When Anger is a Force for Good

Last Wednesday I attended “Anger: A Force For Good” event held at the wonderfully hospitable ad agency BMB. The event explored what made people angry, how they channelled their anger (tellingly the talk was held on the anniversary of Trump’s election and the Russian Revolution centenary) and whether anger could be used positively.

Haras Rafiq, the CEO of counter radicalisation think tank Quilliam, talked about the dark and destructive side of anger: islamist, far-right and far-left extremism. I learned that people became radicalised when they had real or perceived grievances and were fed partial truths.

Anthropologist Nazima Kadir illustrated what we unfortunately knew too well (think Brexit, Trump, AfD, etc.) – people get angry when they are ignored.

To lift us out of the darkness of anger’s destructive forces was a presentation by Ian Murray the founder of consultancy house51 and BMB’s own Head of Planning Jamie Inman. A stat that I took out from the research was that almost as many people in the UK (45%) got angry about the injustice of something that happened to other people, as about something that affected them personally (47%). If empathy is key to a more peaceful and happy world, than empathetic anger is nothing less than a driving force for good.

On the day of the event there was hopeful evidence that anti-Trump anger started bearing fruits, as Democrats swept to victory in governor, state legislative and mayors’ elections across the US.

In media and advertising it’s widely accepted that emotive content and marketing perform best.

Top shared media stories are emotional. In case you are wondering which emotions dominate, well, it varies by media. In the last 12 months the top shared story on The Telegraph “Redhead emoji finally on the table after campaign for ginger equality” is 59% joyful (IBM Watson Tone Analyzer). Whereas the Guardian’s top shared article “Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it” is 59% fearful. While The New York Times‘s “Trump’s Lies” is 72% angry.

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising found that marketing underscored by emotion performed twice as well as campaigns based around rational thinking.

Traditionally, marketing has been dominated by two emotions: happiness and fear. In the first episode of Madmen Don Draper calmly tells his clients: “Advertising is based on one thing: happiness, and do you know what happiness is? … It’s freedom from fear.”

According to BMB/house51 research 60% of the UK population got angry in the past week. So there is a lot of anger out there, and it is important for marketers to be ‘in tune’ with how people feel.

Forget the John Lewis ad, my current favourite is Jigsaw’s pro-immigration campaign. It starts boldly with “British style is not 100% British. In fact, there is no such thing as 100% British”, and finishes with “Fear, isolation and intolerance will hold us back. Love, openness and collaboration will take us forward”.

A great campaign targeted at Jigsaw’s liberal educated target audience, which addresses their anger with Brexit and anti-immigrant climate.

Tesco’s mass-market positioning means that its similarly-themed Christmas ad provoked an angry reaction from the far-right for featuring a Muslim family. Its yet to be seen what it would mean for Tesco’s sales but the ad has worked generating priceless publicity.

Both Jigsaw and Tesco have managed to either chime with existing anger or provoke anger, and both campaigns carry a positive message of love, openness and happy co-existence. So, perhaps the most successful campaigns are three-part dramas that take us on a roller-coaster of a range of different emotions:

1. Set-up: anticipation;

2. Jeopardy: anger;

3. Resolution: joy.

And after more than a year of anger, I can only hope for a joyful resolution to the Trump/Brexit saga.

More reasons to eat chocolate

Even talking about chocolate can make people happy. 46% of tweets about chocolate brands in the UK express positive emotions: happy, excellent, great, #fridayfeeling, lovely, smiley face, etc.

And there are more reasons why people are cheering for chocolate than just enjoyment, elation and excitement triggered by the chemicals phenylethylamine and trytophan found in it. Natural language processing and text link analysis of the tweets let me discover these reasons*.

The three brands which were tweeted about most positively in the last month were Lindt, Mars and artisan British chocolate Seed and Bean.

Lindt was making people happy with its variety of flavours. Always a bonus: 70% dark, Raspberry dark and Sea Salt dark are my favourite!

But like I’ve seen with other categories, brand social purpose is a strong driver of positive feelings towards brands. Even more so for chocolate brands, where choice is abundant and its becoming more difficult to differentiate.

Thus, the reason why people were so happy about Mars was the chocolate maker’s  announcement it is investing $1 billion to fight climate change.

The majority of positive tweets about chocolate brands were dedicated to Seed and Bean. How was it making people happy?

Being ethical tops the list with 61% of all tweets. Rich variety of flavours is second with 25% – I am enjoying Raspberry and Coconut as I’m writing this. Offering vegan options and great taste complete the list with 9% and 5%  respectively.

For Seed and Bean, and Lindt making people happy also means that they are more likely to want to try the chocolate – a link to the healthy bottom line (for the brands’ P&Ls, maybe not so much for chocolate enthusiasts).

Positive emotions about chocolate brands account for 64% contribution to people wanting to try the chocolate.

Being ethical has a 24% direct and indirect link to the desire to try. Variety and having vegan options also make a contribution of 7% and 5% respectively.

Having social purpose and generating positive emotions is paying off for a smaller and relatively less established Seed and Bean, which accounts for 68% of tweets by people wanting to try a chocolate brand.

* The analysis was performed using IBM SPSS Modeler Text Analytics.

What social data can tell us about social purpose

Increasingly brands want to know whether people think about social purpose when shopping, whether it lifts their moods or if they talk to others about it. Sometimes asking people about it in surveys may not yield accurate results: people often don’t register what they are thinking about, and may not realise that social purpose matters to them. Others may virtue signal, and exaggerate the importance of brand social purpose to them. And lastly, social purpose can have a different effect on different groups of people.

Thankfully, whilst still not perfect, actual data of conversations on social media can help understand whether social purpose matters to people engaging with different brands, and what effect it has on them.

I looked at over 14,000 tweets in the last 30 days, mentioning UK supermarkets: Aldi, ASDA, Lidl, Morrisons, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose.

Using IBM SPSS Modeler Text Analytics package, I extracted over 5,000 concepts from these tweets and organised them into 100 themes/categories, ranging from food, drink, taste, price, customer service to emotions, employment desirability and social purpose.

When tweeting about Social Purpose in the context of UK supermarkets, people mentioned 15 different types of action, including fundraising for/donating to charities, paying fairly to staff and suppliers, improving communities and lives, helping victims of disaster emergencies, staff volunteering for charities and local communities, protecting the environment, ensuring sustainable food supplies and supporting food banks.

Present in 5% of all tweets, social purpose ranks joint 5th amongst key themes, behind food, other products, and location but on-par with customer service and offers, and ahead of wine (!), problems and online shopping.

1. Food: 11% of all tweets

2. Products: 10%

3. Location: 8%

4. Store: 7%

5. Customer Service: 5%

5. Offers, Promos, Competitions: 5%

5. Social Purpose: 5%

8. Wine, beer other drinks: 4%

9. Problems: 3%

9. Staff: 3%

9. Online Shopping: 3%

10. Plastic Bags: 2%

Text link analysis showed that social purpose was most likely to appear in tweets about Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and M&S. It was also linked to other themes, e.g. staff, produced in the UK, plastic bags, etc.

 

Waitrose punches above its weight when it comes to being mentioned in tweets with a social purpose theme. It was mentioned in 11% of all tweets but 25% of social purpose tweets, giving it an index of 233. Tesco’s was mentioned in a whopping 41% of social purpose tweets, although a third of those were negative, accusing the retailer of pocketing plastic bag charges. M&S is underperforming relative to its overall tweets share, giving it an index below 100.

 

For Waitrose and people tweeting about it social purpose is hugely important, present in 13% of tweets and ranking 3rd only behind food and store environment.

Text link analysis shows that social purpose is interlinked with other themes. Most importantly it shows that social purpose makes people feel and tweet positively about Waitrose. It also makes them want to work for it.

Overall, premium and mid-market food retailers have higher social purpose indexes vs those competing on price. One could argue that this could be explained by their customers’ greater levels of interest in social purpose.

However, most likely this is due to the brands’ own levels of engagement in social purpose activities, how consistently they live this purpose and how they communicate it to the outside world. This would also explain variations within each category: Waitrose vs. M&S, or Tesco vs. Sainsbury’s. And with one-third of regular Waitrose customers also shopping in Lidl (Kantar/TGI), consumer segments are now shared, and there’s nothing stopping brand getting behind social purpose.

What makes people happy at work? Now there is a formula

Dame Carolyn McCall, current CEO of easyJet, and former CEO of the Guardian, where I had the pleasure of working with her, is believed to be the frontrunner for the top position at ITV. Lucky, lucky ITV. McCall, one of only four women in Glassdoor’s Top 50 CEOs rated by UK employees, has not only turned-around easyJet’s profitability, piloting it into FTSE 100, but has also greatly improved employee morale.

McCall, whom rival Michael O’Leary dismissed as “media luvvie”, has re-assured staff that they were not about to turn into “orange Ryanair” and was often seen on-board a flight chatting to passengers and crew. Rated 4.1 out 5 on overall employee satisfaction on Glassdoor, easyJet is now one of the Best Places to Work in the UK, above British Airways (2.9), Eurostar (3.6), Virgin Atlantic (3.1) and certainly no one’s luvvie Ryanair (2.3).

So how much does satisfaction with Senior Leadership influence employee morale (and therefore, productivity, retention and ultimately, bottom line)? An awful lot, and I have data to prove it. Glassdoor collects real-world data by asking employees to rate: senior management, pay & benefits, career progression, culture & values and work-life balance. It also asks people to submit an overall satisfaction score and agree/disagree whether their employer’s business outlook is positive.

I ran regression analysis on Glassdoor’s UK data to determine what influences the overall satisfaction score. The top predictor of employee satisfaction was 1) Senior Leadership, closely followed by 2) Culture & Values and 3) Career Opportunities. Work-life Balance mattered much less, and Pay & Benefits were a minor contributor to the overall level of satisfaction.

And this is the formula, ta-da:

Overall Satisfaction = 0.19 + 0.29 x Senior Leadership + 0.26 x Culture & Values + 0.23 x Career Opportunities + 0.13 x Work-life Balance + 0.11 x Pay & Benefits

As you can see Senior Leadership matters. Yet, it has the lowest satisfaction score out of all factors: 3 out of 5.

Organisations need to create a positive culture and strong set of values that senior managers embody and promote, and that employees share and get behind. According to previous studies, people generally feel happier at work when they can see that their work is benefiting others. People who felt their jobs really benefited society were much more likely to be happy at work: 59%, compared with the average of 38%.

As for pay, even Adam Smith, writing more than 250 years ago in The Theory of Moral Sentiments said that material gains often make us less happy, not more. However, it doesn’t mean that employers can get away with not paying people their worth or luring unpaid interns to enjoy “great company culture and free beer”. Although not the most important driver of employee happiness, pay is still a statistically significant contributor to the overall score.

Worth noting, that employer’s business outlook was insignificant in my regression model, and therefore, did not influence employee happiness at all. So, when companies assume that staff derive pleasure and satisfaction just from working for a profitable business, they are wrong, unless the benefits of being profitable translate into opportunities for employees or shared with the wider society.

Interesting that not a single charity appears in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work. Charities, which by default are purpose and values driven and generally offer good work-life balance, need to pay more attention to career progression and pay & benefits, which are rated significantly lower vs. the private sector.

As for myself, I’ve never been happier, echoing a well-known fact that self-employed people are most satisfied. In employment, I was the happiest at the Guardian, which offered the best of two worlds: great values & culture together with good pay and career progression. As for Senior Management, here is an anecdote for you. I remember washing my hands in the Guardian’s toilets, when then CEO Carolyn McCall asked me why I sighed and if she could help. I said it was a minor concern, not to worry, it’s just annoying how environmentally-unfriendly were all those paper towels. McCall said to consider them gone. They were gone.

Consumers of the future demand purposeful brands

In the future, the most successful brands will be those that make the most positive contribution to society beyond just providing good services and products.

68% of world’s consumers agree, according to Ipsos Global Trends Survey. The percentage of people that think that purposeful brand will be the most successful in the future, is higher in the fastest growing economies, where issues of sustainability and employment rights have a higher profile and urgency than in well-established economies of the past.

Younger people also want to purchase from and work for companies with strong values and ethics.

Earlier I wrote that quality, price and emotive advertising were no longer enough, in order to future-proof themselves brands needed innovation and purpose.  And it’s obvious that consumers of the future care about brand purpose whilst young companies (Tesla, Patagonia, Lyft, Toms) built purpose into their DNA.