overindulgence in an activity: a shopping jag: a crying jag. A stab; an intense and concentrated movement or actionI increasingly find myself at a very particular and exciting intersection.I find myself there not by accident but by design: having helped build a methodology that reaps its greatest rewards at the point where applied science and commercial creativity collide.
- 9 years ago
Leadership /
We’re up to our ‘proverbials’ in Brand Advocates, Influencers & Champions. The social shock troops have to no little degree saved a lot of the big consumer multinationals from themselves. They have proved themselves both central in driving relevance and a vastly improved and far more respectful model of customer service. They are to that end critical in securing the survival of relevance in many multinational brands who until quite recently had acted with old school impunity and arrogance when called to account.But the blunt grassroots tool for creating better is just one of two required to secure an improved human existence in the face of our stratospheric levels of consumption and the brands who feed it.
- 9 years ago
Stakeholder Trends and Insights /
The story goes that in a recent conversation with a large, multinational client, yet again, at the mention of the ‘S’ word, the brand people did everything from polite wincing to effectively spitting their coffee across the room.Now to be fair, it was mentioned not in splendid isolation, elevated as some false god — the hero of the day — but in context to Shared Value and Social Brand, seen as a set of three pillars on which to build a more resilient, inclusive and adaptive Brand Story.So, no Sustainable evangelism — just an eye to rigour and a wish to build something of substance, built to absorb whatever turbulence and volatility our fluid and accelerating world might throw at it without losing its shape.
- 9 years ago
Organizational Change /
Innovation. We love it! Especially in the trending world of sustainability.And rightly so: The potential impact and influence of sustainability innovation in the shaping of a more positive human existence is immutable and immeasurable.Innovation’s role in reinventing and reimagining the way the domestic, private and public sectors use, reuse and replenish the limited resources we have at our disposal is critical to our survival as a race. So anything that inspires us to escalate our ability to innovate, whether that might be of the incremental, process or radical kind, deserves all the help it can get. We cannot really afford for sustainability innovation to stall or fail — but it does so, all too often.
- 9 years ago
The Next Economy /
The time when we were happily seduced into reaching far, far beyond our means with a promise of infinite everything and the glittering lure of a‘larger-than-life’ life, seems, to some of us at least, quite archaic now.But even in our socially enlightened, austerity-shredded, community-conscious, light-speed-connected present, we still struggle to get to grips with a smarter, lighter, less financially and materially burdensome style of life.We’re all still living ‘larger-than-life’ lives. We seem to struggle to find meaning in the things that exist comfortably within our means.
- 10 years ago
Leadership /
Mention to a sustainability person that their career trajectory should be hurtling them towards some form of divine obsolescence and the reactions are, suffice to say, mixed.The idea of them passing through some blissful reinvention to rise phoenix-like, only stronger and wiser, in some new primary function at the heart of the business doesn’t always ring everyone’s career bell.The fact that they should wish to render their current position and the status they derive from it obsolete — a planned professional obsolescence — seems confusing to some, demeaning to others and otherwise simply, quietly terrifying to those who have been on the 'S' mission for so long.
- 10 years ago
Supply Chain /
After the recent piece regarding palm oil and the depredations its industrial cultivation rains on the heads of one of our most wonderful simian cousins, if there is anyone in the beauty industry or from one of its agencies that read it and didn’t end up feeling anything other than a creeping, yawing shame climb up their neck I would be staggered.Sadly, whether they give enough of a flying arse to do or say anything about it has more to do with income, career, the unassailable truth of an utterly disinterested management structure and the luxury of distance.
- 10 years ago
Marketing and Comms /
There’s nothing sexy about a Materiality Report. Delicately revealing your intimate water stewardship credentials is unlikely to get any one hot under the collar. And no one at your local is going to leap out of bed for a carbon-reduction conversation.Dream in a Box is a methodology I have been working on for some three years with Peggy Liu of JUCCCE and China Dream fame. It has its own dream: to help people re-imagine a more enduring, future-proofed model of prosperity at scale, a prosperity that aligns itself with a populist aspiration — a new aspirational concept of thriving within our own, our communities and our immediate world’s means.
- 10 years ago
Marketing and Comms /
We're living in The Age of Scratch Card Brands — social networks have closed the gap between brands and the businesses that deliver them to the extent that businesses now sit immediately beneath their brands. Social networks have rendered the factory and boardroom walls in glass — a rude employee or a river foaming with effluent can be captured on a phone camera instantly, be on YouTube in seconds and viewed by millions shortly after. Potential health and safety violations tolerated by out-of-sight factory workers are no longer out of mind to the consumer activist buying the brand promise four thousand miles away.
- 10 years ago