Do Brands Need to Have an Opinion?

Pepsi had to pull its ad with marching protesters within 24 hours, while Nike's Colin Kaepernick campaign lifted sales. Josef Havelka is an agency man who describes himself as part of the Woodstock generation that once stood on the barricades too. In this talk he looks at where brand purpose came from in marketing and whether brands really need to have an opinion.

You'll learn why the famous Stengel 50 chart is methodologically flawed, why declarative surveys about "belief-driven buyers" overstate what people actually do, and why both Larry Fink's letter and Amazon Dash buttons push companies towards purpose. Havelka shows when purpose works, as with Patagonia or Ben & Jerry's, and when it turns into hypocrisy, as with companies that don't pay their taxes. He adds a Czech survey suggesting Czechs care about brands having a view about a third as much as people abroad.