 All right, great. Thank you all for joining us. We're going to get started here in a minute. I should have expected more people to be joining us. So thank you all for being here. All right. I'm going to go ahead and get started. I'm Justin Bellamy. I'm the founder of JB Media Group, which is the marketing agency for SoCAP. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to lead this panel discussion on branding and marketing for impact organizations. My company does content marketing and digital strategy primarily for the impact sector, both for-profit and nonprofit companies. We're located in Asheville, North Carolina, and have a team of 14. About almost half of us are here at SoCAP. And this is our fifth year working for SoCAP. And in addition to the impact sector, we work in health and wellness and tourism, and to a lesser degree, other industries as well. But this panel is mostly about the great panelists that I've pulled together to share their insight and wisdom. So I'm going to have brief introductions, and then I have some questions prepared, and then there'll be time for Q&A from the audience. So we'd love to hear what you're working on and what questions you have, how these folks might be able to help you. To start with the introductions, I have Enthea Kelsik, the chief marketing officer of B-Lab. Please tell us just a little bit about your work and your work in the impact sector. Absolutely. Hello, and thank you for joining us in this space. I had the privilege of doing this last year with Justin, and we were in a much, much smaller room. And so it's nice to see everyone have some breathing room. As Justin said, I'm chief marketing officer of B-Lab. B-Lab is a nonprofit organization, but it might be better known as the certifier of B-Corporations. We started about 12 years ago as an organization whose mission was to redefine the role of business in society as an actor of good and not necessarily one of extracting value. Today, we have a community of B-Corporations that is about 3,000 companies large around the world in 60 countries and 150 industries. And as chief marketing officer, which was a brand new role when I joined just over a year and a half ago, as the community grows, so does the need for bringing awareness to that movement. There are many people probably in this audience that know what a B-Corp is and there are many people outside of the SoCAP walls that do not. And so primarily my role is to help bring that awareness to what a B-Corp is and also just the broader movement of business for good through lots of coalition and collaboration. Great, thank you, thank you for being here. Next we have Thomas Cumberbatch, who's the CEO of Godspeed Communications. Thomas? Hello everybody, how you doing? Great. I am from Ottawa, Canada. Yes. I'm very happy to be here. It's starting to get a little nippy and it's beautiful out here. So thank you for having me in this beautiful place. I am husband to Tegan, a father to Justice and Journey, my two boys. Many years ago, many half moons and muffins ago, I played football and at the time, I thought that I'd be a football player forever. The truth is is that there were different cards in the plan for my life and I went through an identity crisis. I said, my goodness, I'm not Thomas the football player, who am I? And in that crisis, I was forced to do a deep exploration of who I am. I started Godspeed, which started as a film production company and I realized that I needed to transport that exploration of my own soul into the process that I led clients into and it evolved from a film production company into a full service branding agency where we help, what we unearth and illuminate the souls of brands that do great things. Our mission is to transform the anatomy of business from an institution to individual and every day my team and I, we work hard to help businesses to understand that the soul of your brand, who you are, their deepest purpose is really what should drive every aspect of the way that you think interacts with each other internally and interacts with the world. Fantastic, thank you, Thomas. Appreciate you being here again. Thank you. And last up, but not least, we have Simon Mainwearing, the CEO of We First and New York Times bestselling author of We First. Morning, everyone. Hi, I am so excited to meet all of you and also to speak between two ferns for the first time. Right? It changes everything. It just layers on a comedic element that you just can't escape once you see them. I'm the CEO and founder of We First. We're a creative consultancy based in Los Angeles that drives growth for purpose-driven brands because ultimately, if there's no margin, there's no mission to be had, right? And growth and purpose are intimately connected now. And really, how do you do that? It's the distinction between someone getting up here or you getting up there in the marketplace and trying to sell everyone in this room on something, one to many, or actually getting up here and really positioning a brand and saying, we're of service to something higher than ourselves and it's one to one to many. And we all work in service of that. And I don't think anyone wants to be sold to anymore. You don't want more ads in your Facebook feed. You don't want to be geotargeted. No one trusts advertising anymore. In which case, what we do is really position brands to become movements. And the way that you do that is the parts and also the sum of the parts. You have to have very clear strategy. You have to do the culture building so it's true of your organization. You have to do the community architecture, which I might call marketing, out there in the world to rally people around you. And then you've actually got a shape culture above and beyond that. Much further beyond than the purview of business normally. You've actually got to go out there and change how people think and behave. And when you get those individual parts right and those parts all work together, then you become that movement that you see in so many of those brands that people out there point to and go, wow, that's amazing and so on. And I know a lot of this session is directed towards questions. So what we do is the strategy, the culture building and the creative side and we do it for startups and foundations and nonprofits. We do it for purpose leaders like Tom's and Virgin and Timberland and others you might know. And then also very large complex organizations like SAP and Sony and Avery Denison and others. So just as a prompts to the questions you might have. And I really hope that this session is valuable to the questions that you have pressing for your organizations right now. Fantastic, thank you. Before we jump into the deeper questions, I want to ask two really quick rapid fire questions of the panel. First is who or what inspires your work? Thoughts? Yeah. We just happen to work with incredible individuals. I mentioned earlier that our real mission is to transform the anatomy of business from institution to individual and really what inspires our work are the amazing people that we work with. See a lot of times we're caught in this fallacy that business is four walls and bricks and mortar. We all know that our business is our people. And our process is so intimate that we end up becoming friends with most of our clients. And really their stories, their life stories, where they come from is what drives our creativity, what drives our empathy, what really builds the strategies that solve some of their challenges and address some of their heart aches. And it enables us to really celebrate with these brands authentically, with these clients and these friends that we make authentically as they find success, happiness, and joy. The only way for us to really be inspired is to know the people we're working with. And that intimacy is something that I think is missing in the world. And we try to keep it simple. In my culture, I come from a village culture, my background, and I try to just transport who we are from that village culture standpoint and caring about the person in front of you into the creative process. And that's really where we find our inspiration. I would also, a slightly different perspective, which might be that I actually get a lot of inspiration from historical figures. Because at this moment in time, we're really challenged because I think for the first time in human history, we're facing challenges that are much larger than humanity at large itself, like the climate crisis and so on. In which case, you can look back to history and go, what had to happen for there to be large-scale, seismic shifts in consumer or citizen thinking and behavior around the world? And if you look at the role of storytelling in that, it's incredibly powerful and often overlooked. So if you look at JFK with the moonshot, that narrative and what it did for the country here in the US, or if you look at Martin Luther King Jr. and his Eye of a Dream speech, or if you look at passive resistance with Mahatma Gandhi, there was a fundamental moment where they distilled down what was kind of latent in society and distilled it down to this very powerful narrative and gave it a very simple expression that allowed everybody to rally and mobilize around that then drove those shifts in thinking and behavior. And that can happen on a macro scale around issues like climate crisis. It can also happen on a scale specific to your organization, for-profit or non-profit. And I'm constantly struck by companies that come to market with exciting new products, innovative new solutions, but they overlook the storytelling part of it because I checked as you were all coming in, you're 100% qualified to be human. I checked, every single one of you, it happens every time, it's extraordinary. The point being that we're still human beings sitting around a campfire telling stories and we're not really gonna connect at a heart level, which is gonna motivate a shift in thinking and behavior unless we tell the right stories, in which case what inspires me as historical figures who played a pivotal role in those sort of shifts in behavior that made all the difference in culture on a national global scale? I would say that the thing that, or the group of people I would say that inspires me most is youth. And I would say on a very personal level, I came to B-Lab a year and a half ago from almost 20 years in the advertising industry at a sort of moral self-questioning that was inspired by my four-year-old daughter at the time who continually asked like, what do you do at work every day? And so while she's probably satisfied with any answer that I give because we're chatting, those answers became less and less satisfactory for myself. And so hence the transition into a world where I could do the work that I love, but in a space that was truly driven by impact. And on that same front, I have the distinct privilege of working with incredible CEOs that are part of our B-Corp community who work as part of their own internal moral imperative to do this work, and yet they are in the minority. And when I see that message reach the mainstream, occasionally it's the peer pressure of those incredible CEOs reaching others, but oftentimes it is youth. And so folks like Greta Thunberg and others who are racial justice warriors or gender equity warriors or anti-gun warriors or the like, it is the youth that is actually shifting a lot of culture and demanding change and the platforms that they've created demand that people listen. And so, and I am here to listen and be inspired by them. All right, thank you. So last rapid-fire question, just real brief answers from each of you please. One project or one project or client that you're most proud of or outcome of your work? The last year and a half of my life, I would say, being the client and having the opportunity to work both internally doing our own work with agencies. We currently work with We First. I think I am most proud of the work that I've been able to do in the last year and a half, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more. Yeah, thank you. I've enjoyed working with an amazing company. It's also a B Corp in Asheville, North Carolina called Deltaic Homes. They make these beautiful, round, sustainable homes. And they came to us and they said, listen, we have an amazing company with amazing people, but we don't know how to articulate the depths of who we are to people. You know, there are a bunch of engineers, intellectuals, they said, but there's something deeper. And to see them take what we've been able to unearth over the past year and implement that in the business and rally their team together in this deep sense of purpose and start to weave that through every aspect of their business has been really special for us. And I'll give two, but make them really short. One is large, which is a corporation we worked with in the last couple of years called VF, which is a very large apparel enterprise that owns 26 major brands like Timbaland, North Face Vans and many others. And they were a publicly traded, analyst driven, high dividend yield company that really wasn't, it was more performance driven than purpose driven. And we rolled out their purpose inside their organization to their 70,000 employees across these 26 brands. And all of that is to say that, you know, a month ago they announced with others that they were boycotting leather from Brazil when the Amazon was being burned. And for a company that was purely performance focused to then become so purposely focused that they disrupted their entire supply chain across 26 brands is a significant statement by a company and a very real cost to them because of the values that they now stand for. So that was a powerful experience. And then a few years ago in 2015, we were brought in to define the purpose of Tom's with Blake McCoskey and his team. And I was to see him in there for five months. And it was interesting because Tom's and Blake, they were the sort of architects in some ways of the social enterprise space. And we gave them a solve around their purpose, which was to create a world where we live for one another. You buy one another's given, employees and leadership are there for one another, public and private sector, the way of being they own in the world is living for one another. And that allowed them to speak to all their product verticals, all their different stakeholders with a singular voice. But the moment probably most proud about all of that was, Blake is such an inspiring entrepreneur, was so touched by the solution that he actually got it tattooed on his left bicep. So now we insist that all clients get any solution tattooed on a body part, just saying. Great. Thank you, Simon. Thank you everybody. So moving on, I've created, I've drafted three questions, one each for the panelists, and I'd like you to spend between five and 10 minutes talking about these topics, and then we'll move on to Q and A. As far as they have Simon, so some of you may have, we're there, we had a workshop yesterday, and Simon actually spent about an hour and a half on this topic, so I'm only asking him to condense it down. And it's something he touched on in his intro, but during the workshop, you led a conversation around why brands should look to build a movement around their work. Can you share a little bit about this concept and what it looks like from your work, especially from a storytelling standpoint? Sure, as I mentioned, I think the big missing piece for a lot of organizations who are so heart-led with the best of intentions is they fail to tell the story well outright to engage people, and even when they do engage people, they don't close the story loop, they don't share the story of the impact that was achieved, in which case it's no surprise that employees or the next year it comes around would say, well, why will I do this again? I didn't know if I made a difference in the first place or the same with consumers. And the fundamental reason this shows up as a problem is that even those companies which are purposeful, which is in the minority, typically talk about their purpose and their impact in a self-directed way. So they say, this is what we did, or these are the hours our employees volunteered, or this is the meals we provided through Feeding America or whatever it is, instead of getting off themselves and being community focused. And that may sound like a simple distinction, but it's all the difference in the world as to whether somebody listens to you or not, because you've got cat videos to look at, you've got Facebook, you've got WhatsApp, you've got God knows other things that are demanding your time right now as I speak, don't look down. So all of that is say, well, how do you architect a community? How do you drive a movement? Too often brands look at the purpose as a passive noun. They define their purpose if they're lucky and they're happy with it, and it sits there on a page and it does nothing. It needs to be an active verb, it needs to be a slingshot for a movement that will drive a cultural conversation that will rally all stakeholders, suppliers, employees, consumers, customers, partners, the world at large around that movement so that everyone builds your business with you. And that's the key to it today. I don't think any of us, has anyone here got too much marketing money and too many resources in their team? And just going, we're gagging on it, can we just give it away? I am yet to meet a company that can do that or says that. And to that end, the only way that you're gonna get the attention of people who are really largely only interested in themselves because their lives are so consumed by so much going on is to talk about them. And the only way that you're gonna talk about them effectively is to position your brand and service as something larger than yourself and then create these participatory opportunities for them to show up and make a meaningful difference to that end. So if you took, and I think there's some flyers that we put on the chairs that kind of lay this out in some way, but if you define your purpose, which is why you exist as a company, you set the course for your business. You then drive a cultural conversation internally and externally around that, from your onboarding of employees to the culture you build at work to how well you equip your employees to be advocates of your brands when they talk to people. And it needs to be a simple, consistent, and scalable message. Not something complicated. That's why with Tom's it was to create a world where we live for one another. We all get that at an emotional level, but there's a lot of compressed complexity in there that you can unpack about stakeholders and product verticals and all that good stuff. You then go out to the marketplace and that third level is really community architecture. So you've got your strategy and goals, you've got your culture, you've got your marketing or community architecture, and you really need to shift your mindset from traditional paid media channels, which are self-directed and you're trying to talk about yourself, to something that is much more collaborative. And so you've gotta leverage this idea that you're gonna co-author the story with your brand, like Dove does when it engages women around real beauty. You've gotta collaborate in new ways. For example, when Eveline reached out and got crowd-funded, the finance they needed to move into Canada, and you've gotta form partnerships that can expand and accelerate your reach, like you might see with Ben and Jerry's and Tesla around climate change. All of those three strategies have one thing in common. They're collective. They're very much a we-first brand, in our vernacular versus a me-first brand. We're committed to something higher than ourselves and we're doing it together. And then the last stage, that fourth stage, is really the opportunity for brands is to transcend their products, their services, or category to shape culture. Don't take my word for it. Have a look, gun control, Dick's Sporting Goods, Patagonia with access to public lands, women's empowerment, gender equality, LGBT, all of these things going on. You see brands wading into these cultural discussions now, like never before, would you agree? Like you look at the Super Bowl, you look at the press every day. And I tell you what, in our humble opinion, what we think is going to happen. The luxury of choice that brands currently have as to how far they change and how quickly they change in terms of their positive impact and role in the world is about to be snatched away from you. Because these issues, these compounding social crises we face, climate change, loss of biodiversity, acidification of the ocean, and so on, are individually extraordinary, but together, they really do threaten the planet and our well-being and will compromise people's lives all around the world. In which case, that's going to throw the spotlight of scrutiny on business at a level we can't even imagine in the next three to five years. And in the same way Silicon Valley talks about hockey sticks with software companies, we're going to have a hockey stick of expectation where every single brand has to be done clear about its role in the world and very articulate about it and mobilize all stakeholders to that end. And your social license to operate will be revoked and your ability to grow will stop unless you can mobilize all stakeholders to work with you to drive growth on the strength of your impact. And that's why you need to become a movement and that's why you need to be very strategic about it. Great, thank you, Simon. So I think my transition to Thomas sort of aligns with that conversation. I think you have to understand yourself really well in order to create that movement and articulate that message. And Thomas, I know that a lot of your work revolves around helping brands ignite their soul and illuminate it. So why is this important? What happens when brands fully understand and embrace and communicate their soul? It's a great question. With that shift that you're speaking about, Simon, with brands needing to operate with a purpose in order to exist, I think what we're actually walking into is into a season where you're gonna find a lot of brands who are only saying and doing certain things because they know that they'll need to do those things to exist. I think the cycle will just continue and in order to build brands with integrity, we need to start at the nucleus of the human soul. And at the end of the day, I think that if a brand is going to say something really great that's gonna impact culture and is gonna run a marketing campaign that's going to impact culture, that actually needs to be a part of the fabric of the brand. And in order for a brand to be sustainable, they need to actually be what they say they are. And what I've seen over my time building brands is that when companies try to impact culture but haven't done that first at the level of their own soul, they can't sustain it. It's not sustainable. And we have to remember that in brand messaging, there is always an agenda. We're trying to get people to like us. We're trying to get people to buy our product and to hire us. But I think brand integrity is where we start in that process. And at the end of the day, when we talk about a brand anatomy, we're talking about the soul, we're talking about the mind, we're talking about the body. And I think by the time we get to the body, which is the marketing, the messaging, the things that we all see, people are smart enough today to understand whether the mind and the soul are in the right place. And what we do is we're, I see our work as not only kind of like an insurance policy for the brand in terms of their longevity and their integrity, but I also see it as a place where we can actually unify the people that come into the brand and we can help these companies to maintain their staff and maintain their clients longer because they're actually inviting their staff and clients into something that is real. And you know, it might sound fluffy, it might sound sappy, but the truth is that we're all human beings. We are all people. And when we start to think of brands as institutions and messaging machines, we forget that there has to be something that upholds the entire thing, that holds the entire structure. When you see companies that are going through strife and you, I mean, you've seen this at your level dealing with these massive brands, when they go through major strife, what keeps a brand creating? What keeps a brand having civil conversation? What keeps a brand innovating when things are upside down? What is it? It's not just money. It's not just the amount of people that are in front of the CEO or the executive staff. It's the driving force, the reason why they started in the first place. And the trouble is, is that we have so many brands today that don't really know what that is. They don't know what that is. So for us, what's really important is deep diving into the deepest purpose of these brands, understanding the stories of the individuals that work in the company, because they shape the brands. I'll give you an example with Dell Tech Homes, a company that I was speaking about earlier. They are a 50 year old family run business. And in that process, I got to meet every single employee in the company. And I was able to have a meaningful conversation with every single person. One of the things that we create at Godspeed is a book called The Soul Guide. And it's really the DNA of a brand in a book. It's a hardcover book. They range from 60 to 150 pages. But it's a book that holds all of the principles of a brand. One of the most beautiful things I've seen in my professional career is the day that we got to present The Soul Guide back to the entire staff. You know what's beautiful is when we ask them for their voice, people said things like, part of what you read is what I said when I spoke to you. What do you think that does for that employee? What type of equity? What type of equity does that build in the brand? So when now the brand goes out and starts ministering to its community, guess what? They have real ambassadors, real ambassadors. They don't need to ask their staff to share the value of their company. The staff is out there sharing the value of the company because they're happy to tell the people that they know that they're living a life with purpose. We talk about work-life balance all the time. That's pure nonsense. Sorry if I offended anybody, but it's nonsense. At the end of the day, what we need is work-life convergence. It's when who I am at work and who I am outside of work come together to create something authentic. And that's what operating at the level of the soul does. It allows you to take who you are, all of your innate tapestry, and live that out every day through every brand message, through every product that you create, all the innovation that you have, all the relationships that you make. That's what we do every day. And I think that's really important. You can't have, I don't think you can have a business or brand without that. Thank you, Thomas. All right. So, last conversation point before the Q&A, and Thea. B-Lab is a big part of driving the impact economy forward. In essence, your organization is catalyzing and growing the impact business movement. What role do companies play in their own storytelling in growing this movement and taking it mainstream? The role is incredibly important. I think I would start by saying the B-Corp community, as I mentioned earlier, is 3,000 companies strong, rapidly growing across 150 industries, 60 countries. And that's powerful. From a storytelling point of view, that's incredibly challenging. How do you tell a story that shares the values of companies across sectors in a variety of countries and languages? And in a variety of scales, we have incredibly small companies from solopreneurs to our largest companies like Denone. I would say the way we do that and the principles by which we operate in order to do that are very much about what Simon and Thomas just talked about. We take that we first approach and we have to really understand deeply what the soul or the DNA of each of these companies is and what they share based on being a certified B-Corp. And so some of those principles are about going beyond brand, so the B brand to really movement building. As an organization, we have to take the approach of thinking collective voice first and not individual brand voice first. And then one of the most challenging things, I think particularly for me, having come from the corporate sector is really allowing ownership of the brand story beyond our walls and releasing control. And the way we do that and the way we activate that is essentially on three levels. So one is individual through the companies themselves, one is through that collective action and the other is actually through collaboration which is storytelling that goes beyond our brand point of view. On the individual level as a brand, as a B-Corp brand, what we have to do as an organization where I sit is release the control of that brand into the hands of those 3000 companies and allow it to live inside their brand stories. And so that means that we are, we're thinking about branding from a framework point of view, not from a specific messaging point of view so that it can live inside Patagonia as well as it lives inside Lemonade or We First, for example. And the way we see that coming to life is when our companies are able to embed that first inside from a worker and employee standpoint and I think Athleta, if you've been to an Athleta store recently, their retail staff are incredibly knowledgeable about the B-Corp certification, understanding what it is, how it connects to not only their own personal roles inside the organization, but also the products and experiences that they're providing and then creating that story through their retail, their web presence, their email marketing, that's in and of itself, like embedding that into the culture allows that company to really talk about what it means to B-Corp for them specifically. On the next level, the collective action level, this is the greatest challenge I face in my year and a half at B-Lab is how do you create a collective communications platform for that set of companies? And our first foray into that was launching a campaign last fall called Vote Every Day which is about how you can empower people, whether consumers, investors, workers, what have you to vote for their values every day beyond the ballot box. And by doing so through buying from or working for or doing business with B-Corps. That platform was created in partnership with a steering committee of B-Corps who were incredibly thoughtful and created a lot of debate about what direction we should go to get into more of those specifics, like the challenges are around tone of voice and messaging and even language and even something as might be innocuous as Vote Every Day is that too political in our current context. And so we landed on that place and have had incredible success of launching that campaign as a collective and then also, again, releasing control of it and allowing B-Corps to take that message and activate it as they see fit. Similarly, on that collective action front or collective voice front, as many of you I'm sure know in this room, with the announcement of the business round tables, new purpose of business to deliver stakeholder value alongside shareholder value, re-released a letter to those business round table CEOs, congratulating them on joining the party and also inviting them into our community with a set of tools and pathways for how they can take action against that statement. And from a marketing standpoint in releasing that message and that letter to them which was in a full page in the New York Times, getting to the right messaging and to the right tone of voice for that was also a challenge in the 48 hour turnaround that we had. And it's interesting, again, like releasing control. I think we certainly had a point of view at B-Lab on how we wanted to position that message. And then as we cultivate and allow for collective action in the creation of messaging as well, you start to see where the challenges are and where you can start to meet people in the middle to again, release that control and allow for ownership elsewhere. And then finally on the collaborative front, I think this is where releasing that control and allowing the message to live within the context of other brands and their messages and even embedding into their cultures, we start to see B-Corps doing their own sorts of campaigns and leading the way for other companies, some of which are B-Corps, some of which are others, an example of which was Patagonia leading an effort in 2018, I believe, which might come back in 2020 around allowing people in their organizations to vote. And it was called Time to Vote, led by Patagonia, 200 companies signed on, many of whom were B-Corps. But again, releasing that control and allowing the message to live within the companies and go beyond. And so with that, I would say the greatest challenges that we face as an organization in terms of driving forward a movement from a messaging and communications and marketing standpoint is also the greatest benefit in that in releasing control, you actually get a ton more innovation and so many more ideas and so many more voices at the table that it truly then becomes a movement where everyone is able to communicate that message in their own voice. Fantastic, thank you all, great insight. Looks like we have 20 minutes left or more, so I'd love to open up some questions. Yes. What do you guys think about the intersection of your world with Burns Media, PR, in all these sessions together yesterday as well, still the old school, whether it's at ER, on speed box, et cetera, in order to accomplish a number of these goals and where do you see your discipline spitting in with that? Yeah, just one thought on that. The question is, what is the role of Earn Media above and beyond traditional paid media in the landscape today and how do you leverage that most effectively? I think that most brands are only throttling on one of three opportunities they have out there in the marketplace to get their message out there and resonate and enlist others to kind of work with them. Most limit themselves to paid media and increasingly that's a shift to digital and social and there's vanity metrics and bots and we sometimes worry, do we even know what we're getting for the money that we're spending? We hear that very often. And that is not invalid, it is valid, but it is not the only solve. There is a whole other category which is more about showing up in response to culture in a way that's gonna be meaningful to people. So for example, AirBnB now has its open homes program which just invites hosts to open up their homes for free to the victims of natural disasters which unfortunately are increasingly frequent. In which case a natural disaster, tornado, hurricane, something comes through, the hosts open up their homes, the victims obviously get a huge benefit, the hosts get the fulfillment that comes from that and there's a huge halo effect for the brand. And it's not advertising, it doesn't look like advertising, but if you think about it from an earned media point of view, suddenly mother nature is your advertising agency. You know, when it misbehaves, it creates conditions for your brand to show up in a way that will drive earned media. So that's really about above and beyond earned media, just showing up and playing a role in culture that doesn't look like advertising that is in alignment with your purpose and values that resonates and in turn drives earned media. The third area is really to be ready to play into issues that are undeniably relevant to your brand. So for example, with Patagonia and access to public lands and mining rights and bear's ears, within three hours they were the first who did a website takeover saying the president stole your land, sued the president and within two weeks they had that advocacy platform up their action works. But they were ready to go. And I actually, you know, at a B Corp event had the chance to speak to Rose Macario who is the CEO of Patagonia not long ago and I said, if you was, if there was one advantage that you, everyone lords you, everyone puts you on a pedestal. If there's one thing you do better than anybody else that makes all the difference, what do you think it is? And I leaned in and everyone's like, oh my God, wasn't it? And she said it's actually kind of speed to market. It's not product innovation, it's process innovation. Because she said we don't spend too much time talking about what we're going to do. We know who we are, we talk about it and we do it. And you saw REI and North Face and other brands turn up a week later, but by that time the earned media cycle, the heat in the media cycle had come and gone and you lost that first mover advantage. So I think one of the most unleveraged powers of being a purposeful brand is to not only see purpose applying to all departments and functional roles inside your companies, not just CSR or philanthropy or marketing, but also to allow it to play out in a wider sense in your role in the world. That looks a lot different to just paid media ads. How can you go out there in the world and just show up in a way that expresses who you are that doesn't look like advertising but will resonate at a profound level with people because you're truly making a difference, you're walking your talk. And how can you prepare your organization to respond ahead of anybody else when these issues come up? And so I think there's an opportunity to leverage earned media in multiple ways that most brands are not tackling at all. Other top thoughts? I mean, I can just say that particularly in the last, in my time at B-Lab, earned media, I don't suppose was a purposeful strategy, but certainly opportunistically, the way that we've seen the most impact infinitely. And I think the strategy, if you will, has been to join the conversation, join what's happening in culture, but also understanding the rapid pace of our media cycle. Like we don't have an opportunity not to jump into the conversation. And so whether that's through a New York Times ad or whether that's through a provocative tweet, like I think the way we join the conversation and create that provocative outflow of the conversation is the way that we're seeing the most brand awareness building that we're looking for. Additional questions? Over here? Yeah, yes. You can just always fire a client when you feel like, oh, this is not authentic, this is not soulful. How do you balance that? I think, excellent question and something I grappled with seriously over the last five years or so. I think one of the interesting things that I'm seeing as a trend that might interject with that is having come from the agency world, there is a trend towards what is the role of marketing at large and also agencies in the storytelling of things that might not be truly authentic. And I think there is a need for companies to tell provocative stories, to shift culture and then also look internally to start to think about what's the real impact they're having from a social or environmental level. One of the ways that I think personally and the team that I worked on that we started to do this was create either the provocative conversations or actually cast out on the ways things were actually operating inside some of the companies where we were telling very purpose-driven stories and that might not align with their actual business practices. And I think as marketers, as agencies, as the people who are telling the stories, there's a seat at the table to actually then impact the operations going upstream into a business to ensure that the stories that are being told are truly authentic and actually creating more stories that are more compelling to consumers to create demand. I'd add one note to that, which is we've got to be careful of being too black and white about it. No brand or company is all good or all bad. I mean, if you look at the sustainability conversation, I remember 12 years ago, it was should we be sustainable? And then eight years ago, it was how? And then it, five years ago, it was competitive. And now it's table stakes and people don't want to talk about it. You know, now it's purpose. At the same time, there's a evolving sophistication in this conversation. And as a function of that, you've got big legacy brands who've got real problems to shift what they do. And do you abandon them? Because then you've got to ask yourself the question, how many social enterprises that have a cleaner slate will it take to offset the negative impact that these big companies are having? Or do we need to really invest the time to retool these larger companies in addition to starting new companies? And so, you know, in our experience, we struggle with this question as well. We all have this wonderful thing inside us which doesn't appear on an anatomy map called a BS radar. And your audiences out there are so highly attuned and I have a 20 and a 17 year old daughter and they smell BS a million miles away. And they're ready for BS. They're BS ready at all times. And so, all I would say is take comfort in our disgruntledness as consumers and citizens out there and our distrust because that course corrects a brand if they're saying the wrong thing or purpose washing. And at the same time, we have to make considered decisions. Okay, if this company looks legit and they really want to make the change, then we work with them to make that change in the hope that that will grow and increasingly redefine the organization over time. But I'm yet to find a company that is doing it all right. In which case, I think we've got to hold their feet to the fire and find out if they're true and authentic about it and we can judge that for ourselves. But we never keep that sort of third eye out. We never close that third eye and say, hey, do they really mean this or are they just doing optics and trying to talk a good game? In which case, you are right to step away and politely call them out on it, not by finger wagging at them but saying that this can do you more harm than good. And we have one choice here to do it authentically or not to do it at all. But to do it disingenuously is gonna hurt everyone. So I'm gonna share a quick story to address your question as well. We are working with a local real estate company. The owner is 30 years old. When you walk into that brokerage, you think you're, it looks like a bunch of models walking all over the place. The people are really focused on being themselves. It's a young brokerage that says, you know, I don't wanna live into the identity of real estate as usual. So as we're building their brand, we developed a big idea with them and that idea is radical independence. I asked them a question very early on in our relationship. I said, do you wanna use this business to impact this neighborhood? Not just the community, the neighborhood. So I never really thought of it. Tell me a little bit of how you think you've been impacting this neighborhood over the past four years. Not a lot. So I began to go through this process of understanding what's important to the owner and to the team. You know, right before we started working with them, we made a vow to never work in real estate again because our experience working with brokerages wasn't good. And you know what I said? I said, you know, if we are going to be a company that works with businesses for the purpose of creating better impact, greater impact, then I need to sit with this particular business owner and help him to use his business as an impact machine. Guess what? We got to understand that one of their family members suffered with autism. We got to understand that a lot of the people on their team are in the LGBTQ community. And next thing you know, six or eight months later, they're hosting events for their community, raising money for autism, and having talks and discussions around freedom. And I think our role as purpose-driven marketers, purpose-driven brand ambassadors and business builders, we have a little bit of an evangelistic mission or calling. I think if we're gonna really create impact, we're not gonna do that with people who look and smell and sound exactly like us. I think it's important to be transcendental with what's inside of us, that fire can't stay within the groups of people who believe what you believe. I think it's our role to work with people and help them to understand because the business status quo, what we learn in business school doesn't talk about that impact. We didn't learn about those things. So now that we know those things, it's our duty to journey with people, be empathetic and help people to see the opportunity of impact. Thank you. Most of the conversations this morning has been surrounding brand ambassadors and purpose for for-profit businesses to bring purpose into the marketing for for-profit businesses. What about for non-profits that live and breathe their mission? I'm sure that there are ways that we all can be better storytellers. I think we all work in that area as well. And I think it's incredibly competitive for non-profits, foundations and NGOs now because suddenly all these brands have woken up and are playing a more purposeful role. So you're competing for mind share and donor share and with a whole new audience, which is a real, real challenge. At the same time, and I say this with love as someone who spent 10 years working with non-profits, that the industry can be considered a little bit sluggish in its mindset. There's a way that things have always been done and that's the way we've always done them. And in our experience, much of the time you're fundraising to fundraise. And the time is not being adequately directed towards having the impact that you need to have on the ground, yet you're the best qualified to do it and so on. So I think we need on a marketing communication side to get a little bit more intentional and strategic about the way you go to market because you're competing with everybody else and so what do those best practices look like? And I think there's a lot of habits and traditions and rituals inside the industry that are ripe for disruption, that can be shook up and so on. And then I also think that there's an opportunity for a more collaborative mindset with brands where for-profit brands, where you can look at it and say, hey, well, if you guys are clearer about what you stand for and you've got this higher order service to stakeholders, not just shareholders, then how can we partner in ways where we bring our unique expertise to the table and the compliment your skill set? And so I think the non-profit world or foundation world is waking up. I think there's, you've also got to compete with what we're seeing a more for-profit approach to philanthropy like the Zuckerberg Chan initiative and other things out there where they're consciously in a business model terms and practical terms having an impact but more of the for-profit business model. So I just think the game has been raised up so much higher. So the simple answer would be to really embrace the best practices irrespective of where your for-profit or non-profit to take a collaborative approach and to really build back from the future. And what I mean by that is I have experienced in the non-profit world that it's sort of iterative. You build on your past and your legacy is your credentials and so on. I think the younger audience of donors and supporters that you're looking to appeal to are less concerned or influenced by your past. They want to know how you're relevant to the future and how they can participate and so on. So I think suspending that mindset which builds on the past and really looks to the future and the role that you can engage others around that could also help as well. Yeah, to build on that I think sitting in a non-profit now and having the requirement of communicating our story as well as the story of B Corpse, you start to see the differences and how that works. I think first off just to echo what Simon said, the principles of storytelling are universal. It's a human activity and so the ways by which you do that I don't think change whether you're for-profit or non-profit or an individual. I think the challenges that non-profits face in telling that story are slightly different and I think in my experience thus far, one of the challenges I see in the non-profit sector is a focus on the internal story. And so what have we done? What is the impact we have made versus truly understanding the audience which is sort of a marketing fundamental of who are you talking to and what is their interest in your story and your impact and actually translating that story into something that is engaging and relevant to that audience. And for non-profits, the audience is varied. Like your funders are an audience but each funder is quite different occasionally or your funders are the communities that you're impacting and how you talk to them versus how you talk to a funder is incredibly different. And so I think one of the boxes that I am always on at B Lab is well who are we talking to and what are they interested in? We have lots of stories to tell and let's ensure that those are the stories that are relevant to them so that we are engaging in the right conversation. Thank you. Back here we have one. This is a practical question. So for in building a brand movement, I'm curious what have been the key like tactics or elements of taking a company's audience from like I'm buying one time and I think you're great but I'm buying one time to a movement which is like really engaged and they have a community. I'm curious what you've noticed have been some of those elements of shifting from transactional to movement. I mean, I'll start, there's a few fundamental things that I think without which you cannot do that which is, and everyone heard the question, right? Did everyone hear the question? The question was how do you shift from a transactional approach to something that is more movement focused with your audience and what tactics can you use? I think everything we do is a function of how clear-eyed we are about ourselves in the sense that unless you know who you are as a brand and what Thomas was saying, which was so important in terms of the integrity of your intent, you know, the clearer you are about that, the more effective you're going to be when you shine all the light and energy and resources of your brand through that filter out into the world. So the first thing I'd say is if you're not clear about that, you're just gonna broadcast your schizophrenia or your lack of clarity out to the world and you're gonna waste all your marketing dollars. So that's the fundamental. But then above and beyond that, you need to do this mindset shift from being the celebrity of your stakeholder community to being its chief celebrant. You know, as Anthea was saying, you've got to really stop talking about the impact that you wanna have and really talk about those lives you're impacting and celebrate the role that others could play in the world. You know, we can all ask ourselves a very simple question. Are you more likely to participate with a brand in making a difference if the brand is talking about join us because we are doing this, this is what we stand for in X, Y and Z? Or are you more likely to participate if you say something like, you know, too many kids go to bed hungry every night and we wanna stop that. So we're creating an opportunity for all of us to help make that a reality. I think we're much more inclined when that same conversation is framed in terms of the brand being the celebrant rather than the celebrity of that conversation. So that's the second piece that come from is so different. You know, I don't know ladies, you ever gone to a party and you meet a great guy and whatever he does is talk about himself and you're like, that's awesome but I'm just gonna go and get a glass of water, right? And all you guys, you're guilty, you're all guilty. No, but it's like, you know, the come from makes all the difference in the world. So being very clear-eyed about who you are, getting the right come from when you go to market. And then I think increasingly, this is something we've just noticed over the last six months, that if we were to oversimplify things and characterize the last few years as a moment in time where brands were stepping up to play a bigger role in social change, what with Greta and Unger Week, the Ewing General Assembly Week and so on, there seems to be a powerful shift to citizens and consumers, especially young ones taking things into their own hands. And they're not waiting for brands anymore. We don't get a gold star for showing up and saying we care and we're gonna make a difference. In which case that shifts the dynamic even further. You need to identify maybe through influences, but more broadly, those who are authentically committed to the same things. And then really approach them in a way that you would like to be invited in to what they're doing. And you're only going to be allowed in if you're doing it legitimately. And you wanna be truly of service to what they're committed to rather than trying to loop them into whatever your brand is trying to achieve for itself. And so, I mean, it sounds like there's a number of stages, but for a lot of us as purposeful brands, nonprofits, for-profits, sometimes we do all the right things and it doesn't work and we don't know why. And it's because it's like there's a series of gates all the way through. And if you get one of those gates wrong, it breaks down the momentum you create when you're creating a movement. A movement has a life of its own that goes from one person to another and so on. And it can break down for any one of those reasons. So I think there are three things you can do. And I think more and more, we're going to see younger, Gen Z self-organizing themselves in participatory ways around issues they care about it, care about, and they're gonna raise an eyebrow at brands knocking on their door. And we have to be really clear about our credentials so that they're gonna wanna welcome us to the party. What would you say, Thomas? Couldn't say it better. It's hard to add to that, that was fantastic. I would say that as brands think about transitioning from transaction to movement, I think what brands need to do is place the voice of the people inside of the company at a higher level. And the reason why I say that is because I'm really speaking about ownership. I think when we see companies where the people inside of the companies are actually driving that transition from transaction to movement, I just think that at the end of the day, people can believe that transition to movement a lot more. I think that at the community level, at the neighborhood level, I think that brands need to be able to put their people at the forefront. I was having a great conversation yesterday with somebody who's in the audience right now, and he was talking to me about what he does when his business is, and he was saying that he partners with larger brands to make sure that there's a connection between the people who work in the companies and the neighborhoods that are being impacted, the people at the community level. And I think these movements are really important. And I think if we can build brands where we're conscious of giving our people ownership, this shift from transaction to movement becomes organic and it's not necessarily just a proclamation from the top of the ladder. Time for one more quick question back here. The question is, in a lot of ways, we're all oversaturated with media, right? These telephones just are radiating our rodentous zones as we speak right now, frying everything. I mean, really, they just rule our lives, right? I don't know the color of my daughter's eyes anymore. They're all like, oh, Dad, you've been away, you know, what, I don't know. The question, I mean, I think there might be a kind of counterintuitive answer in as much as something that we advise clients is to go underground. And what do I mean by that? And this points back to what Thomas was saying earlier. It's so important that you're doing it for real. And what does that mean? You don't go out there looking for attention. You don't just necessarily go for the influencer that's got a million followers in high engagement schools or whatever. Keep your eye on the right prize, which is what do you really need to do to move the needle in terms of the impact? In which case, who do you partner with and how do you do the unsexy work that's required to get the result? And the reason you do that is not you're being naive or ignorant of the need to be a marketer, but rather, there is so much media out there and there are so many people calling BS on inauthentic attempts that when someone shows up doing something for real, people notice and they talk about it. And there's nothing more powerful than having other people talk about your work or to loop other people in to support it than as opposed to going out there and talking about yourself. And so what I mean by going underground is the answer is so simple, do it for real and challenge yourself to answer and address the harder questions and issues and find the partners that are really moving the needle. And that work through the impact alone and through the sophistication of your approach, you'll create a gravitational force around your efforts that will attract the attention of others and that will inspire them to share it with others because everyone's a media outlet right now. We don't need to be one ourselves. Let our impact be that heat seeking missile that mobilizes all of these media outlets around you and that is the most authentic halo you can build for your brand. I love that. There's something that we're becoming more conscious of every day and it's the idea of space, creating space. Look where we are right now. We've created a space to have this conversation. I think our minds need to shift away from how do I get the media to capture this or how do I share this in social media to how do I create space around my purpose? And sometimes those spaces aren't necessarily huge. Sometimes they're intimate and they're just places where you actually have the permission to just be your authentic self as a brand. And guess what? Like you mentioned, people tell the story. People tell the story. And I'll share one quick story example of how that's happened in my time running Godspeed is this, we got a call one afternoon from a center for young moms. We'd worked with them the previous year with a school board capturing the story of one of these young moms. And it was disconnected from their brand. It was, we were just literally working with someone who was attending that particular school. So they gave us a call and said, you know what? We could tell in what you were doing last year that you cared so much and we have a story and we have a crisis. So I said, what's the crisis? Well, guess what? These young moms went out in social media and said, look, girls, you really need to understand who you are because you might end up in a situation where you're with someone who doesn't care about you and now you're 14 years old and you have a baby. What ended up happening was all this backlash started hitting these girls. All these people in social media were calling them all kinds of names and these girls were so hurt by the reaction in social media that some of them were suicidal. So they called us and said, we need you to help us. We don't even know how. So on the phone right there, I said, why don't we run a campaign where we create space for these young ladies to tell their own story, to have their own voice. And it was a week away from World Anti-Bullying Day. In one week, we built a brand called We're Winning, a campaign called We're Winning. We shot three videos with three young moms. We built a website. We created the look and feel and visual identity for the brand and all we did was bring them together and allow them to tell people who they really were and what they are, winners. Because they're 15 years old with daughters and sons and they're still going to school and they're working towards something. Well, guess what happened? Unbeknownst to us, these big cameras pop into the room. When we are launching it internally at the school, these news cameras come in and start capturing what's happening. Someone told on us. And next thing you know, I'm getting phone calls going, I saw you on the news. I saw you on the news from all my friends. That was not intentional, but we all created space for meaning and I think we have to think about creating space more and more every day. All right, join me in thanking the panel. We're a few minutes over. Thank you for your time.