Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Opinion Party. I'm your co host, Laura Jones.

I'm Jason Gaikowski.

And today, we've got a really feisty one, I think, what's shaping up to be. Our topic today is should brands take a stand? Welcome to the party, Kim Whitler.

Thank you. I 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 consumer of it, it seems like more often than not, I'm quoting you guys in a lot of my research. It's it's just exciting to be here today to talk about such an important topic. 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. Our goal one of one of our big activist efforts was to save the lives of cats and dogs.

Who's against that? Nobody. 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.

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 wanna 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 this sign? Is that how you know? And they they go, no. No. It's what you do.

Oh, it's what I actually do exposes what where my values are and my beliefs, not if I'm running a TV ad.

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.

I'm gonna 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 methodology. What are the one or two core tenets of this book that every marketer should take away?

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?

Should brands take a stand? I think we had a really interesting debate. I think we landed on it depends. But Kim, thanks so much for joining us on opinion party today.