The Soup is Getting Cold with Jeff Fromm - Issue 7
An interview with author, speaker, marketer and future trends expert.
Jeff Fromm is an author, speaker, marketer and future trends expert. In 2010 he led the first public study into millennials with Boston Consulting Group. That work informed his first book Marketing to Millennials. He has since co-authored three more: Millennials with Kids, Marketing to Gen Z and the most recently launched The Purpose Advantage.
He is a regular columnist, the president of Futurecast, a forward-thinking trends consultancy, and a partner at Barkley, a creative idea company. He is based in Kansas City and Arizona, USA.
Why Read: Sustainability and purpose are big business trends. Marketers across the globe are tasked with helping their organisations define their purpose, and then sharing that in an authentic way to their customers. There are many challenges to getting it right. And many opportunities. Jeff Fromm is an expert on trends, culture, and change, making him a great addition to The Soup is Getting Cold interview roster as an expert in a growing area all businesses should invest in.
Can you tell us about your latest book The Purpose Advantage?
It's a marketing book that looks at UN Sustainable Development Goals and how businesses can make the world a better place and increase their profits. Those are not competing goals but rather things that coincide; adding good isn't a cost, but rather a prerequisite for business success.
It's the second in a book on purpose and sustainability and it was born out of research and in talking to leaders on the topic. A good chunk of the book is workshop style. Though it's meant to help you think about how you could answer some tough questions.
Most of the time when brands are winning, they are trying to create opportunities to do more than just the functional because otherwise, a competitor can easily take away your advantage.
Which companies do you think are doing well on these aims?
I think there are several large companies like Procter and Gamble and Unilever that have really started making big bets. The Unilever UK team is early in the space, looking at how they really integrate sustainability into the business model.
There are a lot of upstart type brands that do that, too. That's a common way for an upstart brand to get a footing.
It can be easy for brands to go wrong, given the way the public can react instantly to any missteps?
Yes. Sure. I would say one of the best-in-class brands that might have gone astray lately has been Ben & Jerry's. I think they've actually gone too far outside of their brand permission.
What do you mean by brand permission?
Every brand has a certain amount of editorial authority and the strong brands with strong emotional connections have probably more editorial authority, but that doesn't mean Ben & Jerry's can go from talking about environmental justice to declaring that Israel is an ‘Apartheid’ state. They've got to kind of stay within their remit so to speak.
I think maybe when you get outside of that swim lane, maybe it's not so great for your brand to have a point of view on everything.
What you should try to do is pick the topics where you should have a point of view and agree this is where you should spend your resources to take action.
So much of it is when brands get in trouble is if they talk about something without taking action. If they lead with action instead of talk, you're usually safe; if you lead with talk before action, you usually fail, so, that makes it tough.
If brands think about that editorial authority, then what you do is you say, here are several topics where we should be allowed to have a point of view, and then maybe there's some other topics where it's not our place; there's some other brand that should have a point of view.
For some companies it feels relatively easy for them to align with a purpose, but for some of the older industries - heavy industry, tobacco - industries which are going through big changes, where there's maybe a lot of negative PR, what advice do you give to those kinds of companies?
Let's say you're a big company, then you're going to need to look at your entire supply chain. That would be true for your big steel company or your big agriculture company, whatever, so you have to look at the entirety of the supply chain.
So in that big agriculture company you have everything from the ground, to the animals, to the local communities; where the farmers live, to the distribution centre, to the big city where the company has their offices, to multiple offices in these global cities around the world - right down to the population centres where most of the product is eaten.
As you start to look across that supply chain, you must look at stuff like how you make investments. I mean, if you said ‘well we're not going to do any more of anything,’ the local community goes out of business, because your big agri-business is the business supporting that layer in the local community.
A lot of the economics make it quite a delicate conversation to have. If you're supporting rural farmers, for example, in West Africa supplying cocoa and you suddenly decide to not use their product; you're putting at risk, an entire community.
Yeah, the goal isn't to stop making chocolate, in that example. The goal is to make sure that the local farmers are paid fairly, that the local farmers pay their staff some reasonable wage. It's a complicated issue because a few years ago, all the cocoa coming from West Africa was pretty much coming from slave labour.
But also perfect is the enemy of progress. It is complicated, but one of the things you have to ask yourself is: if we did nothing it might be worse.
Do you think changes like that within bigger companies always comes from the top down, or do you think it's bottom up?
I think it’s all over the place. I think some of the time it comes from the top down, but I think some of the time it comes from the bottom up and I think some of the time it comes from the side. It's like, “okay, we see the trends. And if we don't start to move, we're going to be out of work.” I think, typically, the bigger the company, though, more often change is not at the centre of the love engine.
The flip side is there are usually some really smart people in a big company who are like, “hey, we need to make some bets.”
So do smaller businesses need a purpose?
Here's the thing, I think if you have a clear purpose it makes everything a little bit easier and gives you more tailwinds for growth. Does that mean every company has a clear purpose, no. Does that mean if you have a clear purpose, you're gonna have success? No, but I think the tail winds point to the fact that you have more probability of attracting employees who are like minded, more probability of being able to sustain your growth, so it's not absolute.
I think that it gets trickier when you're a bigger company sometimes because maybe the right purpose for your brand in Europe is different than the right purpose for your brand in North America, but they usually figure that out. I think if you're a little bit smaller, sometimes it's a little easier.
The ideal scenario is that you connect your origin story to your future aspirations. And when you do attach your origin story to your future aspirations, then you can have a pretty strong purpose.
You are a specialist on millennial marketing. The phrase millennium marketing is often overused in advertising circles with many detractors.
When I started working on millennial marketing it was more than 10 years ago.
And people didn't even use the term millennials, they used the term Gen Y. At that moment in time, there was not a lot of information - really almost no information - on their consumer behaviour or needs.
The purpose of the research I did was to fill a gap for people who are looking for fact based information. Today there's so much information. Millennials are not broke and unemployed and living in their parent’s basements.
That was probably never a fully true narrative, but during the Great Recession of 2008/09 it was a partially true narrative. And so I exploited the fact that if you went to Google in 2010 you weren't gonna find any information; today you find a tonne. I think I debunked the stereotypes around millennials.
Today, marketing to millennials is just about marketing to the modern parent.
But at that time it was this teenager that we don't understand who's using a mobile device to check out my brand.
Millennial marketing was a moment in time because of the technology shift, and the change in marketing from large brand to consumer, as opposed to consumer to consumer which is common today.
12 years ago, companies still sort of had this command-and-control model that's very true. Today they do. I think a lot has changed.
What, if any, are the major differences between Millennials and Gen Z?
Gen Z is even more intentional, social, and mobile than millennials in terms of their behaviour with technology. But they are far more traditional in their values around hard work, money, and things like that.
My generation, Gen X, never fought a war, but we never protested; we never took action against policies we didn't agree with. Gen Z is very passionate. My generation never did any of that, we were just a bunch of lazy guys.
Gen Z is very action oriented, very focused on collaboration and hard work and money is no longer a dirty topic. I have expectations for this generation that are far greater than of my own generation.
What are the brands of tomorrow going to look like in this purpose driven world?
The most useful brands of tomorrow-land are going to be the coolest brands of tomorrow-land. I think that's a big trend. Pragmatism.
Pragmatism, sustainability, emotional connection; those are the brands if they can hit that Venn diagram centre, they're there.
I think they win because the consumer will pay a small premium for brands that make the world a better place, are pragmatic and useful to their lives.
And then if you're trying to grow, that small premium fuels your entire purpose profit cycle. Your customers are less likely to change to a competitor. And they're more likely to recommend a friend so you get word-of-mouth and then you generate more word-of-mouth.
Social media is an accelerant word-of-mouth. A word-of-mouth accelerant when you tap into that pragmatism, sustainability, small price premium quotient, that allows the consumer to take control and tell their friends.
Find out more about Jeff Fromm and The Purpose Advantage here.
Thanks for Reading.
Past Issues:
Issue 1:The Soup is Getting Cold with Martin Lindstrom, best-selling author, brand expert and TIME magazine’s one of the “world’s 100 most influential people.”
Issue 2: The Soup is Getting Cold with Nick Entwistle, the founder and Creative Director of The Bank of Creativity and One Minute Briefs, a social media phenomenon.
Issue 3: The Soup is Getting Cold with Alon Shtruzman, Hollywood TV producer and CEO of Keshet International, Keshet Media Group's global distribution and production arm.
Issue 4: The Soup is Getting Cold with Sheree Atcheson, Sri Lankan-born Irish computer scientist and world expert on diversity and inclusion, as well as the author of Demanding More, a Financial Times business summer books of 2021 choice.
Issue 5: The Soup is Getting Cold with Justin Calderón, a Barcelona based journalist whose work appeared on the BBC, Foreign Policy, CNN, Newsweek, The Bangkok Post and more, on his new life as a digital content marketer.
Issue 6: The Soup is Getting Cold with Angelica Malin, award-winning entrepreneur, podcast and event host based in London and the author of She Made It: The Toolkit for Female Founders in the Digital Age.