Jay Curley: "We aspire to be a social justice company that happens to sell ice cream"

[Music] my name is Jay curly I'm a senior global marketing manager at Ben & Jerry's and so I lead the US consumer marketing team and the marketing side of the global activism and advocacy work that we do what that really means though is I'm about 1/3 traditional ice cream marketer one-third more like a digital storyteller like a media company and then one-third like an activist manager China yes run issue advocacy campaigns how's the general experience been with um brands on brand has been fantastic it's been it's been a lot of fun I've learned a ton and it's been just in this amazing space so it's been a fantastic day personally I think Ben & Jerry's is one of the only companies that kind of practices about the creatures walks to talk when it comes to advocacy and activism in terms of making real change why do you think that is well I think you know at Ben & Jerry's we really we aspire to be a social justice company that happens to make ice cream and again that's the aspiration doesn't mean we always live up to it and we've been doing it for almost 40 years now and so we have honestly the confidence and the experience to be a little bit more bold in the kind of courage to live our values and to speak up about our values is baked into our culture you know that said it's exciting because we're no longer one of the few companies that are doing are really speaking up and using their voice for good and more and more we see more and more businesses joining and using that opportunity and that that's what we want to see we don't want to be alone we don't want to be the one of the few right we really want more businesses to join us and to you know use their voice and their business operations to kind of create change in the world I think he is it will be almost imperative a brand to have some kind of place yeah I mean I think I think more and more it it already is I think if you're going to be more than a commodity you need to build relationship with your customers based on you know authentic connections and people want to know who you are and what you stand for and that's more than making like nice socks or good detergent it needs to be about who are the people behind the company what do they care about and you know one of the best ways for a company to do that it's just where those values on their sleeves and and work every day to you know see those values come to life in the world I think some companies yeah a lot of companies are afraid and it's because especially bigger companies they're concerned around alienating people they're risk-averse because they have a lot to risk and it's smart for people to be cautious but at the same time you know people need to kind of step out and do it do it for the right reasons like we've seen over the years where people fumble where they're likely trying to make good earnest efforts and that may discourage even more people from trying but I my personal opinion is that if you're coming from an authentic place people will forgive your stumbles when you're pandering or you're doing it as a marketing campaign then that's where you get called out well I mean I think in general in the world right now the biggest issue that we face in Europe in the States in the developed world really focuses around social equity and you know these issues around income inequality racial justice in America they're so fundamental and they're so seeped into our institutions that it's it's hard to unravel them and they're just built right into our culture of psyche very few people sit around and want to be racist or very few people want to sit around and exclude other people from prosperity but so much of it is just its inertia within within our institutions and I think the more that we can expose people of that and the more we can work on unraveling the those bits of around systemic racism in America around inequality globally we can really make this role a lot better for everyone and that's exciting that's exciting to work on and it's really hard but anything worthwhile doing is really hard so it's worth diving into you