Culture Change: Rewriting the Purpose/Profit Narrative
Those companies thinking they need to choose between purpose and profit are out of step with the cultural narrative—and data. Today, purpose well activated is a strategic and financial driver.
Brands: Get Past the Fear of Change and Embrace the Fear of Irrelevance
In a marketing, media, and consumer landscape where 75% of brands could disappear overnight and no one would notice or care, businesses and brands need to embrace the fear irrelevance more than anything else.
It’s Not CSR—It’s Marketing
Across the biggest and smallest companies in the world, CSR and ESG reporting are increasing exponentially. But no business will get credit for doing what they should be. Instead, companies need to embrace the decades old doing well by doing good adage more fully, and turn CSR into reasons into marketing-driven reasons to care—and buy.
Cancel Culture Is Here to Stay: Brands Better Get Used To It
Cancel Culture is the exercise of consumer power, among today’s increasingly conscious consumers. It’s not a reflection of intolerance so much as an impatience with the state of the world and expectations that brands play an active part in making the world a better one.
Mr. Rogers Was Right
It goes without saying that there are troubled times. But, as Fred Rogers said, in scary times we should “look for the helpers.” Advice that brands, like children, should heed.
Market and Mindset Shifts: The Evolution of the Conscious Consumer (Times have changed and so have why—and how—people buy?)
The conscious consumerism that began in the 60s with the Whole Earth Catalogue has evolved, and so have the wants, needs and expectations of the people evolving it. To survive—let alone thrive—in today’s competitive landscape, brands need to market to these mindset shifts.
On Being More Human (as Brands and Companies)
Among the lessons business should take from the Pandemic, among the greatest global humanitarian crisis of the past 100 years, is the need to think, be and act more human. They’re not “consumers” or “customers”; “agencies”, “vendors’ or “clients”…they’re people. We need to act and market accordingly.
Driving Brand Equity Through Shared Values and Passions
In a world where most brands don’t matter to most people, the surest way to brand affection and likability is by marketing to shared values and passions.
Winning on Values In a World of Good-Enough Alternatives
84% of Amazon searches are by category not brand. In this world of good-enough alternatives, embracing a shared-values marketing mindset is the fastest path to meaningful, brand distinctiveness and de-commoditization.
How to Drive Cultural Relevance and Resonance
The data is clear. Brands that are seen as culturally relevant outperform those that aren’t across health and sales metrics. This talk breaks it all down and provides an actionable template for moving forward.
The Activist CMO
Since 2016, there have been countless articles on “Activist” CEOs, from Apple, Salesforce, Sephora, AirBnB. It’s past time for the Activist CMO to join this conversation.
The Activist CEO
An exploration of what has accelerated the growing ranks of Activist CEO’s and a pointed POV on where it’s all heading, and what the implications for brands and companies are.
Seth has spent his career spent in and advising the c-suite of the most iconic brands globally, designing effective culturally-driven solutions to their most intractable problems. His career, marked by never having held a position that existed before he held it, spans from his first job as the 3rd person in the US marketing department for Evian, where he helped turn the world’s most generic substance, water, into a premium-priced lifestyle brand to starting the Marketing practice at legendary Hollywood agency CAA; serving as President of youth-focused NGO Rock the Vote; the first Global CMO for Live Nation; founding his own double-bottom-line women’s brand and company, and starting the Purpose-Driven Marketing Practice at the equally legendary Hollywood agency Endeavor’s cultural marketing agency, 160 over 90. Seth is currently Managing Director of Forbes' CMO Network, where he has insight and access to the challenges facing the world's biggest brands, and the people who lead them.
Throughout his career his work has integrated the need/want states of people, culture and business; helping shape these businesses and the cultural landscape itself. Advocating for over 20 years on the role "purpose," strategically conceived and activated, can play as a strategic and financial driver, Seth makes the case that any narrative suggesting business must choose between the two is a false one; out of step with today's consumer and cultural context.
He is the author of both federal legislation, The Truth in Advertising Act (HR 4341), which called on the FTC and Advertising Industry to consider the unintended health consequences done to generations of women and girls by photoshopped ads and images, as well as The Scratch & Sniff Book of Weed (Abrams), now in its 7th printing.
His 2nd book is expected to release in late 2022.