In our new feature, we go around the world to explore the wide world of communications and international correspondents provide their take on local issues. Each month we’ll bring you one highlighted story, with more from global communications on Communicate’s iPad edition

Singapore straight

In Singapore, H&M’s CSR activity might just have gone beyond a sustainability story and into the chapters of legal change. Our Asian correspondent, Cindy Ng, investigates

For most companies, controversy is best avoided. For those organisations, when exploring their corporate sponsorship options or looking to see with which causes to structure their CSR policy, it’s the media friendly charities such as children, animals or environmental causes that they turn to.

But here in south-east Asia, H&M, the Swedish multinational retail giant, has overtly gone against the grain, courting controversy in its first year of operation in the Republic of Singapore. For although Singapore has a reputation as an economic power house - it is the world’s fourth leading financial centre and boasts the third highest per capita income – it has a slightly less contemporary attitude to sexual freedom. Here in Singapore, homosexuality is still a criminal offence. It was in this climate of limited acceptance to gay lifestyles that H&M sponsored the AIDS charity Fashion Against Aids (FAA)

Whilst FAA was a global initiative introduced by H&M in 2008, its Singaporean operation embraced it with a ferocity all the more surprising considering Singapore’s attitudes to an illness still associated in the region to gay sex. Whilst there have been no prosecutions for homosexuality since 1999, Singapore is a country where officialdom is not known for its tolerance of alternative lifestyles.

H&M didn’t hide its involvement, using celebrities and pop-culture on an integrated marketing and communications platform of social media (including Facebook, Twitter and a Fashion Against Aids YouTube channel) combined with live concerts, celebrity events, outdoor advertising, public relations and print and television advertising. The additional benefit of this promotional activity was an increase in customer sales, with H&M donating 25 percent of the sales of the FAA collection to HIV and AIDS prevention projects for young people carried out by DAA, YouthAIDS, UNFPA and the MTV Staying Alive Foundation.

The global benefits of the FAA campaign can’t be denied. H&M raised SEK 15,136,057 for the four charities. They also encouraged customers to contribute to other good causes with direct donations made in their stores. In 2011, their customers donated a further SEK 11,491,276. Cause related marketing campaigns work. They impact brand affinity and in turn brand equity, as well as consumer perception, loyalty and actual buying behaviour. Over the past five years H&M have won numerous CSR and sustainability awards. But here in Singapore H&M’s involvement was seen to go further. Their CSR sponsorship is thought by some to have resulted in challenges to the Singapore legal system.

Within six months of H&M’s Singaporean operations successfully bringing its message of greater tolerance to the retail emporiums of this city state, local couple Gary Lim and Kenneth Chee were allowed by the high court to challenge the Singapore’s Penal Code, arguing that it violated the nations constitution , which stated that “all persons are equal before the law and entitled to the equal protection of the law.”

This case, and another currently going through the High Court, could completely overwrite Singaporean law.

In an age where marketers constantly cry out to the comms department to show more evaluation evidence, some might argue there can be no greater evidence that corporate sponsorship and grass roots CSR activity can change lives in ways that go beyond corporate metrics.

Foreign language

Russian investment bank, VTB Capital, has defied a world banking collapse with a clear-cut and adaptable communications strategy. Our Russian correspondent, Ekaterina Grigorovich investigates

For an upstart Russian investment bank looking to rally investors behind its offer as an international and Russian company, Russia’s current corruption ranking at 133 of around 200 countries in the world by Transparency International – the exact same ranking as Iran — is not a promising statistic for potential investors. But for VTB Capital, overcoming communications challenges has been the modus operandi since day one.

When it launched in the spring of 2008, the economic catastrophe of that autumn was just a glint in the eye of most bankers. By December, Reuters had documented VTB Capital’s unlikely meteoric success amidst “one of the darkest moments in stock market history.” The established name of the massive clearinghouse VTB Group helped VTB Capital establish a place for itself in the global investments marketplace. But a flexible and transparent communications strategy shouldered a huge heft of the load.

“We had to reconsider our strategy during the recession,” VTB Capital’s global head of communications and marketing Olga Podoinitsyna says. “We didn’t stop doing everything but redeveloped our strategy to meet clients expectations according to the market. We started speaking with the market in its own language.”

One of the investment bank’s initial and now most successful programmes is its investment forum which brings banking, investment and political leaders together for three days every year. This too, had to overcome its fair share of problems as its second annual forum was to be held the same week the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted spilling smoke and ash into the skies above Europe.

The forum will now be in its fifth iteration in April and boasts high-profile media partners and speakers from the business and political spheres. The annual event serves as the most prominent public feature of VTB’s communications strategy. It engages with its target audience, key stakeholders and relevant outside influencers in with consistent language — i.e. that of global politics and investment.

While a Russian bank can get in to trouble on the international scene by aligning too closely with a motherland known for corruption, VTB Capital succeeds in promoting Russia because of the established reputation of the bank’s itself and its experience in the international investment market.

As the recession has seen the end of everything from major global banking institutions to high street favourites to mom and pop shops, VTB Capital has persisted and even expanded since 2008. Its London office, more of a second home than an outpost of the Russian headquarters, was located in the old premises of the Moscow Narodny Bank, a remnant of the 1910s.

VTB Capital has taken its heritage and platform and adapted it to new places with an assertive communications strategy. “Because of market development and our communications strategy, we are well prepared to do business and represent the interests of our clients in all parts of international markets,” Podoinitsyna says. She adds this kind of culturally sensitive communications strategy enables the bank to wield soft power and to present Russia as a place worthy of investment and VTB Capital as the right company to handle that investment.

The Russian economy has been evolving since Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost 30 years ago. Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, and his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, have spent the past few years fostering the development of the Russian economy by encouraging foreign investment. To both promote investment and continue Russia’s economic evolution, Podoinitsyna says VTB Capital “must keep up the development of our business to continue meeting our clients’ expectations and to continue having a direct dialogue with investors.”