Laura Jones (00:18)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Opinion Party. I'm your co-host Laura Jones.

Jason Gaikowski (00:22)
I'm Jason Gaikowski.

Laura Jones (00:24)
And this is the podcast that explores some of the most pervasive myths in modern marketing and dispels them with the cold, cruel facts of data. And today we've got a really feisty one, I think, or what's shaping up to be our topic today is should brands take a stand? And I think just to give you a little bit of context.

We're gonna be talking about both sides of the coin as I think all of our opinion slash fact discussions do. So Jason, what have you found in the data? Hit us with some data.

Jason Gaikowski (01:03)
Well, Laura, I can't wait to get into this one. Even though we're going to talk about both sides of the coin, I'm not sure there are in fact two sides of the coin, at least from the way I'm reading the data, right? So should brands take a stand? Look, we've taken a look at what happens to brands over about a 20-year time horizon. And what you find is if you look at inner brands list of the world's best brands, the world's most valuable brands from 20 years ago,

Laura Jones (01:15)
Mmm.

Jason Gaikowski (01:32)
Only a third of them remain among the world's best today. And you see a similar kind of pattern in Brand Asset Value, Valuator data, whether I'm looking at the strongest brands, BAV brand strength, or the most famous brands, BAV brand stature over 20 year.

time horizon, you see significant fragmentation, erosion, and fall off. In fact, there's about an 80 % chance that a brand who has reached the highest of heights is likely to fall, and about a 67 % chance that they're going to fall by at least five rank points or more. And again, these are the best and brightest brands.

These are Coca-Cola, these are McDonald's, these are every brand that comes to mind. And I think that what we're seeing is part of a larger pattern and the pattern may almost be inevitable. There's a theory that came forward starting in the 50s and it came from media brands and it was called the theory of the least objectionable program and the least objectionable programming.

And they were able to cultivate mass audiences and mass followings by not putting forward anything objectionable. And when you look backwards at the history of brands, you can see that pattern. Charmin became an enormous icon of toilet paper by not really offending anybody. Right? Not really taking any kind of a stand. You can see the same with McDonald's. You can see the same with Coca-Cola, who wanted to teach

the world to sing by bringing everyone together, right? But it's unclear that that strategy works as well as it used to. Starbucks, for an example, they built an enormous brand, an enormous business around least objectionable brand, winning out over regional competitors like Pearls and Caribou.

And yet what we see over the past 10 years is that Black Rifle Coffee Company, which anchors itself into military values and military messaging, has been the fastest growing coffee brand over the past 10 years.

Interestingly enough, some of the most polarizing brands in our data set, incredibly high preference, but also incredibly high rejection rates. Think military organizations, think political parties. These are the brands that were strong 20 years ago and are equally strong today. And I think that more and more brands are waking up to this. CVS took a stand. They said, just say no to tobacco. And they've substantially outcompeted Walgreens. Patagonia.

clearly stands for the environment. Monster Energy Drink. Look, we can't say that Monster Energy Drink hasn't taken a stand for something, but they've delivered 20x shareholder returns since 2010. Right?

the gravity of market fragmentation is real. And in markets that are both saturated and crowded, I think the data tells me that taking a stand may be the only way to stand out. So that's what the data is telling me. I'm really excited to get into this with our guest. I know she's done a lot of research on this topic, and I'm super curious to hear what more we might learn on this.

Laura Jones (04:56)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Jason, for that take. And without further

let's introduce our guest today, Professor Kimberly Whitler. Kim is a distinguished professor, author, and former marketing executive, CMO, in fact, with deep expertise in brand strategy, CMO effectiveness, and corporate governance. She's got a robust industry background and an academic focus, so she really brings...

a complete and nuanced point of view. And she bridges the gap between theory and practice, bringing valuable insights into how brands can build trust and sustain loyalty. And she's done a lot of research on this topic. So welcome to the party, Kim Whitler.

Kim Whitler (05:37)
Thank you. am Laura. I'm just so honored to be here because I have to say as a big fan of the data that you all produce and as a consumer of it, it seems like more often than not, I'm quoting you guys in a lot of my research. It's just exciting to be here today to talk about such an important topic.

Laura Jones (05:56)
Yeah, absolutely. And let's get into it. I mean, you bring such a unique perspective having both the industry and the academic experience. What first got you interested in really exploring all of the data and researching around this notion, should brands take a stand and what happens when they do, and really just their overall role in bigger societal conversations?

Kim Whitler (06:21)
Yeah. So, you know, when I shifted from kind of being a marketing practitioner to an academic, I now am a professor at UVA's Darden School of Business. One of my goals was to do research that really mattered to the people at the top. That's the board of directors, CEOs, CMOs and the C-suite. And I'm always looking for things that I find very curious where a practice is inconsistent with a theory or something like that.

And so if you go back to 2018, it really started with Nike's embrace of Colin Kaepernick. On one hand, we saw them do this. and by the way, one of the things that I focus on when I teach marketing is I don't use the word marketing. I talk about how marketers are growth engineers. Our job is to create more consumers, more advocates, drive value. And by driving value, we create more growth. We uniquely do that in the firm.

And so that's what I'm teaching every single day. How can we grow the business? So you see on one hand, Nike embracing Colin Kaepernick, which is interesting because what you start seeing are reports from morning consult that there was deep division. You know, I think Jason, you talk about the goal is not to, know, to not be objectionable today. Perhaps the goal is to be the most objectionable, objectionable brand, then

there's a consequence to being the most objectionable brand. And so I'm watching this Nike thing play out and I'm observing the data. I then am working with a group of mid to senior level executives and I literally had people say that they had been lifelong Nike consumers and they were now not only never going to buy Nike again, but they would not even give their Nike products to Goodwill. That they did not want to contribute to

providing those products still kind of, know, out into the system. And I thought, this is unbelievable. Marketers are supposed to create affinity and love, not hatred and vitriol for their brands. And so for me, there was all this messaging. The media was saying, you have to take a stand. No longer can you sit on the sidelines. You must take a stand. And there's this enormous push for brands to take a stand. But then I'm watching

This, you know, this potentially lead to not just dislike of the brand, but truly hatred hate for the brand. You can look at X. Let's look at it on the other side, right? Many of the people who say brands should take a stand. say, well, do you like the CEO of X taking a stand? They don't. I'm like, they don't because they don't like that stand. Right. And so, so for marketers, we have to kind of step back and be principled about this and say,

Does taking a stand help? When does it help? When does it hurt? And as an academic, I've learned a long time ago never to say it's always one way or the other. It depends, right? There are conditions under which it can help. There are conditions under which it might not help. And so what's fun about this type of problem is that it's much more complex when you dive into it. think then unfortunately a lot of executives, well, executives are finding this out because they're

doing things and it's not always working and they're getting a lot of backlash. And so they're starting to realize it's more complicated than perhaps we might have thought of 10 years ago. So anyway, that's what got me into it is when I saw this meme or this narrative that you have to take a stand. then I watched consumers literally rejecting the brand and hating the brand. said, well, this is interesting. This is an interesting problem for me to go study.

Jason Gaikowski (09:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, this, you know, your commentary, Kim, it, it brings to mind a lot of the work of Roger Martin, who certainly had a lot of influence in, my own career and in my own thinking. And, you know, the way he talks about organizations needing to make strategic choices and that if you cannot articulate an opposite choice, that isn't patently stupid.

then it's not a real choice, right? Then all it is is a nice sounding platitude. And so I think there's something interesting about at least my view of Nike's choice, right? We are going to stand with the value system of a younger generation, even at the expense of the value system of an older generation.

I can also look at it through an economic lens and say, look, the future growth value of millennials and younger is a lot bigger than the current operating value of boomers and Xers. And I'm willing to make that trade-off in order to create a brighter growth trajectory for my organization. I don't know if that resonates with what your research is, but certainly what you've explained, that's what brings forward to my mind.

Kim Whitler (11:34)
So Jason, I think that's a really, you know, it's an interesting point because there could be a strategic choice that Nike made. And what they could have said is that we want to shift the brand liberal, that we were mainstream. We don't want to be mainstream. Younger people tend to be liberal. Although if you look at the vote two weeks ago, it's interesting how many more young people voted conservative. I think it was like 46%. In my lifetime, I've never seen that.

Jason Gaikowski (11:47)
Yep.

Kim Whitler (12:04)
Okay. So something's going on that I think is very interesting to kind of peel back the onion and try to understand, but they could have said strategically, we want to shift to be more liberal. What I find interesting is that the notion of social injustice, that's not a liberal or conservative issue. That is largely unified. There's nobody who will verbally go out and argue for social injustice. Right? It's like who, like I worked at PetSmart. We had PetSmart charities.

Jason Gaikowski (12:29)
Right.

Kim Whitler (12:34)
Our goal, one our big activist efforts was to save the lives of cats and dogs. Who's against that? Nobody. That's not a politically divisive issue. It's a unifying one. So you can be an activist and be a unifier and appealed everybody. So social injustice actually appealed everybody, but it was the choice of somebody who kneeled for the flag. That fell along political fault lines. The people on the left believe that kneeling for the flag is deeply American.

The people on the right believe it's deeply un-American and unpatriotic. And so the choice of Colin Kaepernick, had they chosen, I'm making this up, Serena Williams, to be the face of social injustice, the reaction would have been very different. Right? So the issue itself, I don't think was divisive. It's the execution and who they chose to partner with that all of a sudden pushed them into different buckets. Now,

Let me come back to your point about maybe there's strategic, there was a, there was a strategic shift to move the brand liberal. So the choice of Colin Kaepernick helps move it liberal. I would then expect to see a shift in their purpose and their purpose has been and continues to be to inspire and motivate every athlete, everybody with a body, every body. it so their purpose doesn't appear to be ideologically aligned.

or politically aligned, it appears to be mass. And so I expected if it was a strategic shift, I kind of was looking for just like Patagonia, they are a very liberal brand. were birthed as a liberal brand and it's clear in their purpose and they live it in a very aligned way. just expected if it had been a strategic shift of Nike from mass to liberal, I would have expected it because I think your argument is good one.

Younger people tend to be liberal. They want this to be a younger brand. I could see a strategic argument to shift it. I would have then expected though, if that was the driver to see it play out in their purpose and their purpose didn't shift.

Jason Gaikowski (14:41)
agree.

Laura Jones (14:42)
Yeah, and let's talk about because we keep saying people want this people demand this there's there's been a lot of research that suggests that people do want brands to take a stand and that's kind of why brands are stepping up and getting involved in places that they previously as Jason pointed out in the earlier research would would never have been injecting themselves into. What are your thoughts on that Kim?

Kim Whitler (15:08)
Yeah, I mean, because if you go back again, when I saw what was happening with Nike, one of the things I do is I start consuming all the all the managerial research because that's much faster than academic research. Academic research takes years, but academic research is much better. It's higher quality. They control for things. They're looking at endogeneity there. So it's better. But the early research that was coming out oftentimes

It was from organizations that had a point of view that tended to be more activist organizations. And they were putting out a lot of research that was saying, you must take a stand. You must take a stand. Edelman at the time, I mean, I like, I love the work that Edelman does. They have this trust barometer. but you know, they were early advocates of companies taking a stand. And so what's happening is if you're a CEO, a C-suite leader,

You're reading every day that you must take a stand. Then you have Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the largest company in the world in terms of managing assets, who sends out a letter to CEOs and say, you must take a stand. You must do more for society. By the way, we could have a whole hour long conversation about what is the role of companies in society. I would actually argue that most of progress has come on the backs of companies.

So if you want to change what companies do, what might we be sacrificing? If we shift them to doing things that they currently don't do, what is the consequence? I, you know, I tend to come at this from a lot of progress has come on the backs of companies specializing and focusing on creating value in a specific way. If we take them and shift them in a different direction, there's a consequence to that, to the point that Jason said.

You know, the research early on was all kind of unilateral. The problem with the research is there are multiple problems. But one, it's always looking at it in the abstract. Do you want companies to take a stand? Everybody says, sure. Because what consumers are thinking is you're going to take my side. When I work with young people, I always ask this question. I said, how many of you want companies to take a stand? And they all say yes. I said, OK, I want you to think about your favorite brand.

I want you to think about the most important issue that matters to you. How many of you want that favorite brand to take a stand on the other side? And I said, look at this, you all agree. Not one of you wants a brand to take a stand on a side you don't agree with. Therein is the growth problem. It's when brands that appeal to a broad swath abandon that and start

Pivoting to one side or the other the potential is that they can a this is the potential problem They can alienate folks. So the research doesn't consider that or the research doesn't consider trade-off choices Let me give you an example. Would you like coca-cola to take a stand on abortion? Maybe people say yes Then if you ask them would you prefer coca-cola to try to address the creation of better products that don't create?

childhood diabetes, you know obesity or would you like them to go work on abortion policy? My guess is that consumers would say we'd like you to work on making better quality products that are healthier for society Does that make sense? So none of the research has trade-offs So, you know say do you want companies to a stand on gun control climate change abortion animal rights human rights?

We could go on and on and cause it was like, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. And then that research gets published and executives look at it and go, my gosh, everybody wants us to do something. need to go do something. And pretty soon then everybody's speaking up on topics that they're not really experts on or that they don't know much about. And they end up getting in a lot of hot water because they get hit from both sides. So I think.

Laura Jones (19:21)
Yeah, Kim

Kim Whitler (19:22)
I think if you look at that early research, just didn't look at trade-offs. It didn't look at what happens when every brand starts taking a stand. So I've got a piece of paper. Do I want my paper brand to take a stand on abortion and my pen and my Jabra and my cup brand? And pretty soon consumers are assaulted with messages about virtue. None of the research considers that. What happens when we're hit over and over and over

with messages about what we're supposed to be doing. How does that then affect consumers? So I think we're seeing this play out in real time as brands listen to that early research and we're starting to see examples where brands win and where they lose listening to the research. And so we're learning more.

Laura Jones (20:10)
Yeah, that is such a nuanced perspective on really making sure that consumers of this data in the business environment really understand how research is constructed, how it's set up.

having fundamental flaws or biases. And so that's really good advice is to go back to the source. And to your point about what happens when all of these messages go out and whether they're for one thing against one thing, your research touches on this Kim and you've looked at what various points of view, how that affects, how these brands taking a stand affects people with different.

ideologies, methodologies with the data. Can you explain a little bit about some of the research findings from that?

Kim Whitler (20:59)
Well, you know, I'll pick up actually BAV data, which I love. I think we published an article in Journal of Retailing in the spring and then HBR just picked it up and they really highlighted the BAV data, which showed that multiple years after Nike embraced Colin Kaepernick, what you see is this negative asymmetric effect. And I have some research I'll talk about with some specific quotes, but negative asymmetric effect means that

The people who agree with a point of view were neutral or slightly positive and the people who disagree were deeply negative. Okay. And so what we see from the BAV data is that three years after Colin Kaepernick, they shifted the brand, you know, to the left and, and liberals were far more positive about the brand than they had been before. In fact, there was an increase of 24 % in terms of usage.

I'm sorry, I take that back. That's wrong. In terms of Nike is a brand that cares about its customers. Democrats saw that much more positively. That was up 33 % versus the prior three years. Republicans were down 54%. But in terms of usage, liberals were up 3%, conservatives were down 24%. So you see the negative asymmetric effect.

But that's just end of one. I'll share with you a couple of research papers that are in high quality journals. And these are different groups of researchers. So I like to see broad-based evidence across journals, across researchers. And what we're seeing is whether it's investors, employees, or consumers, there's this negative asymmetric effect. And let me just give you an example. This is looking at employee reaction.

There's a demotivating effect of taking a stance on a sociopolitical issue with which employees disagree and no statistically significant motivating effect of taking a stance on one in which employees agree. So essentially, employees who disagree with a political stance taken by their companies are demotivated. do less work and do lower quality work.

but the people who agree with it are not more motivated and work extra hard. Okay, that's one example. Here's another example. This is consumer reaction. The results from a series of studies involving both unknown and well-known brands show that attitudes towards the brand decreased substantially among consumers who disagreed with the brand's stand, whereas there was no significant effect among consumers who were supportive of the brand's stand. So there's a number of these papers and what they're showing

is that it's a win if they agree. Or I'm sorry, I take it back. If they agree, it's kind of neutral, maybe slightly positive. But if they disagree, it's a loss. we can all, and a lot of times when I work with, with young people, if they're liberal, I use the example of X because I'm like, you love it when Disney took a stand, you love it when Coke took a stand, but did you like it when X took a stand? You hated it and you're against X. in fact, you're

getting off of the platform. That is the problem. If you are a brand that has three liberals, four independents and three conservatives, which do you want to fire? Right? This is an anti-growth strategy. What's I in an ideal world. And I think Jason, this is where I'd love to dig in with you on this objectionable objectionable piece. Cause I think you have an interesting point in an ideal world. want to keep all 10 of those consumers.

How do I do that while also not being boring and dying as a brand? Right? And so in the research that I published in in a journal of retailing with Thomas Barta, where I use the BAV data, you you can still be an activist, but you have to understand your consumers. If you're Patagonia, you're birthed liberal, be liberal, know, own it.

Jason Gaikowski (24:53)
Yep.

Kim Whitler (25:16)
Go in because most of your consumers already know who you are and they buy into it. you're rifle black, rifle coffee, and you stand for helping vets, by the way, most of America doesn't have an issue with helping vets. That's not a controversial issue, right? If they were spending money to go maybe create the next bomb, that might be more controversial, but you can be an activist. But part of it is understanding where your activism is, how it fits with your brand and how it fits with your consumers.

Jason Gaikowski (25:30)
Yep.

Kim Whitler (25:46)
As a marketer, goal is to grow our consumer base, is to be as inclusive as possible. And so by picking a side where you irritate people and you offend them and you motivate them to go try to destroy your brand, that's kind of the antithesis of what we're trying to do as marketers.

Jason Gaikowski (26:05)
Yeah, mean, in your commentary around negative asymmetric effects, I've studied topics adjacent to that in psychology and colloquially what we see showing up again and again and again is that bad is stronger than good, right? It just.

Kim Whitler (26:28)
Losses loom larger.

Jason Gaikowski (26:29)
All right, it just, it just is that stronger than good hate is more powerful than love as a motivating force. Fear is more powerful than hope as a motivating force. and it does bring me around to wonder if perhaps the winning strategy is to take a stand as a way to take a, as a way to stand out, but to find the least objectionable stand.

Right? So as you said, no one is against social justice, right? But people are against fiddling around with conventions around how we interact with the flag in a public sporting event. Right? No one is, no one is against protecting the environment, but that doesn't mean that Patagonia is going to appeal to the hunt and fish crowd in the same way that they do to the hike and camp crowd.

Right, and so perhaps a winning strategy is yes, take a stand, but find the least objectionable stand that's gonna work for you, your brand, and your consumer base.

Kim Whitler (27:39)
Yeah, and I, because I'm really fascinated by that, by the language of objectionable. think there's something really interesting that you're picking up on that I would love to, to think more about. I, because I agree with you that I think this is about figuring out what your brand really is and who your brand reaches today. And you have to, you have to be aligned with that. And what we see, I'll give you an example back. This is around the same time that, that.

that Audi was doing, I'm sorry, that Nike was doing Colin Kaepernick, Audi ran a Super Bowl ad that talked about gender pay inequality. And it started off with this like father's voice that said, you know, what will I tell my daughter? Now that's a really important issue. that the right issue for it? Look, is that the right issue for Audi? There are thousands of issues, thousands of issues. You cannot take a stand on every issue.

You know, PetSmart takes a very big stand on saving the lives of dogs and cats. That's the right issue. That's where they should stay centered, you know, and they can be potentially maybe they're objectionable to some people, you know, in some way on that issue, if they take a stand against pet mills or against breeders, right? But they come from a place of really believing in that issue. It's embedded in the brand.

At PetSmart, can bring your pet to work on Fridays. If you have a reptile, you can keep it at the office all week. Like there's all sorts of things that say, love and care about animals. It is part of the brand. And that's where there's an authentic connection to the activism. Too often these brands are saying, gosh, gender pay inequality is hot. I just read about that. So now Audi's going to talk about it.

But when you peel back the onion and you go and you look at who's running Audi at the time, which I did, and you look at who's on the board and you look at for any press release that talked about pay equity, you saw nothing. And so then, and this is an interesting piece of research. This research was done in India. So this is interesting. But they've looked at young people. And one of the worst things you can do is to try to co-op.

the co-op, the emotion of an important issue to try to gain sales. Right. And what they did is they looked at 286 participants, millennials who varied on a number of different factors. What they found is that in companies rush to support a cause and attract the value and ethics driven consumers, the company or brand may stretch their activism part too far and may not be able to connect with the audience and are seen

as a mere marketing gimmick. by the way, after Colin Kaepernick, Morning Consult did a quick pulse poll and what they found is that a number of people thought that it was a marketing gimmick. Young people are deeply skeptical of actions where you try to appear to be virtuous and good. And so this is where I think Jason, your whole point about

Laura Jones (30:38)
and what they found is that a number of people thought that it was the one, it was the marketing gimmick. Young people are deeply skeptical of action through the media.

Kim Whitler (31:00)
How do we connect this in a deep way? Patagonia is a great example of a brand that has a point of view. It was birthed that way. It has been consistent throughout time. They own it, and they consistently deepen that. They even change their purpose to more clearly reflect that connection to their brand, to who they are. So I couldn't agree more, I think, on that point.

Jason Gaikowski (31:27)
Yeah, there's something, there's something really important that I think too often gets lost in an organization. And the way I talk about it is don't don't lie to yourself. Like

Don't go out in the market and start making promises that your supply chain, that your business operations, that your financial and economic commitments aren't lined up in order to keep, right? And, you know, I have enormous respect for Patagonia as a brand.

love the environmental commitment that they have. you know, counterintuitively hunting brands are among the leading conservationists, right, that we have in America to very, different audience faces to very, different consumer motivations. And yet really, really united in a common cause of protecting the environment, but in very, very, different ways. Right. So I think there's I think there's something really important.

that when you take a stand, it is not a marketing stunt and it is true to the commitments that you are making of capital, social capital, intellectual capital to how you operate as a business.

Kim Whitler (32:46)
You know what? I'm going to share a story. And I think because you kind of come at this from the human side, I think this will resonate with you with a consumer psychology side. So for me to make the point about what brands are doing this inauthentic, almost manipulative attempt to co-opt hot topics to gin up sales. So here's what I do. I walk into class. I'm going to do the Dove case, the Dove.

Jason Gaikowski (33:05)
Yeah.

Kim Whitler (33:13)
campaign for real beauty, which is by the way, another great example of super positive activism. Nobody who has a problem with, with girls self-esteem, nobody's most everybody's going to agree with that. It's a very unifying cause very much fit with their brand because their brand was focused on, you know, women and girls and so forth. But what I do is I walk into class and I wear a sign around my neck, huge sign. Like, you know, the

the people who stand out on the corner with these crazy signs. And it says, I care deeply about students. All right, that's what the sign says. And I walk into class and it's just like, what are you doing? I said, I will talk about later. I go through the whole class. I don't say a word. The whole class, I'm just promoting what a good person I am because I care deeply about you, right? We go through the whole class. And so we get to that. said, I want to come back.

to the sign. When you and I want you to be honest, when you saw this sign, first of all, how do you know if I care deeply about you? Because I wore the sign. Is that how you know? And they they go, no, no, it's what you do. it's what I actually do exposes what where my values are in my beliefs, not if I'm running a TV ad. OK, let me ask a different question. Now that I've written this and promoted it.

What happens next? How do you think? What they're doing is they're looking for times when maybe I didn't live up to that. They're skeptical. Right? So now I've set a higher bar of expectation. Everything I do and say is now going to be judged through the lens of my promotion. And so I come back to I go, OK, if you're a brand, what's the best way?

If you have a value that you care deeply about cats and dogs, do I go run a bunch of ads about that? Or what do I do? I act in a way where the employees talk about, I'm going to use Container Store. Container Store doesn't run a bunch of ads about what a great employer they are, but in the retail space, they're an employer of choice because they take care of their employees. They live it, they walk it, and guess what happens? Word of mouth happens.

And they get all sort, everybody knows about it. Their employer brand is a terrific brand because they operated in a way that was consistent with their values and they earned a reputation, not through promotion, but through their behavior. so I think, as we start saying, when we talk about activism, if this is just an ad campaign, Pepsi comes to mind with Kendall Jenner, Audi, you know, if this is, or is this truly part of who you are, have been?

and plan to continue to be for decades. That's a core question that brands need to grapple with versus just picking something that's hot and popular right now.

Jason Gaikowski (36:15)
No, that is incredibly consistent with our research. In fact, we've identified that how brands show up in the world, in the market, in the lives of their customers, call it customer experience, is 60, 65 % more powerful and persuasive than what they communicate. Effectively, the brand impact of customer experience is 63 % of total brand impact.

Kim Whitler (36:37)
Mmm.

Jason Gaikowski (36:45)
suggesting that, yeah, we have that data, right? We've done that analysis. Yeah, I'll share it with you at a different time. And also on the topic of word of mouth.

Kim Whitler (36:46)
Do you have that? Is it? He said it over.

Laura Jones (36:50)
You

Kim Whitler (36:52)
Okay.

Jason Gaikowski (36:55)
we find that the lift associated with customer experiences, both for preference and for recommend to a friend, are just under 400%. So effectively, anything having to do with loyalty, anything having to do with preference, anything having to do with recommendation effect, that's all customer experience and little to nothing to do with marketing and communications.

Kim Whitler (37:21)
I would, if you wouldn't mind sending it to me, I'd love to weave that into an article in some way. So that's very powerful. That's terrific.

Laura Jones (37:29)
Yeah. And I mean, I'm loving just this conversation about data and the power of really understanding what a company is and really the authenticity piece. And Jason, you mentioned commitment, and this is something I know, Kim, you have spoke about as well as the role of the CEO and, you know, who the responsibility to...

You know to satisfy the needs of right we talked a lot about consumers and how they're demanding this or are they depending on the research? but you know, what are the commitments of the CEO in the broader sense?

Kim Whitler (38:07)
So, you know, it's funny that you bring this up. I want to share with you. This is a piece that just is now in press. This is brand new research. Top top management journal. Listen to this. Political CEOs are more likely to engage in corporate misconduct. Quote, this is a quote, companies with stridently political CEOs are more likely to engage in corporate misconduct. People with strong political convictions tend to have an us versus them mentality.

Laura Jones (38:24)
Hmm.

Kim Whitler (38:37)
that discounts the opinions of others as well as an unwarranted sense of moral superiority. They grant themselves a moral license through which they rationalize bad behavior. And so, you know, this is brand new. It's not even in print yet. It's on digital. That means it's impressed, but it's not yet gotten to the print set. Brand new research out of Academy of Management Journal. Very, very interesting. I think Laura,

Your point is, is that when we think about protecting the brand reputation, one of the top risks or one of the top issues that boards worry about is risk and reputational risk. And one of the areas in which activism unfortunately is getting a lot of attention is when you have a Bud Light fiasco, you have a Disney fiasco, okay, Coca-Cola got hit and you all of a sudden you start seeing reputations like,

the Harris EquiTrend, you start seeing their reputations drop. Disney overnight went from 77 % favorable to 33 % favorable. They essentially became a political brand. What's 33 %? The number of liberals or conservatives. So liberals, okay, but they lost a bunch of people in the middle and to the right who were for the parental rights and education bill down in Florida.

across the country. so CEOs have to be the protector of the brand and sometimes the pressure is not coming from the outside. It's coming from the inside. if you, when I work with groups, one of the things I'm starting to see the pendulum shift. So I've now worked with over 1200 different people and I run the Disney case or I run the Bud Light case or I run the Coca-Cola case.

And I watch how people. Who feels comfortable speaking up and who doesn't? And there is strong advocacy typically for the liberal point of view. The conservative folks tend to be quiet, which then made me ask a question. If at the top of the firm, you're getting advocacy in one direction, you may not actually have a robust understanding of how your employees, your consumers, your investors, your stakeholders actually feel.

If one side is more vocal than the other and again, if you work at a highly conservative company, you could have a conservative. You know, echo chamber. And if you work at a highly liberal company, you can have a liberal echo chamber. CEOs have to understand this and they have to kind of step back and make sure that they're doing their due diligence to protect and strengthen the brand. Because at the end of the day, the buck stops with them. And by the way, the pressure could also be coming from the board.

Right? So if the board is like-minded or vocally in one direction and they don't represent their consumers or they don't represent their employees or et cetera, then you could actually be getting biased information and skewed that could lead you to make errant decisions. And so I think CEOs are critical and kind of stepping back and saying, have to do share responsibility for this entity. I am the protector and the steward of the company.

And I need to understand all sides of this issue. All, I need to respect, be inclusive and be tolerant and really understand my entire community of millions of stakeholders to try to steer this in the best possible direction. It's easy when we only advocate for our own point of view, but as a CMO or a CEO, you are responsible for CMOs for all consumers, CEOs for all stakeholders. And that's a very complicated thing to

to deeply understand and then to navigate.

Laura Jones (42:27)
Absolutely, that concept of fiduciary responsibility, especially in public companies cannot be understated, right? And CEOs cannot lose sight of that. And that research that you just quoted sounds fascinating. And you brought up boards. And we know, us in marketing know that CMOs are very underrepresented on boards.

What are the advantages, what are the benefits of having more marketers of that mentality as part of boards? And ultimately, how can that impact decision making?

Kim Whitler (43:05)
Yeah, so I've got a whole stream of research on this. Again, the same thing happened. You know, I sat down and I thought marketers are, according to academic theory, the demand generators. So you think of demand functions and supply functions, or you think of output functions and throughput functions. Marketers are the demand output generators. Okay, so then you say, here you go, what's the top issue for CEOs?

Consistently, it's trying to figure out how to generate growth. Okay, well shoot, if the top challenge for CEOs and companies is growth and marketers are the growth engineers, of course you would have marketers on boards, but you don't. Right, so then for me, I go, that's fun. That's a fun problem. Why not? And so we went and we spent several years studying this. And what we found is that when boards have marketers on them,

Not surprisingly, guess what happens? They get better growth outcomes. Okay, they get better growth outcomes. And so we looked at other different things, but the short of it is that they get better growth outcomes. I've got some additional research where we're looking at how, what is it that one marketer on a board can do to so dramatically shift the decision-making of a board so that it changes the growth trajectory of a firm?

When you say that, that sounds almost impossible. How could one person on a board have such a dramatic effect? And we were looking at this through two different lenses. One, I've done a series of interviews with board members who are looking at narrative methodology to understand stories and through those stories, how they changed the trajectory. The other is we're looking at big data. So just the traditional big data sense.

And a lot of times is that they're shifting the strategic focus. They tend to be a little bit more long-term focused than a lot of quarterly. If you have a lot of finance folks on the board, they're very much focused on short-term performance. Marketers tend to be more focused on long-term performance. They tend to be far more consumer-centered. Growth comes from keeping, building loyalty with your customers and finding more customers.

And so if you are engaging the board in more conversations around how do you do a better job with your customers and your consumers, you might actually help create stronger strategies, et cetera, that help go generate growth. So those are a couple of ways in which marketers, think, are helping shift a firm performance when they're invited to be on boards.

Laura Jones (45:43)
Yeah, and have you seen any best practices of CMOs? Oftentimes one of the things that's cited as a reason why there aren't more marketers on boards are lack of either financial acumen or connecting the dots in between what you talked about, that demand generation and really that language of finance. So what are some of the bridges that you've seen best in class marketers build in between those two worlds in order to gain credibility and access?

Jason Gaikowski (45:43)
Yeah, that.

Kim Whitler (46:10)
So I haven't done this research, but I have a hypothesis. Okay, so this isn't known, but I think it's a hypothesis. I have a belief that the marketers who come from the GM side, who have P &L experience are going to be the ones first who get to the boards and second who are more effective because when you are, so think about it in this way. If you grow up in kind of CPG, CPG treats marketers as the brand managers.

And so you are held accountable for delivering profit and loss. That's very different than if you grow up, I'm an influencer marketer and now I become an expert on executing and communicating promotions. Okay. I'm disconnected from the P and L it's, it's, it's possible for me to not understand how my decisions are directly connected to the P and L. And so.

I have a hypothesis that I think certain marketers are going to be better prepared, more likely to be invited to boards, and are going to be better equipped to do what you're talking about, Laura, which is to speak the language of finance because they were in charge of delivering finance through growth and consumer-oriented strategies. So if I, like some of the folks that I've interviewed for my research, they would not call themselves marketers.

but they come from brand management. They call themselves general managers who have growth engineering, consumer understanding as their core capability, as opposed to general marketers who have operations or general marketers who have engineering expertise, right? You and I would call them marketers, but they don't see themselves as marketers. And those are the people who tend to end up landing in these board positions.

Laura Jones (48:01)
Yeah,

and that is just critical and I think that's really good advice to people in the profession or to aspire to marketing roles but also board roles, right, is to just get close.

to your CFO, to your financial community, understand just like you mentioned, understanding all the different points of view of the different consumers that you serve, understand all the different points of view of the stakeholders and really make sure you're constantly building towards that. Well, that's great. I wanna bring up your book really quickly, Positioning for Advantage. Kim's written a book here, Techniques and Strategies to Grow Brand Value.

Thank you very much for including BAV as part of your overview of methodologies. But if there's just one or two key takeaways as to why I thought this was fantastic, it's really a comprehensive overview of how to get in there and make things happen. What are the one or two core tenets of this book that every marketer should take away?

Kim Whitler (49:04)
Well, so let me tell you why I wrote the book. There are two things that kind of hit me. One is I went as a student, I was not a marketing student. I remember my college marketing class, I took one. I was more finance accounting. And at the time I thought, this is kind of interesting, but I don't get what marketers do. Like what do you actually do? There's a bunch of theories and models, but what do you actually do? I didn't understand it. And I felt the same way after graduate school. And so on one hand,

you know, all these other functions have tools and they have equations and they have these very tangible things. The same time I was talking to the president of the academic global academic community for marketers and she said, we're missing tools. And so what I set out to do was to create a book that I call bridging the theory doing gap that we have these nice frameworks, but how do we connect that to practice? So we talked about brand building.

practices, but how can I teach somebody to go build a brand effectively? And so the whole book is set up on a series of tools. Each chapter is a tool. And then at the very end, the very last chapter is a chapter on how you can practice building competency by using the tools. Right. And so the book is a little bit different than a lot of other books, which are either a lot of books out there are stories.

very interesting stories about a principle, or their textbooks. And this kind of was somewhere, it was more geared towards practitioners, but people who wanted to build capability. And so it's a level deeper than these stories. There are stories in there, but it's a level deeper designed to help them kind of build capability. And so it's more for folks, frankly, like me, who ended up in, I was in GM roles where growth was critical.

Ultimately, I now know that was all about marketing, but I didn't have a marketing degree. And so it can help upscale folks who end up in these positions, not quite knowing what this stuff is. It moves it from pure theory to more practice. So, I mean, is there one thing to take away? I mean, it's all all of these tools are designed to help you identify and position brands effectively. But it's kind of it's a different type of a book. If you're looking for stories, it's not that.

And if you're looking for a textbook, it's not that it's kind of in between those two, if you will.

Laura Jones (51:32)
Yeah, I felt very seen when I opened it up and actually saw something called a creative brief, which for those of us that have been on either side, brand or agency side, have written hundreds and hundreds. And I have to tell you, Kim, I mean, I think you're spot on. I did go to business school and have a marketing degree and I never heard of a creative brief until I got my first job in advertising. So.

This book really fills a need. And I love what you say in the back about you. You know, it is a tool, it's full of tools, but you also talk about as a marketing leader, how do you create culture and how do you align teams and making sure that the cross functions that you're working with all have strategic plans, which I think is a really important thing because as a marketer, it's like one of the most interdependent roles within a firm. And you need so much alignment in between.

tech stakeholders and finance stakeholders. And sometimes even as we talked about employee relations, HR stakeholders. And so there's just really some tactical advice here on not only for the individual, but how to grow teams as well. So yeah, really exciting. Definitely check out Positioning for Advantage, Kim's book. yeah, I think we're kind of up at time. So Kim, congratulations on

all of your research and also your Harvard Business Review recent article. Check that out everyone in the latest print edition, the November, December. should brands take a stand? I think we had a really interesting debate. I think we landed on, it depends. And you need to be very, very thorough. And maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe lots of opinions, lots of data. The debate rages on.

But Kim, thanks so much for joining us on Opinion Party today.

Kim Whitler (53:27)
Yeah, thank you so much. And I just want to say again, I love what you guys do at BAV. So as an academic who really, really, really relies on your data, thank you for all that you guys do. I appreciate it.

Laura Jones (53:35)
Thank you for all the events.

Jason Gaikowski (53:39)
It's been wonderful to have you here with us today, Kim. So can't thank you enough for your talent and your expertise and your ideas.

Laura Jones (53:49)
All right. So Jason.

Jason Gaikowski (53:52)
Laura.

Laura Jones (53:54)
Another interesting opinion data mashup. I love Kim. Kim is just one of the leading researchers in the field. She's so prolific. Everyone, if you get a chance, just really go check out her publishing page. And I think some great lessons, right? Let's all be curious. I mean, there's too much data out there and let's...

Jason Gaikowski (54:15)
Yeah, kids.

Laura Jones (54:22)
investigate where it's coming from and ultimately truly understand that every action has other correlating actions that come out of it, right? So, Branzo takes stands in the wind. Yes, exactly. Trade-offs.

Jason Gaikowski (54:34)
Straight offs.

Right? You're,

you're, you're, you're unlikely to get something for nothing. And, you know, her book, I have to say, I'm really, really glad that like she's brought that book forward with an emphasis on tools. I mean, as you know, Laura, in my heart of hearts, I believe that knowledge is power. Right. But I've also really come to recognize that tools are how power gets applied.

Laura Jones (55:00)
Mmm.

Jason Gaikowski (55:01)
And I think that her work is making a really important contribution to helping marketers become the truly effective business leaders we know that they can and should be.

Laura Jones (55:15)
Absolutely, more power to CMOs and marketers. All right, well, that wraps up. Yeah, let's wrap this party up. Thanks everyone for joining the party today. If you wanna hear more or read more about the data that we talked about, please check out the show notes or head over to bavgroup.com for more information. You'll find lots of info on there as well as theopinionparty.com.

Jason Gaikowski (55:19)
Bring it. We gonna wrap this party up?

Laura Jones (55:43)
And if you liked what you heard, please share these episodes with others and hit that subscribe button and be sure to join us again next time on Opinion Party.

Jason Gaikowski (55:53)
Goodbye Laura and anybody else, we'll see you next time.

Laura Jones (55:56)
See ya.