Why Purpose Driven Brands Attract the Best Talent

Why Purpose Driven Brands Attract the Best Talent Your corporate and employer brands can be hugely helpful when recruiting. Why is it that some companies seem to attract people to a cause as opposed to simply a job? What can normal companies do to emulate the success of Patagonia, Zappos and Apple? I asked this and other strategic brand questions to  Jeremy Waite, author of Survival to Significance  and Head of Digital Strategy, EMEA at Salesforce Marketing Cloud.  You can  listen to the audio podcast on  iTunes  and  Soundcloud  (embed below) or keep reading for a summary of our conversation, a longer version is available at Link Humans.  Questions by me, answers by Jeremy. What are  the 5  levels of brand leadership? Essentially you have this level of survival where its called the location level. People follow you because they have to. They follow you because of where you are, its about place. A utility company, maybe a bank, maybe a mobile provider, maybe a broadband provider. You havent got a relationship with them. You might not necessarily like them but the customer service or because of the location of the store. Maybe a supermarket. Thats it. You follow them because you have to. So thats in survival mode and typically the behaviour on that level is where everyones trying to compete against everyone else, its all market share, theyre just measuring likes. Theyre just throwing everything out all over the place, measuring every single metric that they can. Push content all the time. Discounts, promotions, deals, you know what its like, right? We see that in social all the time. But then something interesting happens, and they start to become successful and they say actually, you know what? Maybe we shouldnt measure everything all the time. Maybe we should only measure customers, or our unique customers or unique conversations. Maybe we should start filtering out all of this noise and only measuring the important stuff and starting to have a conversation. So like Vaynerchuk, Solis and Sinek  that are advocates for how to build customer companies, you know, Marc Benioff talks about that a lot. It starts to flip, so its not about the content anymore, its about the conversation. And thats where I believe a brand starts to become successful. So thats where youve kind of got this level of where people follow you because they like you, right? So theres a certain position that comes with that. And then really success, I break these down into three levels and say they follow you because they like you, then you go to a leadership level where people follow you because of what your brand has achieved and that might be measured by ROI because its commercial success. Youve done amazing stuff, youve performed well, your marketings done well, youre measuring the right stuff, youre making money. People like that. Employees are inspired so they want to work with you. And that might be the commercial level of leadership but then theres a level above that that I thinks the highest level of success which is where people love you. And this where youve got a genuine emotional connection with a brand. And you start to become loyal with them. So this isnt like where they follow you because they like you Facebook or they follow you on Twitter. They may be your favourite football team, it might be your favourite fashion brand, or your favourite actress or sports star. This is where theres a genuine connection because you love them because of what theyve done for you. And you can do all of that on your own. This is where you start to measure customer satisfaction, youve got people like KLM that just do an incredible customer service, great experiences, theyre measuring everything properly, NPS customer service resolutions. And thats about as good as you can get on your own. Now what happens is theres a level above that, but companies cant get there on their own by putting in a good strategy or buying expensive technology. You can only get that by your customers putting you there. And I believe thats a level of significance where youve got a cause or a belief. And Im trying to take this one stage further than Simon Sinek  talked about years ago when he talked about whats your purpose. Whyd you get out of bed? Im like well, theres a stand. Because its not enough to have a purpose, youve got to stand for something now. And what you stand for is more important than you what you sell. And whether its philanthropy, whether its giving back, whether its some kind of foundation model, whether its Mark Zuckerberg trying to create internet.org, or its Patagonia giving away all its profits, or Salesforce giving away all its time and product. Thats the level where people are genuinely inspired by that company. And regardless of what happens, they are incredibly loyal and theyre always going to love that company regardless of price. And theyre going to start causes, theyre going to start groups, theyre going to write books about them even if they dont work there. So the book, essentially, for me is what are those five levels? Howd you get from one level to the next? Whats the tactical things you can do to get there. And then the book ends with a handful of stories about companies that I believe are significant. And its a debate, right, because its my opinion. This is the fun bit and this is why this is a social thing. This is really where it gets down into the exciting stuff for me. Hopefully this opens up a conversation about I agree with that, dont agree with that. Uber is not successful, Uber sucked because of the way that theyre doing  But thats good because thats the conversation at the moment, were not having enough of. To recap,  the location level is level one. The like level is level two. The leadership level is level three. Youve got level four which is all about love. And the other level, level fifth is about loyalty and  thats where most of the case studies happen when we talk at conferences. We see the blog posts written about this is what Zappos did and this is what South Western did. And weve heard the same case studies a million times. Thats all a level of success. What a lot of people dont talk about is the level above that where you genuinely got some kind of mission or cause. What happens to a brand when it becomes significant? So its a really good question. Ive been asked this a bunch of times already, and theres two ways to answer this. The first way is that the top levels about loyalty. And from a marketers point of view, if we put our strategic hats on we could really talk about how its six times cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one. And if youve got levels of loyalty, like Kevin Roberts and Saatchi talked about this back in 2005 in his book Lovemarks  about loyalty beyond reason. People will buy from you regardless of what price you are, because theyre genuinely loyal. They will always buy Levis, they will never buy Wranglers. You go and speak to cowboys, therell always buy Wranglers, theyll never buy Levis. Theres a level of loyalty there thats very specific, its very tactical. But the other side, which is where it gets a little bit fuzzy is what youre kind of saying is that if you do have a cause, and if you are trying to have some kind of philanthropic vision, you are trying to create th ese profits with a purpose. And the founder of Patagonia said exactly the same thing. We want to make a lot of money, but we want to make a lot of money so we can give a lot of it away. And the more we make, the more we can give away. The challenge is whether its possible to measure the fact that if you have a cause, and you give more away, youre going to make more. But Bill Gates famously said years ago, and its obviously easy for him to say that being one of the richest guys in the world, That the more I give away, the more I seem to get. Which is a nice kind of spiritual vision. I think if we kind of go too much down that fox hole, were kind of missing the point. So the loyalty side, I think, is very tactical. Love our customers, love our employees, measure employee satisfaction is customer satisfaction. But that kind of touches on the top level of success as well. What I want to do is say theres a level up here where its not so much about measurement, and its not so much about all these tactical things that weve done in the past. Its about legacy. Its about what are people going to remember in 20 or 30 years time or when youre gone? If people are going to sum your life in one sentence, what are they going to s ay? Whats the one liner theyre going to say about your brand? And theres not going to talk about, Nikes got amazing customer satisfaction. Theyre MPS score is five times better than the industry average. Theyre not going to say that. Somebody might remember, Oh, damn, did you see that Nike did that amazing initiative in Ethiopia where theyre trying to solve healthcare issues and spending a fortune to invest in adolescent teenage girls. And theres a whole story there that doesnt get told. But yet we get consumed with maybe the darker stories of No, lets talk about Nike the bad brand, or lets talk about sweat shops, or ethical trading. I think theres really positive stories that we dont hear enough of. What brands have got it wrong? I can list a few. Yeah, and this was a really difficult one actually because its a very touchy subject as well. I work for an incredible brand myself and just the size of our company we deal with an awful lot of people, so were going cross paths a lot. So trying to be very sensitive, and its difficult as an author. How do you  stay authentic and credible, and try and call people out, whilst at the same time not upsetting people? And I went back and I had a look. I use an example of BlackBerry just because I worked with BlackBerry a few years ago and BlackBerry were incredibly successful, had a phenomenal market share, dropped through the floor. And theyve now got a great CEO whos trying to take them back up again. Phones for You. I was the Head of social for Phones for You for a while. And they did some amazing stuff. And while I was there, we became the biggest telecom brand in the UK and we did all these wonderful things and put strategies in place,  but where are they now? Theyre gone.   So I talk about them and I feel like Ive got a view because I can talk about them, Ive been there and also, theyre not around any more, so they obviously did a lot of things wrong. So the future hasnt played out as we thought. But Phones for You were interesting because they had a very, very transactional view of customers. And it was very much kind of click to buy. It was all money spent on search and display. It was very much how do we create an action to get someone to upgrade their phone, or buy more data, or to change their plan, or can we find a way of upgrading them before their plans and stuff? And obviously, its an incredibly competitive landscape in telecom. And Phones for You was doing some reall y good figures for a while. But I think it goes to show that transactional relationships just dont play out. Whereas loyalty does. Loyalty youre in it for the long term. Transactional is very, very short term. ROI driven, lets make some more cash tomorrow view. And essentially, that was the downfall of Phones for You. They didnt invest in customer service. They didnt invest in loyalty. They didnt provide the best customer experiences. It was a very transactional experience to go in one of their stores and to try and buy one of their phones. Even though you may have gotten a phone cheaper in their shop than anywhere else. You may have gone in wanting to get a cheaper Samsung, and you end up walking out with an iPhone. I think thats typical of a brand in survival mode, fighting for market share, trying to buy attention and eyeballs, cheaper deals, discounts and promotions. And exactly, you know, where are they now? They fell over. Is there a recipe for becoming a brand that puts  purpose before profits? So I dont think its a step by step guide because once you talk about profits with a purpose, that is something that has to be embedded within the culture of the company. You cant just say, and a great example might be a brand that says, Right, were going to attach ourselves to this charity and were going to have this initiative, that were going to go out and support schools. And its almost a very transactional view. Lets attach ourselves to a cause because it looks like the right thing to do. And thats CSR. A lot of CSR policies are like that. What Im trying to talk about is there has to be a giving mentality thats completely different. So its not so much that youve got a step by step guide because really, thats what CSR policy is. Its how do we figure out what it is that were doing to make the world a better place, and be responsible and all that sort of stuff? And its interesting stuff and we should all do it. But I think theres a level above that that has to come from the founder. So whether or not, you know even from Patagonia and youre talking about lets give 10% of revenue, or 1% of profits, whichever is greater and were going to donate all of that to outdoor charities that we believe in. Whoever hes investing in, usually some kind of local charity around the mountains and stuff, the outdoor brands that he works with. Marc Benioff, you know, the 1-1-1 model, you give away 1% of product, time and equity. And that came right from day one when the company was set up. That wasnt an initiative that we thought, well, well do that because its cool and weve got a whole bunch of money. It was if were going to make a lot of money, we need to make sure that as we scale, our giving can scale as well. And the reason I ended up write the book when I was looking into it. And Im not, you know, Charles Best from Donors Choose says, If you give away one dollar, youre a philanthropist. And I think theres this misconception that philanthropists have to be like Warren Buffet or George Soros and have billions of pounds before youre a philanthropist. You give away one dollar to the guy on the street, you know, and youre a philanthropist. The issue with businesses, and you can look at philanthropy.org and theres a whole load of sites that you can go find out these stats, but of all the money thats given in the world to do good stuff, only 5% of it is given by companies. And of the 5% thats given by companies, 80% of that is given away for tax reasons because it makes sense to do that, because you can offset your tax against corporate giving and stuff. But that leaves a very, very, very small percentage of brands that are saying we want our profits to have a purpose. What brands are significant and doing it right? I used the, its kind of a really cheeky idea of an example, Levi Strauss, one of the biggest jeans brand in the world, one of the best socially connected brands, huge company, done incredible stuff, patented the denim and riveted the jeans together. He didnt want to do that in the beginning. He didnt want a make a ton of money, even though he left his family and he moved over to San Francisco in the middle of the gold rush in the early 1900s. He wanted to invest in universities, in scholarships, and orphanages. And he was like, How can I do that? Well, how about if I set up a business? Then he saw peoples pants were ripping when they put their axes and stuff in it. So he buys this new tent material, he makes this thing that ends up being denim and then they figure out that they can rivet them together because they start to become torn. And his friend comes over and says, We can patent this, but Ive got no money. And he says to Levi, Youve got a bit of money because youve got a camping shop even though youre not selling that much stuff. Do you want to pay for the patent? Well split it 50/50. Levis Jeans are born. Now Levi starts to give away a ton of money and theyre doing amazing things. And it came from he wanted to make profits with a purpose, but his purpose came first. So now my challenge is, if youre making a ton of money, fantastic. You need to put those principles in place. But youve got to make sure its authentic and your intent is correct. But the brands that are doing the best stuff like Toms, like Patagonia, like Levis and Salesforce, even Nike when you look at their foundation stuff, it happened on day one because their company was built on a purpose and they knew what they stood for. And everything was like secondary. I actually believe, provocatively, a lot of people dont agree with me on this, I believe Facebooks exactly the same. Theres a reason why Zuckerbergs investing so much money into internet.org. It makes no commercial sense whatsoever for Facebook to do that at the moment. Transactional brand, short term money, keeps stakeholders happy. The two-thirds of the world, that internet.org is trying to connect, are not going to spend any money on advertising, theyve got no data plans.  Hes trying to make people access Wikipedia by floa ting drones and giving Wi-Fi to everyone, or seeing a farmer that you can check your stock price and make more money to support his community. And that isnt a financially driven incentive, thats just we want to connect the world to make it a better place. And we can be really cynical, as we should be, because its Facebook, but again stories like that dont get told often enough, I dont think. And I dont think people like Zuckerberg, and internet.org get enough credit for that sort of stuff. Connect with Jeremy on Twitter @JeremyWaite.