Every now and again, brands get an opportunity to fight for their customers.  Not just to provide a product or service that meets their needs, but in a proper scrap to defend their collective best interests.

Done well, sticking up for customers helps brands show they really are on their side. That they do understand them, and the pain they live with. By fighting for them, brands can make their customer’s lives easier.  But of course, this is not always easy to do.

As part of the Fourteen Forty Communications team, we’re delighted that’s what we’ve been doing with Xero, the global small business platform.  Xero’s customers tend to be smaller businesses.  A common complaint (since time began) for smaller businesses is that their big business customers often don’t pay them on time.

This late payment problem will be familiar to many.  We all know the drill.  It’s horrid.  Late payments put people out of business.   But it’s more than that.  It can mean the more successful that small firms are in drumming up business, the harder it is for them to make ends meet when the late payments rack up.

In 2023, late payments cost small businesses £1.6bn in the UK. 

The new government has now confirmed it will legislate to compel companies to declare in their annual reports how much of small businesses’ money they are holding onto in late payments.  This will put the C-suite under scrutiny.

Xero pioneered calling for this measure and we have worked with them to campaign for it to be introduced, as an important step along the way.

We’re delighted for that success.  And we’re delighted that our work with Xero, along with our friends at Brands2Life, is now up for a raft of industry awards. 

We’ve been shortlisted by CorpComms (best corporate and best integrated campaigns), Drum (business to business) and the PRCA (business to business technology).

This is the sort of work we love.  It’s changing people’s minds on a knotty issue, and the futures of many firms who will benefit if prompter payments come through.

Read more about our campaign to level the playing field for small business.