Transparency - why it clearly works

GOING public with the intimate details of your cost structure and profit margin is not a PR approach every manufacturer would be comfortable with. But, for Made in Britain member Private White VC in Manchester, the strategy of making high quality garments and carefully crafting a well-planned transparency strategy is paying off massively, earning them column inches in the top marketing journals as well as more PR and sales.


It’s the premium design and manufacture of a Private White VC product that’s always the first reason people choose the company’s menswear, but using business transparency effectively can reinforce the manufacturer’s uniqueness and bring about more sales as a result.
The company has published an honest exposé of ‘where the money really goes’for its made in Britain jacket compared with one made abroad. This queries one of the classic taboos in business and that’s what got the PR and marketing social media community interested in Private White VC’s approach. Buying the Private White VC jacket means that more of the money you pay goes to the business that actually makes your jacket and its suppliers – not ‘elsewhere’, which often means overseas. The marketing team saw the benefit of explaining this to customers.


Britain’s only home-grown copper tube manufacturer Mueller Europe makes 75 million metres of plumbing pipe a year. Almost half of the material is sourced from re-cycled scrap copper. Coming clean about this remarkable (and sustainable) fact to consumers and buyers shouldn’t be hard because the new circular economy matters to everyone. Revealing that your business is helping reduce commercial waste is one of the ways transparency can work in your favour. It’s comforting to know that by ordering made in Britain tube under Mueller Europe’s two brands Wednesbury Copper Tube and Yorkshire Copper Tube, customers are supporting British manufacturing AND reducing the burden of non-recycled materials input. Clearly that has to count as a marketing double-whammy!


Hand-crafted coffee machine maker Fracino makes some of the hardest working coffee machines in the world. It makes them in Birmingham. Fracino machines, with their hand-welded copper pressure cylinders, produce millions of cups of premium coffee every day. Over its 20-year, or longer, lifespan, a Fracino coffee machine will earn for its owner millions of Euros, pounds, dollars or yen. The machines are sold in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Dubai, India, Australia, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Fracino will even recycle a pre-loved Fracino coffee machine in a closed loop approach that most automotive manufacturers could only dream of and the company has been offering this service since it first started making its coffee machines in 1999.


Made in Britain member VR Firth likes transparency so much it goes to great lengths to publish pictures of its copper plates and other parts on social media, asking customers if they’d like to buy them. What a great idea!


Transparency might be the perfect approach for some marketers, but all too often, it gets overlooked, especially when you have so many other USPs to talk about. Transparency is also a core value of the Made in Britain organisation. You can read much more on this subject and our other values here in our Code of Conduct.

By Made in Britain 5 years ago | By Made in Britain

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