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Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
Today, we're going to have a delicious conversation with a purpose-driven firm called StrawberryFrog. And I say it's delicious because when we started doing this work over 35 years ago, it was pretty lonely out there. But in the aughts and the twenty-teens, there have been some amazing organizations that have really embraced purpose from the inside out. And StrawberryFrog is one of those. Today, we're going to have a delightful conversation with Chip Walker who's a partner in the firm. He's also head of strategy.
Here's one of Chip's comments. Purpose lives in a senior management ghetto, and it has to be let out. It has to really inspire from the bottom up, from the factory floor." They have research that they have conducted. It's called the Purpose Power Index, and they did it before COVID, during COVID, and post-COVID. The first two were really studying with over 15,000 respondents, consumers, what brands are really embracing purpose well. We're going to talk about those indices, but also we're going to talk about their most recent research, which is about employees. And those of you who follow me and Carol Cone On Purpose, you know that we feel that employees are the engine that drives a company forward. So with no further ado, this is a fabulous conversation. Welcome to the show, Chip.
Chip Walker:
Thanks so much, Carol. It's a pleasure to be here.
Carol Cone:
And I love having you here. For years, I have been a huge fan of StrawberryFrog because you have done extraordinary creative and strategic work, and you do advertising but you also, we're going to talk about purpose today. This is 110% about purpose. So I'd love to start with a little bit about your background. You've been at the firm for a long time. And then I also want you to, I know our guests are going to say, "StrawberryFrog, that's a really standout name. I've never seen a StrawberryFrog." But why that name?
Chip Walker:
Yeah. Sure, sure. Well, as you mentioned, I'm the head of strategy at StrawberryFrog. We're a movement marketing firm, which means yes, we do advertising, but we do a lot of other things having to do with getting a company to a higher purpose and putting that out in the world and activating it. My background is in brand strategy, consumer strategy, creative strategy, all that kind of stuff on Madison Avenue. I've been with a lot of the major firms and had a similar role at BBO, with Young & Rubicam and whatnot. But Scott Goodson, the founder of StrawberryFrog, and I have been working together for several years. We're good pals and collaborators. We've worked together building the company. The name is unusual. You're right, strawberryFrog is 25 years old this year. And part of our history has always been this mythology around what we call dinosaur versus frog.
Carol Cone:
Okay, do tell.
Chip Walker:
StrawberryFrog was created to be an antidote to the giant dinosaurs that are the usual suspects that move slow. And there was a little animal from the Amazon that we ran across, or actually Scott, who the company's founder did, that is it's an actual real frog called the strawberry frog. And it's small. It's nimble. It's very powerful. It's actually, believe it or not, is poisonous, which you don't think about.
Carol Cone:
Oh, you're not poisonous. Your work isn't poisonous.
Chip Walker:
We're not poisonous, but we're small, nimble, powerful. As I said, an antidote to the dinosaurs that you want to avoid.
Carol Cone:
I love that. Let's talk about movement marketing. I love the fact that you're saying, "Well, we don't just create purpose as a catchphrase," that there's a lot more to it in terms of your approach. So please explain what movement marketing is. What was the eureka that you and Scott came up with to say, "This is how we approach brands and companies"?
Chip Walker:
So what do we know about successful societal movements? They gather together a tribe of people and rally them around a shared purpose because people want to create change. So I think the whole idea behind a movement is getting people to do something, to make change because they want to. They're already motivated. It's something that they need to do.
So this notion of movement marketing was born, and it's been part of our DNA. We started with Smart Car but we use that same kind of thinking for clients like IKEA, moving all the way up through Pampers. We were their global digital agency for years. And we've just continued to refine this thing that we call movement thinking year after year after year, and it continues to be a powerful idea.
And I think what happened around I'd say 2017, '18, that I noticed was that a lot of companies that were coming to us were wanting to talk about purpose. And while we had thought about purpose in past years, movement was our major focus. I think what we began to realize is that as the companies came to talk to us, is that their issues around purpose weren't necessarily defining purpose. A lot of them had been through a purpose exercise already, maybe more than once. They had consultants in, develop purpose number one. They didn't know what to do with that so they developed another one, and so on and so forth. The issue wasn't defining purpose. It's what do we do with it? And we started to realize that movement was a brilliant way of thinking about how you activate purpose, because what is movement? It is a group of people rallying around a shared purpose to create change. So thus, we began to really think more, a lot more about purpose as the main driver of movement marketing.
Carol Cone:
And I'm curious, how did that make you and your colleagues at StrawberryFrog feel, and especially about the relationship they had with their work? Because this was a significant shift for you.
Chip Walker:
Yeah, it was a language shift and it almost felt like the rest of the world was catching up with some of the things that we had been thinking about for a long time.
Carol Cone:
So what's your favorite movement marketing project program client that you've done?
Chip Walker:
It's usually the one that I'm working on now.
Carol Cone:
Oh, okay. Good answer.
Chip Walker:
But honestly, no. I'll tell you what my favorite is. It's just because it's a long-term client that I have a lot of love for, and I think it was around an important idea and it's continued to evolve. And so this was a movement we created for a bank, believe it or not, called SunTrust. And basically, what it was is SunTrust came to us in, I think it was around 2015, and their business wasn't great, either externally or internally. They were having employee motivation problems. A lot of them, they were having, their market share was just even to down, and they basically just needed to reinvigorate their brand internally and externally.
They had developed a purpose called lighting the way to financial wellbeing, which was good. Everybody kind of got it. But again, nobody really knew exactly what to do with it. If I'm a teller-
Carol Cone:
Exactly.
Chip Walker:
... what does that mean? If I'm a customer, what does that mean? It sounds great. So what we did was really tried to put that purpose through the lens of movement thinking. Movement thinking, usually is culture. So what are issues that people are dealing with that lighting the way financial wellbeing can help solve? And it was obvious. After the Great Recession, so many people, even in 2015, had not really recovered or didn't feel like they'd recovered. There's famous statistics about how many people couldn't put together $400 in an emergency, et cetera. There was just a lot of anxiety out there around finances and money at epidemic proportions. So we decided to spark a movement. We ended up calling the movement onUp. It stands for onward and upward, but it's really a movement against the financial stress that is so epidemic and for financial confidence for all Americans.
So all of a sudden with the onUp movement, if I'm a teller getting up to go to work every day, I know that what I'm going to be doing is trying to find a way to help people be more financially confident. That starts to lead the bank to know what kind of tools it should develop, what kind of products it should develop, how should it behave, how should it treat people.
And so as I said, one of the reasons it's a favorite movement of mine is that it was needed. It made a huge difference for the bank internally in terms of engagement, retention, all of those metrics which we have. We're having over 5 million people join the movement. And in fact, the financial education program, it was called Momentum onUp, was so successful that was part of the movement that Truist started with its own employees, giving them financial education so that they could make people feel more confident.
Carol Cone:
That's wonderful. So you, I'd love you to share with our listeners, you created, you've had this incredible purpose and you activated it. Then there was a merger and a new brand. How did you get Amanda Gorman? There's a video that you utilize her in. Was that external, just internal? I just adore her. She's amazing.
Chip Walker:
Yeah, it was both. So what happened was that the Truist merger was announced, I think, in either late 2018 or early 2019, and it was going to go public towards the end of 2019. We had a campaign developed. And then the pandemic hit and it just didn't seem to be the right tone for the pandemic. We were going to take over the world or something with our new campaign, and it was not the right time. And so we really had to just stop and rethink how as a new large financial institution, we wanted to interact with the world.
And as part of this, we ended up doing a film. And I'll say my partner Scott had seen Amanda Gorman and heard about her, and this was before people really knew who she was. She had been, I think, the Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, but again, most people hadn't even heard of that. Nobody had heard of her, but Scott had seen her and just thought she would be a brilliant voice to deliver a message of hope, I guess we'd call it, and inspiration for this effort that we were doing along with United Way. So it was an external film that obviously got a lot of play internally with Amanda reading a poem that she had written, and I guess the rest is history. It got a lot, lot, lot of attention and really helped put Truist on the map early.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, wonderful. Before we turn to your research, which I love research, we're going to talk about the Purpose Power Index, I'd love for you to share insights into activation, internal activation. Because as we both know, that's where the purpose is either going to inspire and ignite or it's just going to fall flat.
Chip Walker:
Yeah. Well, we've done a fair amount of research on this topic, and we have a lot of clients over the years, including Walmart in the US, which we were one of their primary internal agencies doing a lot of communication to all of their 1 to 2 million employees. So we know a lot about what some of the pitfalls are around purpose activation internally. I think the big, big, big issue is that there's a huge gap in all the companies that we've looked at. And just at a macro level, if you just do a study of American companies and employees, what you'll find is that purpose lives in a senior management ghetto. And basically that if you interview senior management about purpose, they love it. They're inspired by it. It makes them want to get up and go to work every day. It makes them not want to leave the company. They love it, love it, love it. Talk about it, tell people about it.
As you go down from middle management to frontline workers to junior workers, every layer you go down, it gets vaguer and vaguer. It's like the telephone game. All the way when you get down to the brand new junior employee, they don't know anything about it, or if they've heard of it, they don't know what it means. And to them it's just like, "Blah, blah, blah." So that is a huge issue in many companies, is that senior management does not really realize that what's inspiring and motivating to them may not be to people below them.
Carol Cone:
Okay, so the senior management, how do you get them to get out of their, no offense, egos or excitement to recognize this must cascade down? That's the first question. So how do you get them to recognize it? And then what are some of the tactics that you've used to get that guy or gal on the manufacturing floor or in the warehouse or at their computer to really get and live the purpose?
Chip Walker:
I think part of the reason is that companies are starting to realize that you got to use some of the same marketing thinking that you do for external audiences. You got to apply that same thinking internally. And it's actually, it's not that complicated. You need to treat your employees like a valued audience the way you do your consumers. You have to think about the channels they use. Where do they like to be communicated with? What do they read? How do they interact? In some companies, it's very much person to person, and you need to cascade things down through the layers of the organization. There are other cultures in which people actually do look at videos and read information that you send them. Many companies, they do not.
Huge issue that we have, a lot of our internal activation is with companies like Walmart where it's very hard for them to communicate very often with folks who are out on the retail floor all the time. They're not in front of email. They can't be looking at their phone. So we have to find creative ways of targeting folks. One of the things we did for Walmart, just as an example, we actually ended up targeting some of their employees by geofencing stores and being able to send messages to employees' phones who we can identify by knowing if they go in and out of the store every day. So sometimes you have to get creative in terms of the channels you use to interact with and get in front of folks and engage with them, but we basically treat them like a valued audience the way we for external audiences.
Carol Cone:
That is brilliant. It's really, really fabulous. And I suggest to our listeners, we're going to put your website and some of the cases in our show notes because you've got some beautiful, beautiful cases. I love them. Now, I'm going to turn to my other favorite subject or sub-subject of purpose, your research. So you have created the Purpose Power Index. Are you in your... Is 2023 the most... That's the most recent one, right?
Chip Walker:
Yeah. So we've done it every other year. We did the first Purpose Power Index in 2019, that we did a second follow-up in 2021, and then a third wave in 2023. '19 and '21 were both consumer-focused. And the one in 2023, the most recent one, was focused on employees.
Carol Cone:
Great, okay. Let's just talk about what was the moment you had a eureka moment? "We have got to do this research."
Chip Walker:
Sure, sure. The first wave, as I said, was in 2019, and it's just right before and as the pandemic was happening. And I'd mentioned that we had a lot of companies that were coming to us asking us about purpose. And one of the things that we noticed was that there wasn't great empirical data on which brands are considered purposeful. There was a lot of hearsay and people making assumptions and guessing, but we didn't see any empirical data that told us, what connotes a brand that people consider to be highly purposeful? And then how do you get to be one of those brands? And which brands are more purposeful and which are considered less and why?
So we decided we would do our own studies since we couldn't find one out there. We partnered with what was then called the Reputation Institute, it's now called RepTrak, but a very well known company that is a research firm, sophisticated research firm, that just studies brands.
Carol Cone:
Right.
Chip Walker:
We looked at 200 brands across, I think, between 12 and 15 different industries. So a representative mix of brands. And basically with RepTrak, we developed a battery of questions that we validated to determine how purposeful a brand is. And there were four aspects that we looked at that formed an index where we ranked brands on being perceived as more purposeful by consumers all the way down to less. And then we looked at, asked a bunch of questions to get at drivers about, well, what predicts if you're going to be considered purposeful or not?
And I should tell you the things that we measure in terms of placing people onto the index or things like this is a brand that has a purpose that's bigger than making money. It is a brand that improves the lives of people in their communities. It's a brand that's committed to changing the world for the better. It does things not just to benefit of shareholders, employees, or customers, but society as a whole. So our definition of purpose in the Purpose Power Index is that it's a brand that is serving a larger role world, not just making money. And the brands that rose to the top in 2019, this is right before the pandemic, slewed a bit towards social good-oriented brands.
So this was brands like Seventh Generation, Tom's the shoe brand, REI, Patagonia. These are brands that were known almost from their founding as having some sort of social good component. So I guess probably not shocking. Whereas at the bottom of the list, you had a lot of financial institutions, Monsanto, chemical one. So to be honest with you, the results weren't shocking but it was good confirmation. And we learned that the drivers of purpose are in this order of importance, product and service, making products and services that help make the world a better place, planet and taking care of the planet was important, how you treat people and communities, including your own employees, and then being involved in positive change, in doing things that have a social impact.
That was 2019. And I think what was interesting when we did the research again in 2021, we found that purpose was quite sensitive to things going on in the pandemic and the events that people considered the most purposeful had shifted. And it was now some of the social good brands, yes, were also getting high scores, but a lot of pandemic heroes like Zoom, Pfizer, even Clorox, brands that we associated with the pandemic took on a much more purposeful halo to folks, as well as industries that had really been working to be more purposeful, like automotive with Tesla, Toyota, even GM moving way up the ranks with things like electric vehicles.
So I think what we learned is that in as period as short as two years, the landscape in purposeful brands can change a lot. So this is a dynamic thing in people's minds impacted by the news cycle and things that they're hearing about your company. It's not something where you do a tracking study and it just seems to taste the same every year.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. No, that's fascinating. And we did some pre and post too, but curious about did you ask questions about, like with employees, are you more loyal? Are you more likely to stay? Will you refer a friend? So getting as hard metrics as you could on employees. And then could you get any hard metrics? It's tough with consumers, like intent to buy versus buying. Did you make any progress there?
Chip Walker:
Yeah. So in 2022, we did the survey primarily among consumers, but we did a subsample of employees in that study. And then as I said, in 2023, we just did a study only among employees. And so let me address the employee issue first, is that, yeah, what we find is that employees who believe that their company has a higher purpose and are engaged with their company's higher purpose are much more likely to be loyal, to want to stay, to recommend their employer, et cetera. Same thing is true for consumers in that folks who rate a brand as highly purposeful are much more likely to want to buy the company, to invest in the company, to say good things about the company. And it's one of the things is that there is a lot of data out there linking purpose to important business metrics like employee engagement, like even just sales and revenue. There's some really good data out there supporting that, including ours.
Carol Cone:
And I love that your major statement was because I want to dive into this. "Employee search for meaning will define the future of work." That was at the top of your report. So let's dive into all of a sudden we've got working from home.
Chip Walker:
This study was a real breakthrough for us because we do a ton now these days of employee engagement work. But when you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and things like that in the consumer world, we know what's at the top of the food chain in terms of motivating people and at the bottom out in the consumer world. But do we really know that for employees? And that was one of the things that we wanted to learn in this study, and what role does purpose play on the hierarchy of needs of motivating an employee. And what we basically found is that it's at the top. Purpose is at the top of meaning. And let me go into what I mean by that.
What we found was that there's a definite hierarchy. If you think of a pyramid, at the bottom of the pyramid are two things. They are pay and benefits and my everyday experience. So these are functional requirements. These are things that if you screw them up, it makes people want to leave. But just because you fixed them doesn't make people want to stay. So that's pay and benefits and my everyday experience. How's my boss? How's the environment? Do I have the equipment I need? Do the systems work? That kind of stuff.
At the top of the pyramid are three things. There is a belonging, there is a sense of accomplishment, and there's purpose. In that order. Belonging, do I feel like I fit in here? Am I treated equitably? Are people like me comfortable here? Sense of accomplishment and forward momentum. Am I getting promoted? Am I growing and learning? But at the top is sense of purpose. Is this work meaningful to me personally? Do I feel like the work we do here at this company helps make the world a better place. That is at the top.
Carol Cone:
I want you to talk a little bit about the purpose. You also identified purpose gap in, I guess, it was a 2022 survey. And what did you find in the gap? Because I think it's really important because again, it can't be laminated. It has to be lived, and then there was a gap that you said between senior management and the employees. What was the data on that?
Chip Walker:
Yeah. Well, in the employee study, we found there are actually several purpose gaps.
Carol Cone:
Oh, great. Do tell, do tell.
Chip Walker:
The one that we've talked about most recently is the gulf between senior management and the rest of the company. As I said, understanding of and engagement with purpose goes lower from senior management to middle to frontline workers to junior staff. It goes down at each level. So as I said, there's a gap, a gulf, really. I think gap is not even a big word, a big enough word.
Carol Cone:
There's a gulf. That's great.
Chip Walker:
But there is another gap that's worth thinking about too, which is... if you think about the level of employee engagement that you have with a purpose when it is announced and you think about the level of employee engagement you have with a purpose, let's say, 18 months later, there's typically a huge gulf between what the expectation was going in when you launch the purpose, what you actually find 18 months later. That's another gap that's I think important to look at because I think the other thing is that companies don't necessarily measure that. And I think one of the important things to do if you're launching a purpose and doing an activation program is to make sure that you have that measurement in place inside your company with your employees.
Carol Cone:
Great. So you did a perfect segue to measurement. Let's start with employee. We've got a client here. They've got to go back to senior management, that maybe the CEO or the head of strategy. And they've got to say, "Okay, yes, we launched this beautiful purpose and we're doing a little bit of employee engagement," but I have data that shows X, Y, and Z. So let's go with internal first because you've done a lot of work with employees and internal, and then let's go external because that's a little bit harder.
Chip Walker:
To me, it is twofold internally. One is the old saw that we all use, which is surveys, but they are important and you should do them where you basically ask people. They can be misleading so you got to be careful with them. But so it's one important source of information is employee surveys. But the second one that we really like to pair with employee surveys is participation metrics. For example, for onUp, the movement I talked to you about for SunTrust which was really about making Americans more financially confident, we developed a series of actions that people could take to participate in the movement, whether that was attending an event, signing up to receive information, participating in financial education, raising your hand to know more about certain aspects of the movement.
Carol Cone:
Great. Now, how about consumers? How do you measure that the purpose is come through the brand and is impacting choice?
Chip Walker:
Yeah. Well, again, it's somewhat similar. I'd say it's conceptually similar in that we look at survey-oriented stuff about just people's perceptions of the brand, consideration, preference, all that kind of stuff. And the role to which the work that we're doing, the purpose, the movement are contributing to that. So that's important. But again, movements are usually trying to get people to do something.
Carol Cone:
Do something.
Chip Walker:
Raise their hand, engage, so looking at social media participation metrics. Oftentimes, we're actually asking folks to do something very specific.
Carol Cone:
Great. And I agree with you. I am curious if you have any sort of great insights into, okay, the purpose has been created, et cetera. Yes, we have to activate it internally. But how do you convince the C-suite about putting sufficient human resources and budget against real activation? Do you have any insights?
Chip Walker:
Yeah, so it's easier. What I've found, what we have found is that it is easier to talk the company into that funding things externally than internally, and I think it's mostly for legacy-oriented reasons. I think the issue internally has been that often those budgets weren't just sitting there. We find frequently to do a purpose activation program, even for a large well-off corporation internally, you got to go find the money. And often ends up going all the way up through the CEO because the budgets, it's just not the way things have worked. I think that's changing. Companies are starting to put together internal marketing budgets, but that's just starting to happen.
Carol Cone:
Great. Super. Now, I've asked a lot of my podcast guests this question. What is the future of purpose in an AI-driven world?
Chip Walker:
I feel like I get asked about AI all the time. And I'm sorry, I hope I don't disappoint you, but I'm not afraid of AI. I feel like AI, the ideal thing I think we can get out of AI is to be much more productive. And I don't personally see AI as changing the fundamentals of the things that we've been talking about around purpose, but I guess my hope is that it's going to make us so much more productive that we can focus more on activating purpose instead of just worrying about talking about it.
Carol Cone:
Great point. Do you think that there will be a large learning model that will be able to create the purpose and then put a plan together to activate that purpose, let's just say, internally? Is that something you are worried about?
Chip Walker:
Sure. You could ask Claude or Bard or any of the AIs like, "Oh, come up with some ideas for purpose," or, "What would be the steps you would go through?" But you've done this before. What you get is something that looks like it came out of ChatGPT. It tends to be relatively generic. It's not often telling you anything that isn't super obvious. So I guess the way I think about it is that it might get you to a bad first draft of some thinking. And so it might speed you up to getting to some good thinking, but I don't think it is a substitute for good thinking.
Carol Cone:
Okay. And I agree with you. It's the humanity side that I think that purpose truly, when it's nuanced and it's real, that hopefully AI can't figure that out, that that needs human beings. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I want to give the last word to you, Chip, because I love the conversation. I love having knowing organizations like yourself who are authentically committed to purpose. You understand this is not a strap line. You have both internal and external activation via movement marketing. So what final words do you want to leave with our guests, our listeners, to help them in their journeys?
Chip Walker:
I guess I'd say three things that I always think about that it concerns me that maybe get overlooked is that when you're thinking about purpose, that you've got to... I'm talking about brand purpose, not personal purpose. Brand purpose, that you've got to start with thinking about a company's business. And the intersection of that company's business and how they make money with a larger role in making the world a better place. I think that's the first pitfall that people run into. They just want to do something that's do-gooder but it's not intimately connected to the way that the company makes money. So that's number one.
Number two, this is, I know it sounds obvious, but I'll keep saying it, definition of purpose actually is not that hard. Activating it is really, really hard. And people spend years and money on defining and then they don't spend anything on activating.
And then the last one is more recent obsession, which is that senior leaders have got to get out of a purpose ghetto and avoid the country club syndrome of just being at a club where they talk to other senior leaders at other companies about how purposeful they are, but then nobody else in their company knows anything about it. So they've got to break out of that ghetto, as it were.
Carol Cone:
Those are three terrific points, and you can't say them enough. So I really appreciate those final parting words. It's been absolutely a joy to chat with you, Chip Walker. I really appreciate the candor of the conversation and that you joined me today for this great discussion.
Chip Walker:
Thank you so much, Carol. Really appreciate being here. We're huge fans of you and the work you've been doing for years, and you continue to inspire us so thank you for having me.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them, and Hendrick Mark and Kristen Kenny at Carol Cone On Purpose, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at True Story FM, and you, our listener. Please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
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