Michael Campion: Let's go a little bit deeper on that term that you used just a couple of minutes earlier communal gain as opposed to commercial gain. How can brands do more for the communities, serve their communities better?

Bob Sheard: So communal gain. We've very much lived in a world of individual gain and as we've moved into the 21st century, the impact we have on communities has very much come to the fore. So commercial gain and communal gain bridges both the imperative that things have to work economically, the lights have to stay on, but also what's the impact of those lights staying on, what's the wider impact of the activity, of the economic activity that we have to generate to generate a return?

Adidas Terrex is a project we worked on last year and Adidas has a long heritage in the outdoors. It's long been a sponsor of winter sports, winter Olympics and outdoor sports, but it's never truly harnessed that franchise and so we helped them build a vision around Adidas Terrex, which is Adidas in the outdoors. But we recognized that much of their urban community didn't use the outdoors, I think 1% of people that visit National Parks. So when we created, helped create the brand design and brand vision for Terrex, we realized that Adidas had a strong franchise in the outdoors given its whole history of winter sports and winter Olympics involvement. It also has a huge urban and ethnic audience that really relish the brand and culturally resonate with the brand. But what we also knew was that in the national parts of North America only 1% of visitors are represented by the BAME community, so it's very much the national parks in the outdoors and Anglo-Saxon white enclave. And so what we wanted to do was change that, and we did that with communal purpose. So Terrex's communal purpose is to get access to the outdoors for everybody. Everybody should enjoy the well-being and positive effects of communing and enjoying the outdoors.

And then, finally, Tesla is a great example of communal purpose to create, well, first of all, to kill the internal combustion engine, but in doing that, the communal effect of that is to create sustainable transport for life on Earth. So you can see how communal purpose has a very important moral dimension. But ultimately, having a strong moral dimension is good business. Good business is good business, and so ultimately that's what will sustain.

Micheal Campion: And speaking of good business, I think consumers hold an enormous amount of power now. Sometimes, as an individual, you feel too small to make a difference. But how do you perceive the consumer, the individual, as having power to shape brands, to bend towards communal gain?

Bob Sheard: I think consumers have the power to shape not just brands, but shape the world. I think that if you look at the defining crises of our time both the climate crisis and the COVID crisis. As citizens of countries we had no democratic lever to pull to ensure the effective, interdependent management of those crises. All we had to do was sit back and watch 195 different countries with 195 different leaders, with 195 different cabinets of politicians, 5,000 politicians in all, grapple in a disintegrated way to either deal with climate change or deal with the COVID crisis. We just had to sit and watch. We had no democratic mandate or vote to try and change the way things were managed. In that world, that's not going to change anytime soon. What we have to do, as citizens and consumers, is to create the space for those leaders to move into with policy that means we can have much more effective leadership. The one way we've got to do that is the way we spend our money. It's the one democratic expression that we've got. Where we spend our money determines our belief systems. It determines how we want things to be. I'm a great believer that, as consumers, we can buy the change we want to see. If we buy the change we want to see, we'll select brands with strong moral purpose, strong communal purpose. In that way, through small acts of consumerism, we'll change brands and we'll also change the impact of brands on the world and therefore change the world.

Micheal Campion: I love it. So in that sense. You are happily relegating your position as the most influential shaper of brands to the consumer. The consumers are the biggest shapers of brands, not brand designers, are they not?

Bob Sheard: Totally, 100%, agree. With all humility, I believe that this is the first time in my career where consumers have been ahead of brands. Throughout the 20th century, brands were ahead of consumers in all sorts of ways, but actually now I think it's flipped. I think more power to them. Generation Z are definitely in a position that is ahead of brands. Brands are trailing consumer values, brands are trailing consumer attitudes, brands are trailing consumer habits and there's a real race to catch up. But I think it's brilliant. I thrive in that sort of chaos.

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