Jennifer Sey: Get Comfortable With the Discomfort of 'True Brand Purpose'

If you want a simple, unambiguous, right or wrong answer about “brand purpose” when reading about the views of Jennifer Sey, you might come away discomforted no matter how you view the issue. For Sey, being a lightning rod for thorny conversations is something of a hallmark. Her vocal stance against school closures related to Covid-19 restrictions in 2021 led to her split with Levi Strauss & Co. in February. At the time, Sey was brand president. She was often mentioned as the denim brand’s next CEO. After 23 years with Levi’s, she was done. Most high-profile executives in Sey’s position would take some time off, let the heat die down and find another corporate perch to land on. But both she and companies she’s spoken to have been cautious about making a match. With a potential return to corporate life on hold, Sey has resisted the opposite end of the job spectrum: politics. In a conversation with Adweek, Sey waved off any interest in pursuing elected office. 4 Questions CMOs Should Ask Their Next Agency Partner Despite appearances of an unbound public executive willing to wade into the most painful controversies of the pandemic era, a conversation with Sey defies pigeonholes or easy, calculated categorization of politics across local, national, health policy or the boardroom. That’s not to say she isn’t clear on the subject of brand purpose: She’s just released a new book that doubles as both a C-suite memoir and a critique of how brands express and connect—she might say exploit—with consumers’ values. Separately, she’s also producing a documentary that aims to show the negative impact of pandemic school closings on kids’ mental health and learning. “The book is a memoir, but I don’t think of it as a typical one,” Sey said of Levi’s Unbuttoned. “It’s told through the lens of being a corporate insider and C-suiter and looks at social justice capitalism and the pros and cons of taking these issues on.” The book takes aim at the way brand purpose is practiced by major businesses. It’s a view that’s increasingly shared by marketers, who feel pressure to emphasize performance over purpose—that many marketing leaders, such as ones at McDonald’s, Shake Shack and Mastercard reject the “either/or” stance as a false choice. At some point, I just felt, ‘We need to get back to just selling jeans.' —Jennifer Sey, former chief brand officer, Levi's Still, the pushback against brand purpose is getting more of a hearing than at any time in the past two years. One prominent marketing practitioner directly linking his name to the anti-purpose cause is Thomas Kolster, the founder and creative director at Copenhagen-based Goodvertising Agency. Kolster’s new book, The Hero Trap, preaches the “post-purpose” gospel. His argument that CEOs, by attempting to co-opt values they don’t truly believe in, are ultimately killing their brands. For Sey, brands’ have a problem of selling values instead of their products. “The primary emphasis needs to be on making a great product, marketing that product along with all those benefits and selling it at a fair price,” Sey said. “At the end of the day, that is why people come to you and buy what you have to sell.” That’s not to say that brands shouldn’t take a stand. Sey does not abjure the stance Levi’s took on promoting LGBTQ+ rights when she was there. In her framing, if brands get too tilted toward the values and the culture, then they “squeeze out any bandwidth to actually focus on what it is you really do. I was really feeling that in my last couple of years—outside of all of the conflict I was facing, I was just inundated with employees demanding that we take stands on all sorts of things.” During her last few years at Levi’s, she was spending three-quarters of her time answering political questions. Her attention was heavily focused on deciding whether or not to post about a particular issue on social media. “At some point, I just felt, ‘We need to get back to just selling jeans,’” Sey said. For its part, Levi's responded to Sey's book and her comments about her time at the company. “Much of what Jen Sey has said and published publicly about Levi Strauss & Co., her time with the company and her departure is untrue or grossly misleading," Levi's said in a statement to Adweek. "Our company supported Jen’s personal advocacy on many issues, and our leadership defended her right to speak out about schools reopening on several occasions. However, when Jen went beyond calling for school reopenings and began using her platform to criticize public health guidelines and denounce elected officials and government scientists, it undermined the company’s health and safety policies and created very real questions about her ability to represent the brand and carry out the responsibilities she had been entrusted with as an executive officer of the company.” Sey responded to the above statement: "Levi’s has said repeatedly that they supported my open schools advocacy but not my criticism of public health guidelines and elected officials. But health and government officials kept the schools closed. It is not possible to advocate for open schools without criticizing these officials. What Levi's is saying is contradictory—it makes no sense." Brand purpose at the crossroads Brand purpose can generally be defined as companies expressing concerns in line with consumers’ demands to address the harder edges of doing business. Supporting sustainability and reducing the causes of climate change; combating racism, bigotry and sexism; and protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ populations are generally viewed as universally good things. But companies and executives didn’t come to brand purpose out of a sudden discovery of a collective conscience. It came as a realization that consumers increasingly fixed their politics to their shopping and workplace choices. In 2019, the Business Roundtable reaffirmed its commitment to “stakeholder capitalism,” with 181 leading CEOs from companies such as JP Morgan Chase, Apple, Progressive Insurance, Amazon, American Airlines and Chipotle generally declaring to promote the common good. Of course, the idea of consumers having anything in common at this point in U.S. history makes that vow particularly challenging. To Sey, the promise not only rings hollow—she attempts to make the case consumers might not care. The Nike example The tension over brand purpose that companies are struggling with is found in the disconnect between the reasons consumers cite for purchase intent and actual purchases, according to Sey. She pointed to a 2018 New York Times article that detailed an alleged culture of misogyny within Nike during one of the inflection points of the #MeToo movement. While Nike was responding to the pressure to remake its workplace more inclusive to women by running ad campaigns in support of Women’s History Month, it was receiving outside criticism of its treatment of the star athletes it sponsored, its female executives and the athletes in the Nike Oregon Project. “You had Allison Felix, the Olympic gold medalist, saying when she was negotiating her contract with Nike that they weren't going to pay her while she was pregnant. You had female executives saying they were mistreated and harassed, and athletes were being abused. None of it aligned with the image they were presenting in their ad campaigns. The campaigns were just a pose. The reality was they were treating women terribly. But no one cared. The image they presented was a lie.” Sey said. “You had Mary Cain, the young woman who was a runner in the Nike Oregon Project, who was abused and mistreated and ended up suicidal with a serious eating disorder—and ultimately sued Nike," she continued "Those three things happened in the span of a year and a half. Those are terrible things. They were all in the New York Times. They weren't a secret.” Her point: If consumers really cared about brand purpose, the impact would have shown up in Nike’s sales. “There was no effect on Nike’s revenues,” Sey said. “The brand grew close to 8% that year. To me, that’s evidence that consumers don’t really care. Nike could have focused on treating employees fairly while marketing the products that consumers wanted. It would have been less hypocritical.” Still, Nike may have blunted the negative news coverage that year by running campaigns in support of Women's History Month. That was the same month the brand launched a major effort in support of Colin Kaepernick, "Dream Crazy." How Can We Advertise Our Brands Through Failure? But to Sey, that argument only proves her point about the superficial nature of so many brand purpose efforts. “I’ve seen data that says two-thirds of Americans don't feel comfortable expressing their views publicly, which is pretty astonishing,” Sey said. “To my mind, we have to get back to being able to disagree with each other and debate things and come to some sort of societal agreement about how we're going to move forward even if we disagree. Sey hopes Levi’s Unbuttoned will spark a deeper discussion about honest expressions of brand values within companies. “You’ve got to screw up your courage and say what you think,” she said. “That’s not to say you need to come into the office guns blazing and talk about who you're voting for. It's so important that we all find the will to use our voices and find ways to instill mutual respect for that as brand leaders.”