We live in an age of "woke" marketing: brands supporting social issues such as feminism, LGBTQ equality, racial justice and the environment. Whether tech or CPG, what a brand stands for is increasingly part of a buyer's purchase criteria.
Organizations need to win the trust of sceptical buyers and connect on a deeper level through shared values. 64% of buyers believe brands can be a powerful force for change. But, if these efforts are just lip service virtue-signalling, empowered consumers will expose brands for pandering (and harm the movements they are co-opting.) If they're legit, brands are taking advantage of an incredible opportunity to build loyal customers while driving social impact.
What are the risks of woke-washed marketing? Where is the opportunity? This is a new era as marketing and social movements are colliding in real-time. And, we need new rules of engagement.
In this talk, Katie covers:
The difference between meaningful brand support and pandering (with examples)
The seven risks of performative brand allyship on brands and social movements
How to navigate an age of accountability amid cancel culture and hashtag activism
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Okay, we're back for our our next conversation and presentation in the broad field of ethics, we're on our what in normal years would be the growth stage. And we have Katie Martell going to walk us through marketing in in the age of woke in the age of social movements, and how that's impacting the way we all think and the way we all act and interact with the world around us, including brands.
And obviously, there are some opportunities in there for brands, but there's a lot of pitfalls too. Katie's gonna give us some guidelines on how to navigate that world. Brian, thank you so much. Thank you so much to the team at Turing Fest. What a fantastic pivot in the world of twenty twenty.
We've all had to make some very strange choices this year. Thank you for continuing to hold this event and hold this program. I'm so delighted to be part of it. I have been a big fan, I've attended it And what a cool opportunity to present something that I am really passionate about these days.
My name is Katie Martell. Today's presentation is navigating the uncharted waters of wokewashed marketing. I'll get into a little bit today about what I think is just a very strange new normal in marketing. And this applies to companies of all sizes, B2B, B2C, largest companies, the multinational companies, all the way down to startups.
This is an issue we're all facing, we're all dealing with. You can Google me if you want more about me, but the short and the long of it about me is that I have a nickname in this industry as the unapologetic marketing truth teller.
All that means is that I think to keep our industry moving forward and to continue to evolve with it, we have to be willing to tell somewhat uncomfortable, exceptional truths about the space. In other words, what everyone's thinking, nobody's saying, and some things that have some impact that we may not be willing to admit.
In twenty twenty, we are facing a lot, right? But one current that I think has been growing over the last five years or so is the rise of woke marketing. Woke is a term that just means that you are aware of social justice issues, or you have the language to talk about systems of oppression or social movements and things of that nature.
In twenty twenty, I think we're seeing a high point for the intersection between marketing and social movements, woke marketing. Today, I'm going to talk about why this happens a little bit. I'll show you how some companies are pandering to these movements, exploiting them.
I'll also show you some really important risks of doing that, six really key risks and dangers to performative brand allyship, as well as some examples of genuine allyship and some really great examples that I believe represent a shift in where the business community is and where it's going.
And I've only got twenty minutes to do it all in. So let's get started. Let's jump right in with a really simple truth that this is the age of social movements. Social movements have always existed in our world and our society, but right now in twenty twenty, man, we are living in an age of social change, right?
We've got causes that are seeking to change the society in which we live. We've got feminism, right? And the women's rights movement. We're living in the midst of a civil rights movement for the LGBTQ, equality movement, Black Lives Matter, sustainability, our election, right?
Pandering even happenings, even happens with the pandemic. This is an age of social change and with social change come narratives, conversations, sides, enemies that are created. It creates a very polarized space, but it also creates momentum and energy. And that is like catnip to brands.
Brands who wanna break through, who wanna earn trust. And what we see in twenty twenty, one phenomenon is something called femvertising. You may have seen this. It's basically the use of feminism in advertising. Feminist messages like equal pay, equal rights for women, girl power.
You've seen these before. March sixth is International Women's Day. So no matter where you are around the world, you have seen ads that feature women's empowerment. Here's some examples from McDonald's flipping the golden arches to a w because that apparently signifies that they support women.
We've got Jane Walker instead of the iconic Johnny Walker brand and others that you see here. We've also got LGBTQ and Pride Month. Right? We see rainbow washed marketing. Every social media logo in June, Pride Month, is flipped to a rainbow to signify that company's support for the LGBTQ equality and for rights.
We also see companies marching in Pride parades. Green marketing, environmental sustainability, climate change is a huge narrative, especially with the new Biden administration. We're gonna see a lot more companies signifying through billboards and packaging and ads where they stand in terms of their sustainability efforts and their attempt to be green, excuse me, and eco conscious.
We've also now in June of this year as well, the US saw a massive rise in the response from brands to the Black Lives Matter protest after the murder of George Floyd and countless other named African Americans who were needlessly murdered at the hands of police and other racial justice initiatives, looking at things like systemic racism.
What we saw, of course, was this blackout, right? Every major brand putting a little black square with some white text about how they stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. This is nothing new. And I think this is fascinating. We like to think that we've invented marketing sometimes in the last twenty years or so because of the world of digital transformation.
Myself, I've been marketing to marketers for all that time and working deeply in Martech. And so we tend to think that we've invented all of marketing. In nineteen sixty eight, Virginia Slims ran a campaign that was really one of the first of its kind.
They had this really catchy jingle, you've come a long way, baby. I didn't Brian, I'm not a singer, I'm sorry. But it's this really catchy jingle about, look how far you've come, women. And now Virginia Slims, we've created a cigarette just for you.
Biologically superior to men, of course, according to this ad. And the video itself had, images of women's rights protests. So this was nineteen sixty eight. Think about it. The women's rights movement in the US was really gaining in strength and popularity. And this femvertising, I believe was the very, very first.
In twenty twenty, there are some nuances that caused this to be like the hottest thing in marketing right now. One is expectations from consumers. You might hear a lot about Gen Z. It's like the new boogeyman, right? It used to be millennials. My generation used to be the one that was changing everything.
Now it's Gen Z. But this data that I'm showing you here comes from Edelman and it looks across generations. This is not just a Gen Z thing. This is not just for the kids. Across generations, a majority of buyers, in this case sixty four percent, believe that brands can be a powerful force for change.
On the right of this chart, you'll see that many are belief driven buyers. That means that they choose, switch, avoid, and could boycott your brand based on your stance on societal issues. This is now a majority of buyers. In the age of woke marketing, we've got three different Confluences that are creating the need for brands to step outside their comfort zone to now create campaigns that are feminist, something we've never had to do before.
One, of course, driver is just to differentiate. We we are living in an age of commoditization. It has never been easier to start a company. There are more options for consumers than ever. And many times, it's a race to the bottom on price.
If all the options look the same, marketers need a way of differentiating. It's a noisy, noisy world, and and this is a way of doing Let's launch a campaign, right, that features our values and our beliefs. We're also trying to earn trust at a time when buyers are inherently skeptical.
Thank you. One hundred plus years of marketing doing that to us. But it's also a time when when there's so many options, commoditization, trust becomes the thing that can differentiate a brand and create very long term lifetime value and loyalty. Beyond needing to earn trust and needing to differentiate, we also need to align with buyers on shared values.
The majority of consumers out there, B2B or B2C, don't want a relationship with the company. When they do, it's because of shared values. This idea that you see the world the same way and you share the same core beliefs. It's like a good marriage. Right?
It's founded on very shared beliefs. All of this is happening right now. This is the charter for any marketer in twenty twenty. I don't care what it is you're marketing. And so what's happening is the age of woke marketing. This has become the best idea that brands have to differentiate, earn trust, and align with buyers on shared values.
What we're also seeing is just what brands do. We're gonna wanna go where public opinion is going. And here in the US, public support for LGBTQ rights is at an all time high, thanks to the work done over the past five decades of this movement N plus.
We also see where the ground swell is, meaning where the grassroots, where the on the ground energy is. These social movements I mentioned, Black Lives Matter, for example, really start as ground level movements and brands want to be at that level. They want to be where the energy and the groundswell is.
Most importantly, brands want to be where the purse strings are being controlled. And women think about femvertising, right? Women control eighty plus percent of consumer spending and sixty plus percent of social media sharing. The LGBTQ community, for example, represents a trillion with the T dollars in buying power, and that's not even counting the allies of this community.
So you have to look at where public opinion is going. It's moving in the direction of these social movements. Even Black Lives Matter has a majority of support, although sometimes the media makes it look like it's the opposite here. They wanna go where the ground spell is and you need to go where the purse strings are being controlled.
What that means is back in June of this year, this is what companies had to decide between. I love this meme. And there's so many memes about this hilarious intersection between social movements and marketing. In June, if you were a brand, you had to choose between pride, you had to choose between the stay at home coronavirus, we're with you kind of messaging or Black Lives Matter.
They were all converging at once. And many brands were caught off guard. They were caught wondering, how do we capitalize on this moment? Which narrative do we plug into? Which zeitgeist do we need to tap into? Many were caught without a framework to think about these issues.
And that's what I'm hoping to do with this presentation, but I'm also working on a book and a documentary about this issue because it's a new way of thinking for brands. The biggest truth, don't forget I have a nickname Truth Teller, is that marketing really has a pandering problem.
I'm gonna run through some examples, but I only have twenty minutes. And so I want you to know that there are countless. This is like the tip of like the Titanic iceberg. There are so many more examples than what I'm gonna show you today.
One is from KPMG. It's a TV commercial. It features Phil Nicholson and Stacy Lewis, who's the golfer you see on screen. And the spot has her teeing off and then some glass, you know, glass ceilings are breaking right here. You see it in the court of law. You see it in a laboratory.
You see it in a boardroom, right? Glass ceiling shattering, classic feminist trope. And the tag at the end, the tagline is here's to breaking more glass ceilings in golf and everywhere else. It was to promote KPMG's sponsorship of a women's golf tournament. At the same time that this ad was running, KPMG, which of course is one of the big four accounting firms, is the subject of a four hundred million dollars class action lawsuit alleging a pattern of gender discrimination.
Over a thousand women, a thousand women have spoken up about KPMG denying promotions to women and penalizing them for taking maternity leave. And this is just one example of many guns, publicly available information that you don't see when you're looking at these ads.
This campaign made international headlines. This is Fearless Girl. Little girl staring down the charging bull of Manhattan's Wall Street, iconic Wall Street imagery. It was commissioned by State Street Global Advisors to of course coincide with International Women's Day, the day of femvertising. And you have to know that at the time, right, the exact same time frame that this campaign launched and made viral headlines and everyone in their little ***** hats were taking selfies with the statue, you had to know that State Street agreed to pay five
million dollars to settle allegations that female and black executives at their own firm were paid less than white male counterparts. To boot, leadership team, eighty two percent male, nearly entirely white, intersectionality matters. There's a million examples of these. Well intentioned campaigns that ignore what's happening at the company.
When the Black Lives Matter movement came out, we saw the black squares and there was a rush, right, to respond. Some intrepid armchair journalists like William Otto here took some of these responses and added their own layer. The Met Opera tweeted this beautiful piece about there's no place for racism in New York City in the arts and the Met stands with those and yada yada.
George Floyd, you know, rest in peace. And William just points out with his tweet, the Met has never performed the work of a black composer. Oops. Mark Ritson had a fantastic piece where he looked at the executive team of companies like Adidas, again, behind those statements and compared them to these statements side by side.
For Adidas, he founded all white e team, but he also wrote this. The executive board of Adidas looks like he had just come in from a fun day of golf at an exclusive Scandinavian country club. Mark dragged them, rightfully so. Chris Franklin designed this piece, which I think encapsulated the spirit of these black squares.
We at Brand are committed to fighting injustice by posting images to Twitter that express our commitment to fighting injustice. Look at the bottom. We hope this action encourages you to view Brand positively without, you know, expecting anything from us. I could end the talk here.
It really summarizes my whole point here. But what I'm really trying to encourage is that we look at this as a pattern, not just Black Lives Matter. Don't forget rainbow washing. Now my wife and I, I am a part of the LGBTQ community.
My wife and I love to buy these stupid rainbow pieces of clothing. Every year, Adidas and Nike, and everyone has these like rainbow, I don't know, shoes, hats, questionable fedoras. And I'm sorry if you have a fedora like this. I just think they're weird looking.
And every year we like to, you know, see the fact that, hey, we're being celebrated instead of being persecuted. It's a really emotional moment and an emotional connection with a brand like Adidas. In this case, they had a hundred and sixty eight products in their twenty nineteen pride collection, much of which, the profits went to supporting the world's largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, the Trevor Project.
It's a feel good moment, right? Man, this is way better than not being able to get married or legally getting fired, which many of us still can in many states. It's really much better than getting murdered for being gay, but it's also not the full story.
I mean, look at Russia, right? Look at twenty eighteen, just one year prior to that collection coming out, where Adidas was a major sponsor spending one hundred and seventy six million dollars to sponsor the FIFA World Cup. Russia, of course, is a terrible place if you are a member of the LGBT community and it made it very unsafe by the way, for the fans of the sport and the athletes of the sport that are part of this community.
Russia is known for its anti gay purges, anti gay propaganda laws, discrimination. I mean, it is not a welcome place to be gay. But don't worry everyone, Adidas put out a statement. I love statements. I have a background in PR. I love drafting these statements.
The first three words are we see them everywhere, right? We condemn laws that could lead to discrimination towards our employees, business partners, athletes, and anybody in the Adidas LGBTQ family. Now that's the official statement. It should make us feel good about it. To me, it's the equivalent of sending thoughts and prayers after like a mass shooting or something.
It's it's really not helping. The most important part of this statement to me is the last word, family. Family is what we use to identify each other in the wild. You're part of my community, we call you family. It's really tough to consider Adidas' statement as holding that word family with the same reverence that we do.
We see greenwashing. Greenwashing is when you spend more time and money claiming to be green through marketing and advertising rather than actually implementing business practices. And all of this has a name. It's called wokewashing. You see this term in Harvard Business Review and The Guardian and even Urban Dictionary.
I mean, this is this very strange new normal in the world of marketing. And I think we have to be honest about where we each sit. Whether you are a marketer, a founder, an employee of a company, or you are a consumer, you all have a choice.
You can you can choose to be part of the the allyship that these movements are asking for. Or we can choose excuse me. We can choose to co opt, pander, or virtue signal our way to performative allyship. I wanna make a note of what performative allyship actually means.
This is when you see these black squares with an empty promise. You see them when they're opportunistic. Maybe the company itself doesn't have, a history of supporting the cause or has anything to say before it was bandwagoning to do so. It also passes the blame.
And that to me is the biggest, feature of performative allyship. It and this is according to Holiday Phillips, who is a former tech employee, Apple Monzo. She's now an activist, a writer, and educator. She says performative allyship refuses to acknowledge any personal responsibility for the systemic issues that created the context for the relevant tragedy.
In other words, it looks for a villain out there, right, instead of looking in house first. This is dangerous. This is our new normal. I believe that if we aren't honest with ourselves about the risks of this, then we actually threaten the movements themselves and our brands in the process.
I have six risks of performative allyship. I won't go through them all today, in a twenty minute talk, but I will tell you that you can just find me and find articles that I've written on this or book me to come speak to you and your team, and I will happily do so.
But I wanna cover really a couple of these. The risk of performative allyship in my mind is really about reducing the work to be done. It makes us believe that what we really need to do as a brand are take the easy ways out, newsjacking, right?
External messaging, focusing on societal, rather than using our time, our space, our budget, and our influence. I don't just mean internally. This should be a prerequisite to being part permission to play in these social movement narratives, things like education and policy and closing your own wage gaps.
But we should make use of our influence. Netflix did that in North Carolina, back in twenty nineteen in January when, the HB2 law was gonna remain on the books. Netflix pulled production to show that they did not stand with the the values behind those laws, the homophobic values behind those laws.
Rent the Runway is a great example of a company who responded to the Black Lives Matter movement with legitimate action. This is CEO Jennifer Hyman and co founder. She took responsibility for it. She said, look, we we have a problem in the fashion industry.
We are not recognizing black talent and giving back to black creatives. She took a stand. She said very firmly that they believe that supporting black designers is in the fashion industry's moral and financial best interest. She also took action. She donated a bond, not only money, but resources from the company to support black designers and made commitments about fifteen percent of their fashion talent that they feature and that they support will be from the black community.
You should Google the fifteen percent pledge. It's a retailer movement to to have fifteen percent of their shelf space devoted to black creators and black designers. And that's to represent fifteen percent of the population being black. Now look, this is one example of many of companies that are doing it and stepping up in real ways.
And I really wanna focus on a couple more. I mean, the second real, risk of this is that we are exploiting a human rights movement that has been full of sacrifice and that has been full of actual real people dedicating sometimes their lives to these movements.
To me, that is the, strongest indicator that we really, are not understanding what these movements are entailing. Right? We are ignoring the sacrifices made, especially when you look at Black Lives Matter. We're talking about real lives. This is not a corporate issue. The biggest risk to me, and again, there are six, but this is my big one, is that it creates an illusion of progress.
Forty six percent of men in a recent time study believe that the pay gap is made up. Like it's the Easter bunny. Like it just doesn't exist unless they don't, if they don't believe it's real. McKinsey of course, found that the workplace, for men is considered to be fine, equitable.
It's a lovely place to work. Women see a workplace that is less fair and offers less support. What we're doing with woke wash marketing without any real action is really creating an illusion that society is more progressive than it really is. Don't forget, if you're gay in America, you can still be legally fired in many states.
There's no federal statute. If you're a woman, only twenty two percent of C suite executives look like you. And if you're like many women, one in three between the ages of eighteen and thirty four, you're dealing with sexual harassment issues. I mean, these to me are the issues that feminist movement is asking for companies to solve.
Feminist ads don't do that. We can't see problems that we don't see or understand clearly. So there's a lot more to chat about this. The point really is that there are risks. There are actual real felt financial brand employer risks to the community, there's lobbying risks, there's hidden agendas behind performative allyship.
And I ask each of you that's watching this right now to understand that you have a role to play in this. If you're making decisions on behalf of your firm, ask what the movement needs from you, not what you stand to gain from performative alignment with the movement.
Ask yourself, how will you use your platform, your privilege, and your power? It's a lot of P words to be saying. How do you push back professionally on virtue signaling directives? We are really dealing with a very strange decision from company leaders. Real allyship will show ownership over an issue.
It's actions over ads. If you think that this is all being political, politically correct, this is outside of the norm, I will encourage you again to understand that consumers are expecting this from the companies they do business with. My favorite quote is that the only thing you find in the middle of the road on an issue is roadkill.
You've gotta take a stand when it comes to human rights, when it comes to the values of your organization and the people that you employ and the people that you serve. We're dealing with a shift in our world, and it's a really interesting shift from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capital ism.
How what you do as a business affects all the stakeholders involved in your organization. This is the shift that's happening. You can choose to live in the old world where performative allyship and just, you know, speaking, words over real action is is the way forward, or you can seek to have real impact.
I believe that if this is our brand new normal of marketing, then we need some new rules of engagement. I'm hoping to dispel those, myths, create some rules, create some frameworks and show you examples of companies that are really doing it right and creating what I think is an example for the future of business in a documentary, in a book that I'm creating called Wokewashed.
If you'd like to be part of this film or this book, or you'd like to bring me in to come speak to your team about this, I'm actively collecting research and doing this, but really I believe it's going to be one of the most important issues of our time as marketers.
And so I really want to thank the TuringFest team, Brian, Eric, thank you for making this possible and giving me a small platform in twenty minutes to just open some eyes around this issue. I hope that I've changed the way that you look at this type of marketing, both as a creator of it and a consumer of it.
And if you'd like to stay in touch with me, do send a newsletter where you will get lots and lots of articles and research on this topic. It's at katie martell dot com. So with that, we're going to move over to questions. And Brian, I will pass it back to you and I would love to answer your questions.
So please ask away. Okay. So we're gonna go and have a chat with Katie now to dig into some of those issues that you raised. And there's lots to unpack. Katie, thanks for being with us. Welcome to the Turing Fest stage. I see you've got your own Christmas tree there, which is which is excellent.
Gotta be festive. Getting in getting yeah. You're getting in the mood. That's quite right. So this this feels like such a such an important issue, but such a thorny issues. It's a tough one, I think for people sometimes to get their head around on the individual level, but it seems like a harder one for organizations, corporates, brands, even startups to figure out.
So who maybe first up, who are you helping with all of this kind of thing? Who are the the companies that that are picking up the phone to you and saying, we don't know what we're doing. Please help. It's usually less of a we don't know what we're doing.
It's more of a, hey. We think exactly to your point, We hope that we're thinking about this in the right way. I've spoken internally at companies that are large and consumer facing and, you know, small tech brands. Unfortunately, this is an issue that affects everyone and maybe that's an opportunity.
Right? I mean, I think if you are a multinational corporation, sure. Your impact in the world can be a lot bigger and greater and expanded. Even if you're a small startup, you know, you have a role to play in the fabric of society and the fabric of your community, both geographically, but also you know that of your customers and partners, your employees.
So really that whole idea of shareholder value moving to stakeholder value, it's universal. Think that I'd love to name drop, know, but it's names you would recognize. Companies as large as some of the largest enterprise tech brands just are trying to figure out how to leverage their, like I said in the talk, their platform, their privilege, their power in a way that's authentic, in a way that's meaningful.
Some founders, especially, I think a lot of these companies, really the founder has to be the one to say, we need to do better or we need to do something. They're looking at the pressure brought about by these social movements, they're thinking we can't just let this moment pass.
Our employees are demanding it. Our consumers are demanding it. We've gotta do something. I I very much expect this, to be something that is top of mind for every business leader. It it whether you said in HR or marketing, right, across twenty twenty one.
There are some really major firms, like Porter Novelli, for example, which is owned by Omnicom, who are doing this kind of consulting in the weeds of it, helping companies identify purpose and how to, pivot their resources accordingly, for some of the largest brands.
And then there's me who's, you know, coming in and hopefully waking up consumers as well. I I my my talk and my book and my film, it's all meant for everybody. This is not a film for marketers. This is a film for everybody.
I want everyone to see that, where we are in this world right now is a very strange time and that there's a lot of power in consumer activism, employee activism, as well as brand activism. It was it was interesting in your in your presentation to see the the origins of femvertising, which is a hell of a word.
And back in nineteen sixty eight, and that sort of Wonder Woman kind of character and cigarettes for especially for women now. And just actually thinking, though, about what what the that period of time looked like in the United States, look like in Europe, you know, Paris riots, etc.
We we were in a pretty tumultuous time in society, it seems like we're definitely in another one. How much is the is this just a case of the business world trying to catch up with the realities of society? Like I said in the talk, I I think kind of yes.
I also think that in twenty twenty, purely, I mean, is like super simplistic, not an economic, you know, economic. There there are more companies than ever. There are just more brands than ever with more pervasive reach globally than ever. Marketing is now, I would say, the most powerful industry in the world.
It's it's akin to propaganda in that way. Right? It it affects minds. It creates an idea of normalcy. I I just think the world in twenty twenty looks different in so many ways we could spend another hour talking about. The key for brands is that you need to differentiate.
You need to earn trust. Trust is at an all time low, and companies are truthfully desperate to show that they can be trusted or to position themselves as trustworthy. And you need you need to create some kind of a shared relationship with buyers.
I mean, you see this, Brian, in, enterprise tech. Right? You have this dichotomy that's created by some challenger brands to say there's the new way and the old way. Right? Companies like Salesforce and HubSpot, right, that have created this like enemy out of other brands or the old way of doing things.
It's polarizing. Yeah. But it's also about creating shared belief with buyers. And so for me, this is just more of that and more of the same and more of what buyers have come to expect. The difference between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty is that brands have a far greater ability to reach, far more people and social movements are happening on social media, right?
Which is where a lot of these brands are trying to enter the conversation, trying to sustain it. But, you know, history repeating itself, nothing is new under the sun. It it often is just like that, that ad I showed from nineteen sixty eight with the the cigarettes.
It's just more, oftentimes, not always, more virtue signaling, virtue hustling, performative allyship. There's all kinds of words for it. And I do think that it'll come to a head. I think we'll get to a point where consumers are just, a, sick of it.
Studies are showing they're already starting to get sick of it because there's so much. Edelman calls it trust washing. Right? There's just this massive rise of it and it's becoming annoying to some consumers. In another regards, they're coming to expect it. So I just think this is one of those things like positioning, like product messaging, like brand values that every company has to figure out or stay out of the conversation entirely, which is an option, by the way.
I feel like nobody really thinks about that, but it is an option to stay out of these. Yeah. That that was actually my next question. I mean, is it is it institutional conservatism for a brand to say, you know, we're going to stay away from this conversation entirely, we're going to stay out of it, we're going to stay in our lane?
Or is is there now just an expectation that a brand has takes a stand or takes a position and makes it makes it you know, are we how this is pretty aligned with values, I guess. And and what you spoke about in your talk was how values for some customers is a key reason to buy or to avoid a brand.
But you mentioned that it is an option to stay out of conversations about social movements, etc. Is that when is that the right wrong or right decision for for a brand? Now you're asking the million dollar question, and thank you for asking it.
There is no right answer to that. Unfortunately, I'm gonna give the true consultant answer of it depends. What it depends on is much to do with who the organization is and where you can have impact. What I'm rallying against is essentially a PR driven decision to enter a narrative.
June happened. Black Lives Matter happened in the US. And there was a reactive, which is never a good thing if you're in PR, reactive response to just say something so that people don't think we're a racist organization. Right? I mean, know that that was the conversation happening within many brands.
This rush to be seen as part of, you know, the the arc of history and you wanna be on the right side of it. Great. When it's a PR decision, then it's a PR decision. And PR decisions are surface level decisions. Right? When it's a true value based decision, when it's something that the organization as a whole can a, have real impact in.
I showed the example of Rent the Runway, deep in the fashion industry and a CEO who understood that as just as the head of a company, not the biggest fashion brand in the world, but one that can affect change in their in their lane to your point.
They can affect who they hire. They can affect the, designers on their platform, the representation of models, the way they pay their employees, etcetera, where they donate. Right? In that lane, you kinda create your own lane. Then it makes sense. It's aligned to not only the values of the business, but but lived experiences of the founder and the employees, etcetera.
When you've got companies that have nothing to do with some of these issues, that are offering no real action or meaningful support or anything inside the business, the supply chain, the the terms of use, the fair use policies of its products. Right? Just kind of throwing out meaningless statements, that's that's what I'm rallying against.
And I think in many cases, it's not there's no con you know, compulsion, you know, to to issue an ad on March sixth for International Women's Day. I don't think we need feminist advertising. Correct. This might be counterintuitive or maybe people are gonna disagree with me.
Please do. I don't believe the world needs feminist advertising. What we need are legitimate family leave programs and paid leave and and equal treatment of women and addressing the real problems in companies that hold women back. I mean, the pandemic has affected women and minorities especially.
That's the kind of real ugly work that's a lot harder than running an ad, running a PR campaign. So in many cases, it's a question of do we really need to add our voice to this, or are we just clogging up voices making a difference?
And is this something we can actually affect change in or are we just doing it for the virality of the spot or the brand lift or all these other, again, PR signal or surface driven metrics? I I would love to live in a world where I never see another feminist ad in my life.
Truth truthfully. I hope nobody gets mad at me saying that. There was a this is kind of reminded me. There was a a speaker that I was very, very happy about having recruited to speak at Turing Fest a couple of years ago. And this person, they were they were pretty senior product manager at a at a well known company in the valley.
I got a phone call from them to say, look. I'm really sorry. I'm not gonna be able to come because I've been I've been approached by Facebook to head up, their one of their integrity teams. And, it was an eye opener that Facebook decided to build an integrity team, you know, that was in two thousand eighteen, so fourteen years after they started the business.
You know? So they maybe came to the conclusion they didn't have enough integrity and needed more of it. It feels it feels like we're a little bit in that same space here. Right? You you know, this is a reflection of the the DNA of of the companies of the founders of the way they the way they really are, as opposed to just the sort of PR exercise, when it works.
But there is there's something that I find seems difficult to me around allyship. How should brands just be allies and keep it quiet? Or is it okay for them to talk about that? If they talk about it, are they, besmirching it somehow by trying to cash in on it or be seen to cash in on it?
It is a pretty tricky space. It's super tricky and it's exactly where this issue becomes very hairy. I think that, it's the framework is really simple. It's if there are actions that back up the, statements of allyship, great. I am no stranger to the shift from shareholder to stakeholder value.
And as part of that, of course, brands should earn PR and affinity and all of that for the real work they're doing. This is so like, unfortunately very simple. But if a brand is living up to the words on screen, great. I'm all for it.
Can businesses be a positive force of change in the world? Fantastic. For all the problems of capitalism and to your point, you know, Facebook having an integrity department, which is kinda hilarious if you think about it, you really do have an opportunity where brands are realizing, oh, we can make a real difference.
And that's going to lead to yes, monetary brand, you know, value and actual value creation. It's, you know, it is part of that shift where the value of an organization has shifted from the physical, you know, plans or the number to this, very kind of abstract idea of brand.
So there is tons of value in promoting the good work you're doing. I do think that since we're here since we're here now in this weird collision of social movements and branding, we might as well do some damn good. You've got companies like Ben and Jerry's.
I spoke to Christopher Miller who is their act full time full time activist manager. Full time hired person to deal with the the brand's activism. Is that an a realistic scalable thing that I think every brand will adopt? No. I don't. But what I think is that we've ended up on this, like, spectrum.
We've you know, between real allyship and performative. Most brands are somewhere over here in performative. They don't realize they're sitting on an opportunity to create real change, an opportunity to affect essentially, if you wanna be a feminist organization and you wanna support LGBTQ folks in the world, start at home.
It's so simple that I think it's we're over complicating it as consumers, employees, and as brand leaders. To answer your question, if you do good in the world, talk about it. If you do good in the world, of course, you should you should create PR about it.
Is it exploiting? Maybe. Maybe. But are you doing the work that again, I'll I I showed all the the folks in the movements, the the folks that have lived and died for these movements. Would they look upon what you're doing with some sense of pride, or are they gonna think that you're that's the that's the litmus test.
You feel good about it, of course, make some noise about it. Again, background in PR, we're hungry for storylines. But if it's just a PR effort or a PR exercise, you're doing more harm than good. I I I think there's a role for somewhere in the middle, Brian, where you're you're talking about the good you're doing, but you're still, holding yourself accountable to creating some kind of meaningful change wherever your platform allows you to.
Sounds like a a very simple rule of thumb for brands is to see where the idea are originated. If it came out of the PR department first, then maybe you've got the things in the wrong order. A question that's come in. Yeah. It's about something you mentioned in your talk, ask what the movement needs from you.
The question is, where does this conversation happen? Is it an external one with your team? External with activists and customers? How do you have that conversation without asking people to do a bunch of free emotional labor for you? So That's a big one.
That's a big one. Don't don't go to your, black employees and ask them, you know, how do we support you? Right? The person asking this question is completely correct about that emotional labor that a lot of, organizations have put on to employees in marginalized communities.
I've been the token yay in a room, and I've been asked weird questions about what the community needs. Like I'm some kind of a spokesperson for everybody in the rainbow, you know, umbrella. It's weird. It's weird. And I think that this comes from a place of respecting these employees, respecting the movements and the communities that they come from and recognizing your place in this.
I think the answer is yes. The conversation has to happen with the kind of three layers of, you know, who's affected by a business. It has to start with, the e team, the c suite. I mean, this has to be an issue that is not just thrown to the diversity squad.
You know, that department you created to meet once a month with, like, cronuts to talk about diversity? This has to come from, like, the core of a business. If it's really gonna be a meaningful, shift or a meaningful decision, founders especially. Then you gotta talk to employees.
There was a ton of companies this past election cycle, Hotjar. And who was the one that told their employees? They sent out the email to ten million customers saying, vote Biden. I mean, it was just lots of companies entering the fray around the political conversation, all to various degrees of success and controversy.
But what was core, Hotjar is a great example. They they decided to take off the Trump Pence reelection campaign from their product, which is a behavioral analytics platform. And there's a great breakdown of this in, Nandini Jemi and Claire Atkins branded newsletter, which you should all read and subscribe to immediately.
And they talked to the CEO of Hotjar, and he basically said, look. We talked to our employees. We got a sense of where they all stood. And, of course, some dissented and some supported, but the majority supported our decision to do this. And that's why we went forward.
You need the support of the people that represent your brand and and are are responsible for delivering on the promise of your brand every day. So talk to the employees, but also this is a matter of customers. You need to decide who you're for in the world.
Who are you for and who you're not for? This is an age old, you know, marketing, testament. Right? One of the refutable laws of marketing is knowing who you're for. Are you for everybody? Are you gonna allow everyone to use your platform, for example, or will you decide to kick off Nazis and racists and and put in policies that, right, that decide and and put a stake in the ground on what your values are and where you stand?
This is all part of that conversation. So, it's not an easy answer. It's also a lot of work, but respecting the movements, respecting your employees, and respecting your customers is where it all starts. It's obvious if you're starting from the other end of just wanting to be part of the conversation and check that box and move on to the next quarter.
So not an easy answer, but I think there are definitely, consultants you can hire, I'm not one of them, who can, help you navigate these social movements. They come from the world of D and I. This is where, these types of D and I type consultants can help you identify your place among some of these social movements.
I wouldn't try to make it up as you go. I would really do the work and spend the money to, you know, research before you decide to move forward. Yeah. It was interesting. Those those examples that you mentioned there, the the hot hot jar one, David Darmanen is the is the CEO you're talking about.
And I read I read the interview that Nandini did with him. And I am subscribed to her her excellent newsletter. She's she's joining us on Thursday, by the way. So I'm going to be having a chat with her this Thursday afternoon. I'm looking forward to she spoke at the conference last year, as I think you know.
And, yeah, she's amazing to see the journey she's been on and the work she's doing. But that that hot jar versus David Barrett is the guy Expensify is the was the other company. Yes. Thank They they emailed all their all their customers with explicit political instructions, which is pretty novel.
I thought it was really interesting the contrast between those two things, actually. Hotjar was just like, no, you know, we're not we're not gonna let you use our product to you know, we don't believe in what you're doing, so we're gonna withdraw our product, and you've breached the terms of service or whatever, versus Expensify emailing all of their customers to say you should do this.
It's a made the debate that it provoked as well was really interesting. Think there's quite a different view, maybe a European versus a US view on all of that. I've definitely had a had a disagreement with some American pals about it. I wanted to ask a final question about woke washing.
Because it's getting called out increasingly, but brands are still doing it. Are they still doing it because they just haven't caught up yet to the world, or are they still doing it because they've just done the numbers and it's working? That's a really good point.
And and who am I to to say if it's working, you should stop doing it. Right? Can I poke at you for a bit there? Can I bring you back to tell me what the view was in Europe on the hot jar issue?
It was well, it was the what? So I don't wanna be speaking on behalf of the whole continent. But it was it wasn't so much the Hotjar one. It was the it was the Expensify one. My my in my circle of friends on on the Hotjar thing, people were broadly thought that was a good thing, you know, that they they made the right call.
And, and I mean, it's interesting to see Nandini, like, hounding down brands and then, you know, being their conscience in loads of ways. And she's been very effective at it. The expensive I think, I think in general, well, again, in my, in my from the conversations I've had with people in Europe, people thought that was a step too far.
Know, had they been saying, you should, it's important for you to vote. That's one thing. Yes. To say you should vote in this direction. That that's not what I want from my software providers, I gotta say. Even though, you know, you can totally understand the the importance at hand.
But, yeah, I mean, I know of a company where a lot of their staff, they've they've they've, know, quite a big company, a lot of staff, those staff, all everybody, not just the the those emails went to every customer, every u end user, not just the the admins.
And, yeah, that company had a lot of Republicans who were really pissed off. So, yeah, these are these are, for sure, these are tricky, tricky questions. I think we're pretty much out of time on digging into them today. So we're gonna have to we're gonna have to wait till your till your film comes out.
So tell give us a quick plug for that. When is that coming out and how can people get their hands on it? You can definitely get on my newsletter, to find out when it's gonna be live. We're in that process of building, creating this issue is happening in in real time.
And and I wanna give, your next speaker, Nick, a shout out. You're gonna hear from a founder who's actually living the values that he portrays. So Nick, Francis, go you go girl. Brian, thank you so much for for having me really. So my newsletter is just like katie dash bartel dot com, but you should subscribe to Nandini's, I think.
It's branded dot substack dot com. She's in the front lines of calling brands out for, explicitly funding hate sites. Nothing controversial there. But she's literally one person with a partner and having an amazing impact. I mean, they took down four thousand plus brands who were funding the site Breitbart News with two people.
We can have immense change if we're willing to kind of call out difficult, what I call exceptional truths about the industry. Things that we're all thinking, nobody is saying. Speak up. It'll help us move the industry forward. It's only gonna create more value for, this industry and all who who work in it.
So, Brian, thank you. Really, really appreciate it. Thanks, Katie. Thanks for being with us. And hopefully, we'll see you in person next year or some other year. So take it easy. I hope so. See you. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. And as Katie mentioned, we're gonna be back at four PM UK with, with Nick France from HelpScout.
Just another quick shout out for the and digital event that's going to be coming up after that. It's at five thirty this afternoon, you can sign up through the Turing Fast web app or mobile app now. And they're going to be discussing data ethics in finance, which is frankly a pretty big and interesting topic.
So there's going be lots to dig into there. But next up, have Nick Francis from help scout talking about a different way that he sees about building business. See you in a minute.
