Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Purpose-based brand definition & strategy About this episode Jeff Nelder, Chief Purpose Officer at Employer Funded Financial Aid Inc., delves into the significance of purpose-based brand strategy. He explores the essence of aligning a company's mission with its purpose, emphasizing how intentionality and authenticity can forge trust and drive brand success. Jeff provides insights on how stakeholders can benefit from a clearly defined purpose and mission, offering examples and strategies for marketers to articulate and promote their brand’s purpose effectively. This discussion encourages a shift in focus from mere profit generation to delivering consistent value, ultimately building a trusted and purpose-driven brand. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we're going to discuss purpose-based brand strategy. Joining me is Jeff Nelder, who is the Chief Purpose Officer at Employer Funded Financial Aid, Inc., better known as EFA, which is a groundbreaking platform that transforms collegiate talent acquisition by reducing turnover and risk by optimizing hiring decisions through milestone-based scholarships. EFA's innovative approach empowers employees to invest directly in relationships with their potential hires, leading to improved retention, enhanced productivity, and significant cost savings. And today, Jeff and I are going to discuss purpose-based brand strategy.
1:59 Speaker 04 All right. Here's the first part of my conversation with Jeff Nelder, the Chief Purpose Officer at Employer Funded Financial Aid, Inc. Jeff, what the F is up, my friend?
2:10 Speaker 05 What the F, glad to be here, Ben. Really glad.
2:13 Speaker 04 We've had some fits and starts here. You got sick, then I got sick. And it turns out the hardest podcasts to schedules are the ones that are like with your buddies. And here, all I want to do is talk about how to market toilet paper. So are you ready for this?
2:29 Speaker 05 Let's talk about toilet paper.
2:31 Speaker 04 All right. That sounds, dare I say shitty. Maybe we should talk about some brand and some strategy and some marketing stuff. You're my go to guy when it comes with understanding the ethos of marketing, the human connection and the psychology behind why people make decisions, why we associate value with brands. And you're a very thoughtful and purpose driven human being. So tell the rest of the world, because we're all sit here mixed up and we're worried about our email open rates and artificial intelligence taking our jobs. And how do we get social followers and God knows whatever PPC campaigns we're working on? And it turns out there's a psychology behind what we're doing
3:15 Speaker 04 that we probably should be thinking of first. Tell me a little bit about purpose based strategy and why it's relevant for marketers.
3:21 Speaker 05 Ben, thanks a lot for that wonderful run up. Let's start out by saying all businesses have a mission of some sort, right? It's not that purpose based brand strategy exists in a vacuum. And here's this purposeful brand right here that discovered something that nobody else knows. The real question is on focus, which we all have a lot less of these days, right? There's the distraction that comes from being tethered to a device. There's the distraction that comes from a really volatile media environment with lots of different perspectives and generally people not knowing who to trust in many cases. As I was moving towards this wonderful appointment that we have with each other,
4:05 Speaker 05 I was thinking about the state of purpose and I was feeling Kind of sad. I felt like we're in an environment right now where signaling virtues has become a stance that I know a lot of people individually seem to look at with distrust. And so I went to a go to source for me, which is called the Edelman Trust Barometer. Do you know the Edelman Trust Barometer, Ben?
4:27 Speaker 04 No.
4:28 Speaker 05 So every year they survey about 33,000 people worldwide on the status of trust in the world. And typically, business has been the most trusted entity because of a degree of competence and a degree of transparency and objective measures that supports that competence that lead to a feeling that there's this demonstration of consistency. Consistency is at the foundation of trust. But this year, things look a little bit different. Business has taken a big hit. Media's trust is at an all time low. People don't trust the government. That's at an all time low. And it's because people are aggrieved. There's a huge sense of grievance across the board. People are afraid.
5:13 Speaker 05 They're afraid of technology, namely AI, taking their jobs. They're afraid of the rich getting richer at their expense. They're afraid that they don't know who to trust. And when I think about that on first blush, that's a lousy situation for continuing to prove that purpose based brands do better, which has been the historical context, right? It seems really sad. I can see you want to ask me a question. Jump in because this is rich.
5:40 Speaker 04 It's funny because I was going to make the joke. You know, every brand needs a mission statement as long as they're marketing towards millennials. And to me, there was this sort of practical stance in marketing of, I'll use the toilet paper is a product that's meant to wipe your butt and keep you clean. And it was practical. And now every toilet paper brand has to have a mission statement and a purpose. And I feel like a lot of that is because it's so easy to spin up brands, create challenger brands, go direct to consumer. It's just easier to create and distribute products. And so the only thing we can differentiate on is the reason why we're doing it, not what it is or the values or products or purposes.
6:24 Speaker 04 You have a different take here. So give me your definition of purpose based branding. And I just want to go over like where you're coming from when it starts with the reason why a brand needs a purpose.
6:36 Speaker 05 Well, every brand has a purpose and it's a question of focus whether or not they actually crystallize their purpose. And taking your toilet paper example, if a brand can create value in your life, do it ethically and consistently and well, that's a brand that you trust. I mean, we all probably have a favorite toilet paper brand that we use. We trust that brand to do something for us and that creates a relationship. Now, it doesn't have to be toilet paper. It could be just about anything that creates a relationship with you as a value generating, consistent, trusted participant in your life. And if you can surround yourself with entities that you trust, that generate value for you consistently, that you feel like you have a relationship with, then your
7:20 Speaker 05 life becomes better. And in my opinion, every brand wants to become the one to trust and that's where it starts with purpose. Purpose-based brand says, like the brand I'm working for now. So, we sat down at Employer Funded Financially and we said, what is it that we're here to do? And I'm not going to plug the company. I'm just going to say very near to me, the process that I went through. And we were here because US student debt was so high. We were all parents and it concerned us. And we said, we want to reduce US student debt. And we had a mechanism to create that value, to reduce US student debt. Somebody has to benefit. That's a whole other story because a customer has to benefit from what you're doing. But US student debt, wow. At the time when we started building our solution,
8:03 Speaker 05 it was 1.77 trillion dollars. And for context, that's about one and a half times US credit card debt. Massive problem. As we sit here today, it's higher than that. Took us a while to build that product. Most current report that I've seen, it's now 2.18 trillion, which is more than US credit card debt and auto debt combined.
8:25 Speaker 04 It's also how much I still owe for my remaining mortgage.
8:28 Speaker 05 Right. There's lots of problems with debt. Nobody likes debt. It's a good purpose to have. But for us, if your purpose is to reduce US student debt, it's hard to argue with that. And then if you can start showing traction with that and actually creating progress against that and do it in an ethical way, a lot of people are going to say, wow, I trust that brand to create a certain value for me and I want that brand in my life. And every brand potentially, including the toilet paper brands, has that opportunity. So, purpose-based brand strategy means that you start by saying, what's this higher order of value that I am here to create in the lives of my stakeholders?
9:05 Speaker 04 Give me an example here, and I want to use the toilet paper example. And I'll just say that word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing known to man. When we were talking about toilet paper in our pre-planning meeting, I switched our family's toilet paper based on your recommendation. Northern, am I correct?
9:24 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:24 Speaker 04 I think of toilet paper as a commodity, not something that has to be purpose driven. All right, I think of Liquid Death as a purpose-driven brand, right? It's trying to do something kind of piffy to make drinking water cool. But toilet paper, I don't really care what the purpose is. But you seem to think that the toilet paper brands are all purpose-driven. Walk me through what the purpose of the brand behind the toilet paper? And how does that work in your head?
9:52 Speaker 05 I wouldn't say that every brand is purpose-driven, but every brand can be purpose-driven and every brand has a purpose. And there's a difference. Purpose-driven means that you have something that continually drives you. You have to know what the promise is that you're making to the market in order for it to continually drive you. In order to know it, you have to define it. And purpose-based marketing, purpose-driven marketing, comes from a place of being intentional and figuring out what your higher order purpose is. Now, you could say, and I think a lot of the issues with trust in the US today spring from this. You could say that a counterpoint to every brand has a value to create for you as a stakeholder. You could also say every business is just in business to make money.
10:37 Speaker 05 None of this other stuff matters.
10:39 Speaker 04 That was going to be my next question is all the brands should try to be purpose-driven and communicate the value that they're creating and the reason why they exist. And that should dictate their marketing language and their offers and their pricing and their promotion, because they have this higher calling of what they're trying to achieve. But fundamentally, isn't the purpose of a company to generate profit? We live in a capitalist society here in the United States. Like, isn't that the purpose for everyone?
11:06 Speaker 05 I would say the purpose of the brand, the purpose of the company, the purpose of the organization of people who are creating on behalf of the brand every day is to create a certain value and money follows that. Bain did a study last year, I think, maybe two years ago, found that they created some objective measures and they found that a purpose-driven brand, a purpose-driven company who intentionally creates a value, has a delta of about 5X between its performance and companies that don't intentionally follow their purpose. So if you're just in business to make money, unless you build money printing presses, or you're a hedge fund, or your avowed purpose is just profit-based, you're not trusted by stakeholders. And trust is key. It all comes back to trust.
11:51 Speaker 05 Every brand should become the one to trust. So if I'm an investment firm and my purpose is to generate superior returns and I do that ethically, my stakeholders will say, "Oh, I trust that brand. It does what it says. It does what it looks like it should be doing and it does it ethically." If my purpose is to create cleaning products that don't hurt the environment, if the purpose of my company, like a seventh generation, is to protect the environment in some way, in a very plain-spoken way, that's how people think of seventh generation, and if my purpose is to protect the environment and I create products that clean really well without harming the environment, then people will trust me to do that.
12:33 Speaker 05 If my purpose is to organize the world's information and do no harm, and I make an announcement that I'm going to lay off 25,000 people because that division isn't making enough money for me, well then my brand is going to take a huge trust hit, likely, because people will say, "That brand is demonstrating that its purpose is to make money because instead of doing no harm in the lives of 25,000 people, which is significant, it's saying, 'You're not making enough money for me, so you're out of here.'" Even though that brand is making a lot of money overall, that's the difference between following a purpose of creating value, your intentional purpose of creating value, and just demonstrating that you're in the game to make money if you're not a hedge fund, if you're not an investment firm.
13:17 Speaker 04 So for marketers, most of us come into existing brands. Chances are, most marketers are not founders. And so that means that let's take the executive marketers that are coming into a new brand and trying to figure out how to understand what the strengths of their team are, understand their existing channel mix, understand performance. But fundamentally, it seems like a large portion of the job is understand the purpose of the brand and help to communicate that. What's the way that you figure out what a brand's purpose is? And then make sure that all of your marketing activities are aligned towards that purpose, but also are still the most effective marketing tactics you can have?
13:57 Speaker 05 At base, intentionality drives this sort of an initiative. So you have to get everybody bought in to an intention to define purpose, to define mission, to define elements like vision and values and positioning, which are all core to any sort of sophisticated brand strategy. The way into this, for me, when I was a consultant, was usually get a group of decision makers in the company, founders, board members, the C-suite, and get them to start defining what their sense of the company's purpose is, what their sense of the company's mission and vision and values and positioning is. And not everybody knows how to articulate that stuff. So I always broke it down. I said, okay, the key thing here is to start with purpose.
14:41 Speaker 05 The definition of purpose, in a very crass sense, is that I am here to... dot, dot, dot, create some value. So I would always ask people, I would isolate them, so group think didn't happen. And I would say, I want you to tell me what higher order of value you believe this company was founded to create. This company was founded, like in Apple's case, to create beautiful design that works, which I don't know if that's the case anymore. But let's say you sat down with the leadership and people said a variety of things that amounted to beautiful design that works. They all said in different ways. You get them together, you take the purpose statements. And my method was always, I take the purpose statements that people craft when I'm asking
15:23 Speaker 05 them just to say what they really believe without getting hung up on looking good. Looking good in front of anybody and I put everybody's articulation together and I throw it up on a wall and everybody votes. The way I did it was I said, okay, order these one to five, five, five people in the room. The lowest score wins like in golf. So there would always be one that won. And because everybody voted anonymously and came up with it anonymously, group think didn't happen. Intimidation by whoever the the biggest dog in the room didn't happen. And everybody could discuss this stuff without any ego. Now you can also scale this method where you start out with a small group and you establish some sort of a lexicon for purpose. And then you go out and you test that with other stakeholder groups. And you come back and you hone it and you hone it until you actually get to a purpose statement.
16:07 Speaker 05 Everybody wants to buy into that. They all feel like they can articulate and get behind with a sense of authenticity. Right? So you start out with purpose, which is I am here to do this. And then you build on that. Usually I go next into the mission, right? So mission, if I think about what mission is, mission is we marshal these key resources for these groups in order to achieve our purpose.
16:32 Speaker 04 Give me a specific example. You were using Apple before, but you've got a purpose inspired design or functional design.
16:39 Speaker 05 I'll use EFA.
16:40 Speaker 04 Great.
16:41 Speaker 05 So we realized our purpose was to reduce US student debt. But we have multiple stakeholders, key stakeholders. We have students, we're reducing US student debt for students that benefit students. We're reducing US student debt, certainly for employers stand to benefit because higher debt means that your employees are more likely to be looking for another job while they're in the current job. And employers are bleeding talent. So Gen Z is much maligned and I don't want to malign Gen Z because I think there's a lot of reasons why Gen Z shows up differently in the workplace right now. But Gen Z tends to churn very highly in a job. The entry level gets into a job and estimates as high as 40% within year one are out the door.
17:24 Speaker 05 And it takes six months for somebody to become productive in a job. And about three quarters of that churn, so about 30%, three out of your 10 workers that you hire are going to come in the door and be out in the first six months by themselves. sells by their own choice. This isn't even people that you let go. So you invest in about $6,000 a head in attracting the talent. You invest in training the talent and onboarding the talent. And then three out of 10 are out the door. And according to Sherman, it costs you one to two times the whole compensation package. Salary plus tax matching plus benefits to replace that person. This adds up. This $100 billion problem across the US and corporations.
18:05 Speaker 05 So if we can reduce US student debt by enabling employers to invest in the talent they wish to hire and retain, then employers really stand to benefit. And that became a very quick mission statement for us. We're on a mission to reduce US student debt by helping employers invest directly in the talent they wish to hire and retain. And that very quickly succinctly describes a purpose and how we're going to achieve it.
18:33 Speaker 04 I guess what I don't understand is the difference between how you're describing the company's purpose and the mission. And I understand you come into an organization as a marketer. You need to make sure that you, your stakeholders, you're all aligned on this center ethos. But then there's this notion of, well, what's our purpose? What's our mission? And then what's our tactical operations? Help me break down what the three are.
18:57 Speaker 05 So if our purpose is to reduce US student debt, and the way that we reduce US student debt is by involving employers in investing in talent to reduce that US student debt, then employers have to benefit. We have to describe how employers benefit. So we've got a purpose. Then we've got a mission that includes how we achieve our purpose. And then on top of that, we have, I want to give a shout out to these other elements, which I think are incredibly important as well. We've got a vision, which is how the world changes if we and other aligned organizations are successful in pursuing our mission. We've got our values, which are the road rules for how we behave as we go along, pursuing our mission, trying to achieve our purpose. And then we've got positioning, which is incredibly important,
19:42 Speaker 05 which is for each of these stakeholders, we help them. Do or achieve something so that they can achieve some sort of other state so they can become something else in an improved position. And then finally, brand promise, which is all of this distilled into a very short, pithy promise that you make to the marketplace, which becomes a decision tool. So if your Hallmark caring shared is their brand promise, and if they can demonstrate that at every touch point in their brand experience, they become a trusted brand in greeting cards, which are supposed to do something or other, right? Like, and everybody knows Hallmark. Then tactically speaking, once you have your brand defined with your purpose driven brand defined with purpose, mission, vision,
20:27 Speaker 05 values, positioning and brand promise, then all your tactics are developed so that every experience across this map of brand experience touchpoints. So maybe you come into contact with me via email. Maybe you come into contact with me via my contract between you and I. Maybe you come into contact with me via the news about me vis a vis how I interact with regulators. It's not just the marketing channels. It's any touch point that one of your stakeholders might come into contact with you. You tactically orient yourself so that you can deliver on that brand promise across all of those touchpoints, which sounds
21:06 Speaker 05 miserable and complex, and it is complex, but it's not miserable as long as you're staying true to that brand promise. As long as you're telling the truth. There's something else that I always say, and this bears mentioning. We've all heard this. Tell the truth. It's easier. You got nothing else to remember. It's just the truth.
21:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:25 Speaker 05 So you got to define what that truth is. And that truth comes from a deep place where you're going to consistently deliver on it. And that's this intentional orientation towards achieving your purpose.
21:36 Speaker 04 It seems like it's the way the world should be. We should all, as marketers, as honestly, like corporate citizens, as world citizens, as people, have a sense of purpose and have our purpose drive our mission and have our mission dictate our values and have our values dictate our tactics and have our tactics reflect- Our purpose and it sounds as you lay it out like a linear process of you go from one to the next to the next to the next. But it seems like almost every brand struggles with this definition of purpose. And then the articulation of it to the marketplace, because we're all trying all sorts of different operational tactics.
22:18 Speaker 04 We're all trying to get visibility and awareness. I think of the metrics like as a marketer, what I think starts to drive the business results are things like reach and frequency and depth of message and conversion rates as opposed to like, but did it come from the heart? So how do you rationalize the practical nature of what most marketers are thinking about and doing on the daily basis? With this notion that we should all have this central heartbeat in our head of what the organization is meant to be doing? And what we actually do.
22:57 Speaker 05 It comes back to being the one to trust and it being the one to trust and making promises and keeping promises, which can sound incredibly naive in the type of volatile, polarized environment that we live right now. With the elevation of greed to the status of a value among so many, unfortunately. But in my opinion, it could be way simpler. And I keep thinking about this idea of creating value and really doing it with a sense of excellence. And staying in touch with the people and the groups of people that you create value for. And striving to do that better and better. And then allowing your tactics to be more like a bat signal that you shine out into the marketplace.
23:39 Speaker 05 Something else we haven't discussed is the idea of personal brand and how that lines up. So if you have an organizational brand that is intentional, well-defined and can deliver on its promise. And the people working there don't see themselves reflected in that brand, don't understand how they play their part in an authentic way. Don't see their leadership, you know, really living the brand that they're supposed to be leading. That's a huge disconnect. And so something else as a consultant that I always recommended and worked to sell into an organization because I thought it was a good thing, fundamentally good thing, was defining personal brands. So in the same way that you define an organizational brand as a C-level executive within this
24:24 Speaker 05 company, what are you here to do? What gets you up in the morning about working in this company and running this company? And talking through it with them till they get to the point of crystallizing how their sense of purpose aligned with this organizational purpose. My organization is here to do this, and in my life, I am here to do this. And personally, I am here to achieve this purpose, my personal purpose, by doing certain things, and that's my mission. And if I am successful in my mission as an individual, the world and others like me are successful, who are aligned with my mission, the world will change in this way. You see, Ben, if you can go deep within an organization and facilitate the ability of
25:08 Speaker 05 the leadership to line up behind that organization's purpose in an authentic way, and I say authenticity because it's incredibly important. Authenticity is projecting the truth to you, and we'll come back to the same adage, which is telling the truth is easier because you don't have to remember anything. Authenticity winds up coming out, and if you're not telling the truth, that winds up coming out too, and you wind up with creating a trust issue for your brand because people don't trust the leadership of the brand, and then they start distrusting the brand. But if the leadership starts by determining how their own sense of purpose and mission lines up with the organization's sense of purpose and mission, and the organization is continually striving to deliver excellent value and fulfilling on their promise in
25:49 Speaker 05 a way that people trust because it's consistent, then the people working there who are looking to their leadership for leadership, actually, right? Then the people working there start seeing how their sense of purpose lines up with that bat signal. And then all of a sudden, you have an organization like REI, Opt Outside. I mean, REI is a co-op, but it's a great example because they came up with Opt Outside, seemed counterintuitive that on Black Friday, a brand that was a retail brand would say Don't come and shop here, get out. But it was consistent. It was trustworthy. It was truthful. It was delivering on their promise. It lined up with creating a level of excellence in the value of facilitating outdoor adventure. And you know what happened? Profits followed purpose.
26:34 Speaker 05 And that's typically how it works. You could say it's super complex, but when you're behaving authentically and you don't have to lie and you don't have anything to remember and just doing the best you can and in the views of your stakeholders, doing it with excellence, you're a purpose driven brand.
26:48 Speaker 04 You know, I fundamentally believe in purpose driven brands and it's a really hard topic to wrap your head around as a marketer. We have to be very tactical. We have to be thinking about what is happening in the marketplace to try to figure out how to stand out. But fundamentally, the brands that have the longest staying power, that have the biggest impact on the world are ones that have an understanding of who they are and of what they want to be as they continue to evolve. So Jeff, I want to thank you. And honestly, this is a different episode than what we normally have on the Martech Podcast. We're normally talking very tactically. We're normally talking about
27:29 Speaker 04 our operational tactics. This is a chance for us to step back and stop and say, hey, every little while, we need to have a check in with ourselves to understand why we're doing what we're doing. And you've always been a great reference point for me to stop and think about my purpose, about the purpose of creating content, about the purpose of supporting the brands that we support. And I think that understanding of how to think about being a purpose driven brand, well, it might sound fluffy to some people and I don't have time for that. We're busy doing other stuff. Fundamentally, this is the most important thing that you can do is understand why you and your organization are there. Why do you exist? And the more that you can get behind that mission,
28:13 Speaker 04 the better off and the more profitable you'll be in the long run. Let's move on to our lightning round. First question is game plan.
28:21 Speaker 05 Okay.
28:21 Speaker 04 Give me the playbook for ensuring alignment between your personal and your company's purpose.
28:27 Speaker 05 You got to define the company's purpose first, then you got to define the personal purpose, and the personal purpose has to contribute to moving the company's mission forward. It's as simple as that.
28:36 Speaker 04 It sounds like one of those things where it is very linear, but when you're starting to think about alignment between personal brands and company brands, it never feels like it is that simple. How do you pull back the covers to understand what the true motivations or purpose of a company is outside of what they're actually saying?
28:56 Speaker 05 I always start with the leadership. I get the leadership together. I isolate every individual. I walk them through a conversation. I bring them back together and I throw their answers up on a board and it's totally anonymized so that when everybody looks at their answer amidst the other answers, there's no group think, there's no intimidation, and there's no ego involved. Ego is a big barrier that gets in the way of simple, plain-spoken, impactful conversation and authentic articulation.
29:31 Speaker 04 All right, let's move on to our next question. We're going to talk tagline. Purpose, mission, and vision are big, important words. One other person that's talked a lot about similar concepts is Simon Sinek. Talk tagline with me and react to his advice to marketers in the tagline, which is, "Start with why."
29:48 Speaker 05 I think why, and motivation, and intention, and genuine impactful value are all part of the same idea. I mean, he's not wrong. He's a university professor, and I love that he's achieved such great success. A tagline should be a simple, catchy articulation of what you're promising the marketplace. I think BMW does a great job. Everybody knows BMW. Ultimate driving machine. BMW is not my ultimate driving machine, but for people who are enthusiasts, man, it's their ultimate driving machine. They love to geek out on it. They love to get together with other BMW enthusiasts.
30:25 Speaker 04 You could feel every pothole in the road. I don't understand it.
30:29 Speaker 05 No, but you just say ultimate driving machine. Everybody knows that's BMW immediately because they're consistent about it. One thing you can say about BMW is they sure strive to deliver that idea with excellence, and their stakeholders certainly agree with them that they're delivering it with excellence.
30:43 Speaker 04 I think that the idea of start with why the example that always comes to mind is from Simon Sinek's old famous video comparing Apple versus Dell where Apple sells the idea of the personal computing device, but the purpose of it is that it's going to help you be creative and Dell sells a box with RAM and hard drives. Which one do you want? One that's going to help you solve your problems or one that has RAM and hard drives? Well, I think the market has clearly spoken. When you think about the juxtaposition of marketing towards purpose as opposed to features, how do you delineate between when you talk about yourselves and that sort of underlying purpose and vision as opposed to try to promote the how?
31:28 Speaker 05 The features all add up to the how and the why. If you shortcut things and move straight to the features, like your example of Dell, Dell back in the day, Dell made computers that were affordable and they promoted making computers that were affordable. And I always felt like it was a missed opportunity. Apple's computers were always difficult to afford back in the day compared to the Dell computers. I always wondered, why didn't Dell make it sexier by saying, this is every man and woman's computer. We're inclusive about computers. I haven't thought about this in a while, but my sense was always that there was a better angle of accessibility, empowerment. We
32:09 Speaker 05 want to make this possible for everybody. And if Dell had done that, you would have sexy, expensive, battling against, we just want to do this for everybody. And things might look differently today in terms of where Dell is in the marketplace. I would argue that Dell is not a failed brand at all. I don't want to give that impression, but I do think there was always opportunity. You know what else? Let's juxtapose Microsoft with Apple and the trajectory of those two brands. I think with how Bill Gates transformed his public image through, as we understand it today, you know, Melinda's influence with Gates Foundation, the name Gates became representative of creating
32:47 Speaker 05 impact and creating access and positive things. And if Microsoft, instead of focusing hardcore on features and geeking out about features, had seen the opportunity with accessibility and empowerment and hit on that harder earlier with commitment to things like the Gates Foundation, more aligned with Microsoft earlier on, they might've gotten to where they are now earlier and things might look different.
33:13 Speaker 04 I want to move on to our last question. Double down or diversify? Should marketers double down on integrating their company's purpose as a viable part of their marketing efforts? Or be more tactical about sharing things like product features and attributes?
33:28 Speaker 05 Double down, baby. You gotta double down. You gotta start from a deep and disciplined place and you gotta know that you need to become the one to trust. There are examples in the marketplace of brands that have become too big to fail and I think Apple is one of them. The type of affection that I'll just say all of us felt for Apple as a brand. It was our brand. When there were problems with the brand, people owned the brand and they become evangelists of the brand, even to Steve Jobs when he was still alive, which I think had an impact. But when a brand becomes so big that it's captured you, yeah, it'll make a lot of money, but if people have an opportunity to defect, they certainly will. They always will. And word of mouth becomes not your friend. It actually becomes a deleterious force in the marketplace.
34:12 Speaker 05 So double down, figure out what you're promising, define that promise so you can keep your promise, keep everybody happy that way.
34:18 Speaker 04 All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Jeff Nelder, the Chief Purpose Officer at the employer-funded financial aid, also known as EFA. If you'd like to get in touch with Jeff, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you could visit his company's website, which is efio. That's E-F-F-A dot I-O. If you'd like a summary of this podcast, or if you'd like to apply to be a guest speaker on the Martech Podcast, head over to martechpod.com. You can also find us on YouTube, Instagram, or X. And if you'd like to contact me, we can connect over on LinkedIn. My handle is Ben J. Shap, B-E-N-J-S-H-A-P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning.
35:03 Speaker 04 All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
35:35 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHearEverything.com.
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