Wren Aigaki-Lander

Wren Aigaki-Lander is a social purpose expert who has worked with some of the most influential companies in this arena, including Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia. Originally from Northern California, she read Finance & Economics as an undergraduate before moving to Barcelona to gain her MBA. She now lives in and around Bristol, UK, a dynamic and progressive city which appeals to forward-thinking organisations.

At Futerra, Wren worked on sustainability reporting for the London 2012 Olympics and on the Accounting for Sustainability project established by HRH The Prince of Wales. She worked closely with Suzanne Biegel on the advisory committee for Women Effect and, as COO of the Centre for Thriving Places, has helped drive the concept of the wellbeing economy. Wren can be contacted at hellowrenal@gmail.com. Her new website, alacrityatlarge.com, will launch soon.  

We met for a coffee at Wapping Wharf on Bristol’s waterfront on a cold November morning, when the idea of business purpose was back in the marketing industry media. 

Martin: Thank you for agreeing to have a chat with me. So you were born in San Francisco?

Wren: Yes I was. Home is Marin County, which is just over the bridge.

Martin: Home of Lucasfilm - I know it well!

Wren: Yes! Not far from the home of Lucasfilm. [I was] raised by hippy parents who chose Northern California as their home, primarily, but I’ve lived in a number of places in the States, but with lots of international travel as a child, and I always had an ambition to live outside of the States. When I googled ‘socially responsible MBA’ at age 30, ESADE in Barcelona came up and I made my decision immediately. I’m out!

And it was life-changing, in terms of being connected to the world in a way that we aren’t often in the US, even with a broad-thinking family. Living in Barcelona was absolutely magical, though my career was focused in sustainable business at that point and Spain was not ready yet for that. I was starting the conversation way too far back. And in Barcelona I met my husband, who was from London, so we ultimately made it there, and then went to the West Country like many Londoners do.

Martin: You headed west! How does Bristol compare with San Francisco?

Wren: People say ‘Oh, this is so much like the Northern California situation’, and in many ways I recognise a lot of those qualities, but I would say Bristol is way more radical than Northern California. There’s cultural context for marketing in the States but I think Bristol has cultivated its sort of anarchist origins into a way that allows people to choose the way they want to live here and I really love that, and it’s way more extreme. My dad lives in San Francisco still and I go back going ‘Oh it’s going to be like Bristol’ and it’s not – it’s not nearly as special as Bristol is, frankly!

Martin: Amazing! I read that when Stephen Merchant was trying to persuade Christopher Walken to come to Bristol to film The Outlaws, he told him it’s just like San Francisco. And whatever he said, it worked!

Wren: Bristol is a special place, and in the context of the last couple of years, Bristol is showing up on the world stage for its leading thinking – for example, around Black Lives Matter. We’ve got world-leading businesses here, so I’m constantly amazed at what that independent stream of thinking is able to achieve in the world’s eyes. It feels really fun to be here for that.

Martin: And you’ve been working with all sorts of different organisations here, all with a common theme, would you say?

Wren: Yes. I only work with businesses that I can get behind – it’s part of the dregs of being raised by hippies! I’ve worked primarily in the socially-driven faction of the private sector for most of my career and that remains true for the kinds of organisations I work with here in Bristol. However, in this last couple of years, I’ve had more of a streak of working with charities, particularly the Centre for Thriving Places, but the common thread between all of those is a real desire, particularly by their founders, to deliver something incredible to the world, and that can be via their product, but it needs to be beyond that – I think there is a real sense of an opportunity to use their organisation and their business as something that they can be very proud of - and it’s not usually just money. That’s how I choose.

Martin: And social purpose is so in the marketing news at the moment. Peter Field did some research recently that suggested that businesses built on purpose have some competitive advantage but he’s had some criticism around that because it appears he was a bit selective with his data and he’s had to defend that decision.

Wren: Yes – it’s an interesting way he chose to slice that!

Martin: And unfortunate, perhaps, because, initially, when I saw it, I thought ‘Fantastic! He’s found the Holy Grail – this is what we’ve been waiting for!’ and it wasn’t quite what we hoped, I think. But I’m not sure I completely agree with some of the criticism. Byron Sharp said that if every business differentiates itself on purpose, then they’re not going to be different from each other.

Wren: I didn’t agree with Byron Sharp’s points on that at all. Purpose has to be the North Star of an organisation. What’s driving us? What’s driving our employees? How do our customers connect to us? And within that, you’re not just hanging a marketing message on purpose – ‘We’re here to change the world in this way’ – you’re hanging it throughout on ‘That’s what we’re trying to do; here’s how we do it as a company; and here is our differentiated offer in the marketplace’. So to suggest that a company would only ever be hanging their communications and their connection with their core audiences on one single message, and therefore they couldn’t differentiate, is a very simplistic view of what purpose can offer an organisation.

Martin: For me marketing fulfils a need and hopefully does it in a responsible way, and fulfilment of that need is linked to the purpose of the organisation.

Wren: Yes, and this [current] purpose conversation, and Friedman [too], if we’re going to go back fifty years - it’s not taking into account some of the current global challenges that we have, and of course we always feel like we’re in the most dire generation, don’t we, so I would imagine that these conversations have been happening for decades. However, I think the current global context around climate change and around social justice and equality have material impacts for business in a way that we haven’t faced in previous times, and so that challenges some of the free market assumptions around that question of marketing.

I think now, when we talk about being an organisation or business that offers a product that meets a consumer need, and how we connect with them about that, we can’t do that at the expense of social justice or the planet. And that’s still a progressive view, to some extent, but the fact that global governments are now having to acknowledge that would suggest that we’re starting to bring that into the mainstream.

I think that an overall trend that I’m keen to dive into with you is around this idea that we’re not a black and white world any more, we have a much more nuanced view of what humanity is about and what we need from our external context in a way that evolution from Industrial Revolution times in business have not yet caught up with. So the Milton Friedman black-or-white kind of thing isn’t actually a particularly relevant conversation any more, in my opinion. It doesn’t actually hold the nuance and the reality most of us face, and Covid has highlighted that more than anything. So this is a different conversation with you than it would have been two years ago.

Martin: So it’s moving that fast?

Wren: Well, yes, and I think there’s evidence to suggest that. My focus in recent years has shifted more from external focuses in marketing into internal and employee engagement and culture. However, those two things are inextricably linked. When we talk about purpose, we’re talking about how we connect with our people and community around us. How do we connect by selling a good? How do we connect by recruiting our workforce? How do we connect by attracting and retaining a loyal customer base? And those three things are interconnected now.

I think we used to be able to silo those relatively effectively and Amazon does that well now, still, where the employees are having an awful experience and customers are having a great one. And they’re obviously hugely successful, but I think we can look at that and go ‘Is that a business model we want to aspire to in the future?’ and I think most people wouldn’t suggest that that’s the place to go in business. We can’t parse the marketing question without stepping back and looking at the broader landscape, about how we operate as a business.

Martin: Yes, and the Friedman article seems to have been written in a bubble with no connection to the real world. OK, it was written in 1970, but it implies that businesses should only care about things that make them money and everything else is irrelevant, and if it costs them money to fulfil those, then a business shouldn’t be doing it. But we’re at a point now where things like climate change affects every single business.

Wren: One of things that struck me re-reading it again – because my undergrad is in Finance and Economics, and then later I did my MBA – so I’ve revisited his principles a number of times throughout my career, and every time I probably get further away from agreeing with him. I started out pretty free market, actually, and I’ve gone round.

Anyways, in thinking about that question of what is the purpose of business, there is a pretty clear distinction, which I think he recognises, between bigger corporates and independent small and medium size businesses where the founder or owner is still very much in charge. In my experience, because those are the kinds of businesses I like to work with, you do think about what a founder wants and needs from their organisation and how do we get that.

However, looking at Friedman’s focus on corporates, and the idea that employees are agents of the employer, who are agents of the shareholders - kind of fine, as a basic explanation; however, because of the world context of climate change and social justice and, indeed, a competitive recruitment environment, where people have different requirements than they did in 1970 in terms of what they needed from their employment, I don’t think those arguments hold up any more. Because, in fact, I think what we would see from the corporate responsibility movement on the Unilever/Danone scale is that you have leadership, the C-suite, the board level, defining an organisation’s goals, which absolutely are still very profit focused, but recognise their need for a licence to operate, and their need to recruit great people. And the licence to operate is both from a business operations perspective and from a customer and reputational perspective. I don’t think those factors existed in the same way when some of this thinking had been done.

So I think there’s an update for a new age in that, yes, employees are responsible for fulfilling the wishes of an executive team and a board of shareholders, but at this point, those people are probably more accountable to have a broader view than they used to be.

Martin: So those stakeholder groups are driving that change?

Wren: Yes. I think, again, if we’re going to be parsing what a company needs to be communicating out, what they need to be marketing to their customers, the idea that you would do that with the absence of any sense of responsibility in those ways is only probably effective for a much more niche market than it used to be. If you’re creating nuts and bolts, how do you dive into purpose? But there are still requirements of those kinds of organisations, in terms of how they do that, which is broader than making money in a way that it wasn’t forty years ago. 

Martin: I’ve been following the Activision Blizzard problems at the moment – the State of California is prosecuting the games company over alleged employment law issues, particularly around the frat house culture and treatment of women. The employees have organised and staged walkouts and some change seems to be happening because of that. Employee pressure seems to be driving a lot of it.

Wren: Well, when we look at purpose – let’s think about Apple. When we boil it down, ‘Think different’ is kind of the purpose of the organisation. They have been hugely successful in marketing based on that purpose – that was a core differentiator from the Dells of the world, at the time – and they have purpose at their core, purpose at the heart of their communications, they have a really clear way of delivering their product through [an] excellent user interface and design and what they have done has evolved over time – they’re hugely successful. Yet they have had real criticism of their sustainability, the business is not 100% matched up and the consumers, the mass consumer market is still not necessarily holding these kind of companies 100% accountable for these kinds of things.

And I would have to say, as a leader of these kinds of organisations, it’s got to be scary, at this point, because it’s hard to know when something will take, when something will go viral, when something will create that mass change because we have now had more of those kinds of situations. Uber, while still incredibly successful, has faced huge legal challenges and licence to operate issues in various markets. So all that’s to say, we can’t have a black and white thing [any more].

However, what does that mean for us? I think if you’re a marketer you could go ‘I‘m gonna take my chances and I’m going to roll the dice with the Activision thing - we’ve got a great product and we can decide to just throw the culture stuff under the rug’ and that may, in fact, serve you your profits for the next five to ten years. I would really question, if you’re going to take that kind of tack, how you future proof that. I think that’s the question that we’re facing now: you can absolutely continue to ignore some of these things and remain relatively profitable and successful, but whether or not that’s a future proof strategy, to me, is probably the biggest question.

Risk is always the place these kind of things come into the boardroom first, right? So, sustainability: we saw that trajectory of going ‘We need to care about recycling’ into ‘It needs to be a core part of our strategy’ – it inched into the boardroom through risk. And I think the same thing is true with culture and will be true for marketing and customer comms as well.

Martin: I think that’s a really good way of looking at it – seeing it as another risk that has to be managed. It puts it in corporate language. One thing I must ask you is that, even though there is some scepticism about differentiating on purpose, some businesses do that and seem to have been successful doing so – companies like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s, both of which you have worked with.

Wren: Absolutely. Twenty years ago, when I started my career, I was lucky to be working with those kind of American leaders (I was based in the States at that time) and that was a really powerful differentiator, at that point. And, frankly, those two are kinda funny examples, because they’re still, twenty years later, theexamples, and they’re led by particularly campaigning CEOs, which is some element of all of this.

One of the tranches of work that I started to get into more through Futerra and others in the last decade was revisiting purpose with these pioneers and going ‘It’s no longer differentiating us’. One great example is a client we had, which is a very successful American company, very values-led, was early in the organic food game and had led on organic. Organic as a differentiator now? I mean, it’s laughable. We did a whole bunch of work with them, coming into their boardroom going ‘Our whole culture was established on us being pioneers, on us having these really deep principles around organic, but now we’re lost because we don’t know what else is driving our connection’ so I think, in that case, purpose can’t be the only differentiator.

A powerful marketing message has to combine the combination of those things, so purpose should be absolutely a core point of connection with all of your stakeholders, and absolutely your customers, but it needs to be through the lens of great delivery, so I would describe that as values (‘How do we deliver in a really powerful way?’) and an incredible product. So without those things and just to solely rely on the ‘Oh, we’re different’ - that doesn’t work, that’s never worked in many cases, or it only works in the short term. I think part of the question that we’re going to ask, and [the path] that business is being dragged along, is ‘How do we take the longer-term view’?

Martin: So, is that part of the problem – this quarter-to-quarter mindset?

Wren: The short-term lens is absolutely part of the problem – and we’re seeing that across the private sector and the public sector. So, again, that’s one of those world contexts in recognising that the way we’ve set our systems up isn’t actually serving us particularly well. But probably, more than that, it’s the bigger problem of ‘What are we aiming for?’ So, back to the meta of going ‘If we’re just aiming for profits then we’re missing a whole lot of opportunities to do lots of other really impactful work that could drive our future business really successfully’.

If our employees are invested and connected to what we’re trying to do as a company, they bring their best thinking and they’re coming up with ideas for our next products for the [next] five or ten years. If they’re burnt out or killing themselves or leaving for our competitors, where is that leaving us in terms of our race for innovation? And if our customers have been fed a message where they’re driven to the lowest dollar, and we’re not differentiated on anything except something that’s very easily replicable by our nearest competitor, [then], again, we haven’t created that connection. Purpose is the connection in the long-term. Short-term cycles may actually dictate whether or not you’ve been up or down a quarter, in terms of profit, but I would argue there’s three key measures: joy, profit and impact – so JPIs instead of KPIs.

Martin: JPIs - love it! So, it’s back to that Friedman thing about making sure that businesses are part of the world and not just these profit-making bubbles existing in a vacuum.

Wren: Yeah. It just feels kind of nonsensical. With JPIs, if you only focus on impact like lots of charities do, your business is going to shit because you haven’t paid any attention to your employees and you can’t pay ‘em because you haven’t made enough money.

Milton Friedman (Image: Wikimedia)

Martin: I spoke to Liam Black co-founder of Fifteen with Jamie Oliver and I asked him about whether people go there because they are training disadvantaged young people to be top chefs. He said that the most important thing was that they had to make great food, first and foremost.

Wren: Yes!

Martin: Then, if you have two restaurants next door to each other that are of a similar quality, the social purpose element might give you competitive advantage for some people. But you have bake that sense of purpose into the whole offer, rather than this corporate social responsibility [CSR] thing, where it’s more on the side. What’s your thinking on CSR?

Wren: I was just revisiting the idea of CSR and it’s very different than it used to be. I think there are more themes coming out of it. It is sort of a catch all to describe a general department or programme within an organisation. Now it needs to be more cross-cutting, just because, again, if we care about recruitment or if we care about our customers’ impression of us, then it just needs to be broader. All of this stuff has to be integrated.

The Industrial Revolution drove efficiency, it drove productivity, it drove a whole lot of things which really advanced us in lots of ways. However, again, it ignored the nuance of humanity in the global context, in a way that technology and the internet has challenged. Lots of these principles that drove efficiency and productivity, which were invented before the internet, have to be evolved to recognise the sort of challenges we face now. So the idea that you would say ‘Oh, we just have this programme off to the side…’; again there’s going to be corporates doing that successfully for the next decade, maybe, but we still know, and we’ve known for a long time (back to the Jamie Oliver example), that if you have two options that are relatively equal for a customer, the one with probably some green or social justice credentials may have an edge, but the critical factor in that is ‘all things being equal’.

The idea that we would do purpose instead of delivering an excellent product that people are expecting is silly as well – [that doesn’t] make business sense and nobody would argue that, of doing that to the detriment of what you’re there to achieve. Milton Friedman [implies that] if you’re making decisions that are challenging your ability to operate, that’s not smart. However, we now know that some of those decisions actually are enhancing [companies’] ability to operate.

I think CSR used to be niche – when I did my MBA thirteen years ago, I chose it for its corporate social responsibility focus and it was taught as a unit on the side, and all of the other content was 100% the same [as other degrees]. That can’t really happen any more, and I know they don’t teach it like that any more, because we recognise these core business risk issues. 

[In terms of] business size, you have a lot more leeway to practice some of these things on a smaller scale. So we’re here [in an area] populated by independent businesses who have made specific business critical decisions. Better Food is an incredible business and there are people making specific choices to be there. I shop there, [even though prices may be higher] because I think I’m buying that because it’s led by a founder who has done a lot of great work in this town, I know he’s supporting his employees who are working there and I know the product that I’m buying is something that is consistent with my values. I am white and middle-class, I have the ability to make those choices because I’m not choosing a £5 beet over sustenance for my family, so I think there are some limitations in terms of practicality with a model like Better Food, but that’s not to say that there aren’t other organisations [influenced by it]. We’ve got Asda over there – they’re inspired, to some extent, by Better Food. Asda has a massive vegan range now, so I think what we’re seeing is that we can bring purpose into any organisation and operate at the scale that it needs to operate. Asda doesn’t, all of a sudden, need to be a Better Food, and it can’t be, because it won’t serve its customers very well and there’s a huge amount of their customers that wouldn’t be able to access that. However, they’ve also recognised that there’s a shift and that, in fact, there may be a market opportunity, in terms of appealing to that middle ground. It can’t be a sidelined initiative.

Martin: So it happens over time? It’s a long project? Dynamic businesses like Better Food appear and it takes a long time to influence other businesses, but it does happen over time hopefully?

Wren: I think it spreads when they’ve had a material impact across joy, profit and impact. Wapping Wharf, as a development, is a good case study, because this was developed by a family development firm; they’re not huge, like the very big boys around the UK, but they’re not tiny little single family folks. Championed by a guy in his 60s, his vision was to bring a new development with loads of new housing, but to specifically populate it with independent shops and great cargo units, where you could have a much more flexible space that appeals to Bristol culture. He was able to bring in established anchors, like Better Food. He paid for [the] cargo [units] himself, because investors would not buy into that. He put up all the money to do it and it’s been a raging success. Now you’ve got Wapping Wharf proposals all over Bristol, and indeed all over the country.

So, what do we learn from that, in terms of our purpose thing? Well, when you start out, the traditional finance world would have said ‘This is not going to work’. You can’t have [this independent café] – they don’t have enough credit history to sign a five year lease or a ten year lease that we need. But the developer says ‘I see the vision of this, which is delivering a much more community-oriented yet still profitable, still beautiful, still buzzy kind of place and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is to prove my concept. And I think that’s the thing in terms of how it spreads. There’s going to be people who have to put their money where their mouth is, set the example and show what a beautiful future looks like.

And I would say, alongside my other things that I really cling to, showing what a beautiful future looks like is really powerful. And so, we’ve got Asda selling vegan ranges, we’ve got real estate developers all over the country trying for a Wapping Wharf kind of thing; there are new mechanisms to finance independent shops and retailers because there’s a broader understanding about the benefits to the community over [out of town supermarkets]. So back to the olden days when you had to have a successful case study, you still do, we can’t throw out some of those core principles, but let’s aim for something bigger.

Martin: And some people will choose to shop in those stores and hopefully that generates more awareness of the social impact of this store – ‘Do I want to have a local butchers or greengrocers in my area, because it adds value to the area in a way a supermarket might not?’

Wren: Back to the Covid impact, I think that’s been really important - as people’s geographic influence and access was diminished, they understood the value of a local independent grocery store. They see the value of that in a way that I think we hadn’t understood before and I can say that with confidence, because coming from the Centre for Thriving Spaces, where we were looking at the numbers across the country, in terms of what makes a place thriving, the changes in terms of social cohesion and some of those core questions in just two years’ time – we’ve been banging on for years about wellbeing economics and now people go ‘Oh, I understand what this means; it means that when I leave my house and I’m shopping from a business aligned with what I care about, I get a lot more benefits than just that thing I purchased and brought home: I am supporting my community and, in fact, if I don’t align myself with those businesses, I am not going to have that shop next time I leave the house, because they’ve gone out of business and its been replaced by something else. So I think Covid has provided a new lens for us, alongside some of the social justice movements and climate change challenges. I think, overall, people are able to take a more nuanced view and an understanding of businesses’ contribution than they have before.

Wapping Wharf, Bristol, UK

Martin: So in terms of this idea of a vision of a better world…

Wren: There are a few core tenets. That’s one that came from Futerra. They did some really ground breaking work ten or fifteen years ago now and the core concept was ‘love not loss’, which is the idea that, until that time, in [the] sustainability [world], we were always putting polar bears on icecaps and that wasn’t motivating anybody. So their purpose, which they’ve actually just updated for the new era, has been around make sustainability so desirable that it becomes normal. And that I think is really core. What is that thing that is so desirable that it becomes accepted by the mass?

I think what’s ‘so desirable’ has evolved over time. You have a new and nuanced idea of what ‘so desirable’ means and I think, with the internet, we have the ability to service that desire in a long-tailed way that we didn’t before. The emphasis on mass isn’t necessarily so important for so many folks. But also the idea that we can aim for things that fulfil a set of ideals and that we should expect that our businesses are supporting that - we can be doing that in all parts of our lives, down to our reusable earbud or whatever, and, again, not everybody can afford to do that, so I think there’s ways that we need to be able to build in access to those kinds of things. I think the ability and the awareness of the potential for making those choices is the newer thing.

Martin: So, marketing’s role in all of this – is it painting this picture of the future?

Wren: Absolutely. Marketing for the sake of driving revenue growth is one very narrow lens to look at it and I’m probably not that interested in that discussion, as you might have gathered! But marketing as a way to build a connection with consumers around a point of relevance which can and should include your product is a very rich way to approach it. So marketing is not the Devil’s art in that regard. I think, like with any tool, it’s how you wield it and if you use marketing to create a picture of a beautiful future that allows people to feel included, and to feel connected and energised by doing whatever that thing is that creates that beautiful future, that feels like a massive service to society.

In fact, where largely sustainability, climate justice, social justice movements have not been as successful are their inability to craft messages that connect with the audiences that they need to reach. So I think the discipline of marketing is hugely effective in terms of all of the things that we need, in terms of change in business and awareness to create the kinds of products and services that we as a society need. I’m not anti-marketing.

Martin: Marketing is about communicating, so it’s about using it for positive ends. This idea of a beautiful future is very optimistic. Some years ago, Mark Ritson in Marketing Week predicted Leave would win the Brexit vote because, in its communications, it was creating a positive vision – how accurately it did that is debatable – but conversely, Remain was saying leaving the EU would be a disaster, and they lost the referendum.

Wren: And, yes, there’s the question of whether it’s true or not, but putting that aside, we as humans, from a behaviour change standpoint, are motivated by those positive messages, and the Simon Sinek model, the golden circles model, would also suggest that that connection through purpose speaks to part of us that doesn’t actually access language – it’s a core part of how we create a connection with our audiences. So, yes, if we’re just getting back to what actually hits people from a physical and neurological standpoint and what appeals to their interests it’s that approach, for sure. I love Simon.

Martin: I’ve used him in some of my teaching and he does seem to resonate with people. He’s got a great way of putting it across. Tim Smit at the Eden Project was also very keen to keep the message positive, and I think he was right about that. If I wanted to put something up about, say, the amount of rainforest we’re losing he’d say that approach was a bit depressing.

Wren: I think he was right about that. And I think there’s something about an authenticity and a realness, too, that you can’t lose in your sense of optimism. So I’m American, and Californian even moreso, so, especially here, I’m always the most optimistic person in the room, in many ways, and that can’t be mistaken for a sense of naivety about the realities of things. With that Eden Project example, I really agree with that idea of how do you create those moments of awe and those moments of connection with the natural world. The other side of that is if the purpose of the Eden Project includes people’s awareness about their own changes or the big global issues, is you go ‘What is that sense of agency that you’re pairing with that sense of optimism?’ We all know that customers are smarter and more educated, [with] more access to information that they ever had before, so optimism without authenticity is probably not the most effective route either, so there’s a balance.

Maybe nuance is one of my key words for today, but I think that the idea that any one method [isn’t right] - what works for Tim at the Eden Project doesn’t work for Danone in selling yoghurt or whatever.

The idea, too, that the academics of the world who are running articles in Marketing Week are looking for broad trends - not that the work isn’t useful, but then to sort of eliminate the examples is actually not that helpful, because I think something about nuance and being context-specific is way more important to business than it ever has been before. Those broad generalisations aren’t quite as helpful as they might have been in the previous [eras]. They might be to multinational organisations, but me, I’m not interested in that.

Martin: So are you feeling optimistic?

Wren: Yes. I feel optimistic about society’s general sense about what is important. The work at Centre for Thriving Places has been hugely interesting to me, and important for the world, because one of the things it’s been looking at is what are the universal senses about what makes people happy? With the assumption that people are achieving a base level of income – we can’t throw that out, money is hugely important in that way; people need to achieve a base level of security – but beyond that, happiness is not about money. Once your basic needs are covered, the universal sense about what it feels to be thriving is around feeling mentally and physically healthy, it’s around a really strong sense of social connection and belonging, it’s around the ability to be challenged and to be learning.

If we’re appealing to those kinds of interests in our consumers and in our fellow citizens, I think we have occasion to be hugely optimistic about business’s role in delivering those. If we can’t honestly hold our hands up as an organisation and say that we’re delivering those, or if indeed we can say that we’re actively working to the contrary, I think that’s a real problem and, again, presents a business risk. But we, as a society, I think, have a view towards prioritising those things that are truly important – with the elevation of the climate change agenda with that renewed sense of self and what’s important after Covid, I think marketers are going to be faced with the challenge of: how do we bring those global contexts together in a way that really serves what our customers want and need to see from us now?

Martin: And if you were to give advice to young marketers or businesspeople to think about in their work, what would you say?

Wren: I would say that it’s helpful to know what the old-school thoughts are, but beyond that, form your approaches in the context of this new world. Use technology for good. Use that sense of authenticity to create that connection with your colleagues and your customers and demand the best from the organisation that you’re working for. For me, being a young marketer, those were not the lessons that I heard - they were ‘conform, align’ - and that’s not the kind of approach that will create that sort of breakout and runaway success. Again, if we’re looking for consistent success, you want to be really clear on your fundamentals and then be really responsive to your external environment. If you want to create that sort of virality and break out success, I think it’s those same ideas but elevated and bringing in new creativity. I don’t think the old school way of marketing really fosters a true sense of creativity and connection.

Martin: I think that’s a great way of looking at it. So what’s next for you?

Wren: What’s next for me is really diving in with small and medium sized organisations who are doing big innovative things in the world and are wanting their own sense of articulation of their purpose to drive their own business strategy, to drive how they recruit and build culture and how they deliver impact for their clients. I’ve had twenty years of looking at this from various angles so working with Ben and Jerry, or working with the Patagonias, or working with the entertainment industry trying to establish a sort of sense of sexiness and customer connection there, to working with the leaders in comms or wellbeing economics, or placemaking – there’s lots of these different 21st century ways of doing business that I’ve been fortunate enough to see evolve over the last twenty years that lots of people are only getting a little glimpse of. I’m really looking forward to bringing some of that experience to bear to support those business leaders to strike out and try those new things.

I think we’re in a real innovation space right now, where we’re testing and learning, and testing and learning, and testing and learning in a way that we didn’t necessarily do so much of before and I’m really looking forward to supporting leaders to do that; [supporting] teams to get really organised and energised about why they’re choosing to go into the office instead of staying at home in their pyjamas and how they’re recreating that sense of connection with their customers after people are emerging from their Covid dens; and how we’re aligning all of our future actions towards servicing that big vision. I am so excited about it – I absolutely love it!

Martin: I can tell! It’s great to see that enthusiasm!

Wren: I’m aware that I’m in the more radical Bristol space, but I’m loving that I can bring this radical layer, but overlay it with the old-school stuff – so [asking] how does this actually work? My purpose is championing 21stcentury ways of living and working. So that’s going ‘How do we take what works and bring us into the new world?’

Martin:  Absolutely! Thank you so much for finding the time to talk to me on this cold autumn day here in Bristol and good luck with it all.