Episode 162: Purpose is the New Black with Stan Phelps and Roger Burnett

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Impressions just aren't enough to attract new customers today. There are much deeper aspects at play around purpose and trust. Today on the SkewCast, I sit down with Stan Phelps and Roger Burnett, co-authors of the new book, Red Goldfish Promo Edition: How Promotional Products Leverage Purpose to Increase Impact. Red Goldfish is a part of a series of books that Stan has created called Purple Goldfish that focus on a range of topics from attracting raving customers to driving employee engagement and more. Stan is a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator. His work is designed to help business owners differentiate their businesses from their competition through his proven IDEA model, helping them increase customer loyalty and sales. A master storyteller, Stan has presented keynote speeches and workshops at over 300 events, including TEDx, and for Fortune 100 brands such as IBM, Target, and ESPN. Roger is the co-founder of Promo Cares and one of the founding chefs at Promo Kitchen, host of the popular Sew Your In Sales podcast, executive producer of the Promo Cares radio podcast. He's the founder of Social Good Promotions, a social enterprise built to teach and deliver purpose-based marketing strategies to businesses of all sizes, while also donating marketing services to nonprofit organizations in the communities they serve. Today, we chat about how COVID-19 will likely impact purchasing habits what the phrase purpose is the new black means and why Stan believes we're on the cusp of the 4.0 version of business, the 8 brand archetypes and their connection to brand identity, the 5 key categories to leverage your purpose and increase your engagement, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Commenscue, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to begin your free trial now, visit commonskew.com. Now here's my conversation with Stan and Roger.

Stan, why do impressions not work, and can you tell us about your moment of truth?

Sure. So I, I think marketing for the longest time has been about interruption and trying to capture and measure those eyeballs and your earlobes. And I think over the last decade, marketing has changed dramatically. Our ability as a customer to gather information and to be able to read reviews, we're much more informed. And I was, I worked for 2 decades where I was all about grabbing attention. And I had something happen to me on a rooftop bar in Manhattan where I was sitting across this older gentleman. We We started talking about waiting. He was on his own. And this guy, we started talking about being on time. And he said something to me that truly changed my life, Bobby. He said, "On time," he said, "no one in life is ever on time." And I thought to myself, "Well, I've been on time before." And I'll never forget this. He put his finger in my face and wagged it, gave me the Dikembe finger wave and said, no, he said, in fact, he said, no one is ever on time. He said, people in life are either early or they're late. On time is a myth. And I remember traveling home from New York City that night, and I thought to myself, that same thing applies to the customers that we serve each and every day. No one just simply meets the expectation of a customer. And so given the choice of trying to lean in and do a little bit more, I started to look for companies that embrace that as a mantra. And the simple idea that if we take care of the customers we have, they will bring us the customers we want.

Yeah. Post-COVID is likely going to introduce to all of us purpose-driven purchasing more than ever before. It used to be a part of the fringe element of companies like Patagonia or Whole Foods or other companies like that. But I love the phrase purpose is the new black. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think going forward that we're on the cusp of what I consider the 4.0 version of business. You know, the first 100 or so years of modern business from 1870 to 1970, there was one thing or one person that was the focus and the center of the attention of the business. And that was the shareholder. And the purpose was to maximize their return. And I think the 2.0 happened, started in the 1970s. No, that's short-sighted. Business, the purpose is to create a customer and to keep a customer. And so in the 1970s, they said, well, if you do that correctly, right, what the byproduct is, is the profit and ultimately the return. Well, in the 1990s, I think there was a 3.0 kind of ushered in. And that was based on an understanding that you can't have happy, you know, enthused customers unless you have happy, engaged employees. And in that model, it was you had to put the culture of your organization first, and you had to make sure that you're keeping your team members engaged because ultimately, They're responsible for creating that experience. Just about a decade ago, I think we started to usher in the 4.0, which is putting purpose at the center of everything we do. And purpose to me is not about just having, you know, a statement that hangs on the wall. Purpose is about the little things that you can do to reinforce your why and bring that to life. And at the end of the day, I think it's the ultimate differentiator in business.

I love the phrase he used, big doors swing on little hinges when it comes to things like that. Can you explain what you mean by that? And then maybe an example or two of how purpose can actually be lived out?

In a business?

Yeah, so that's a great quote. Big doors swing on little hinges. It's not mine. W. Clement Stone. That's his quote. But it's the idea that the little things that you can do that reinforce both your intent. So that's what people are looking for when they're considering either working for you or doing business with you. And it's also about the competence piece of being able to consistently reinforce through the experience that you provide. And it's the little, I call them little cues that people look for that really drive the insight of how we feel when we interact with the brands that we love.

I'm going to leap past a couple of topics that are in the book and jump right to something that I think might be really relevant to the community. And We're through this whole COVID experience. There are many folks who are reevaluating their brand, reevaluating their position, reevaluating their lives in the marketplace. And I think that we will emerge from this dramatically changed, which is why your book is so timely. And to leap past those topics, Stan, you discovered as people are trying to reinvent themselves or identify themselves or Gravitate Toward a Larger Purpose, you discovered that brands fall into 8 archetypes. Now, I'm a huge Joseph Campbell fan, so I was kind of nerding out on your archetypes. And I loved the exploration of archetypes because they held such significance to individual identity. And you explored this as a means of brand identity and types. Can you speak to those 8 types?

Yeah, sure. And it was the 8 types were really culminated from looking at over 300 brands. And not only looking at their purpose, but looking for, again, the little ways that they consciously brought it to life as part of their brand. And it turned out that there was, we found that there was pretty much 8 consistent archetypes. I'll give you really quickly a definition of all of them. The first one is what we call the protector. And those brands have something that's just inherently important to them. That they want to protect. You could think of Burt's Bees as one of those. One of the ones we love is Patagonia. You had mentioned them before. The second type is what we call the liberator. And the liberators are always looking at ways to maybe fix or rethink a broken system. They're all about freedom. So you have folks like Uber, And Airbnb would be great liberator brands. The one we love, Harley-Davidson, is all about freedom and motorcycling is really just a vehicle for expressing personal freedom. The third type is the designer. And the designer is all about kind of creating revolutionary products. They want to empower people. Apple, IDEO, are great examples of the designer archetype. The fourth type is what's called the guide. And the guide is all about trying to facilitate progress, to help people along on their journey. So you have brands like the Khan Academy would be an example of a guide archetype, or the one we really like is Google, right? They're trying to help make the world's information accessible to everyone. The fifth type is what we call the advocate. So advocate's kind of like the protector. It's those who kind of stand up maybe for a group, right? And try to push them along. So an example of that would be like an AARP is a great advocate brand. Panera, which is all about trying to, to help people that have food insecurity. The sixth type is what's called the Challenger, and the Challenger brands are pretty brash. They're really, they're really gonna get into people's faces, hopefully get them to do transformative change. And so a great example of a Challenger brand is Nike. Right? And they're all about trying to give you the resources. Everybody is an athlete. You can do it. The 7th type is what we call the unifier. And the unifier is really trying to set the standard within their industry. They're trying to bring everyone along. Rising tides lift all boats type of thing. An example of that would be Whole Foods is a great unifier brand. Everything that they do around organic. The 8th and the last one is kind of the pinnacle. It's what we call the master. And the master brands are really, they're all about really rethinking business and finding ways that they can really make a dent to improve the world. So a great example of that would be a Warby Parker, you know, who has a model where they're giving back, but they're also trying to rethink an entire category on how we purchase eyewear. And what we found, Bobby, is that really brands, you know, there may be 2 or 3 of these archetypes that you might kind of lean towards. But if you really go deep into why the founder of the company, you know, really started, what was the why beyond it, usually you find you're smack into one of the 8.

Stan, you have— you're a highly regarded marketer. You have studied so many brands through all of your experience with the Goldfish Books. I'm curious what brands you watch and follow personally? Like, are there one or two that you just absolutely love?

Oh boy, that, that's, that's a tough one.

Too hard of a question? It's like asking your favorite book or favorite movie. Did I just do that to you?

So I started working out on the brand side with Adidas, or everywhere else in the world, Adidas. Um, founder's nickname was Adi, his last name was Dassler. Um, so I'm always curious to watch both what Adidas or Adidas does compared to Nike. And I think it's always interesting, you know, in a mature market, there's always two brands that rise to the top and then everyone just fights for the scraps. And I think in athletic footwear and apparel, Adidas and Nike are the top two. So I would say that's— they're probably two brands I keep an eye on just because of my background. Yeah, sports.

I love how what you just taught us, a major marketing lesson there, is to look for the contrasts in these big brands. Roger, skipping ahead again, again, we're leaping over some categories, but folks can find this in the book. For promo, you found 5 categories where promotional products can leverage purpose to increase engagement and impact. And I think that's the world we live in now. It's all about engagement and impact. Can you touch on these 5 and Give us an example.

Yeah. And Bobby, what I'd say before we look at the categories, what I'd want the listener to consider is these are actually areas of alignment.

What do you mean by that?

In a lot of instances now, what we need to understand is what does the organization we're selling to care about? Because once we understand what it is that they care about and what their brand values are about, we can start to mine these 5 categories to find examples and, and factories that we can bring product sets to bear to show them how to make the products that they're putting their logos on actually line up with the brand narrative. And the brand narrative should absolutely be a reflection of what their brand cares about. Right. And so for me, when we were looking at the categories, it was interesting to see how while there are a number of different ways that you can approach this topic, What really stood out was the depth of participation amongst these factories in many instances spans multiple categories. So if you're purpose-driven in a lot of ways, you're actually looking for angles and approaches that would give you additional opportunities to competitively differentiate beyond just this one category, but in no uncertain order, they are Give back, diversity and inclusion, environmental, experience, transparency, and trust. And from give back, obviously that's buy one, give some. Diversity inclusion obviously speaks to places where people are employing underserved populations and including everyone in the discussion. Environmental is the broad big tent category that falls into sustainability and packaging and environmental practices and giving back to the, to ocean cleanups and things like that. And then it was really noteworthy in the experiential category, how many really strong experiential events for nonprofits occur and are put on by members of our industry. They just do a magnificently good job at tying experience and give back together in a memorable way. And then lastly, it comes down to reporting via transparency and the level of trustworthiness that then that creates in the mind of the business buyer who is increasingly getting younger and younger and looking for transparency in order to be able to trust the brand.

In the book, you touch on several of the industry companies that fall under these categories. Do you have, and I'm gonna, again, this is like asking your favorite child, but do you have a favorite supplier story and a favorite distributor story that fit one of categories?

My most favorite supplier story is Ray Del Muro and Refresh Glass out in Arizona. Yeah, Ray's on a quest to save 10 million wine bottles from destruction, and that's just the tip of the iceberg for that crazy engineer. I love him to death. He's so good. He is. And what, what, um, really was noteworthy was his project that he worked on with waste management. Um, the Phoenix Open is the second largest PGA event that's not a championship event in the country, so it's Really, really big event. And they worked with Waste Management to capture— as Waste Management is the sponsor of the event, but, uh, they captured every wine bottle that was poured in the hospitality tents during that week-long event, brought those back to their factory in Arizona, repurposed them as gift items that then were logoed with the Waste Management logo, and then subsequently handed out as gifts at the Waste Management Sustainability Conference that happened about 2 months after the close of the event. So they literally took something that would've absolutely ended up pounded into sand and put in the dirt and turned it into something that then was a great reminder to the event attendees of the ways that a closed-loop system could actually be elegantly done. Great, great story.

How about distributor?

Well, on the distributor side, it really, across all the categories, you know, it's, there's, there's so many people doing so many amazing things, but What I really admire, the Dunston Group down there in Charlotte, Brian Young and Scott Dunston, their group, they've really created a for-profit business that's really built on the shoulders of the trust that they've been able to build in their community by way of the work that they do proactively with the nonprofits in their community. It's amazing to see what they've been able to do and the ways that they're assisting. And I would say, you know, in some instances, even I at Social Good Promotions, I'm modeling a lot of these behaviors that I'm seeing from my distributor peers in the community, for sure.

Stan, I'm really curious. You spent time with Roger, you know our good friend Danny Rosen, you've been around the marketing world your entire career. What do you think of promotional products marketing? And maybe more to the point, relevant to us today, what opportunity do you think we have entering this brave new post-COVID world?

I'm, I'm bullish on promotional products as a vehicle for good. And everything, the central concept behind all of the goldfish was inspired by a word that comes from New Orleans. And that word is called lagniappe. And it's a Creole word, French and Spanish. It literally means the gift. Or to give more. And so I really see the role, if done correctly, that promotional products can play in terms of being able to do that little something extra that reinforces what makes you different. And it used to be, you know, where you were maybe made you different. It may be it may be back in the day, it may have been what you did made you different, and that's not the case now. I think it's more so how you do what you do, and this is right at the heart of RED, why you do what you do. Yeah. And so I think promotional products are ideally suited to be a vehicle to bring that purpose to life.

Stan, can you talk just a bit about the trust index? And then, Roger, I've got a sub-question for you on that topic.

Yeah, I'll actually defer to Roger on that. I mean, my little bit is that trust, which really, if you boil down trust, because I think everyone has their own definition, to me, it's two major elements. It's warmth which is the intent that you have and the extent that people can understand your intentions. And two, it's competence. It's your ability to carry forward that intent and do it on a consistent basis. But I'll defer to you, Roger, on the index.

I love the fact that you mentioned warmth. I think we work so hard on competence that I think we overlook warmth.

Let me ask you, Bobby, which one do you think is more important for people?

I think, um, I think you can't get to any competent arena whatsoever without warmth.

So they're, they're both important, and there are certain behavioral styles that actually, um, value competence more than warmth. Every day of the week and twice on Sunday, people value warmth over competence. Right. You're absolutely right.

Roger, what do you think?

Yeah. So at the open of the presentation that Stan and I give on this book, there's a formula from a book called The Speed of Trust. It was written by Dr. Stephen M. R. Covey. So the younger Dr. Covey, and the equation says strategy multiplied by execution raised to the power of trust is how you calculate results. And so you can have a great strategy and execute it really well. But if you have people who don't trust in one another, the impact of that is going to be slower and more costly. And so I believe now that more so ever than ever, that the role of trustworthiness is going to play an outsized role in decisions, especially for business buyers, because everyone's hoarding cash right now. And so if I'm going to get to a moment where I feel like I'm actually going to spend money, I would much prefer to make an investment in someone I trust than to write out a line item expense for someone to do a job for me. Hmm. And so by creating the Trust Index, what we're really saying is for everyone, regardless of what you do, if you have interaction with people both inside and outside your four walls, the first most important thing you need to do is to consider where you are in the trust relationship that you have with that person at that moment. Because if you do, it makes it much easier for you to then be prescriptive about what activities you can perform in that moment if you have a healthy recognition of where you are in the trust index with that person. And what happens is, as you perform those activities and you see growth in people's behavior to suggest that you're becoming more trusted in their eyes, There should be certain results that occur along that journey that you could point to and say, this is my proof point to know that I'm growing in my trust level with that person.

I love asking this last question of all our guests now. And COVID, with all its calamity, with all its struggle and heartache, has also brought us all some strange gifts as well. Stan, let's start with you. What gift has this experience given you?

Well, after 8 years of predominantly doing in-person presentations, whether that's keynotes or workshops, it's really challenged me to really have to learn an entire new skill set to be able to create a similar, if not better, experience virtually. So that's been fun to kind of be, you know, after you cursed heavens for a while, to actually sit down and say, this is a good thing. And I think going forward, there's gonna be a lot of training that we do, even a lot of presentations that we consume that are gonna be done virtually. And so if this caused everyone to open up to that, Not that I would have ever wished it, but I actually think it's a good thing.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Roger, how about you?

Well, we're going to count the pennies up at the end of the year, Bobby, and see just what kind of hit we took as an industry. I think it's going to be pretty sizable.

Yeah.

And what it's done for all of us, I think, is it's really accelerated the pace of the decision-making that Maybe there were things that all of us were thinking we needed to do, but nothing like a 10-year run of really great prosperity to sort of sweep all of that under the rug. And it's manifesting itself in ways like, I think that it would behoove all of us, and you as well as anyone understands this because of the event you produced. If you're in this space and you're used to selling to people who produce events, you need to learn how to be the producer of a virtual event for them. Because they, just like all of us, have absolutely no idea what to do. And if we can be seen as a compelling choice to help them through this transition, then you've unlocked a piece of a relationship that has traditionally been beholden from us because we were always the tail and never the dog. We always were the ones getting the order for the last minute. What am I giving away at the trade show sort of thing, as opposed to being the person actually managing the production of the event on behalf of the people who want to put it on.

Yeah.

And as I'm watching these events occur, and what we've all seen is some of them go great and some of them don't go so great, that if we can establish some credibility and expertise as an industry to be seen that way, I think it has a way of sustaining our industry for the long term. So I'm hopeful for that.

Great thoughts, guys. Thank you both so much for joining us today. We will put a link out to where you can find the book. I found it through Kindle. But Stan and Roger, thank you guys so much.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah, thanks, Bobby.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SKU Cast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.comandsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.

Mm-hmm.