Utopia Brands: The Path to Growth AND Impact

By Benoit Beaufils, Subodh Deshpande, Thomas Kolster and Paul Polman

Utopia Brands makes the case for a reinvention of the discipline of branding, away from the shallow marketing tools invented in the 60s. It outlines an approach of “deep” branding that puts the development of a brand “Utopia” at its core, complemented by 3 tools: transparency, abundance and community. An approach that turns branding into a leadership tool, and equips CMOs and CEOs with the thoughtware necessary to make positive impact on the world, and grow their business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: May 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9789082295740

Book preview

1.pngCopertina Utpoia Brands - The path to Growth AND Impact

Copyright 2023 by Innate Motion, first edition

Authors: Benoit Beaufils, Subodh Deshpande

and the Innate Motion Collective

Design: Annie Skovgaard Christiansen

Editing: Twan Zegers

ISBN 9789082295740

Logo Innate MotionUTOPIA BRANDS - The Growth AND Impact Benoit Beaufils & Subodh Deshpande

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1: Introduction: Thriving on Purpose—Time to Make a Choice

Chapter 2: Branding Needs a Makeover

Chapter 3: Utopia: Nostalgia for the Future

Chapter 4: Transparency: Revealing What You’re Made Of

Chapter 5: Abundance: Getting from Guilt to Great

Chapter 6: Community: Beyond Consumer Thinking

Chapter 7: Utopia: Branding as Leadership

Chapter 8: Final Words: Let’s Get Down to Business

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Many reasons you shouldn’t read this book and only one great reason you should

Should you pick up this book, if you work in marketing or, for that matter, in sustainability? Most likely not, unless …

For more than 15 years, I’ve been advocating for change in the marketing industry and it’s depressing to admit: I didn’t succeed, we didn’t succeed. Purpose has become what long-lasting taste was to chewing gum in the 80s, yet another piece of advertising lingo with little to no meaning. More and more brands are embracing purpose as a cheap marketing tactic and we’re not seeing the impact, the real change.

Within the advertising industry and outside of it the criticism is becoming more vocal, from activists calling purpose yet another green-washing exercise to cynics doubting the business case. In self-celebratory advertising award shows we see purpose work rise to the top, but most of those career-changing awards aren’t really changing much else. It’s more of the same: a glitzy PR stunt taking environmental or social issues hostage. We have no time to waste on brands using 30 seconds to convince us of their goodwill. The most recent climate report from early 2023 found that we’re missing our climate targets and won’t be able to succeed, unless mass mobilisation happens. So why waste your time on yet another book on purpose?

Utopia Brands takes you on a guided tour around the purpose landscape, from the early days of purpose to the present, to dissect and understand what needs to change. The solution the two writers, Subodh and Benoit, suggest is to dream big. It’s to set out on a quest for leaders and brands to find their Utopia, which they explain is both Eutopia and Outopia: the best place and not a place; an impossible ideal. This is not a small call for change, like putting windmills in your next commercial or ticking the ESG boxes in your next sustainability report. And that’s the whole point: we’ve been too lazy, too naïve, too insincere—or all of the above. A vision for the future, that doesn’t dare to dream big and bring everyone on-board is as useless as a clown on a spaceship. Who are we entertaining or fooling? Utopia Brands sets out to reinvent the playbook for how brands and leaders can make a real impact, not just a dent.

Some of the ingredients in the book’s recipe are well-known to seasoned purpose professionals, like transparency, community and abundance, but it’s the book’s bigger call for a vision that excites me. What if this book can inspire leaders to reimagine what agriculture can look like? Reimagine what travel can look like? Reimagine what impact looks like? It’s not incremental change, but the real system change that’s needed, if we are to respond to the challenge at the scale and speed needed. There are no excuses.

This brings me back to the question I posed at the start: should you pick up this book? If you want to continue aiming for the status quo or believe purpose is simply a marketing exercise, then you better not waste your time. You can continue supporting tree planting projects, take the bicycle to work and recycle when possible. If you want to make a difference and dare to dream big, then this book is a kick-starter, a collection of stories about doers and, finally, a tool for creating a new vision for brands going forward. Utopia Brands sets out an impossible challenge. A challenge as audacious and gargantuan as the climate emergency.

I say, I’m in—let’s solve this shit or fail trying.

Thomas Kolster

Author of Goodvertising and The Hero Trap

Any useful statement

about the future

should at first seem

ridiculous

Jim Dator

Chapter 1:

Introduction:

Thriving on Purpose—

Time to Make a Choice

Drawing of an Old Fashioned television with a youtube icon on the screen

Dear reader:

If you google 80,000 hours, you’ll find a job board that advertises hundreds of jobs handpicked to help you tackle the world’s most pressing problems with your career. You’d be excused to hardly expect marketing jobs to appear on the board: in the not particularly moral world of the for-profit enterprise, marketing is often seen as particularly manipulative and predatory. So if you want your work to be a force for good it would probably be advisable to choose basically any profession other than that of brand manager. Right?

Well, we don’t think so, actually. Over the course of this book’s 8 chapters, we hope to make the case that brands can and should help make our world a better place. Sorry, did we say: help make our world a better place? We meant to say: lead the way to Utopia. Sound unlikely? You’re probably right to be skeptical. But please, bear with us. We’ll tell you all about what’s wrong with the 4 Ms of legacy branding, about why any level-headed realist will always demand the impossible and about what Marlboro Man, donuts and tacos have to do with it all.

But first, allow us to introduce ourselves. You obviously know we are writing this book—you wouldn’t be reading this if we weren’t—but you may be wondering how we ended up in this position. Well, our names are Benoit Beaufils and Subodh Deshpande, and these are our stories.

Author: Benoit Beaufils

Benoit

Valentine’s Day, 1982, France. Rod Stewart and Joan Jett top the charts (I love rock & roll…), and at a public high school in a suburb of Paris, a job fair is being held. At a small table, next to a plumber and a pastry chef, sits an ad agency creative, who is about to change my life. He is witty, cool, and has brought a nice portfolio of ads he has contributed to. There are Nescafé ads shot in the Andean mountains, Renault cars under the line: Diesel, Unchained, and a breakfast drink that claims: Breakfast has a little taste of adventure. It’s glitzy and fun, and the 14-year-old, bored, greasy-haired, skinny-jeans version of me suddenly peeks into a world where you can make a good living just by coming up with a smart line or two.

That afternoon, I informed my parents of my decision to go into advertising. My worried mom convinced me to try for business school instead—advertising really felt a tad too frivolous—but the real point of my choice was to deviate from my dad’s path in life. For as long as I could remember, I had seen him miss family dinners or leave home at dawn on Sunday mornings because some kid was not doing well. My dad was a dedicated doctor who led an ICU at a Paris hospital, specializing in treating very young children. A few years later, a headhunter would ask me if I was related to him. Upon my nodding, he looked deep into my eyes and said: Your father is an extraordinary human being. I never knew the rest of the story but clearly, there was something about my dad. But to adolescent me, he was a boring guy with no time for fun, and going to business school was a way to escape a life like his.

Twenty years later, I found myself in Bangkok, where I worked as the local marketing director for Coca-Cola. There was massive overwork, but money and glamor, too. Moving to Thailand had been a step up in my career. I lived with my family in a grand, company-provided house with its own swimming pool. I led a team of 35 people, designing advertising for Coke, Fanta and Schweppes. Yet despite all the joy and recognition, a little voice at the back of my head kept nagging at me. It was insistently asking me whether spending my days getting people to drink a not-so-healthy sugary concoction was the best use of my time. And yet it was also reminding me that Coke was not just about the sugar, the caffeine and the valiant optimism it espouses—it was also in what business brings to people: Coke, after all, was also the biggest provider of private jobs in Africa, and that, surely, mattered. My doubts about the role of business in society never left me.

I left Coke after a year in Thailand. Not to transform my life and radically change the world, but to live with a little more freedom and time. First, I worked as an independent consultant, then I partnered with Censydiam, a market research agency that used motivational psychology to decode consumer motivations, and I would eventually end up running a small decoration business with my wife... Life was quieter, but also better in many respects, and I was basically convinced that this would be my reality… well, pretty much forever, from then on.

But then I got a call from Christophe Fauconnier, with whom I had worked at Coke and Censydiam. Chris was looking for partners to build a new research and marketing agency. His idea was to humanize business: help companies apply a human logic to business, rather than a business logic to humans. With a few others, we started Innate Motion. At the core of it was the idea that if business was one of the biggest forces in the world, it was in itself a neutral force. It could be used for the worse, but also for the better. The ambition to steer it into the right direction (by being, in the words of Christophe, David whispering in the ears of Goliath) meant I could keep using my brand building acumen, while also being a little useful to the rest of humankind. Somehow, notwithstanding all my adolescent rebellion, I ended up inheriting the need for meaning I had disdained in my dad.

Author: Subodh Deshpande

Subodh

When advertising appeared into my life, it came in the guise of Mrs Bose, carrying the fragrance of her curries. I still recall the view of the city from her apartment. High rises were scarce in Indian cities at the time, but Bombay was a modern metropolis, different from my native town in Madhya Pradesh, India. Filled with beautiful art deco houses and Bollywood film stars, it hadn’t yet experienced overpopulation and managed to look quaint and charming, quietly resting on the shores of the Arabian Sea. People complained of how the new buildings blocked the view. They did not block mine—like Mrs Bose, I lived in one of them, and from there, observed the world. I was 7.

My father was a geologist with the Oil and Natural Gas Commission of India, a man of science. Mrs Bose was our next-door neighbor, a university lecturer who loved to chat and exchange food recipes with my mother. But one afternoon, she elected to share something with me rather than with my mother: she showed me the advertising assignments completed by her students.

As I thumbed through the slogans and sketches, I had what you could almost call an epiphany. So this was where the advertisements I loved in the newspapers and on TV came from: they were conjured out of thin air by creative minds, complete with illustrations and pithy lines! Right then, I knew I would spend the rest of my life in this creative pursuit.

Many years later, after travelling all over India, I ended up in Mumbai with an MBA degree in marketing, working at a global ad agency as a strategic planner. I learned from some of the finest thinkers in the country, spending night and day in the office studying sociology and psychology. I explored semiotics, popular culture, and anthropology. I felt the excitement of framing brands as cultural ideas, with the dream of switching on people’s desires, making them crave the brands we were working on. Shampoos. Food.