The Grey Man: Why brands need to hear dissenting voices
PRIMAL Storytelling founder and contrarian, Kurt McGuiness, questions the value of the quiet revolution if no-one is being heard.
In the immortal, sage-like words of my old football mate, “opinions are like arseholes: just because you’re an arsehole, it doesn’t mean I need your opinion.”
Now, this might seem like a terrible place to begin an op-ed, but bear with me.
See, as poetic as his words were all those years ago, I think he had it, ahem, arse about face. I’ve recently come to realise that, now more than ever, brands do need a variety of opinions, especially from arseholes.
The realisation came to me while I was having coffee with Mumbrella’s own acting editor, Andrew ‘Banksy’ Banks (who is 100 per cent NOT an arsehole, by the way), when he mentioned that he was struggling to understand how my recent comms work with an iconic supercar brand fits with my widely-touted personal ethos of sustainability and reducing wastage.
It’s a fair question. Certainly anyone who has read my recent LinkedIn homilies (or was one of the six people who attended my Mumbrella360 session back in July), would know that at the end of last year, I left my job of close to 10 years in corporate communications at Volkswagen Group Australia, and subsequently started a virtually-led ‘un-agency’, with a promise of doing things differently and making sustainable practise part of the mission statement and business methodology.
Since launching, we’ve signed several clients within the automotive, transport and tech sectors, and each have had their own focus on sustainability, particularly around electrification. As my LinkedIn posts and profile pic now attest, I have pitched myself as a long-haired, husky hippie of comms and marketing. No surprise then that Banksy didn’t immediately get the correlation between fast cars and zero emissions.
My answer to his question was simple – who better than someone like me to work on a brand like that?
To be fair, that brand has actually won a bunch of Green Star Awards for its manufacturing process and facilities, and is pretty well-placed in terms of sustainable practise and (fast) future mobility, but still, my being with the brand actually puts me in the driver’s seat, rather than watching from the sideline.
To go back to my yobbo mate and his massacring of an already crude saying, I believe my opinion, or at least my point of view, makes me uniquely placed to work with seemingly ‘un-sustainable’ brands – and I would argue that many brands in this space need more people like me to open their mouths and share their beliefs, not less.
In this new, disturbing age of ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘quiet sacking’ (which sounds like something from a Jason Bourne flick) I think what brands actually need is more loud. If this trend of quiet-anything continues, we might all miss out on the opportunity to get better, be better and do better.
I get it. Some brands are just bad for business in Agencyland, save only for power suit-wearing cliches like ‘The Merchants of Death’ from Thank You For Smoking. While I admire any business that prioritises principles over profit, I do wonder whether some would rather spruik their principles, rather than act upon them.
Put it this way: by shunning unpalatable brands or businesses for their perceived crimes against humanity and/or nature, you are guaranteeing one outcome: that you have no chance to effect change with that brand. For agencies that typically market themselves as a hive of creative minds and progressive views, publicly proclaiming they would not do business with certain industries, even on the grounds of ethical principles, actually suggests the opposite.
While I’m sure it must be nice to turn down work (don’t ask me – we’re still very much a start-up), the reality is there will always be another business happy to take on the work who may not have the same convictions or ability to enact positive change that you do.
In my former life as a car company flack, I spent several years in the wake of the global ‘Dieselgate’ scandal pushing industry and government to adopt better fuel standards and support the uptake of electric vehicles; even serving two terms on the board and as deputy chair of the Electric Vehicle Council. In essence, my publicised view was that Australia was being left behind: the then-government was unwilling to change, and unscrupulous fuel companies were short-changing consumers with poxy, third world-quality fuel that damaged our health and cost us a fortune.
Sadly, the response that came from the Government at the time (google some of the choice words from Minister Taylor’s office to see what I mean) was akin to a toddler throwing a tantrum; blocking its ears and refusing to listen.
And we know how that approach turned out for the previous Government.
Surprisingly, the fuel industry, however, was listening. One of the major brands in the space, acutely aware of the decline of fossil fuels and the gaining momentum of a global move away from internal combustion engines, was planning to roll-out a swathe of public electric vehicle charging in Oz, and was interested in sharing ideas to ensure technology compatibility and supporting consumer uptake, even at the short-term cost of its own core business. Needless to say, we jumped at the chance.
By working directly with a brand my company had been critical of, my colleagues and I got a first-look at a national program that would benefit our customers, enabling our product team to further its case to secure future EV stock allocation from our factories in Germany.
I’ll admit, for every story of shared values from across the battle lines there are just as many where brands and their representation just don’t fit. Ask any business with dealings in Russia right now where they sit on the invasion of Ukraine and you’ll no doubt get a similar compassionate, albeit murky, response. It’s rarely a case of black and white when public perception is concerned, no matter how personally we may be committed to an ideal; but one thing remains constant: change nothing, and nothing changes.
Just as agencies and consultants who refuse to work with certain brands miss a chance to reform and improve, so too do brands who don’t listen to their detractors. After all, sometimes the greatest act of patriotism is to question why.
The problem is, with so many voices now deciding to go quiet, who do we listen to if no-one is talking?
Kurt McGuiness is founder of PRIMAL Storytelling
