Activating Purpose Driven Branding

Chip Walker, author, keynote speaker, business and culture strategist: Head of Strategy at StrawberryFrog — a company that provides creativity for purpose driven companies. Your business may or may not have a purpose statement. But it's the activation of that purpose which makes all the difference. Listen in and hear Chip explains how this makes employees more engaged, customers happy to do business with you, and, of course, increases your bottom line. A podcast not to miss!  https://strawberryfrog.com
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 36 | Chip Walker

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome back, everyone. I have Chip Walker on today. He is an author, keynote speaker, business and cultural strategist and head of strategy at StrawberryFrog, which is a company that provides creativity for purpose-driven companies, which all of you that know me know how I am 1,000% behind things like this. Chip is someone who can walk you through how purpose-based branding can improve your bottom line in many ways. Of course, I call it the triple bottom line. I always like to make sure all three bottom lines, all bottom lines are being covered. Chip, I’m so happy to have you on the show today because what you all do is something the world needs a lot more of. I’m so curious. Can you tell our listeners how your career evolved in the position you hold today?

Chip Walker
[01:02] Sure, and great to be here, Taylor. Thanks for having me. In terms of my career and how I got to be here, I started out mainly in the advertising industry in New York City, Madison Avenue, a lot of the big well-known agencies, BBDO, Wunderman, Young & Rubicam. I started out on the strategy side of the business so really became known as a brand strategist helping major brands like AT&T, Dell, Goldman Sachs, others kind of formulate their brand strategy. I did that for a number of years. I’ve been heading strategy at a bunch of these agencies. I’ve been doing this a while. You can probably tell by my gray hair. Brand and brand strategy can sometimes be seen, particularly by folks in finance and sometimes CEOs, as fluff and not really very serious, which is something, working on branding, you contend with a lot, but I stumbled upon this notion of purpose, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years ago when I first started working with my current business partner, Scott Goodson, who’s the founder of StrawberryFrog where I work now.

Scott and I have now worked together for many years. We started kicking around the notion of higher purpose and the fact that is has many of the aspects that we think about when we go to do brand strategy but it’s actually a deeper and more profound idea that isn’t just about brand or marketing. It’s actually a business strategy. I think what Scott and I found when we started talking about purpose that we started to get interest not just to marketers but folks in other areas of the C suite who could start to see that purpose guided things, not just your external marketing, which it can help do, but it can help align your internal stakeholders. It can help get all of your folks that you’re interested in marching to the same beat. It has to do with the trajectory and the future of the business, not just the brand or your marketing. For those reasons, once we started working in the area of purpose, we just started to notice that folks were really taking to it and that helped us develop our business and it was also something that we just thought was important.

Taylor Martin
[03:22] You see this as a growing trend that’s been expanding.

Chip Walker
[03:25] Oh, yeah. I’d say particularly in the last five years, we’ve seen it take off where company after company that we interact with and comes to us is saying to us we’ve been interested in a purpose or we’ve done a lot of work with purpose. We’ve had a consultant in, sometimes more than one consultant in, to help them formulate their purpose. What we’ve heard over and over again, I’d say in the last three or four years, is we’re not sure what to do with it. There’s great interest in purpose. I think it’s a huge trend, but we’re now in a little bit more mature phase, I think, of the purpose era where folks are trying to activate it and to do so in a way that’s authentic and not purpose washing.

Taylor Martin
[04:10] Yeah, purpose washing, I’ve never heard that term before. I always think about mission-driven was the first phrase back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s and now it’s evolved into purpose-driven. Do you agree with that?

Chip Walker
[04:23] Yeah, it’s easy to get into language games between what is vision, what is purpose, what is mission. I find purpose is the easiest idea to work with, but sometimes depending on how people use the term, mission and purpose can be somewhat interchangeable. The thing I like about purpose is that it’s one simple idea that’s really about why you exist beyond just making money. It’s an easy idea to understand and one that I find most people agree with the definition of. When people ask me, of all this talk [inaudible] terms, what do you focus on, I’d say first and foremost I’d start with purpose.

Taylor Martin
[05:03] It reminds me of the Simon Sinek video where he talks about Apple and he talks about the why, why is at the heart of everything. I want to shift gears and dive right into a sensitive spot that I know a lot of listeners are interested in because I hear this over and over again and I always have to give them a different answer because every client is different, but how do you measure the value of purpose-driven activations, purpose-driven branding for a company? How do you show them that it’s good for their bottom line?

Chip Walker
[05:37] First of all, I think it’s got to be bigger than branding if it’s going to be effective. We usually start internally. In an ideal world, if we’re doing purpose definition work and then activation work with a company, the first place we want to start activating is inside the company. We would be looking to measure things like employees’ engagement with the purpose, do they understand it? Once they understand it, do they understand how it impacts how they do their job, how they interact with customers? Does it make them want to get up and want to go to work every day? Does it make them feel that they would like to stay with this company instead of changing jobs? Those are things that – they’re not the simplest to move those metrics but they’re relatively easy to measure.

Now, externally, we know that when the public believes, and especially if both the public and employees believe that a company is purpose-driven, they understand the company’s purpose, they believe it’s purpose-driven, we know that they’re more likely to want to buy from the company, invest in the company, say good things about the company. There have actually been some pretty impressive studies done that show that when folks view a company is purpose-driven that it has greater financial returns. That’s not just me saying that. That’s been major academic stuff that’s been published. When it comes to measuring purpose for external audiences, the big thing to know is, okay, do your customers, do the public see your firm as purpose-driven, because we know if they do that good things will happen.

That’s one of the reasons that at StrawberryFrog about three years ago, well, 2019 I guess going on four years ago now, we instituted the first large scale empirical study among the public of how purpose-driven they see a big range of brands are. We studied about 200 companies mainly in the US. We did one wave that was global but we’ve done three waves of the research now in the US with over 200 companies. We worked with a firm called The Reputation Institute, which is a well-known company that measures brand equity, to develop a scale for how we gauge how purposeful the public sees companies being. We ended up validating four different questions that we use and we put them on an index. We published that research. If you’re ever interested, it’s called The Purpose Power Index. You can google it and see some of the results. Basically, that’s one of the tools that we use, for example, to measure externally how purposeful are companies.

Taylor Martin
[08:05] I can imagine when you first engaged somebody, do you do that right off the bat just so you can get a baseline?

Chip Walker
[08:11] It depends. Internally, yes, we absolutely do just because part of what we did with The Purpose Power research, we did the research among the public looking at what are the top purpose-driven brands and published a list. This last wave also asked employed respondents to rate their own company. What we found was that there’s a pretty significant gap across the country and across employers of all size, small companies, large, big, between how senior management engages with purpose and how rank-and-file employees engage with purpose. Purpose is very appealing to senior management. It’s very easy for them to see how it motivates them and why it’s a good idea and why it’s important. A lot of rank-and-file employees don’t even know what the purpose is much less feel motivated by it. There’s a huge gulf usually between the top and the bottom. When we’re engaging on internal work, one of the first things we want to do is to sort of see is there that big gap there, which typically there is. Externally, purpose is still so new that most brands are not necessarily seen as purpose-driven. When we studied companies externally, there are actually only a handful of brands that are seen as highly purpose-driven. These are companies like Seventh Generation, companies that you’ve heard of. Often the very first thing we do isn’t to go out and just measure that when we start working with the public in a brand, because for most brands, you can assume awareness of their purpose among the public is fairly low. We will put in metrics as we start to do a campaign, though, to do before and then we’ll do the campaign and then we can do after metrics.

Taylor Martin
[09:54] In terms of what you said about the public’s view of which companies are value-based or purpose-based, do you see that as a growing trend now more than ever, like in terms of how many customers are now starting to look through that lens at all the different companies in which they purchase their products or services through?

Chip Walker
[10:13] People are certainly asking questions. When asked, they will say, yes, I would prefer to buy from a company that is purpose-driven. Having said that, as I said, I feel like the field is still kind of nascent. There just aren’t a lot of companies yet who are being recognized as being purpose-driven, but you have a lot of new to the world companies, like Allbirds that are considered highly purpose-driven. You have Tesla that’s come into the car category and really revolutionized things. They are seen by the public as purpose-driven as really trying to push forward sustainability and they’ve shaken up the category. I think consumers are looking for it. They definitely are. I think companies in many categories are catching up.

Taylor Martin
[11:00] Yeah, I agree with you. I’m actually wearing Allbirds shoes right now so they just got a double plug on today’s show. I can only imagine that some listeners out there might be hesitant to purpose-driven activation and branding and strategies. Can you walk us through some of the motions? It could be broad strokes but how you interact and how you start to acquire your information and get to a point where you start to make activations?

Chip Walker
[11:29] Okay, let’s say a client comes to us. I mean, typically, we tend to work with larger companies most often, not always put often. They come to us to talk about purpose and how they activate it. I mean, one of the first questions we’ll have is do you have a higher purpose because sometimes it’s actually a vision that they have or an objective or – and here’s another thing is sometimes they have two or three purposes that have been developed over 24 months with three different consultants and they’re not sure which one – one’s on their website, one’s on the CEO’s wall, etc., so [inaudible] have we settled on what your higher purpose is? Then another question is does the purpose itself live at, what I call, the right altitude. By that I mean there are some purposes that are very lofty that are really about making society a better place. There are some that operate more at a customer level that are really about making life better. Sometimes they’re even about reforming a category, like JetBlue used to be about restoring humanity to air travel, but sometimes though you’ll see a purpose that really feels like it’s too low in altitude, like delivering money for stakeholders on a regular basis. I mean, is that important? Absolutely, is it your higher purpose? Probably not.

After we figure out, do you have a higher purpose, is it at the right altitude, and usually we can work through that, here’s another biggie is does your – and this is probably the biggest issue with purpose more than even altitude. Does the purpose connect clearly to your business and how you make money? A company like UPS, their purpose is moving the world forward by delivering what matters. That is a good example of a purpose that connects very clearly to their business. If you said that to one of their drivers, they would know what you were talking about. Sometimes you get a purpose that’s just really about making people feel inspired and happy. In some cases, that might be a hard purpose to connect to your actual business. We just find when your purpose doesn’t connect clearly to your business, later down the line, you’re going to end up with problems. Employees won’t know what to do with it. People won’t understand how it connects to your bottom line. I think it can keep you – it can make you open to folks feeling like you’re being disingenuous when they can’t see how it connects to how you make money.

Then I guess that’s like – let’s talk about what your purpose is. Once we do that, let’s say we’re happy with that, then we have to move into activation. If you have a purpose, and let’s say a company has been working with a particular purpose and senior management has gone on a retreat and is all into it, yet two or three years later they feel like employees have forgotten about it and it’s not having any impact on their external audiences. Then you have to ask yourself, are you activating your purpose in an adequate way? I think a big discovery that we made at StrawberryFrog is that there’s a big barrier to purpose being activated and that is that often purpose tends to be lofty. We’re working with a bank right now that has a purpose that is great and it’s called inspiring and building better lives and communities, which sounds great. It’s a bank called Truist, a wonderful bank, but sometimes even though a purpose sounds good and you like it, you don’t necessarily know exactly what to do with it if you’re an employee or exactly what you’re going to get from it if you’re a customer. We’ve developed this thing that we call movement thinking. It really keys off the principles of societal movements to help make purpose more actionable. I think what we always say it that purpose is hard to activate because you can’t join a purpose but you can join a movement inspired by a purpose. A purpose is a likeminded group of folks banding together to bring about a shared purpose and change. Movement thinking just helps make purpose more actionable. A lot of times, if a firm is having trouble activating their purpose, we try to put the purpose through the lens of, as I said, what we call movement thinking. It usually makes it a lot more easy for folks to know what to do with it. That’s both inside the company and outside the company.

Taylor Martin
[15:54] Wow, can you give us some examples of maybe how you were close to that part and then you shifted a little bit and then made it able to be motion?

Chip Walker
[16:02] Yeah, let me give you an example of the predecessor to Truist. Truist is a really large bank in the mid-Atlantic southern states and in some ways nationally, but before that, it’s a merger of two banks, one called BB&T and one called SunTrust. We worked with SunTrust bank before that. You may have heard of SunTrust bank. SunTrust came to us I think around 2015. They had this purpose called lighting the way to financial wellbeing, which was a great purpose, but again, while you might feel good about it, what do I really do with it? We looked around at culture and tried to put that purpose through the lens of movement thinking. What we realized was in 2015, 2016, a lot of people had not really emerged from the great recession, that’s both Truist employees and the average American. We’re still having trouble putting together $400 in the case of an emergency. There was a lot of financial stress and anxiety despite the fact that we were supposedly doing better. We thought if you’re going to light the way to financial wellbeing, maybe that’s a problem you could take on.

We started this movement that we ended up calling it onUp, which stands for onwards and upwards, but the idea was that SunTrust was going to take people out of financial stress and take them to financial confidence. That was really the lens we put on their purpose, and all of a sudden, if you were a bank employee, you’re like, okay, what am I supposed to do when I get up and go to work every day? I’m going to help people feel less financially stressed and more financially confident. What can I do? Can I give them information? Can I solve a problem? If you were an American that was feeling under high financial anxiety, which who of us wasn’t in 2015, you started to think, wow, if I did business with them, I wonder if there’s something they can do to make me feel better. That’s just an example of how we applied movement thinking. Movement thinking usually has to do with identifying a shared enemy out in the world, which in this case was financial stress, and a stand that we’re going to take as a company to overcome that enemy. This was a stand for financial confidence. That’s something that both Truist employees and customers found that they can get behind. That’s just one example of how we applied movement thinking to make a purpose really actionable out in the real world.

Taylor Martin
[18:27] I almost feel like you’re giving them a micro purpose dose by doing this. It’s like a purpose thinking because it’s something that’s easy to understand but it’s easier to action on. You can reflect on it, make it a part of yourself, and whatever task you do in the business, it relates.

Chip Walker
[18:47] Right, exactly. I’ve got other examples, too, or we could move on and talk about something else.

Taylor Martin
[18:54] Please, let’s – come on. I want to hear them because I love that one.

Chip Walker
[18:57] Okay, well, let’s talk about – and I forget, Taylor. Remind me. Where are you located?

Taylor Martin
[19:01] I’m in Austin, Texas.

Chip Walker
[19:02] Austin, Texas, okay. You won’t know this brand but it’s a very large one. I’m in New York City. It’s actually the largest employer in New York state. It’s a big health system called Northwell Health. It’s a very, very large hospital group. We started working with them, I think, four or five years ago. They had this purpose that was, I may not get every word right, but it was to improve the health and quality of life of those we serve by providing world class service and compassionate care. It’s a little bit of a mouthful but you get the idea. It's basically improving life by giving great care, which is great, and with a large health system, they need a broad purpose like that. I think when we tried to put it through the lens of movement and we went out and talked to folks in the New York area and we talked to their own healthcare providers inside the company, I think what we understood was that there was kind of an indignation among everyone that healthcare didn’t really seem to be equally distributed in the world, that it wasn’t available to everyone, or at least quality care that you could afford. Why is that and isn’t there something we should be able to do about that? As the leading provider in New York state, shouldn’t Northwell be a company that does that?

The idea that we came up with to sort of put movement thinking on that lofty purpose they have is called Raise Health, and yes, it does sound like raise hell, but it was sort of speaking to the indignation that everyone had. We got to do better. It’s really about can we get this quality affordable healthcare for all and can Northwell be behind that? Of course, that’s something that all the employees could get behind. That’s something that anybody in the New York City area would get behind. We really used it to champion things like we have a big campaign that we did that was about women’s health and the fact that most women’s health was really designed for men if you go into a women’s health clinic. We’re about to launch a campaign that’s really taking on gun violence, not as a political issue but as a health issue in the greater New York City area, which it is. That’s just been a way that, to the point you made earlier, about taking a big purpose and shining a spotlight on it and getting it to a more micro level that you can actually go out and execute upon.

Taylor Martin
[21:34] I just made the decision as you were talking. I am going to start adding purpose definitions in our brand style guides for our clients because we do mission, vision, values, but that purpose one, you have won me over. I think everybody needs to have this.

Chip Walker
[21:51] Yeah, I think it can be clarifying, I really do, as opposed to it yet being one more thing on one of those pages. I feel like it can be an umbrella idea that can help make the rest of those make sense.

Taylor Martin
[22:04] I agree. It ties it all together in a nice bow as far as from my branding mind perspective. Thank you for the stories. Do you have any other stories that where the situation might have surprised you, like the outcome was not what you thought going in?

Chip Walker
[22:18] Maybe an example, and this is an example where we’re doing a program inside of a company and it’s for Walmart. Walmart’s purpose is all around helping people save money so they can live better, which I’m sure you’ve heard before, but they wanted us to activate it inside their company, and they have upwards of two million employees so it’s a lot of people, particularly in the area of health and wellbeing. This is probably a newer experience for me at the time working with a very large internal population of folks, and to your point about what was surprising about it is that, when we went and talked to employees, I think what we found was that things as basic as benefits, and Walmart actually has excellent benefits, even down to – every rank-and-file employee has access to really comparatively good healthcare, very good. What we found is that regular employees tend to tune out communication and announcements to the company about that stuff. There was fantastic stuff that was available to folks that they didn’t know about and did not use at all. Some of this is life saving stuff, like access to be able to go and get an important surgery with financial health, for example, telemedicine that keeps you from missing work because you have to take off work to take your kid to an appointment. It was really surprising. We started this Better Living movement inside the company that was really just about shedding light on everything that was available to these folks. I was just very surprised that I didn’t realize most people don’t read their internal comms. Since then, we’ve worked with many other companies and what we’ve found is that it’s pretty universal. Nobody reads their benefits information, including myself.

Taylor Martin
[24:16] You’re in that group as well. What about – I can only imagine because I know you guys work with a lot of different companies, large, medium size organizations, but what about things that something that happened, like positive aspects that you weren’t expecting?

Chip Walker
[24:31] One thing that I noticed is that – I told you about the Northwell Health movement which is called Raise Health. This was mainly – they hired us to do this to do external programs for them, not internal. It’s not with their employees. This was a lot of things like TV advertising, events, outdoor, digital, all that kind of stuff, which we did, but especially during the pandemic, they had an employee event that was in my neighborhood that they organized it, Northwell Health organized. I went to see it and there were a bunch of Northwell employees there holding signs that said, “We’re health raisers.” I mean, we had not planned that. We didn’t ask them to do that. It’s just employees had really identified with the idea and taken it personally, which to me, that’s what you’re looking for when you don’t have to ask people to do it. They do it on their own.

Taylor Martin
[25:33] Yeah, it’s working. It’s in there and it’s making things happen. It’s making the clocks tick. You never know where a great idea is going to come from.

Chip Walker
[25:40] Yeah, exactly.

Taylor Martin
[25:42] What can our listeners do as first steps for purpose branding to start focusing on their purpose, things they can be discussing at their next board meeting or executive meeting?

Chip Walker
[25:53] I think the first thing is that you really can’t just think about it as purpose branding. I think it’s got to be something that you think about having to do with your company strategy. It’s really got to emanate from the top. If people at the top of the company aren’t really into it, we’ve had this situation where their middle level folks or even junior folks who say we should be more purpose-driven and you come to find out people at the top of the company aren’t really interested. That’s a recipe for failure. First of all, I think you’ve just got to ask yourself seriously, is the leadership of our company, do we take this seriously? I think that’s a biggie. Then at that point, it’s what we’ve talked about already. I don’t know if I have much to add to that. It’s just, obviously, first defining your purpose, seeing if it’s the right altitude, making sure it’s connected to your business, and then once you do that, those two often aren’t the hard part. Often management is committed and you’ve figured out what you think your purpose is. The big million-dollar question becomes how do we activate it inside our company and outside of our company. As I said, we found over and over again that, if you take on that movement lens, it starts to make everything fall in place and for people to feel like they know more what to do with it.

Taylor Martin
[27:14] It makes all the difference.

Chip Walker
[27:15] Yeah, it really does.

Taylor Martin
[27:17] I know that you and your partner wrote a book, Activating Brand Purpose. It seems like that is what we’ve been talking about this whole time.

Chip Walker
[27:26] Yeah, it is both in print, paperback or hardback, available in Amazon and other platforms. It’s also available on Audible if you would like to listen to the book. Just to maybe just briefly about how the book came to be, it really came about for practical reasons in that, and I think I might have started mentioning this a little bit before, that we found in 2018, 2019, going into 2020, that a lot of senior management and companies were coming to us saying we have a purpose or we have more than one purpose and we don’t know what to do with it. How do we activate it? Right now, it’s just in the about section of our website or it’s on coffee mugs, it’s on T-shirts, but that was announced six months ago and now it’s just sitting there. What do we do? We were hearing this over and over again. We felt like we had found this secret sauce with movement thinking that really made all the sense in the world and that we found was making a huge difference for the companies that we were working with. Again, these are companies like Walmart, like Northwell Health that I described to you, major companies that we thought we had some case studies to talk about. We thought, okay, maybe it will be helpful for people if we actually codified this and wrote it down in a book.

That’s basically what the book is about. It has some philosophical thoughts in there about what’s the right way to approach purpose and how do you land on purpose, but more than that, it’s probably a bit more of a practical how to of how do you actually get it activated out there in the world. There are a bunch of case studies. They’re not the usual suspects. In purpose, the usual suspects case studies are things like Dove, which we’ve heard of before. I mentioned Seventh Generation. Those are great case studies, but I think many people have heard about those. We have some more unusual suspects, like a large company called Mahindra, which is a large conglomerate with a couple million employees that we worked with in India, which is a great case study, Emirates Airlines that we worked with, which is I think a great case study. I mentioned Walmart. We did the US launch of the original Smart car. As I said, there may be some case studies you haven’t seen before and that might shed some light in a new way.

Taylor Martin
[29:47] When you talked earlier about we have this purpose, it’s been sitting on the shelf for the last six, eight months and nothing is doing – it’s on coffee mugs and everything, we’re not doing it, it’s not activating, what do you see are some of the biggest hurdles with just getting it across that finish line? It’s like the purpose is all the way to do finish line. It’s just right there. It just can’t cross the line to get to activation.

Chip Walker
[30:07] I think framing is the biggest – the first biggest hurdle, because even though a purpose might be inspiring, sometimes the way it’s framed leaves you thinking that sounds great, but I don’t know what to do. Movement thinking, as I said, tries to reframe it in much more actionable terms. I think we’ve seen over and over again, when reframe a purpose in movement thinking and you start to talk about it to employees, all of a sudden, a lightbulb goes off in their head and they say, “Oh, I see what I do now.” Yes, it's all about lighting the way to financial wellbeing, but what I need to go out and do is help people overcome financial anxiety and be more financially confident, right? I think that framing thing is big.

Then I’d say I think there’s some different hurdles beyond that depending on if you’re talking about internal or external. Internal hurdles include change fatigue. At any one time within the company, especially a large company, there are so many strategies and change initiatives being pursued. You have to recall, even though a purpose may seem like so foundational, it is one of 25 things that employees are dealing with. People have change fatigue, they can get cynical, they can think here we go again, especially if you’ve tried to launch purpose before and it didn’t stick. That change fatigue is a biggie that you have to overcome internally. I’d say externally, I was talking about purpose washing before, but there’s also some cynicism out there with the general public. We had some companies take missteps with purpose that ended up making people feel like some companies doing this are disingenuous. They’re doing it to look good or to maybe take your mind off bad things that they are doing as opposed to they are serious and genuine about it. We could have an entire episode with you and I talking about what are the things you do to make sure that you don’t come across as a purpose washer. That’s another big hurdle to come across when you’re launching particularly externally.

Taylor Martin
[32:17] Yeah, you’re bruising trust.

Chip Walker
[32:19] Yeah, exactly.

Taylor Martin
[32:20] Yeah, so from your vantage point, what do you see looking into the future in terms of purpose-driven branding and strategies and activation?

Chip Walker
[32:31] As I said, I think the topic is becoming more mature and I think senior leaders are starting to recognize that it’s not so simple that, as I said, particularly how do you activate it is harder than a lot of people thought. As the purpose conversation matures, I think it’s going to be turned a lot more to how do we activate it in the right way and make sure that it is – that our purpose efforts are performing the way that we want them to perform. Are they really connecting with employees? Are they driving people to feel more engaged at work? Are they making consumers feel like we’re a better choice versus that we’re being fake? I think that’s going to be a focus but I’d also say I think that there are some risks going forward that senior management focus on purpose not become politicized and viewed as just part of woke culture rather than being actually a business strategy, which is what I believe that it is. It is a business strategy to align a large diverse group of stakeholders around something everyone can get behind versus, as I said, just some woke tactic of du jour. I’m hoping that purpose can stay out of that political characterization because I think at its best, that’s not what it is.

Taylor Martin
[33:54] I completely agree. We covered a lot of ground today. Is there anything that maybe you want to say that I didn’t cover or I didn’t ask?

Chip Walker
[34:02] The only thing I would just want to reiterate is that I think thinking of purpose as a marketing or branding strategy is probably not going to serve you well long term. As I’ve been saying, it’s a business strategy. It’s a serious undertaking that’s got to be bought in internally first and emanate from the top, but if you think of it that way, not only can it grow your brand, it can get all your stakeholders in the same page. It can engage your employees. It can help transform company culture. Increasingly, what we’re seeing is, if you’re broadly recognized to be a highly purposeful company, it has big financial payoffs for your company. I just think that there’s a broader and bigger way we need to think about purpose as opposed to a marketing conversation.

Taylor Martin
[34:46] That’s lovely. I agree. How can our listeners reach out to you or follow your company online?

Chip Walker
[34:52] Yeah, if you want to reach out to me, it’s very easy. I’m happy to entertain questions or what have you. You can just email me. It’s simple, chip@strawberryfrog.com, StrawberryFrog is one word. Strawberry like the fruit, frog like the animal, so chip@strawberryfrog.com. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Just type in Chip Walker and I should appear at the top of the list. Would love it, if you guys are interested, as I said, in our book, Activate Brand Purpose, you can visit activatebrandpurpose.com, or if you want to know anymore about the cases that I’ve talked about today you can visit strawberryfrog.com where we have in depth cases and more about some of the topics that we’ve been talking about.

Taylor Martin
[35:33] Excellent, Chip, thank you so much for being on today’s show. Everyone Activating Brand Purpose is the book. I am going to run out and I’m going to get the audio version because I can consume it a lot quicker. Chip, thank you so much for being on today’s show.

Chip Walker
[35:46] Taylor, thanks so much for having me. It’s been a great conversation.

Taylor Martin
[35:50] Excellent, I completely agree and I love this topic. Over and out, everybody. 

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[35:54] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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