Hailed the “Father of Modern Branding,” David Aaker has received numerous awards for his contributions to the science of marketing and authored some of the most influential books in business. He joins to talk about his new book, “The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding,” and his legendary career.
Debbie Millman:
In the fields of branding and marketing, David Aaker is a big deal. Considered the father of modern branding, he helped define what brand equity even is and created an influential model for branding that is used by many organizations today. David Aaker is the Vice Chairman at Profit, the global marketing and branding consultancy. He’s also Professor Emeritus at UC, Berkeley’s host school of business, and he’s received a boatload of awards for his contributions to the science of marketing. He’s the author of some of the most influential books in business and his latest, The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding: Signature Programs that Impact & Inspire Both Business and Society is out now. It’s a real honor to have David on the show. He’s here to talk about all of that and his legendary career. David Aaker, welcome to Design Matters.
David Aaker:
Well, thanks for having me.
Debbie Millman:
David, is it true that you’ve played over 30,000 games of backgammon?
David Aaker:
Oh, yeah. I’m not proud of that necessarily, but a friend of mine and I just got into it and we played a lot of games.
Debbie Millman:
Now, you were born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1938, and I didn’t realize until I read your memoir that the movie Fargo wasn’t actually filmed in Fargo. Where in North Dakota was it filmed?
David Aaker:
It was filmed in Minnesota, Brainerd, Northern Brainerd, which is the heart of the lake country of Minnesota.
Debbie Millman:
David, it seems like you’ve always had an admirable work ethic. I believe that one of your first jobs was in high school where you were hired to wash the school windows, and I believe that your salary started at 75 cents per hour and you received a nickel an hour increase each month. What did you do with your money?
David Aaker:
I went to college. I was able to go to college because I got a scholarship and I used that summer money, and my folks gave me about a third of my college costs.
Debbie Millman:
You applied to both Harvard University and MIT. You were accepted at both, but your parents wanted you to stay local and turned down both of those offers, is that correct?
David Aaker:
Parents in those days weren’t, at least in Fargo, weren’t so involved in college choice as they are today, and I didn’t have any advisors as kids do today. So, a friend of mine was going to Harvard, so I applied there and then I decided, well, I might like to be an engineer, so I applied to MIT.
Debbie Millman:
So, you chose MIT over Harvard ultimately?
David Aaker:
Yeah, they gave me a scholarship and Harvard did not.
Debbie Millman:
And at the time I read that you wanted to follow in your father’s footsteps and work in engineering management. This in spite of a vocational preference profile you took in 1955 that indicated extremely high orientation toward the persuasive and the literary and low interest in scientific and mechanical.
David Aaker:
Yeah, I briefly was an engineer at MIT and I observed that all my classmates were building radios and growing up when I was playing baseball, and so I decided it wasn’t a good option. So, I went to the School of Management at MIT Sloan School.
Debbie Millman:
In your last semester at MIT, I understand you took a philosophy course on symbolic logic taught by Noam Chomsky. What was that like? What was Noam Chomsky like as a teacher?
David Aaker:
He was pretty good. He didn’t talk philosophy or politics then, he was just symbolic logic. And I thought it was a interesting course and I can tell you for sure he has no memory of me.
Debbie Millman:
Now, I understand that you loved the course, you didn’t find it particularly difficult, but he gave you a D.
David Aaker:
Yeah, that was my worst grade in all of college and it was a little humbling, but by that time I was a second term senior. It didn’t matter that much.
Debbie Millman:
But why did he give you a D?
David Aaker:
I think I didn’t perform well.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, given everything that I know about you, it seems hard for me to believe that that would even be possible for you to get a D, let alone with Noam Chomsky.
David Aaker:
Well, at the time I was playing tennis and the tennis team had a lot of matches in a month and a half, and so I probably wasn’t studying as much as I did earlier.
Debbie Millman:
Now, you’ve written about how your first job after college was at Texas Instruments, where you said you were a rather pathetic go-getter. What does that mean?
David Aaker:
It was a terrible career choice I realize now, because at TI I was in the wrong place in the company, and I was in Houston and the action was in Dallas. I was in instruments, the action was in semiconductors, and I was in marketing, and the action was in engineering and manufacturing.
Debbie Millman:
What made you a rather pathetic go-getter though?
David Aaker:
Well, just trying to thrive in that environment was really hopeless.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how you had a compulsive drive for efficiency, which was an annoying or colorful trait depending on your perspective, and wondering where you stand on the efficiency spectrum today.
David Aaker:
Yeah, I took a course at the Sloan School called Work Simplification, which is basically a time in motion study, and I really liked that. And to this day, it’s hard for me to avoid giving people suggestions on how to be more efficient.
Debbie Millman:
While in Texas, you enrolled in the University of Houston’s graduate program, you took two courses towards a master’s before realizing that a master’s degree in electrical engineering was not for you. You then attended Northwestern University for an MBA, but ultimately decided you really wanted to get a PhD and become an academic. Is it true that you called the director of Stanford’s PhD program at the time, Harvey Wagner, with a request to get into the school?
David Aaker:
Debbie, you actually did read that book. Yes, I did. I called him, and it never could happen today, but back then I didn’t have an application to the PhD program, but I had applied to the MBA program, so he dragged that one out and he called me and said I could come.
Debbie Millman:
You graduated from Stanford with a PhD in 1969, you began teaching at UC, Berkeley for a salary of $11,500. My first salary was in 1983 for a whopping $16,000. What type of research were you doing at the time?
David Aaker:
Well, I came out of Stanford as a quantitative model builder. I have a master’s in statistics from Stanford, and so I built statistical models, mostly econometric models and some probability models as well. So, my early research in my thesis, I got a lot of articles out of my thesis because it just worked well, articles that almost nobody then or now read, but they were published in impressive journals, and so that got me off to a fast start.
Debbie Millman:
Well, in 1981 you were named the Jay Gary Shansby Professor of Marketing Strategy, you were writing books. You’ve since written 18 books on business and branding. Your articles in the Journal of Marketing in the early nineties included consumer evaluations of brand extensions and managing brand equity, and they really first motivated people to begin to conceptualize a brand as strategic rather than tactical. And that changed, fundamentally changed, the world of business. What intrigued you back then about branding? Why branding?
David Aaker:
Well, I was sort of all over the place in the late eighties. And professionally, I had written books on market research, business strategy, consumer protection and advertising, and I had done research in all those areas as well. I was not well positioned. But then in the late eighties, companies began to realize that their strategies were not working. I mean, you can only reduce costs so much, you can only try to gain market share so much, and they thought they needed something else to promote growth, and they sort of, by default, looked at brands and the power of brands. So, brand equity became a topic and I was really ideally suited to going to that area because everything that I had, like advertising, market research and business strategy, all applied to figuring out how to run brands. So, I wrote my first book to define brand equity, and nobody else had defined it before.
And what I did was say that it’s more than just brand awareness and brand image, it’s also brand loyalty. And that was really pivotal at making branding strategic and making it being perceived as an asset. So, my first book had a lot of influence and then a lot of people came to me and said, “Okay, you’re right. How do I do it?” And I wrote the second book called Building Strong Brands in which I created what I call the brand identity model. I’ve switched it to brand vision model now, but the essence of it is that you don’t start out with any pre-specified dimensions of your brand, you do what’s right for you in your context. So you ask, what does your brand stand for? You don’t ask, fill in these eight boxes. That really was one of the things that changed the way people manage brands. And I also emphasize that it’s more than attributes and benefits, it’s brand personality, it’s organizational values and it’s customer experience and so on. So, that’s pretty much the story.
Debbie Millman:
I’m going to ask you a loaded question that anybody that’s working in branding would consider loaded, I don’t know that anybody else would, but here goes. How would you define branding now?
David Aaker:
Well, first of all, brand is just a label that identifies who made the offering. Brand equity is what that label’s worth. And as I said in my model, it has to do with brand awareness, or what I talk about now is energy and visibility, brand image, that’s perceptions and feelings, then brand loyalty, which is engagement and connections. So, then for rebranding evolves with really, how do you create brand equity and how do you manage brand equity? So, that to me is what branding is today.
Debbie Millman:
Your book, Building Strong Brands, which you talked about the brand identity model, you changed to the brand vision model. A lot of people now call it the Aaker model. Though after nearly 30 years of teaching, you were beginning to tire of the academic world. Was it because of the success of your books that you started to think about working in the corporate area?
David Aaker:
No, I was really interested in managerial problems and real business and real programs, and academics are more interested in being theoretically and experimentally rigorous. So, they tended to ignore, so I would say, one level problems and deal with two or three level problems that aren’t that important, but they’re more tractable to research, and the first level problems are more important, but they’re hard to research.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
David Aaker:
Because they’re complicated, and because they are so multidimensional it’s hard to isolate one driving force.
Debbie Millman:
You really created the conceptual framework for thinking about brand equity, and in Building Strong Brands, you describe the aspects that are needed to create brand equity. They’re aspirational, multidimensional, the core identity, the extended identity, and the value proposition. How did you begin to measure those aspects of a brand?
David Aaker:
Well, I think it really starts to address, how do you determine what are your brand pillars or brand dimensions? Some of which are what I call core, the most important three, four, five, and the rest, which I call extended, which help you define yourself, but they’re not as much drivers of strategy and tactics. So anyway, you really have to sit down and say, given my strategy going forward, what kind of brand do I have to have? What pillars has to be there for this brand to be successful? They usually come from a knowledge of the environment around you, the marketplace, the competitors, the customers. Or they come from internally, they come from a knowledge of what you are doing that’s better than other companies and that are really important to customers. That’s kind of what the process is.
Debbie Millman:
David, I started officially working in branding in the early nineties, 1992, and your books and articles influenced a lot of my thinking about the discipline and also how to position our firm at the time in the brand community. And in most of your books you include pre-chapter quotes from influential thinkers, and you included a great one from Mahatma Gandhi in one of your books, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” And that is how I feel other people considered the concept of branding when I first started back in the early nineties, it was positioned in the more precious design world as selling out or the devil’s work. Would you agree with that assessment?
David Aaker:
Well, even today branding still has to be assertive because there’s a lot of people that will be quick to say, well, let’s measure the ROI of branding expenditures and be reluctant to really accept the role of a brand.
Debbie Millman:
But don’t you think we’ve been branding since we started drawing on the caves of Lascaux in ways in which we wanted to position our stories and our memories and our experiences. I mean, how is that any different? How was creating a brand of religion any different than creating a brand of soft drinks?
David Aaker:
Well, that’s certainly true, and you and I accept that, but not everybody does. What happened was, there was a rainy Friday morning sometime around 1934 or something like that, a guy who was running brands at Proctor and Gamble, a small [inaudible 00:15:56] Ivy, which was their big brand, and he said, “I want to hire two people to help me run the brand.” And they say, “Why? What do you want them to do?” And he wrote a two and a half, three page memo in a company that firmly prevented anybody from writing anything over one page, but he wrote a two and a half page memo, which he outlined the Procter and Gamble brand management system.
And basically, it was that you examine sales at a very detailed level and you find weaknesses, and then you provide programs to correct those weaknesses. And there might be sales promotion, there might be some advertising, there might be cleaning up the distribution channel, whatever the problem is, you solve it. That brand management system of Procter and Gamble, for at least 50 years, ruled the roost. That’s how people managed brands, the Procter and Gamble way, and lot of the people managing brands were trained at Procter and Gamble.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
David Aaker:
But that way of looking at brands was completely tactical. It meant that brands were run by advertising managers in middle management, they weren’t run by anybody at the top. And it meant that it was highly tactical, you looked at weekly sales at the level of the store if you could, and then you did changes at that level, so it drove the whole system tactically. And so, that’s where we were in the mid eighties, when brand equity was introduced. One of the reasons my way of managing brands was so different is because the Procter and Gamble way was so established and the people running ads were basically ad agencies because the middle management didn’t really have the talent to do it, so they would be partnered with ad agencies and they would tell them, “We need a campaign in six months,” or ‘We need a campaign to deal with this problem,” “We need a point of purchase display,” or something. So, that’s how marketing worked.
Debbie Millman:
And pretty much everything was on television or in a magazine or newspaper.
David Aaker:
That’s right. And billboard’s, pretty simple, and radio. If a brand changed, who did marketing or marketing and branding? They changed how it was measured and they changed where it was done in the organization.
Debbie Millman:
How did the Proctor and Gamble folks first respond to the new models that you were introducing? Were they skeptical? Did they welcome them? What was that change over like?
David Aaker:
I don’t know. That’s a really good question. It would be fun to look at the history of what happened at P&G, but P&G had really smart people and I was suspect that they weren’t behind the curve.
Debbie Millman:
When do you think that the notion of advertising campaigns addressing all brand issues changed to branding campaigns? When do you feel like that really became the way to describe the work that people do in any discipline around branding?
David Aaker:
Well, I think the concept of brand as an asset is what drove change. And it’s still not a hundred percent. Well, if you look at my last two books, the one before this one was called Owning Game Changing Subcategories, and it was applying branding to the whole concept of disruptive innovation. And it’s really astounding when you look at the disruptive innovation literature, all those important books, all those incredible authors, in their index, they don’t have anything under B for branding. The Blue Ocean book, the Christians in books, Kelly book, all the others, they literally didn’t mention branding.
And if you look at what I pointed out in my book, is that it’s all about branding. You have to become the exemplar brand, you have to define the whole subcategory and why they should choose that subcategory, you need to scale it really fast these days, and you need to build barriers. And all those cannot be done outside branding. And then my last book is on, The Purpose-Driven Branding, it’s about, how do you have effective social programs in your organization? And here again, there’s literally a hundred books, there’s a dozen really, really impactful books by amazing authors that don’t mention branding.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that? How is that?
David Aaker:
I don’t know. But if you think about it, if you’re going to run a social program, whether it’s internal program like Help a Child Reach 5 or Lifebuoy, or an external program like Thrivent uses Habitat for Humanity. Either way, that social program has got to have a strong brand because it needs to have guidance, it needs to inspire and it needs to communicate. And you can’t do that, they know those things well, without a brand. And then everybody’s accepting the fact that an effective social program has got to impact the business positively if it’s going to get resources, have a home and be supported over time.
And to do that, you really got to have a way for it to impact the business brand, for Habitat to impact Thrivent or for Help a Child Reach 5 to impact Lifebuoy by giving that energy visibility, giving it an image lift, giving it a chance for people to engage in it. So, the idea that brand is an asset and it’s as part of strategy and the fight for that is over, it certainly doesn’t exist in disruptive innovation or in having a social program, which are two of the critical issues facing almost all organizations.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk a little bit about disruptive innovation before we talk about purpose driven branding because I think both are really, really significant. In terms of brand innovation, what do you think is more important? If a brand is talking about remaining relevant, what are the early warning signs that a process of erosion has begun that will then require innovation? So, I want to talk about what happens before innovation for large companies or for anybody that’s thinking about creating disruption. How do you know that the process of erosion has begun that requires innovation?
David Aaker:
First of all, I’ve done a lot of research across a lot of categories and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to grow is to create customer must haves that define a whole new subcategory.
Debbie Millman:
Tell our listeners what a subcategory is, because I’m concerned that they might not all know.
David Aaker:
It’s where you added something that’s so important to the customer that it’s a must have.
Debbie Millman:
And is it different from a brand extension?
David Aaker:
Yeah, it is. Because it could be an attribute or a benefit that you’ve provided that others didn’t, like you have maybe something that is very convenient or very attractive or something. Or it could be some association, like Patagonia created a brand that’s all about the environment and maybe if you’re about the environment you share values. Then you have a proclivity to listen to what they say, you have a proclivity to be a little more loyal than you otherwise would be. So, that could be a must have. So, it’s a new way of looking at what you’re buying. But the fact is, that my brand is better than your brand. Efforts don’t create growth, they almost never create growth.
Debbie Millman:
And that’s still a way a lot of people are growing brands.
David Aaker:
Most people, yes. And disruptive innovation is hard, so they don’t go there. I would say that the most empirically valid knowledge bit that we have in all of marketing, indeed in all of business, the most replicated empirical result is that if you want to predict the success of a new offering in the marketplace, the most important thing is how different it is. Research after research repeatedly says this, if you come up with a me too product, your probability of succeeding is very low. If you want to really grow, you need to have something that’s different. And that different has to include something that’s so positive that people will fail to consider other products.
Debbie Millman:
How many ways can a company innovate?
David Aaker:
Well, that’s a really good question. It turns out there’s countless number of ways, hundreds of ways, and they come in two categories usually. And one is from insights from the marketplace, and that can come from trends, market trends or customer trends or knowledge of customer annoyances. So, it can come from customer research, market research, but it can also come from internal things like, Steve Jobs famously never did any market research because it was always his instinct about a technology advancement. Usually not something that he did, but something he knew about and his sense of timing was really good.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about the quote that’s often attributed to Henry Ford, I’ve also talked about it quite a bit. There’s some controversy as to whether or not he actually said it, but I’m going to say it anyway or share it anyway just because I think it’s worthy of talking about conceptually. People have said that he said that if he had asked consumers back at the turn of the 20th century what they were interested in in transportation, they would’ve said they needed a faster horse. How do you see the value of market research now? And what are the better ways to try to get insight from consumers when you’re asking them questions about what they want or need?
David Aaker:
Well, I think that you need to do all of the above. You need to be close to your customers, you need to be close to the market, you need to know what your competitors or others are doing, competitors in your category and outside it as well. But at the same time, you have to be on top of the technology, artificial intelligence, and whatever is potentially relevant for your customers. I think the problem is not so much identifying opportunities as to knowing what to do with them. And an opportunity will almost always be immature and flawed in terms of the way you look at it. And so, you’ve got to not only identify the opportunity, but you have to project how you can deal with that in six months, a year or something after you overcome some of the inherent problems.
Debbie Millman:
What research methodologies do you feel are most effective now?
David Aaker:
Gosh, I once wrote a book on marketing research.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I know.
David Aaker:
Yeah, that was a long time ago. Proctor and Gamble has this philosophy of living with customers, actually literally going and spending time with customers.
Debbie Millman:
So, more ethnographic?
David Aaker:
Yeah, ethnographic. I mean, you can do it with cameras, you don’t necessarily have to drive to Lubbock, Texas. And so, I think that those insights, these qualitative studies have always been a rich way to do that. Quantitative studies are much more suited to more established situations. Yeah, I think ethnographic or qualitative research is good. I think another source is to marshal the information that you already got in your organization. You have sales people talking to customers, you have others that have a lot of insight, but it’s often extremely difficult to get ahold of these and get them to be in a useful forum.
Debbie Millman:
David, when you receive the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Hall of Fame award, you stated that people need to realize that customers are uninterested in what brands, companies, and products say about themselves. And that means that most conventional marketing is not engaging, and worse, is ignored. Do you still feel that way?
David Aaker:
Well, I wrote a book on creating signature stories, and the whole thrust of that book was the fact that descriptions and facts don’t get attended to and they don’t get registered. And even if they do, they precipitate skepticism and counter arguing. And so, there’s a really powerful communication tool and that’s the use of stories, stories to embed your message in, or stories to motivate the message that comes later, or stories to validate a message that came before. But stories is kind of the key because the main thing is that it attracts attention. You say, let me tell you a story and most people are going to listen. And second, you don’t tend to counter argue when there’s a story there. You just don’t tend to be skeptical if you’re involved in the story. It’s a story.
Debbie Millman:
Now, what do you mean by story? And can you give us some examples of how a story might be engaged to help consumers better connect with a product?
David Aaker:
Yeah. In fact, my daughter’s teaching stories at Stanford, and I talked about stories with her for several years. In fact, we kept saying, what is not a story? We finally concluded, a story is not facts and descriptions. So, a story is a narrative, a once upon a time anecdote about a person or a product or a company. It is involving, at least the signature story is involving, has a wild capability that you got to hear this sort of thing. So, it jumps out at you.
Debbie Millman:
Is it different from advertising? Or how is it different from advertising?
David Aaker:
Well, advertising can employ stories and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. I think the best advertising does represent a story.
Debbie Millman:
What are some of the better brand stories you’ve encountered in your work?
David Aaker:
One of my favorites is the Dove Real Beauty thing and the stories they tell about some experiments they did in a shopping center, they have two doors, one marked beautiful and the other ordinary or something. They track the people that go through the door that’s not marked beautiful and ask them why and so on. Another is Lifebouy Help a Child Reach 5, where they had this poor hand washing program to help people stop dying. Two million kids under four, five die each year because of water born illnesses, most of them. And if they wash their hands, that can be reduced. So, they have this program, they teach kids how to wash their hands and they’re trying to reach a billion people, and they’ve reached half a billion already. And they created a video in Three Villages where they put this program in place and it featured a mother in each village.
These three minute videos got 44 million views. I mean, just imagine what that does for their program, Help a Child Reach 5 program. But what it does also for the Lifebouy business. I mean, just think of how much money you’d have to spend talking about how great your soap is in order to get that kind of exposure. And then another story I like, in 1986 there was a dying appliance company in China and they took a middle manager to make him CEO and said, “You got to turn this thing around.” And in his first few weeks a customer came in with a bad appliance, and he went to the warehouse and said, “I’ll get you a new one.” And he found that 70% of them were so were defective. And he took all those defective appliances and he got a sledgehammer and smashed them up, or his employees did. Even today, that sledgehammer is known by everybody that works at that company, which is [inaudible 00:32:47]. They’re now the largest appliance manufacturer in the world. And that story’s part of their success.
Debbie Millman:
So, do you think that people aren’t really interested in product attributes anymore and they’re more engaged by the stories that, in an ancillary way, highlight what the attributes are?
David Aaker:
Yeah, I think it’s always been true. The customers are less interested in products and attributes than the people that are making those marketing and advertising decisions think they are. Yeah, there’s no question about it. They’re much less interested than you would hope or think or assume.
Debbie Millman:
You talk about Lifebouy and Dove, the Dove Real Beauty campaign in your brand new book. The book is titled The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding: Signature Programs that Impact & Inspire Both Business and Society. And in the book you posit that making great products is no longer enough to provide inspiration to both the people that work in organizations and the people that buy the products that the organization makes, and that brands now must address societal challenges in their marketing. And go on to state that sitting on the sidelines in the face of the serious problems, needs and issues facing society is no longer an option. I agree. I want to know why you feel that way.
David Aaker:
Well, there’s a story, I don’t know, it’s probably not true, but it’s about Sir Christopher Ren, who was an architect back in 1690, he built St. Paul’s Cathedral. He was walking along and he saw workman, he said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m laying bricks and my bricks are really perfectly laid.” And he asked the next guy workman, what is he doing? He said, “I’m building a wall, and look at my wall, how great it is.” And then he asked the third one, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m building a cathedral for the Almighty.” People want to build cathedrals, they don’t want to lay bricks. Especially after the covid, the goal to have meaning in your professional life as well as your private life is really compelling, especially among young people. They won’t work or stay at companies that they perceive are just after profits, so you need a higher purpose.
This is a purpose driven economy and one way to get a higher purpose is just to make insanely great products or we’re the best service company. And that’s not good enough because that’s still, at the end of the day, that’s too close to maximizing sales and profits. And so, the tack that really is necessary is to be involved in addressing these huge visible and scary problems that are facing our society, and do that in a way that people feel connected to it that are working in the company. And of course, it goes beyond the employees, although they’re the main source of value for these things, but there’s usually a customer base in some sectors more than others. But even if it’s only 15% of your market that care, 15% of your business is the difference between thriving and struggling. And then there’s investors selling 40%, investors are looking for ways to invest that really enable them to say they’re supporting social programs. And then there’s others that influence the suppliers. There’s a host of others that also really like to be associated with organizations that they can be proud of.
Debbie Millman:
You write about how capitalism has created an unsustainable set of problems which include global warming, resource depletion and an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and declare that business has to decide what role it wants to play. Does it sit on the sidelines waiting for governments to take action or does it start addressing these issues? And you go on to suggest that companies must develop what you have called signature social programs to combat these ailments. Can you define what a signature social program is?
David Aaker:
Sure. Well, first of all, most people that decide they’re going to be involved or increase their involvement focus on giving grants to people, usually could be hundreds or thousands of small grants. Having a volunteer program for their employees and maybe setting energy goals, 50% of our energy’s going to be clean or all of it’s going to be clean in a certain timeframe. All these, they’re unbranded and they’re aimless. I mean, they don’t have a focus that will marshal all their assets and skills. I say you need to have programs that merit branding, that means that they’re going to be around for a while and they’re meaningful. And those that are going to be your signature programs. They’re called signature because they represent you. You say, well, what do you mean?
You’ve got this set of values now that you’re going to be concerned with the environment and social issues as well as your business, what do you mean by that? Well, this is what I mean about that. Look at my signature program, that’s me, that’s us. It communicates in a broad sense what you’re all about, but it also communicates this isn’t tokenism or greenwashing, we are actually doing something. I mean, we’ve got half a billion people now that wash their hands differently than did before. In the Dove case, we got hundreds of, literally, hundreds of millions of women and girls that have a different perception of themselves.
Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite examples of a signature story in your book is the work that Salesforce is doing. Can you share that signature story because I think that really focuses or showcases what the best practices of a signature social program can be.
David Aaker:
Well, they have many signature stories, as should any large company. One of them, for example, at their founding in 1999, they were going to give back. So, they made this 1% pledge, 1% of employees time, 1% of our product, 1% of our profits were going to be going to good worthwhile causes. So, they set a floor, they actually probably do three or four times that much, but they set a floor that everybody knows about and then they challenged other organizations to do the same thing. 10,000 businesses said that. Well, can you imagine? I mean, just having that within this huge Salesforce organization makes a huge difference, but multiply that times 10,000.
So they’ve scaled it, but they’ve done other things. One of their purpose statements for Salesforce is a concept that technology is a force for good. And within their portfolio software they have environmental Cloud, they have a non-profit Cloud and a few others that directly help people that are either doing work in the case of a non-profit Cloud, or they’re making progress, in the case of the environmental Cloud. This software helps them do it and they subsidize this software and sometimes give it away free. So, that’s part of their signature programs. It comes back to 1% of their product, but in their case it’s far more than that.
Debbie Millman:
Dave, I have been really struggling with something that I want to talk to you about and, that is the companies that might be rainbow washing during Pride Month or greenwashing when thinking about sharing with consumers what they might be doing to help the environment, which is really just a matter of sort of kowtowing to ideas that they think that are going to make them more profitable. And you’ve written in one of your books, and I’m not even sure which one, but I wrote it down because I thought it was so profound. It’s something that you attribute to Peter Drucker, “Profit in a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don’t have enough of it, you’re out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you’re missing something.” And I love that because there is this fiduciary responsibility that a corporation has to the shareholder. However, when we have a company, for example, you talk about Chick-fil-A in your book, their Shared Table program, which provided over 10 million meals to needy people, but they also fund anti-LGBT legislation.
As a person who is LGBTQ, I take umbridge with that. Unilever’s mission is to make sustainable living commonplace with high performing brands that are a force for good and taking action for a more sustainable and equitable world. And they have Dove and they have Lifebouy, which are really important and great examples, but they still market AXE. You refer to it as the AXE problem in your book, which is a brand that’s often objectified women. They also own Fair & Lovely, which is a skin bleaching cream sold in India that’s marketed to whiten and lighten skin. So, it seems that these efforts can and undermine any real credibility in making meaningful changes. And how do we rectify this? How do we understand the spectrum of doing good and doing good because we want to do good for the sheer virtue of doing good versus doing good that then results in more profit?
David Aaker:
Yeah, that’s really a tough question, and especially for myself and many others like it that have baked into the whole model that the social program has to help a business in order to get this flywheel going, that the business will help them and provide a long term solution. I mean, the Dove Real Beauty program’s been going on for 19 years or something like that with enormous money spent each year with a whole different way of looking at it and keeping it fresh and keeping it extended. And they do research. And they couldn’t do that if Dove wasn’t benefiting economically from that.
Debbie Millman:
Yep. So, how do you balance economic value with morality?
David Aaker:
Yeah. What I say is that you have to really be sincere and you have to be authentic, and you have to be committed. You have to make a long term statement and you have to have passion and you have to be involved in it. You have to be a thought leader, or you can be a thought leader. So, when you see this really passionate, informed, creative methods of attacking the problem over a long period of time, five years, 10 years, 15 years. I mean, it’s first of all not true, in the case of Dove and Lifebouy, it’s not true that they’re doing this only because they’re wanting to make money. They are making money, and that’s one of the reasons they’re doing it. But it’s still the fact that they’re passionate about the social issues they’re addressing and that comes through. So, I think the people that accuse Dove and Lifebouy of greenwashing are very few.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I don’t think it’s a matter of Dove and Lifebouy, I think I agree with you. Absolutely. It’s more about AXE and Fair & Lovely, and how do you reconcile that they own all four of those brands?
David Aaker:
So Unilever, which I think is the most impressive company in the world at doing social good, and they have several products that are not, by any measure. And one of them is AXE, in which it says that if you wear AXE that all these beautiful girls in bikinis will attack you, and of course, they do it in a humorous way, but it’s still just a position against Dove. It really is. But anyway, the Dove Real Beauty program is not a Unilever program, it’s really a Dove program. And they got 400 brands, so what they’re doing is they’re encouraging these brands to do better and they’re encouraging these brands to move toward Dove. And they created something called Sustainable Living Brands. And to reach that status in Unilever, you have to really be demonstrating you did good. Just a few years ago, there was only 26 out of 400 that did it. AXE was not one of them. But AXE has become a sustainable living brand.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean I’m glad that they’re revising their proposition. And I also read that Fair & Lovely is renaming themselves. But I don’t think it’s a matter of just renaming, I think it’s a matter of, what is the reason for being?
David Aaker:
No. The case of AXE, they discovered that their old strategy wasn’t working all that well, and they’re tired of being uncomfortable being in Unilever, all those people looking down their nose at them. And for those two reasons, they started to reposition as something to be the best you can be instead, and a very positive thing. And as a result, they became a sustainable brand.
Debbie Millman:
When Nike started to support Colin Kaepernick, quite a lot of people took to social media outraged that they were supporting him, and some people were burning their sneakers. There was a couple of people that were running their sneakers over with vehicles to show their outrage. And at the time, Wall Street was very concerned about how this support of Kaepernick would impact the market value of the brand. Several months later, turned out that it had improved the market share. And while it seemed quite risky for Nike to support Colin Kaepernick at the time, it certainly now is something that is shown to be good for their bottom line. Nike was willing to do that without any assurances that it would impact their bottom line in a positive way, they took a great risk in doing that. In the case of Lifebouy, in the case of Dove, those weren’t quite as risky in that they didn’t really incur any ranker from the culture at the time. How do you see the risk taking involved in signature social programs? How much do brands need to mitigate that risk, if at all?
David Aaker:
So, you’re talking about now programs that venture into controversial areas.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
David Aaker:
I mean, Real Beauty and Help a Child Reach 5 and Save Food is not very controversial. But Unilever has a brand Ben & Jerry’s that is off the wall controversial. So, there’s certainly people that will boycott Ben & Jerry’s because they don’t like that.
Debbie Millman:
That’s true.
David Aaker:
And it’s like people that are boycotting Nike. But what you have to realize, and there’s people that don’t like Patagonia, but when you realize for those companies, the fact that their loyal customer base is constrained by that. It can’t grow to 90% of the country, but by the same token, the ones that it can attract, the 40% or 50% they have access to, they have shared values and affinity that make it easier to get and keep those as loyal customers. So, that’s what’s going on. Boy, that Colin Kaepernick, I thought it was a big mistake. And I had a friend, that same day, he said, “No, this is really a brilliant move.” And he was right.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I guess it comes back to the notion of, is it a brilliant move? So, something that is created as a tactic or is it something that is born from deep passion about a stance? And that’s where I get that, I don’t know, that little conflict in me about, of course we want companies to do well supporting signature programs, but somehow the idealist in me would think it’s most important that they’re doing good, not that they’re doing well.
David Aaker:
You need both.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, yeah.
David Aaker:
In my opinion, you need both. I think the really strong programs are those that end up helping the business. It’s just common sense, because when you have a program that’s helping the business, the business got a lot of resources and they got a lot of options. They can include you in your mammoth advertising budget or they could not include you. And if they include you, you just couldn’t dream of that otherwise.
Debbie Millman:
Dave, the last thing I want to ask you about is politics. You’ve been writing a bit about how badly the Democrats position their politics and their ideas. What advice do you have for the Democrats moving forward in terms of how they frame the ideas that they feel are most critical for our future?
David Aaker:
Well, I’m a big student of Professor Lakoff at Berkeley who is a linguist, and he has been very influential in the Democratic party, but not influential enough, I think. It’s all about positioning the discussion, that’s so much more important than winning the discussion. If you can get the discussion on your terms, you’ve already won.
Debbie Millman:
So, can you give me examples of that? How can we better do that?
David Aaker:
If you talk about tax relief for example, you have lost the argument. I mean, if you’re trying to convince people that we don’t need tax relief, good luck. And if you talk about investment in infrastructure, then you’re going to win the discussion.
Debbie Millman:
So, an investment rather than the relief.
David Aaker:
Yeah. If you talk of being pro-abortion, you’ve already lost. Somebody has been successful at getting people to stop being for choice and being for abortion, and that was fatal for the choice movement. So anyway, it’s really about defining the discussion, and the way you do that is discipline and repetition over a long time period. A better way to say this, the Republicans are really good at it.
Debbie Millman:
I know. And I don’t want to say that because I’m afraid it’s repetition and I don’t want to give them credit for doing that. How do they get so good at doing that and why are the Democrats so poor at it?
David Aaker:
They’re just disciplined. Democrats often look at a problem in its complexity. They’re not good at labels and sticking with labels. They’re good at making this subject more complex, which is a realistic managerial way to solve a problem, but it’s not a good way to make the problem simple and control the conversation.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Well, maybe someone listening will figure out a way to get to you to make a difference in the way that we perceive these big issues that we’re facing these days. Dave, my last question is this, it’s a funny question, I read that in grad school you started doing three hours of solid work each day before procrastinating, and you found that that works. And I’m wondering if that is still a tactic for your legendary productivity?
David Aaker:
Well, not as much as it was before. But yeah, I still believe in that. I’ve given my three daughters a lot of advice over the years, but I think that one is probably been more of an influence than anything else I’ve ever given them, because I think a couple of them have picked up on that.
Debbie Millman:
Yep. I love it. Three hours of solid work each day, then procrastinate. David, thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters. Your work has influenced me almost more than anyone’s in the way that I think about branding and in my practice of the discipline.
David Aaker:
Well, good. Thanks again for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Dave Aaker’s latest book is The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding: Signature Programs that Impact & Inspire Both Business and Society. You can find out more about David Aaker and keep up with his writing @davidaaker.com. That’s D-A-V-I-D A-A-K-E-R. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.