28 REAL-LEADERS.COM / SPRING 2022 Sarah Sharif is senior manager at Board of Innovation, a business design and innovation strategy firm that helps the world’s largest organizations navigate fundamental shifts. Align Your Brandwith Your Cause: Shoppers Want You to SpeakUp Your consumer base is crafting an identity rooted in values, ethics, and hard truths. Between the COVID crisis, Black Lives Matter, climate politics, and all the disruption in our communities bubbling to the surface, brands have to become human or fall to the curb, with some even facing cancel culture as their brand is publicly ostracized. Four key questions come to mind: What is your mission? What are your values? Where do you fall in your activism? And lastly, how boldly can you represent and invite new people to your community? Look to teams like Nike’s $40 million financial investment in equity innovation in-house, as well as its choice of very outspoken brand ambassadors. n Below, from left: 93-year-old model Daphne Selfe, 85-year-old model Wang Deshun. Right: 82-year-old model Veruschka von Lehndorff. ETHICAL FASHION The Silver Generation: It’s Not Who it Used to Be Brands are losing tremendous opportunities to connect with aging populations that are heavily untapped, hidden from view, and rarely targeted in the fashion market. Many consumers would love to stick with a brand for their entire lifetimes, but I’m struggling to name one brand which currently achieves this. You may lose your older customer base because their identity and consumer expectations aren’t what they used to be. But consider that older models already grace the pages of your favorite fashion magazines. There’s 82-year-old Russian model Veruschka von Lehndorff, 85-year-old Chinese model Wang Deshun, and 93-year-old British model Daphne Selfe, voted world’s oldest supermodel in 2015. In a new world of identity and radical inclusion, we’re going to see a fresh wave of products and brands dedicated to thinking about customers as humans with changing needs throughout their lifetimes, humans who can wear these brands from preschool to college and during their professional lives, and parenting, through retirement. GETTY IMAGES / ANDREAS RENTZ GETTY IMAGES / AUREL I EN MEUNI ER GETTY IMAGES / STUART C. WI LSON
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