Customers care more about the values of the companies they buy than ever before.

It’s more than your purpose. It’s more than what you sell.

They want to know what kind of company you are and what do you care about.

Does a company want to do more than drive profits?

That’s why I interviewed Dr. Philip Kotler, who is known as the “father of modern marketing.”  He is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and co-author of Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action.

In this interview, you will hear Dr. Kotler describe brand activism, the importance of focusing on a purpose as a company, and the problems encountered when companies do not use brand activism correctly.

To start, what is brand activism?

Dr. Kotler: Brand activism is a movement toward making a brand do more than just tout the virtues of a product or a service, its usual function, and to go and even identify some value or values that the company has and cares about.

For example, The Body Shop, when it started under Anita Roddick, she made it her point that she’s not only selling skincare products as a retailer, but she really was also fighting for animal rights, civil rights, fair trade, environmental protection.

So, her brand was active. I don’t mean that all other brands are passive because they do a lot of work, but the implication is that companies carry reputations, and they want to carry a good reputation.

More and more consumers would like to know what kind of company this is, what does it care about.

Our society is saddled with many problems, and does the company care about any of these problems, or does it just think it’s supposed to make money?

An increasing number of companies would like an identity that goes beyond just making the product or service.

And that is what we are calling brand activism, the brand that connects with some cause or causes.

A Lack of Trust in Society 

Brian:  That’s a helpful distinction. You recently wrote a book on this topic. I’d love to know the story behind why you wrote the book Brand Activism and why now?

Dr. Kotler: I think that, if you look at some barometers, like the Edelman trust barometer, about the level of trust in society today, it’s undoubtedly been falling.

Brian: Yes.

Dr. Kotler: And as a result, many companies are not going to be trusted either, as part of maybe government not being believed, and other institutions.

And companies ought to be the first to fight against bad companies rather than stand near them or be part of them.

So, the idea is that, at this time, companies want to be profiled in a certain way.

In other words, the reputation a company has could be just whatever happens in its course of actions.

Or it could also be something that could be designed better.

Consciously better.

What are the different branding stages of development?

Dr. Kotler: And you see, the whole idea of a brand itself has gone through several stages, and that’s very important. I think brand activism is probably the highest stage, but let me tell you what the stages are in my mind.

Brian: That would be great.

<figure class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_22765" style="width: 713px;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-22765">Evolution of brands from marketing-driven to values-driven</figcaption></figure>

Dr. Kotler: Yes. The first stage is when the company simply does its best to feature its product and services.

Now that’s normal. The brand name was an identifier.

Then brands moved into trying to define the company’s positioning, but not social positioning. Just their positioning: Walmart is the lowest price, Disney is family entertainment, DuPont is the highest quality, and Toyota is long-lasting, reliable performance.

So, in that second stage, the brand became—not just one mentioning a product, but positioning the product.

Then the brand moved further to define a set of qualities about the company.

For example, John Deere makes all kinds of equipment for farmers and forestry workers, and construction workers.

At this stage, John Deere would describe its quality, its integrity, and its innovation.

It’s really positioning, but it’s multi-positioning. Namely saying that it stands high on many traits that most people value.

But this could move into a fourth stage where the brand adopts a very specific cause.

You know about customer social responsibility, and a lot of companies are into that.

So, a company may say that it really cares about the climate problem and wants to help move solutions toward keeping a safe climate in the world. Or it could be some other cause.

Then brand activism is alive with that development of going from customer social responsibility to the company, saying, “here’s one of the things we’re going to move forward on, to the extent that we can afford to do it. We want to make more useful products, make money doing that, but we also want to push forth some cause that would help all of us.”

So that’s the evolution of branding, and brand activism is at one of its latest stages.

How have customers changed their expectations?

Brian: It’s interesting, as I’m listening to you, as you talked about just the drivers that have been… Some of them have been consumer expectations. The trust that we have towards institutions has fallen, but what has really been driving brand activism, and how have you seen, or from what your research has shown, have customers changed their expectations?

Dr. Kotler: I think customers were asked how they feel about the economy and society. We would hear them talk about concerns and fears related to immigration, a decline in ethics, the problem of gun control, a very high federal budget, very high debt, and education failure.

Some people, either they never got a good education to everyone—or the college education, whatever it was worth, saddled them with a lot of debt.

So, there are all these social issues, and they become the ground out of which brand activism becomes essential.

We would say that companies do not have the right to be silent about these issues.

An increasing number of people would argue that companies owe it to their consumers to show that they care for more than just their product and making money.

And that’s the groundwork that inspired brand activism.

And what about B2B companies?

Brian: As I listen to you, it sounds like all these things that externally happened in the world around us, which affects our daily life, influence brands to pick up some of the slack in terms of being able to connect with customers. Do you see a difference between B2B companies and B2C companies with brand activism?

Dr. Kotler: No, I don’t see a difference. I think both companies will want their reputation to go beyond just making their product as good as possible.

If you take equipment companies like John Deere, you take consumer companies like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola.

If you start doing a count of the companies that have made their brand more active, there’d be many B2B and a lot of B2C companies in that list of brand active companies.

Brian: I was just trying to think, some of the brands that come to mind for me would be like Nike, or Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks, are pretty acknowledged, and I know that you’ve highlighted them in terms of consumer brands.

Do you have any names of like B2B examples that people could look to? And it could just be for me. I was thinking perhaps Salesforce.com or Apple. Anyone else?

Dr. Kotler: Yeah. By the way, I’m glad you did mention Salesforce.com because its leader is one of the pioneers in this area is Marc Benioff.

And as CEO, he says that he wishes he and other companies pay a higher tax because that’s the only way to address these growing problems. He is distraught with homelessness in San Francisco, where he’s located. And affordable housing, which is missing.

He personally t