>>Presenter: Welcome everyone.
We're very pleased to welcome Bruce Philp
to our Authors at Google talks this afternoon.
He speaks to us today about branding; a concept
that is very central to our lives here at
Google and to the internet as a whole.
As Google maintains one of the most respectable
and recognizable and even flexible brands
in the world, it will be interesting to hear
his perspectives which he outlines in his
current book.
Now, Bruce has taught at OCAD University up
with our neighbors to the North in Canada
and has focused on constructive ideas in his
private practice as well.
He was the co founder of the GWP, a brand
engineering firm, and is currently a strategic
consultant to companies looking to manage
their brand strategy.
He speaks to us today about his most recent
book, "Consumer Republic: Using Brands to
Get What You Want, Make Corporations Behave
and Maybe Even Save The World."
This book was in fact released in the United
States just yesterday so we are very pleased
to have the book right out of the starting
gate.
His thesis is simple, brands make corporations
accountable and culture is something that
is permanently engrained in the notion of
a brand identity.
Let's listen to how Bruce and his knowledge
can help us save the world.
So, without further ado, please help me welcome
Bruce to Google.
Thank you.
[Applause]
>>Bruce Philp: Thank you very much for that
kind introduction and I should start by saying
I'm really, actually quite glad to be here.
I'm actually really glad to be here.
If I'm honest I checked in on four square.
And I don't think I'm alone in this.
I think you probably get this a lot.
When I was preparing for this event today
I watched a number of previous authors' videos
on YouTube to see kind of how they handled
it and I noticed that if there was one thing
that they all had in common it was that they
began by saying how happy they were to be
here.
I think that's got a little something to do
with the power of your brand and that's kind
of what I'm here to talk about today, is the
power of brands.
And I think, I'd like to think about this
dialogue as being among us as consumers rather
than as professionals because I think that's
where the real battleground is in the years
to come and it has a whole lot to do with
the thesis of my book.
I have a bit of a fantasy about how this turns
out today and it goes like this, when we're
finished you walk out of here with your faith
in capitalism restored or, at least, your
faith in that part of capitalism that has
to do with corporations serving customers
and customers rewarding that service with
profit.
I think it's a terribly important concept.
You may not share the belief that it's threatened
but it is.
There are a lot of people in the world that
think that ought to be ash-canned and, at
the very least, reformed radically and that
capitalism is kind of top to bottom a bad
thing.
I think there's a lot of bad practice in capitalism
but I think there's a sort of central soul
to this thing that has a whole lot to do with
the relationships that corporations and consumers
have through their brands and that that is
very much worth saving.
So in this little dream of mine you'll go
home and the next time you go to the mall,
rather than feel as if you are a predator
or a prey and rather than feeling as if you're
potentially going to be victimized by a corporation,
I'd love you to feel as if it's election day
and you have a responsibility that while challenging
and difficult, is kind of uplifting and empowering.
So that's my dream for how today's experience
or, perhaps, the reading of "Consumer Republic"
will turn out for you.
It's certainly how it turned out for me writing
it.
I'd like to start out by maybe telling you
a little bit about myself as context.
I'm fairly sure that no one who has ever visited
this facility knows less about calculus than
I do.
And it was my complete and abject failure
at calculus that eventually guided me to a
career in marketing, those two things being
diametrically opposite in that they're kind
of polar opposites in the universe so I became
a marketing guy.
A couple of things about being a marketing
guy that aren't very pleasant, one of them
is that we aren't what you called an endangered
species.
If, I went on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago
to see how many people there were on LinkedIn
claiming marketing as part of their expertise,
as part of their resumes and the number was
something like 8.7 million and that seems,
if anything, light to me.
I've certainly seen that many opinions expressed
in a single meeting about issues to do with
marketing so, at any rate, we're not what
you call an endangered species.
It's also very true that were not always very
popular.
My job in the last three decades has been
to separate you from your money and to make
a profit for corporations that I represent
in the course of doing that.
The former CMO of Coca Cola Company, guy named
Sergio Zyman, once described marketing as
the process of selling more things to more
people for more money.
It sounds a little predatory, to me.
So when you stand back from that and say,
okay here's a marketing guy who, A, is not
particularly irreplaceable, if the missiles
were coming in and we were inviting the important
people into bomb shelters I don't think I'd
be at the front of the line and secondly we
don't do a job that people consider very popular.
Why then, would I put my career at risk to
write a book that invites people to spend
less money and buy fewer things?
That seems suicidal.
Even Martin Luther, I think, must've had tenure
when he nailed his thesis to the cathedral
door.
I don't have any more; I don't have that much
job protection, probably a good deal less,
so why would I do that?
Why would I take that chance?
And I guess the short answer is that this
is my, this is me doing what I can to kind
of start some conversation that might result
in saving the world.
That seems ambitious but what's life without
a horizon?
The long answer is a little more complicated
because I really believe that if we wanna
save the world, I'm not sure where that process
is gonna end, but I am pretty sure that that
process ought to begin at the mall.
If we wanna save the world we should start
at the mall because consuming, if we really
boil it down to what that all means, not just
to you and me in our living rooms and kitchens
and garages but to the planet, consuming is
how we shape the world we live in.
Everything that we have inherited everything
that surrounds us, environmentally and financially,
all begins with the process of someone exchanging
money for goods or services.
I believe that brands are what democratized
that process.
I'll come back to that theme a little bit
later on and hopefully persuade you that that's
true, but I fundamentally believe that brands
are how that process of commerce remains democratic
or how the consumer retains some control over
it.
And I also truly believe that we have a good
deal more to fear from a world without brands
than we have to fear from the one that we
have in front of us right now.
So, to explain why I think brands are so important,
this is a story I kind of like to tell as
an illustration, when I was 16 I got the opportunity
to start making my own consumption decisions.
In our house that meant, look we'll provide
you with food and shelter and socks and underwear
but if you want any more than that then you're
gonna have to go pump gas and I still think,
by the way, that's not a half bad way to raise
children.
But, anyway, there we were and the first thing
I wanted when I had my own money and the right
to spend it as I chose, the very thing I wanted
was blue jeans.
The 19 century economist, Thorstein Veblen,
coined the phrase, "conspicuous consumption"
in 1890, whatever 1899, I think.
He described the ultimate purpose of conspicuous
consumption to look as though you were refraining
from productive employment.
So the reason he argued, in 1890 whatever,
that we buy things is we wanna look like we
don't need to work.
So for generations of teenagers from, really,
the end of second world war till the 1990s,
blue jeans were kind of the Lingua Franca
of that and that's how we told the world we
were no longer under the control of our parents.
That we were no longer in the thrall of parental
control and that we were making our own choices
independently, wearing blue denim was how,
was kind of how you started to do that.
Everything else was a bit of an accessory
but it all started with the jeans.
There was a catch.
I went to a country high school so where I
grew up, wearing blue jeans could mean one
of two things.
It could mean that you were autonomous and
therefore cool or it could mean that you had
just mucked out a stall and didn't have time
to change your clothes before you got to the
bus.
So that presents a bit of a complication in
terms of social meaning, right, if I walk
into the classroom and I'm wearing blue jeans
and we're, in any way, uncertain about what
those mean, then the real value of me having
bought them in the first place is called into
some question.
So, teenagers being the geniuses they are
with popular culture at my school and many
other schools like it, we arrived at a solution
to this problem.
The solution was gonna be Levis.
So if you wore Levis which tended to be more
of a city person kind of brand at the time,
it cost a little more money, they were 17
dollars instead of 15 dollars, and they came
in different kinds of blues, so if you bought
the Levis then the signal you were sending
the world is, as I described earlier, that
you were an autonomous free thinking individual
and therefore cool.
And if you wore any other type of blue jeans,
Carhartts or Lees or GWGs or any one of a
dozen others that were available at the time,
then there was at least a question about what
you were, you were either trying too hard
or not hard enough or maybe, God forbid, you
really were mucking out stalls before you
got on the bus to come to the school in the
morning.
So Levi solved that problem.
But, of course, the produces another problem
because if the objective is to be cool we
can't allow just anyone who's got 17 dollars
to be cool, right, I mean that kind of undermines
the whole point of it.
So there needed to be some kind of social
control imposed on this process whereby, just
because I can afford to buy the blue jeans
for 17 dollars didn't necessarily mean that
I cut the mustard.
And that decision was made communally and
was enforced in the following way, at some
point, when you were standing in front of
your locker getting your calculus textbook
for another self esteem crushing hour with
Mr. Quigley someone would come up behind you
and tear the tab off the back of your pants.
Now, it was no mystery from that point on
who made your jeans but it was also no mystery
that the group had decided, socially, that
you didn't merit the right to wear that brand.
So you ended up having to endure, you know,
potentially another year, depending on how
fast you were growing, of wearing these pants
that were rendered, somehow, anonymous.
So, aside from the obvious trauma that this
clearly left me with all these years later,
there were two really strong impressions from
this experience that had a whole lot to do
with how I ended up in this racket and bear
a lot on what we're here to talk about today.
And the first was the sheer power of it.
I mean, it is absurd to reduce branding to
a simple identifier for a value proposition
>>Bruce Philp: Yet, still in business schools
today, this is how it's taught.
It's still in advertising agencies and in
board rooms around the world this is still
how we look at branding.
What is the label we're gonna attach to our
value proposition?
And, of course, that's ridiculous.
The greatest power a brand has lies in it
social meaning.
And as the industrial age disappears further
and further in the rear view mirror and marketing
becomes less a question of just making better
things and much more a question of social
meaning and kind of tribalism, that whole,
that whole thing becomes bigger and more powerful
and more true.
If our choices, as consumers, could not be
observed, in other words if this was the future
and we were all wearing silver lame suits
with white lightning bolts across the front
and no one ever saw us buy anything, I don't
think there'd be much of a career in marketing.
I wonder if anyone, except possibly Google,
would have a future in commerce and, certainly,
the world would be a good deal less interesting.
So social meaning is immensely powerful in
the branding equation and that left a strong
impression.
And the second strong impression that I was
left with is that it was consumers, who in
part, conferred this power on the corporation.
At the end of the day, Levis was no more able
to buy coolness than I was.
And, although they were more successful, the
fame of that brand lay in its ability to make
money and that was also its vulnerability
because it was the consumer who made the decision
that this was the brand that mattered.
That decision happened socially.
It happened without the technological tools
that are available to us today but the process
is not very much different.
It was organic, it was natural and it happened
from the street and Levis could not have succeeded
without it.
As in a democracy, it was the people who kind
of, ultimately, hold that power.
So, and those
[Coughing]
>>Bruce Philp: people are also capable of
taking it away and that actually happened
to Levis some years later.
The beginning of the 1990s when generation
X was coming of age, so these were people
born between 1960 and 1980 let's say, this
was a group of people who did not believe
in tribal conformity at all.
They actually, they had a massive impact on
culture in this regard.
They just shattered it into a million pieces
and everyone was a tribe of one.
And it's no coincidence that Levis was there
after handed the worst most challenging decade
they ever had in the history of the brand.
So people give meaning to that power and people
have the power take it away.
The value of brands lies in social meaning
and that meaning is confirmed by we the people,
if I can borrow from the declaration of inde--
pardon me, the Constitution.
This is what I learned from my, this is what
I learned from my trousers that left an enduring
impression and probably got me into this business.
And, in a sense, it was the birth of this
book.
But it took a couple more things to happen
before I actually got around to writing it
because the advertising business is, if you
watch Mad Men, is nothing but fun and martinis
and why would you sit down and write a book
if you could avoid doing that.
And the two things that happened were these,
first of all, in 2000, Naomi Klein publishes
a book called "No Logo."
It's a brilliant piece of propaganda.
Her journalism is sound and the issues that
she deals with in that book are important
and real issues.
The trick that she pulled was attaching those
issues to the brands that we all wear because
she knew, she knew that we weren't gonna get
emotionally engaged in a sweat shop in Indonesia
but we might get emotionally engaged with
a logo that's on our shoes.
So, in as much as the issues that she raised
were terribly important and remain so, the
way she raised them was a little bit intellectually
dishonest in the sense that both brand names
were the only thing that kept those corporations
from behaving even worse than they did which
is a theme we'll come back to in a second.
So that bothered me cause I was concerned
that maybe we were gonna throw some babies
out with some bath water and brands were very
much our best hope not our worst enemies.
We certainly agreed on the problem just not
what to do about it.
The second was the economic meltdown and at
the time I was working very closely with a
bank brand here in the United States and,
so, I was quite close with how people were
dealing with the question of money and credit
and the guilt associated with those things
and what it all meant.
And in early 2009 before the extent of the
financial services industry's role in all
this had become clear people were very willing
to blame Madison Avenue for what was happening.
And according to a Gallup poll in the spring
of that year something like two thirds of
Americans were prepared to blame marketing
for the meltdown if you can imagine.
And that just terrified me because I knew
from working in financial services how dangerous
it can be for brands to operate without the
kind of accountability that your running shoe
maker or your toothpaste maker has and I also
knew that if we disconnected the behavior
of corporations from their relationship with
consumers that all would be lost.
So I thought maybe it was time to put the
martini glass down and stand up in defense
of brands and maybe try to sell people one
last time on why they matter so much to us.
So in the process of writing the book I came,
I arrived at sort of three kind of thundering
revelations that I think changed me pretty
profoundly.
The first one was that it turns out that consumerism
has always had a political soul.
That's a difficult thing to understand when
you're wandering through the mall today and
you see people behaving the way that they
seem to, particularly when times are good.
But, in fact, the political soul of consumerism
was almost at the genesis of it.
A historian whose work I consulted
>>Bruce Philp: writing the book, talks about
the emergence of consumerism is happening
at the period of enlightenment, so the 17th
century and 18th century and some important
things are happening especially in Western
Europe.
At that time you see people living above subsistence,
on a large scale, you see a push towards secularizing
society, trying to reduce the role of the
church in the way that things are run and
you see colonialism producing a group of people
who have money but didn't inherit it, people
who have means but weren't born to a title
or to aristocracy.
So this historian reports, unfortunately,
that the excesses of consumerism emerged almost
immediately.
[Laughs]
>>Bruce Philp: You know, people got into debt
and bought too much stuff almost right out
of the gate so shame on us.
But, also, what makes the point quite persuasively
that one of the biggest effects this had was
the tearing down of class structures.
That if this merchant class was capable of
buying some of the trappings of wealth and
aristocracy that, by definition, devalued
that wealth and aristocracy and began to tear
down this stultifying, feudal, medieval class
system that had held so much of that society
back for centuries and centuries before that
and that's kind of interesting, to me.
And, in fact, it's ability to sort of tear
down class structures and secularize society
and make people autonomous and free thinking
individuals, remains to this day.
The writer of that particular book points
out that every totalitarian society that's
emerged in the last, even a hundred years,
has had as a common theme, an opposition to
consumerism, right, from Nazi Germany to modern
day North Korea.
If you want to keep, if you want to keep the
hob nail boot of oppression on a people, the
first thing you do is take control of the
media.
The second thing you do is stop them from
expressing themselves, expressing their free
will by participating in the economy.
Tyrants hate it, they always have hated it.
There are no tyrants who are pro consumerists
that I can think of.
And anything that scares power that much is
probably worth being careful with.
The second thing that I learned is that capitalism
has always had a habit of outsourcing its
conscience to the marketplace.
Not entirely, and there's a spectrum of behavior
as corporately for this.
Obviously there are companies that behave
well because that's the right thing to do.
But, broadly speaking, our choices are what
direct the behavior of corporations, in essence.
They don't hear rhetoric, they don't hear,
they don't hear verbal threats, they don't
hear, they don't hear, really, reputational
threats unless it starts to hit the bottom
line but they do hear the cash register ring.
And that is to them the only signal that is
really reliable about what it is we want,
about what it is we'll tolerate.
And marketers tend to chase around like 6
year olds after a soccer ball; they are obsessed
with knowing exactly what it is we want because
that's the past in prosperity.
So what we want, as I mentioned at the top,
an effect that kind of builds the world we
live in.
This is true to such an extent that the market
research business is one of the biggest kind
of corners of the marketing industry in the
world.
The top five marketing research companies
worldwide, alone, count for something like
20 billion dollars in sale.
And when you consider that their product is
an intellectual product, that's not an unimpressive
number.
We are deeply obsessed with what, we as marketers
are deeply obsessed with what's on people's
minds.
And what people want does tend to be the most
powerful force shaping the world that we live
in.
And the third thing that I learned was that
the threat to the marketplace is exactly the
same as the threat to democracy and it really
has a lot to do with why the moment we're
in right now is so terribly important and
so terribly timely.
And that threat is this sort of unholy feedback
loop between cynical corporations and disengaged
consumers.
Corporations make money; they make money in
the delta between what it costs them to make
a product and what we're prepared to believe
that it's worth, right?
It almost doesn't matter what you're selling
that's how it works.
That's what we call profit.
So faith is where the money is.
It, faith in the brand and in the corporation
is where all the money is.
And when we tend to forget about this as consumers,
bad things happen.
And the most common dynamic looks a little
bit like this, we disengage from a category
cause we don't, we don't care anymore or we
don't trust it or we're cynical and upset
about something bad that it has done.
What happens then, in the marketing world,
is the price becomes the focus in that category;
it tends to commoditize and when that happens
you tend to get fewer bigger players.
So like telecom, for example, airlines, you
get fewer bigger players and as a result consumers
tend to lose choice and power.
So, so, that dynamic, there are lots of others
that are equally malignant but that's the
most common and the easiest one to understand.
If we stop caring then a marketer believes
they can only win on price, if they try to
win on price then they kill every marginal
player, the industries consolidate, they become
too powerful, consumers lose choice and the
rest, as it were, is history.
Disengagement from a democracy tends to produce
a dictatorship and disengagement from marketplaces
tends to produce monopolies and I think, I
come from a country where because of the relatively
small population that we have, a number of
industries by practical necessity are, are
oligopolies or democracies and I'll tell you
it's not nice.
We feel less powerful.
When I pick up the phone to call the people
that supply my wireless services, for example,
as I did this week, still being unable to
connect to the internet with my cell phone
in Silicon Valley, their relative disinterest
in my problem speaks loudly to that fact that
I really only have one other choice where
I come from.
So, disengaged, cynical consumers in a consolidated
marketplace don't tend to produce a very happy
outcome for anybody and it gets really scary
if you're selling physical products that get
produced in factories.
In a sense this is kind of how, this is the
kind of thing that drove me the most because
I know as a marketer how obsessive marketers
are with what consumers think of them.
We know how, I know how closely marketers
listen to consumers.
I don't know if consumers know that but, or
if they always necessarily wanna know that.
But they listen obsessively and they always
have.
I mean, the year I turned 16, the year I was
buying my Levis, and subsequently being excommunicated,
was the same year that the UPC code was introduced.
And the UPC code on other things was a mechanism
for allowing marketers to listen to the, to
observe the behavior of the consumers in something
closer to real time.
So that urge has always been there.
What's changed, I think, in a lot of ways,
so, so marketing is inherently an empirical
process and it always has been and it's all
about try something and observe the effect
that and then decide whether you wanna repeat
that process or not.
What's changed, I think, very recently is
that we're not rats in a maze anymore.
It used to be, when I started out in this
business, if you were particularly in the
packaged goods world, that you came up with
the strategy, you deployed the strategy, you
waited 12 weeks for the next Nielsen report
and you all sat in a room and flipped through
this kind of arcane document and tried to
ascertain what affect you'd have with your
strategy.
And if it appeared to be successful you'd
rinse and repeat and do it again and if it
appeared to be unsuccessful you'd make up
some excuse but you never really knew why
it didn't work so people's careers were advanced
more on the basis of how well they could dodge
blame.
[Laughs]
>>Bruce Philp: than, than real accountability
and off they went.
And that's not like it anymore, now the chess
game is happening in real time at an incredibly
accelerated rate to the point where we can
know, depending on the business we're in,
in sometimes seconds or minutes what effect
the tactic has had.
So you may choose to think that we are still
rats in a maze.
I'm less sure who the rat is anymore but I
am sure that we're certainly in a position
to comment on the quality of the cheese in
a much more precise and persuasive way than
we ever have been in history.
So I've kind of come to believe that right
here and right now is a signal moment for
this corner of capitalism because that possibility
of conversation and kind of real time, very
accurate, empirical marketing has arrived
at the same moment when we're asking ourselves
these terrible questions about, about what
are we gonna do with, about over consumption
and what are we gonna do about our excessive
use of credit and the bad consumer behavior
that seems to be propelling these terrible
things.
So my little cry in the wilderness is why
don't we, while we're at it, while we're solving
these big problems, why don't we reinvent
consumerism?
Let's accept that we're not gonna kill it,
cause we're not and let's see whether we can
level the playing field a little cause it's
tools are being given to us.
And let's see if we can give it a conscience
because that's possible.
And let's see if we can use consumerism as
a way of creating value for society.
That's an outrageous idea, maybe to some people,
but why not?
This, there has never been a better moment
to kind of, to kind of take those dares and
to create a system in which corporations make
money by doing the right thing and don't make
money by doing the wrong thing.
The conditions for that have never been better.
Fairly or unfairly, the initiators of that
change are gonna have to be us on the supply
side, the ones who are going to the mall.
So, how do we do that?
How do we give consumerism a conscience?
How do we give capitalism a conscience?
How do we level the playing field and make
our consumption decisions a force for good?
And in the book I try to boil it down to three
principles which are, buy less, buy better
and be heard.
And so I'll kind of unpack each of those briefly,
for a second.
In terms of buying less, we are in this trouble
because there are too many of us who want
too much stuff too soon.
It's not a very elegant description of the
problem but it seems to be a pretty accurate
one.
We have a credit crisis and we have an environmental
crisis because there's too many humans on
the planet who want too much stuff and they
want it right away.
That is clearly not sustainable and it's particularly
so because we tend to act it out in two ways.
We act it out by demanding we pay less for
the products we buy which I think produces
more negative outcomes than it does positive
ones.
And by borrowing to accelerate the process
of acquisition and most of that is a result
of some kind of social pressure.
Back to the blue jeans, we're not gonna stop,
the question is how do we continue so that
we at least buy ourselves some time.
And maybe create a system that is capable
of coming somewhere close to sustaining the
demands we're putting on it.
So I think the answer is, the answer begins
with simply buying less and that clearly,
that clearly has a benefit in terms of how
much stuff gets produced and the resulting
impact on the planet.
But what's less obvious is that buying less
stuff also means that purchases are gonna
be more special from a corporate point of
view.
If I'm only gonna see you every 5 years for
a new toaster rather than every two years
for a new toaster, I'm gonna take that moment
a hell of a lot more seriously.
I'm gonna make sure that I satisfy you because
in 5 years when you come back for a new one,
it's me you come to.
That's, I think, a critical principle.
So the foundational notion is the one I think
is likely to get the least kind of pushback
is that we ought to buy less.
The second point gets a little more interesting
because I'm suggesting that while we're doing
that we buy better, we buy better stuff.
I became quite interested in some features
of the German economy when I was writing this
book and, most notably, up until 2010 they
were the biggest industrial economy on the
planet.
They also had a pretty good environmental
record when it came to manufacturing processes
and to product stewardship, arguably the best
in the world.
What interested me about this was that they
were able to do these two things to be among
the most conscientious producers of goods
on the planet and to be the biggest endurer's
industrial economies in the world by producing
really good stuff instead of lots of good
stuff.
And this is kind of a forgotten industrial
age principle.
When I first started working with Japanese
companies in the mid 1980s, I was very impressed
by how the ability to produce large quantities
things produced efficiencies and made products
more accessible to more people and that seemed
like a good thing to me.
But it seems to an extremist that has produced
a kind of appetite for production, for production
sake.
And when I look at the German economy and
its current resilience and those two features
I talked about earlier, it's hard not to ask
ourselves, "What would happen if we tried
to behave that way, in a way that, if we try
to behave that way when we shop, if we chose
to buy things that were simply better and
lasted longer, that could be prepared, that
we might, in some cases, pass onto our kids.
But that in any case would not fill tables
at garage sales and flea markets.
It sounds pretty good on the, on the surface
of it but there is a catch and the catch is
we have to be prepared to underwrite that
by paying more for things, for certain things.
We have to be prepared to underwrite that
by spending, you know, 75 bucks on that toaster
instead of 25 bucks on that toaster.
Reasoning that over time you'll end up buying
fewer toasters and the long term economics
are gonna work out for you.
But, in the meantime, we need to reward moderated
production with better profit margins, it
just makes sense.
That's the part that we have to bring to the
table.
I think that that could produce some interesting
effects and not least of those effects is
that we might bring back the idea that profit
must be earned.
It might bring back the idea that people can
make money by building great things instead
of by finding ways to build them in greater
quantities and more cheaply.
And I don't think that would be a bad feature
of the industrial age to bring back.
And then the third thing that I think we need
to demand of ourselves is that we be heard.
We make ourselves heard.
We can send signals today that are earlier
and that are more specific and there are more
persuasive than just withholding our money
ever was.
You know, just decades ago, if we were mad
at the Proctor and Gamble Company because
we didn't like the flavor of our Crest toothpaste.
The only way we could make ourselves known
to them was to write a letter to someone in
customer service which may or may not ever
get to, to where it needs to be and, in any
case, we did not buy Crest the next time.
And now we have an infinite number of tools
available to us to kind of parse that reaction
more finely and make it more of a warning
rather than to simply kind of blunt, you know
denial of money.
And it isn't just complaints.
The one thing I think we're learning from
watching the way corporations are behaving
on Facebook and on Twitter, for example, and
I think on Google Plus it's starting to emerge
already.
Corporations will complete for praise and
the reason they'll compete for praise is that
it's public.
Praise in a social media environment is tantamount
to advertising because it does scale.
So what that asks of us is that we not only
make ourselves heard when we're unhappy but
that we make ourselves heard when we're happy.
And if we're willing to do that, if we're
willing to be reasoned and specific about
the things that we're not happy about and
if we're willing to be generous and specific
when things are happening the way we want
them to then you will find, very quickly,
the corporations will look for every chance
they can get to amplify that praise and every
chance they can get to attract more of it.
So this notion of being heard, not only in
open forums like Facebook and Twitter and
Google Plus, but even in the way that we interact
with brands online, in particular, is gonna
be watched, observed, processed, understood
and interpreted to mean something that I think
will produce a kind of better brand of capitalism,
if you like.
Much in a way that a free press is critical
to a functioning democracy I think our willingness
to create publicly available honest and, you
know, reactions to the product experiences
were getting and brand those things is gonna
be critical to this consumer republic that
I've been talking about.
In any case, the point is, to make the right
thing lucrative and the wrong thing not lucrative
and I think this fourth estate principle that
has deep roots in democracy is kind of how
we do that.
This idea that we can, by becoming conscientious
consumers, produce better capitalists may
seem a bit quixotic and hearts a kind of action,
I'm not so sure that it's the latter but I
accept that it's a bit of a dream and yet,
at the same time, there was already evidence
that this dynamic is taking place and that
it is having a commercial difference in a,
a commercially important and relevant difference
in the way that capitalism operates.
We, we see a tremendous correlation between
the fame of a brand and the ethical behavior
of the corporation behind it.
One of the resources that I worked with in
writing the book was a Swiss company that
measures the ethical behavior of corporations
around the world, some 500 companies, and
they look at everything from environmental
stewardship to labor relations to human rights
and then they rank these companies according
to how ethical they are.
And when you look at this list the thing that
strikes you almost immediately is that the
brands that are at the top of the list, the
ones that are the most ethical, are all brand
names you'd find in your own house or find
at the mall.
And the brands that are at the bottom of the
list, the ones that are the least ethical
by in large, are companies that operate in
the shadows of capitalism.
They're companies that produce chemicals or
dig things out of the ground but, in any case,
are somehow beyond our reach as consumers
and that's a pretty powerful correlation even
if it lacks clear causation.
And, in the meantime, when I take that list
and I line it up against the credible list
of the world's most valuable brands, the overlap
is tremendous.
And when I take that list and line it up against
the holdings of Warren Buffet's, you know,
Berkshire Hathaway and the overlap is tremendous.
And when I take that list and line it up against
the list of the brands that Americans consider
the most trustworthy in the world and with
whom they plan to do business in the future,
again, the overlap is tremendous.
So there is an overwhelmingly powerful correlation
between how publicly a corporation has to
live its life through its brand and how well
it behaves.
Why should that be shocking because aren't
we the same way?
And the evidence continues to pile up.
Just last month there was a study published
that made the rounds in the marketing world
in which a research company had attempted
to understand what the fastest growing brands
in the world had in common.
So it was a ten year study and they looked
at tens of thousands of brands around the
world and applied all kinds of science like
neurolinguistics and so forth trying to understand
the nature of the consumers relationships
with those brands and came up with the conclusion
that the fastest growing brands in the world
are the ones who were trying to make people's
lives better.
I know, it sounds like they're just making
it up.
But the evidence was quite powerful.
That the attachment of those brands to what
they call fundamental human values had an
inescapable correlation to their growth as
a business and they kind of signed off by
saying that if you had invested the fastest
growing 50 brands you would have outperformed
the SNP 500 over that ten year period by something
like 400 percent.
So, again, another piece of evidence that
being a good capitalist, being a good capitalist
aren't incompatible and I think we're seeing
increasing evidence of it day to day in small,
um, in smaller, less dramatic ways as corporations
come to terms with the fact that all of their
conduct is now observed and not just what
they say in ads.
So, at the end of the day I think we can have
an impact and I think we are having an impact.
We are guiding corporate behavior and an entire
industry is growing up around this notion
of brand sentiment because corporations are
obsessively worried about this new public
face that they're developing.
This book says that this would be the worst
time to give up on branding, on branded consumerism.
This would be the worst time to give up on
that aspect of capitalism because we, right
now, are perfecting that feedback loop.
We have a better chance than we ever have
to be heard in a meaningful way.
And it would be the worst time because corporations
can see for themselves that they can make
money by doing, by doing the right thing.
And, in, and, and in kind of more than anything
right now because we are asking these big
questions about how we go forward given that
the path has proven itself so completely unsustainable.
I think that disengaging now from branded
consumerism, treating marketing as if it were
a lousy way to make a living and relating
to branded consumerism as if it were a kind
of scam would sell ourselves terribly short.
I think if we wanted to save the world we
should no more, we should no more give up
our role in branded consumerism than we should
give up the right to vote and that if we wanna
save the world we should, indeed, start at
the mall.
And we have a chance right now to make that
count.
And, so, I thank you for your attention and
I'm happy to take questions if you have any.
[Applause]
>>Bruce Philp: Thank you.
[Audience members talking]
>>female #1: I just wanted to ask about your
thoughts about brands reviving themselves
after facing scrutiny, places like Shell and
BP, Nike, just any of your thoughts [inaudible]
>>Bruce Philp: Right, so the question is about
brands that have come back from ethical disasters
and revived themselves.
I think those three stories that you identify,
Shell, BP and Nike are each a little bit different.
Nike, ironically, kind of redeemed itself
in the wake of No Logo.
It gets mentioned in that book something like
37 times, she's really rough on them.
What's interesting is that book came out at
a time when Nike's power as a brand was at
its absolute peak.
So they had a lot to, they had a lot to lose
because they knew they were way past building
a meaningfully superior shoe, it was all about
social meaning, it was all about street cred.
So they, I speculate that they reacted to
that simply because they knew there wasn't
a choice.
They didn't wanna be, they didn't wanna be
the brand that they'd been painted as being
and they were in the, you know, fashion is
the most public and fragile, you know, arena
to do business in for a brand.
The BP case is interesting because they, I
don't think they had any idea what they were
in for when the Gulf oil spill happened and
that story, in fact, concludes the book.
My contention is that they, so they were the
80th most valuable brand in the world, according
to Interbrand, before that happened and they
had just spent millions and millions of dollars
rebranding themselves and putting a new logo
on their filling stations and presented themselves
as kind of a green, you know, having a kind
of green agenda and then this terrible thing
happens.
So I think what history has shown is that
they were not solely responsible for what
happened there but the event ended up getting
branded the BP oil spill and I speculate that
the reason is because they had a brand at
stake.
Because they had only recently put that kind
of like, you know, put that flag on the hill
saying we're gonna be the good guys and then
this terrible, this terrible thing happens
and I, we can't go and, and refuse to buy
anything from Halliburton and we can't go
and refuse to buy anything from Transocean
but there still are 10,000 gas stations east
of the Rocky's that wear that green flower.
I think BP was in a position where it didn't
matter what proportion of fault they earned
or who ought to pay for it, they had no choice
but to deal with the problem because they
had made this investment in who they were.
So that was a case of the brand being used
by society to force the corporation into a,
I would argue, an extremely high level accountability.
Shell I don't think is there yet.
The thing we have to bear in mind is that
brands tend to be narrative.
They tend to be narrative concepts.
We don't judge what a brand does as it were
happening on a clean sheet of paper; we judge
them in the context of what they did yesterday
and what they did last week and what they
did last year.
BP's crisis may, in the long run, end up being
a blessing from the branding point of view
if they show themselves to, you know, have
been redemptive.
But so far, Shell's story is entirely rhetorical,
I think.
So I think the jury's still out.
That category's one that we have a hard time
engaging in cause it's just so difficult to
avoid.
But I think the Shell story is still largely
untold.
>>male #1: So I had a question about the story
of Muji, the Japanese company
>>Bruce Philp: Right.
>>male #1: that's famous for no brand and
they've gotten some renown comments that it's
no brand that sells the brand or does that
fit into your concept?
[Laughter]
>>Bruce Philp: So the question is around Muji
and their anti brand platform and how does
that fit into the story?
The writer, Douglas Rushkoff, you know him
he wrote "Media Virus" and he once said that,
"Striving not to strive is striving none the
less."
I just love that quote and no one can tell
me that Muji's not a brand.
It is completely a brand.
It's a brand for people who want to appear
to be above brands.
And, so, I think they are absolutely subject
to the same laws as everyone else.
They've just worked out the economics of their
business so that they don't have to be, they
don't have to operate at a huge scale which
normally is, that's gonna be a problem if
you try to be obscure and interesting.
But otherwise they are a brand and I would
suggest they're probably a fairly fragile
one cause I don't know where you go with it.
These things tend to be viral in nature and
they've stretched into a lot of categories
with what they make.
So that's a very interesting case to watch
but I've had this question asked in classrooms
and I try to gently say I think it's a brand.
[Laughs]
>>male #2: You mentioned a moment ago that
we can't stop buying from Halliburton.
I'm thinking about buying a cell phone from
a company that made [inaudible].
Do you think that our consumer decisions affect
the wheels of change and also do we have enough
information to be able to know when you buy
a consumer product, what else is going on
with that?
>>Bruce Philp: Right, so I think there are
a couple of things to bare in mind here.
The first is that commodity market operates
on this, on assumed demand.
So on some level our behavior, collectively,
does influence the way that those guys operate.
I think secondly we have to accept that there's
gonna be some differences we can make fairly
easily and there'll be some other ones that
are more difficult.
And thirdly we have to have some faith that
down the road, the responsibility at the supply
chain level is gonna become a competitive
battleground.
You can already see this with ethical and
fair trade products where people are using
the supply chain propositions to differentiate
themselves as brands and we should reward
that if it's true, we should reward that.
But, in the meantime, the examples of cell
phones is a very troublesome one because they
contain a metal that's only available, largely
available in Democratic Republic in Congo
which is place where terrible things happen
to people.
And it seems, to me, unreasonable that we're
all gonna stop using cell phones but I think
that there's a case to be made that replacing
them every year might not be the best kind
of global citizenship.
The very least that we can do to minimize
our impact is not need quite so many of them.
And, yeah, you're right it's difficult to
sort of proactively look for this kind of
information as a criterion to make an in perches
decision.
But I think choosing to be aware of this stuff
and catching information as it comes by and
just making as many good decisions as you
can would be an awesome start.
>>male #3: Along that same line of reasoning,
since it can be so hard to keep track of all
the details and all the supply chain issues
that may happen in production of your good
and being a good consumer, do you think it's
an opportunity for something analogous to
political parties, for consumer goods, like
fair trade is kind of an example of that but
something to say this has our stamp of approval
for being produced ethically and that sort
of thing.
>>Bruce Philp: Yeah I think if those kinds
of movements were to emerge and they were
real that would be fantastic but the damage
that gets done if they're not, if they turn
out not to be real is just inestimable, right,
I mean we don't tend to be very forgiving,
we don't tend to trust these things again
if we find out that they're fraudulent.
So I would applaud that stuff but in the meantime
I'm kind of the view that we should just buy
as carefully as we can.
Don't buy more than we can enjoy, take care
of the stuff that we have
[Laughs]
>>Bruce Philp: because the foundation of this
pyramid is still less and, as I say, I mean
this is low hanging fruit, it's a process.
If we're back here having this conversation
in ten years I hope we're dealing with harder
issues that, that are of the kind you're talking
about because we dealt with all the easy ones.
>>male #4: What do you make of the distortion
by different consumers having different amounts
of money so that people with more money would
have more influence, have more influence.
So their issues would [inaudible.]
>>Bruce Philp: It's a great question.
Because there is some class equity in the
fundamental that we should buy less and buy
better, right?
Not everybody can afford to pay 2,000 dollars
for a stove or whatever.
I think that the power of wealthier consumers
is immense and they probably have the first
duty to do something about it.
I'm not gonna, gonna, gonna lecture a guy
who is working two jobs at minimum wage and
barely keeping his family fed on why he should,
he shouldn't have bought that flat screen
television for 299 when he could buy a better
one for 599 and not replace it, I mean, that
would just be unconscionable.
So I kind of turn my attention to the heaviest
consumers, the ones who are spending the most
money and saying, "You can make the biggest
difference" you'll never catch me saying we
need to legislate income, I'm not at that
end of the political spectrum.
But I would say that if you're blessed with
wealth that, probably, one of the most meaningful
things you could do is apply it to teaching
corporations, you know, what the world wants
to be.
And I'm inclined to not put that sort of pressure
on people who are unable to act on it.
When it comes to the question of labor practices
that's a very tough one, I mean, in my dream
we would repatriate a lot of manufacturing,
I think that's how the middle class was created
and that's probably how we'll get it back.
I'm not an economist and I'm certainly not
a politician so I kind of go back to my earlier
sort of weaselly answer that let's dream of
having that problem.
[Laughs]
>>female #2: Just a quick comment that relates
to the discussion about marking goods as fair
trade or otherwise helping goods in some way,
for instance the organic food group emblem,
of course, have something to be learned from
the senior that came from how quite a large
number of people have debates about whether
organic food is actually better for the environment
or better for health but what it actually
means as a certification is a generally utter
debate.
So perhaps that's the ordinance of where that
came from and how it became to be trusted
and it'll be an interesting case to see whether
it can be applied to other goods as well.
>>Bruce Philp: It would.
I mean, the benefit I think that that movement,
if I can call it that, had was that it got
to turn on fear.
I mean we, we're very easily engaged by being
concerned about what goes into our bodies
and the problem becomes a little bit more
thornier if I want you to wear those blue
jeans instead of those blue jeans because
those ones were made in a factory that, you
know, took care of its employees and those
ones weren't.
That's more abstract and, frankly, a little
less selfish.
But I would love to see us begin to realize
that our interest in these kinds of issues
is really just as great they're just not as,
just not as concrete
[Laughs]
>>Bruce Philp: as eating chemicals is.
Well I thank you very much for your attention.
[Applause]
