Rupen, CMO of Dole Sunshine Company, talks about a world in which we stop considering increasing the profits of the shareholders above all else and start considering the overall global benefits to the environment, to human rights, to business decisions. He insists that while profit should not be the end all be all of business, sustainability should not encompass just environmental factors and does not need to come at the expense of profit.
Dole has produced some pretty remarkable advertising in the last few years. Click here to see their Malnutrition Facts campaign.
If you are curious about how to shift your business towards being truly purposeful in that it will do better for the planet and the people on it, this is the conversation for you. Learn more about Dole’s mission here.
To listen to this conversation on your preferred streaming platform, click here.
Transcript
Rupen: This is the decade that matters. History will look back at all of us and saying, what is it that you were doing when the world was burning?
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler, and this is Scratch Bringing You Marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone. My guest today is Rupen Desai, global chief marketing Officer at the Dole Sunshine Company. Rupen has been the global CMO of Doles since 2019. He got his start and what a start it was at Mullen Lowe where I spent some time as well in the world of ipg. He started as a trainee in 1995 and left 20 years later as a regional VP for Asia Pacific. Rupen was named the shortlist of the W FFA Global Marketer of the Year for 2021, and those results should be out by the time we released this podcast. So really a really interesting conversation with Rupen. I really enjoyed it. We talk about a bunch of different things. The drum that he beats the hardest out there in the industry is all around purpose. And so we hear his take on what purpose should mean to modern marketers and brands. And the biggest thing within that for me is that it's not just about purpose in marketing, it's purpose in your business and how marketing can help deliver that purpose in your business. So he talks about how the purpose of Dole has helped to lead to some of their breakthrough work, but also changes in their business model and his remit as cmo. Not just being about creating ads, but actually figuring out how purpose can drive profit. You'll also hear his take on why he thinks we in the marketing world, are living in our version of the Truman Show and why a certain style of pants had a big impact on his career. Please enjoy my conversation with Rupen Desai. Hey Rupen, thanks so much for joining me. How are you doing today?
Rupen: Thank you, Eric for having me. It's a beautiful day in Singapore and a day closer to the weekend. So <laugh>.
Eric: There you go. Yeah, you're a little bit closer than I am, but that will be nice. So I'm really excited about this conversation. We've gotten to know each other a little bit over the last few months and I think I've been watching what you've been putting out there both from Dole, but then also your point of view. Some of the interviews that you've given, of course, all of the profiling around being named to the shortlist for the WFA Global Marketer of the Year in 2021. Congrats on being nominated for that. So I'm excited to get into this. I know we're going to talk a lot about purpose, but what I love about what you say, and I'm a big believer in as well, is it's not purpose in advertising, it's purpose in your business that comes out through the marketing that you do. So I'm imagining that will be the meat of our conversation. But before we get there, let's start with just understanding a little bit about you and your perspective as a marketer. So Rupen, what is a brand that you are currently obsessed with right now and it can't be your own?
Rupen: So I discovered this amazing shoe company called Solo, which is out of Nashville in Tennessee, United States. And they have this gorgeous label that they put on every product, which they term as the sustainability label, which is a ripoff of the nutrition label. And they list down the impact they have on people, the impact they have on the planet behind every shoe they make. Okay, obviously it's a big cop, it's a climate neutral certified. It is only available in Nashville. But when I see brands like this, when I see businesses like this, when I see them taking the impact of people, planet, and prosperity, I get excited because my first thing is to write an email to my team saying, how do we get inspired from what Solo is doing? I mean, I haven't tried the shoes yet, but I mean just spending time on the brand has made me want to order two of them.
Eric: Yeah, it's interesting because when I ask people that question sometimes it's hard to differentiate between what's a brand they're obsessed with and what's a product they're obsessed with. So you think of some of the answers that you might hear frequently like an Apple or a Netflix or a bmw. And so yeah, the brand plays into the product experience and vice versa. But actually you not having experienced the product at all, your answer is pure in it's just a brand. What they're doing as a brand you're obsessed with most of the names you just spoke about, the Apple, the Nike, the BMWs.
Rupen: It's very unlike it's, it's so unlikely that most people have had deep experiences with all of them. We all form associations, we fall meaning, and that is at the end of the day what a brand is. I mean, product experience is just a part, an important part, but just a part of that is that entire thing of associations the entire
Eric: So Ruben, what are you most curious about right now in your role as C M O, as you look across the industry, just everything that's going on in the world of marketing and business, what's one thing that you're most curious about?
Rupert: So I mean the label on my LinkedIn says I want to build businesses and brands that my conscience can live with. And sometimes I think the marketing industry almost behaves like it's been on the Truman Show. I dunno if you remember the Jim Carey movie where Jim Carey existed, but the world around it was created in a certain way and somewhere Milton Friedman, when he wrote the Fridman Doctrine of the entire Purpose of a business is to create profit for the shareholder in a weird way, as created a Truman show for the businesses that as it exists today, I'm extremely curious about actually trying to write the next chapter of Escape from the Truman Show where we stop just measuring, sell faster, cheaper more without actually taking into consideration the cost at which it's made the impact. It'll have the impact when people throw away the plastic or all of that. And I think somewhere there are new business models, new companies of regenerative thinking that currently I spend a lot of time at work and outside work trying to learn more and do more on.
Eric: And how do you think that changes? Because of course there is this growing trend of people voting with their wallets and saying, Hey, and there's tons of stats out there, I wish I could remember them off the top of my head. Maybe of X percent of people will pay more for a brand that stands for something they care about. So there's the shifting consumer expectations and the demand side that will always pull supply in that direction. And then there's some businesses that are just taking the initiative like the shoe company out of Nashville you're trying to do to a certain extent with Dole. Is it that and it just kind of plays itself out or is there anything else that you see happening or that you think should be happening to shut down this Truman show and rewrite the new normal for purpose and profit?
Rupen: I don't think there is going to be any one silver moment or lightning or a bolt of suddenness that is going to change everything. I think it'll have to be a confluence of various different things. Most businesses report into shareholders, most shareholders tend to be large financial conversation, a large financial corporations. Most businesses work for consumers and most businesses will have leadership teams. But somewhere there has been a systemic creation of shareholder which needs to move to a larger stakeholder view. And I also want to dispel this myth, that purpose and profit work and to each other, against each other, which is wrong. We talk about sustainability as if it is some eco term, but I think sustainability at its core is about building businesses that are sustainable for the shareholder, building businesses that are sustainable for people who work to create your products. It is to make things sustainable for the communities they operate in. It is to make it sustainable for the consumers they live in as well as the planet we operate on. So I think this short handing the word sustainability to just almost has made it feel like purpose or purposeful companies or companies that promise stakeholder prosperity, which is a much wider way of what the business tends to serve, comes at the cost of profit. Absolutely true, untrue. And people couldn't be barking up the, I mean the wrong tree.
Eric: Yeah, and I'm lucky enough to do this podcast and be able to chat week in, week out with people that have such a broad and deep perspective on what's going on in the industry. And for me, kind of piecing it together, talking to you some of the other people that I've interviewed recently, and I don't know the sequence of when these episodes are going to be released, but of course Dean Aragon of Shell who introduced us originally, and I know, well Raja Rajamannar rom MasterCard who I just interviewed yesterday, Jim Tangle, who was last week. It does seem like there's a bit of a ground swell from the leaders of our industry that are talking more about this, that are pointing to more examples of it happening. So it does, I totally agree with what you said. It's not like a light switch moment that it's this way today and then that way tomorrow It's more of a sliding scale and change happens gradually, not all at once. But anecdotally for me at least triangulating some of these conversations I'm having with CMOs or some of the people that are at the top of our marketing world, it does seem like it's getting talked about more and getting pushed forward faster.
Rupen: And that is our role. So when you start with using the word leaders, it is eventually our responsibility to lead. And lead doesn't just necessarily stop at your teams. I mean lead will need to start and end at the genuine conversations all of us need to have. So we'll be failing our daughters, Eric and I have two gorgeous daughters who thankfully look like their mother. If the only conversation I had during my time at work stopped at creating more wealth for my shareholder at the cost of people who made the products, people who helped sell the products, the communities we live in and the planet. And this isn't some work part of me, this is a very pragmatic part of me and everything, every piece of data coming out of COP 26, every piece of data we are reading is, this is the decade that matters. History will look back at all of us and saying, what is it that you were doing when the world was burning? Burning, when the plastics were increasing, when the poor were getting poorer, where the hungry were getting in more in number. And at that point in time, I want to be able to stand in front of my daughters who will be the ones asking me the question and saying, I tried to change the systemic Truman show that we seem to be, have caught up in still trying to follow the Milton Friedman era of shareholder capitalism at the cost of everything else. I'm trying.
Eric: Well, that's the best any of us can do. So I know I'm kind of going off script already, but I think we, let's just dive into that for a minute. So like I said at the beginning, I think the thing that I always think about is brand purpose gets talked about a lot within this tiny corner of the world, marketers that really no real people actually care about. They care about buying a product or a service that solves a job that they need done in their life. And so what you talk about, what Dean talk about, talks about what a lot of people are talking about is how purpose links with profit. And at the end of the day, if it's something that you are doing because you want people to perceive your brand differently versus something that's actually going to line up with your bottom line and how you grow that, then that's not the right way to approach it. So it's not that it's easy, but it's easier to work brand purpose into your advertising and do things that talk the talk of this conversation. But how do you at Dole, and I know a bit about your role there, you're not just the ad guy, you're very integrated with how that business is evolving and the business model and everything that you want to do. So how do you make sure that the purpose of Dole ties to the profits of Dole and takes this broader approach about the impacts it has and it's not just focused on shareholder wealth creation? How do you do that?
Rupen: So you are absolutely right. I think purpose gets talked about a lot in the marketing corner. And I dunno, eight or nine times out of 10 lends itself into some beautiful advertising campaign that all of us, some of us judge in the south of France and we feel good about. And in my opinion, it's probably the worst thing we could do to this amazing word called purpose. And I actually want to change the word as well. I actually want to take purpose and make it purposeful because as of noun, as an objective, it starts defining some advertising PR campaign, but as a word, it starts defining what companies can do on their journey as they become more purposeful. And I think most companies have a business model. I make some chemicals, I mix them, I put them in a plastic bottle, I put a sticker label on top of it, I ship it from here to there and then I advertise it saying it's going to make your hair look gorgeous or clean it or cleanse it.
And obviously I shouldn't be talking on the subject of air, but let's under, let's imagine if I understand what I'm talking about and you are in the shampoo business, unless we are able to look at each and every part of that entire business model, evaluate the impact we are having on people and the planet, there is not much that is going to change in us becoming a purposeful business. Now you see what I founded do. I was lucky enough because the company doesn't make much. Mother Earth grows some amazing stuff, which is purposeful by itself. I mean fruits, the nutrition they serve the diversity they gave, the resilience they give to bodies is purposeful itself. So I started finding a product where I could literally eat my purpose. And yet in a business like that, when you start looking at the entire chain of business, we were cutting fruit and putting it into plastic, single use, fossil based plastic.
There were certain products where we said, we know the sugar being added or this carbon footprint, which is at a unimaginable number or we are wasting one third of the fruit. We grow in a world which wastes one third of the food we grow. And in a world where an equal number of people grow hungry, so it is incumbent that when you found a purposeful product to begin with, you make sure that the entire business model chain starts becoming purposeful one after the other. I mean the long and the short of it is purposeful is what purposeful does. Purposeful isn't a nice two minute commercial and something that wins an award. While the company continues to have a detrimental effect on people, their health communities, their wellbeing, or the planet we live in.
And we are not a look on the other side, which is of profit. None of us are NGOs. We are all in the business with one of our many responsibilities to make money for the shareholder. And therefore, if a business wants to be purposeful, my suggestion is to look at the triangulation of people, planet, and prosperity. Most businesses tend to operate in a way where one gets prioritized at the cost of the other. And in finding ways where people, planet and prosperity, which are all quite interdependent in themselves, all thrive together, whether the action is small, whether it's large, that's how companies can begin their journey to be far more purposeful than they were yesterday. And if we do this on a daily basis we will write the new doctrine and find the courage to actually put the Friedman one to rest as it should be.
Eric: Hey everyone, I wanted to interrupt this episode real quick to talk about some of the research that we are now doing as rival in partnership with the attest. And I wanted to see if any of you listening out there could maybe contribute to it. So what we're doing is we are looking at, it's probably going to be on a quarterly basis, a few of the big trends that we're seeing driving the hyper growth of challenger brands. We're going to dig into those trends, do some of our primary research with attest, some secondary research, and we also want to interview marketers from challenger brands that are exhibiting and leveraging these trends and opportunities. So the ones that we're looking at for our Q2 report right now, we have one that's all about how challenger brands are able to appear bigger than they are, how they buy media, how they come across to the consumer, how they kind of start to establish that credibility and trust with mainstream consumers.
So that's, we have one that's around communities and how challenger brands are able to build communities around their brand. And then lastly, we're looking at one that we're calling the Great Crunch, and it's about how this post pandemic world is coming into this crunch period with the current and pandemic world that we've known for the last couple years. How are brands adapting to that? How should they be adapting to that? So if you are someone who is or knows a brand that we should be looking at to research these trends, or honestly just an interesting challenge, a brand, I'd love to hear from you and start to work it into some of the research that we're doing. So again, please let me know and reach out if you've got any suggestions around this research that we're doing with the test. Thanks so much.
So for maybe entrepreneurs listening who are building their business from scratch like we are with Rival, it's easier to set that foundation from the very beginning. So we're registering as a B Corp, we're donating 1% of our revenue to environmental nonprofits, et cetera, et cetera, right? Because there's no infrastructure or culture or p and l to change. We can just build it the way that we want it. And then for people who are in the C-suite, it's not easy, but you have a voice, you can affect things. For the people that are maybe more in the middle, mid-level marketer someone who feels like they can't just walk into the CEO and say, Hey, I want to change how we do business, but they care about this and they want to try to push things in the right direction. What's some of the advice that you have for them of how they can start these conversations, educate the people around them and start making progress even if they can't change it in a significant way right away?
Rupen: So I think one should start by never underestimating how more powerful you are than the CEO of the company. Okay? And as you grow up the ladder, I mean I hate that word ladder, but as you reach positions of influence, you also realize that probably the CEO's job is the most difficult job in trying to meet so many varying degrees of expectations. And if you start from there where you have far more power because you are shaping the next product, you are shaping the next campaign, you are shaping a project, your level of influence on a project will be far more than the CEO's influence on the 30,000 things and the 30,000 balls they need to constantly move around on a day-to-day basis. So whether you are in the middle of the organization, you have some amount of influence on what you are doing. And the ability to look at is what I'm doing going to leave a positive, neutral, or a negative impact to people, their health, their wellbeing, their economic reality. The planet is something you yourself can start on, which is exactly what you are doing. And look, I don't want to make this sound simpler than it is, but at the end of the day, like you said, a cleaner slate is easier to start with.
Existing slate is difficult to start with, but the question isn't should we start or not? The question is actually we need to and how can I start making a small difference? I mean, a B Corp is equally as difficult as a startup as it is as a large organization.
Eric: Just got to get started getting started, just got to start making progress. I agree with that. So Rupen curious, looking back on your career you know, spent a long time in the agency world, including 20 years at what is now Mullen, Lowe, my alma mater. But I'm curious if you look back at that and maybe with a bit of a lens on the conversation that we were just having, what are the things that have had the biggest impact on you as a person, as a professional that kind of give you this purpose that you have now in your role and in your career? Let be curious to just kind of break that down. What are a few things that have been really mattered most to getting you to where you are?
Rupen: I spent two decades at Linta, Lin, Lin Lin, and I think the recent altar is Mulin Lo. And you and I both spent time there and one of the things the big clients that has been consistent for them has been Unilever. So even though I was on the agency side, the impact of the Unilever living sustainable plants, when Paul Poman announced it about 12 or 13 years ago when he started this journey of business with a purpose, when he started this journey of we live as a business to live behind a sustainable world as had a huge impact, a huge impact on what I do and why I do what I do today.
Things that mattered to me along my career was probably I think a pair of denim. And I'll tell you more about it and moments of oxygen. So I grew up becoming an engineer. So I'm an electrical engineer and my wife still calls somebody from outside if something needs to be fixed at home. So that I was absolutely, I am absolutely shit with it. And then after doing my engineering, I decided to get an mba. And at MBA on campus you're allowed two jobs and if you have to choose between the two jobs so that the next colleague in line gets his or her move and so on and so forth. So on day one, the first job that was offered to me was from a company called Arthur Anderson, which is Accenture now. And they were offering me two times the money, which the company in the afternoon, which was Linta, came to Arthur.
But the difference was everybody that came to interview me at Lin Tess was wearing denim to the interview. And the only question when they ask you at the end of the interview saying, do you have any questions? And my only question was, can you wear jeans to work every day? Because the people from Arthur Anderson were all properly tie prop suit the works, okay? And I know that I put on this jacket just because I was doing this with you, otherwise you'd find me in a pair of shirts or a pair of jeans. But I think that entire mindset that I could wear jeans to work, I could be liberated, I could be creative, I could be innovative, I had to find solutions is why I joined advertising. I mean, today's young, today's youth are far more aware of what they want to do, why they want to do this.
But at my age, at my time, the only reason I chose this career was that I could wear jeans to work. And most of my career, if I look back, has been defined. I define it as moments of oxygen. There are people, situations, bosses, work you do that either give you oxygen or take away oxygen from you. And in trying to navigate different situations, different jobs, different jobs in different countries, different bosses I came to the conclusion that my moments were, my moment of oxygen is when I best change a business to become one that a conscience lives with better. And I did that for Unilever as an agency, and I do that now with Dole as the cmo. So I mean, it's a very accidental marketer thing. So if I sound like I know what I'm talking about, I I'm absolutely no clue. But it comes from having worn jeans all my life and having chosen my moments of oxygen through my life.
Eric: Those are great stories. So Rupen, let's talk a little bit more about the day-to-day, week to week for you as CMO of Dole. I'd love to get a bit of an understanding and share with the audience what does a day in the life look like for you and your role and what are some of the things that you're really focused on delivering right now around this philosophy that you have? How do you actually bring that to life and how you run your team, how you make decisions about investment? Take us into that world for a minute.
Rupen: So look, all our lives have changed dramatically in the last two years. I mean, most of our life is now lived across a screen and mine usually starts at 6:00 AM with two young children. And if you think of the term, organize chaos and take away the word organize, I mean that's usually the start of my morning. There's lots of cuddles kids in the bed and it's usually a six o'clock wake up all time to at eight o'clock I get to find my team in LA the evening before. I tend to follow the long and the short of it in the way I spend my time. And while Peter Field and his partner wrote the long and the short of it in terms of marketing investment between the long term brand equity and short, short-term sales activation, my constant way to try and define my day is to try and spend 50% of the time on trying to define the big strategic moves that we aren't doing today that we should be doing tomorrow.
And I spend 50% of my time on the now campaign, the Christmas campaign, the new fruit ball work. We need to do the media, we need to buy the conversations that the teams want to share new work with me and so on and so forth. I look at it, the reality is there are days I fail miserably and it's 90 10 on the end of short term. And then there are days I succeed and I manage 50/50. So trick I've found is I sit on a Sunday and mark out two to three hours a week in my diary, which I call strategy deck. Now the reality is I haven't written a deck in a long time and this is a code word that my team knows that this is time for me to think and time for me to balance the long versus the short. That one tends to get caught up in on a day-to-day basis. But like I said, you take the word organized chaos, remove organized by the time it's evening. I'm trying to recatch my team back in la. So 10:00 PM my time is usually 6:00 AM or I'm trying to have conversations with you in London or our agencies in Europe or our teams in Europe, and then eventually find my way to bed with the hope that tomorrow morning they're going to give me 30 more minutes to sleep and come only at six 30 and not at six.
Eric: The tactic of blocking time for that strategy deck, or I call it downtime, it's know I started doing it a few years ago and it's probably one of the most helpful things in terms of my productivity because another way of saying short term, long term, although it's not quite the same thing, but it's the way that I think about it is urgent versus important. And what's urgent will always take priority If you give it, people will put time in your calendar, you'll think that you need to go do this, but what gets prioritized gets done, and what's in your calendar gets prioritized. At least if you're like me, that just kind of follows what it says. And so putting that in ahead of time, it sounds like a really small thing and it can be hard to stay disciplined with and you don't always get there, at least I don't, if I have the time blocked, sometimes I do get pulled into something that's urgent, but like you said, you do your best.
And taking a step back, like you do on Sundays, I do on Monday mornings of, okay, what does my week look like? What are the things that I need to accomplish? Making sure that you have that broader zoomed out perspective and then prioritizing your time against what you're urgent, but also what's important. I think if you polled a hundred CMOs or people that are very successful at what they do, probably all of them would have their version of that. So I think that is a great suggestion and thing to draw out that everybody can learn from and apply to what they do. So Ruen Curious, the title of this podcast is Scratch. And the reason for that is we're all about challenger marketing and we believe that any business can think, act, and grow like a challenger with the right mindset and model. And what that comes down to fundamentally is there's all these frameworks.
We have one, a lot of other people have written about, well, what makes a challenger brand? What allows them to grow faster than the incumbents they challenge. But fundamentally for me, it comes down to this idea of challengers are purpose-built for the world of today. They take full advantage of the cultural landscape, the competitive landscape, the technological landscape, the talent landscape. And that doesn't mean if you are a new business then you only know the world of today. And that's why often startups are challengers and can grow faster, but I think any business if they can take that from scratch approach has the opportunity to drive similar levels of growth. So the question I'm always interested in asking to the extent that it's possible to answer is if you had to, in your role right now, if you were able to create that clean slate that we were talking about, wipe the pieces off the board and rebuild them, are there things that you would do differently and what would those be?
Rupen: It's a beautiful question, Eric, and there are days all of us wish we could actually have that and live that for real. And as I look as a company that sells access to good nutrition, I see the systemic creation of the world of unhealthy and get scared. I mean, if you just pause and think about it, unhealthy food has become far more, I mean, you drive a highway in the US you see totem pole after tour pole, after totem pole of unhealthy food, unhealthy food has become far more affordable. So it costs you $15 for a quinoa salad, but you can buy unhealthy food and feed a family of five for $5. Unhealthy food has become far more acceptable. Our children are growing up thinking french fries, oily, soggy, deep fried french fries are a treat, sugary confections are a treat. And when you just take a step back for a company that actually where we can literally eat our purpose, it's a scary systemic creation of a world where elderly food is far more affordable, far more acceptable, far more accessible. And this has a huge impact on our kids and the future generation. I mean the food industry will end up becoming the largest contributor to the health industry if we continue this way. So if I had a magic wound or an erasor or a duster, depending on which part of the world you come from, and I could wipe that slate, where I would start would be the entire thing of eating healthy as a huge and direct implication for your wellbeing, your physical wellbeing, your mental wellbeing, the amount of years you live, what you can do in the later years and beyond. Now coming back to your question in terms of rewriting things as brands, and I think, look, we've separately chatted about your company even before it started. I'm a big believer that you have cracked something that the world needs. It is something that you are good at, you and the partners that you have it is something that will benefit the world. So you have kind of cracked the icky guy, I mean at the end, I mean icky guy. So because the old systemic ways of doing things are not getting us the same results, unless you are big, you are monolithic, you have millions and gazillion dollars to spend. So I'm sure clients will be lining up your door asking for help.
Eric: And for me, having spent a long time working with big brands in the agency world and having spent a long time being in startups, I kind of see where those two worlds meet. How startups and businesses that are built for scratch think about things differently than those that were built for the but are trying to evolve to the future. And that's essentially what we're trying to frame up here and what we do. So I hope that we've cracked it. I think that we might be onto something, but on the inside, like you said, organized chaos without the organized part of it. But we'll see now we just need time and discipline to be able to deliver on the promises that we're making. So Rupen, we are almost up on time. Is there anything we haven't talked about today that you really wanted to share?
Rupen: No, I have, but I'm going to take the chance to repeat it. I think businesses need to move out of the Truman Show, which has a very singular view of success, and it is incumbent upon all of us' leaders to make that change. So when the CEO of BlackRock writes an annual letter talking about stakeholder capitalism, it makes MyDay at the same time when an activist takes on Unilever linking purpose to their back performance, which probably isn't the reason it takes away oxygen from MyDay. And in that there is a moment for each and every one of us as a leader, which is to redefine the true of crazy consumer capitalist world that only judges success by how much money did I make for my shareholder today? Which doesn't mean I won't make money for my shareholder, it just means I will do that in addition to prosperity for the people that work for it, the people that made the product, the communities we serve, their health, their wellbeing, and the planet will.
Eric: So that is the most important thing and certainly the biggest macro takeaway from this conversation for me, what is the micro action that people should do differently after listening to this conversation?
Rupen: Don't spend a single moment more either with a human being, a person, a partner, a boss, a job that takes away more oxygen than it gives you because there may be a million reasons to justify staying there. Security, salary, what will I find? Each of those fears are unfounded. So I'm always here if anybody wants to reach out and talk to me when they find that they are living a life which is taking away more oxygen than it's giving them.
Eric: Well, this conversation has certainly given me some oxygen, even if I'm not wearing jeans, although I guess sweatpants is now the jeans of the post covid world. So I'm rocking those, that's for sure. Rupen, on that note, thank you so much for joining us, and if people do want to get in touch with you or learn more about what you're up to everything that we talked about today, what's the best way to do that?
Rupen: Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I respond to everybody that does. I have this crazy urge to answer all emails and as long as I find the ask genuine, I'll always respond. Yeah, yeah, if you're selling some stuff, don't do that unless I need that stuff.
Eric: All right, Rupen, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate you taking the time, and I'm excited to watch everything that you're going to do this year with Dole.
Rupen: Thank you for having me.
Eric:Take care. Have a great day. Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us, check out we are rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me at eric@wearerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it, and please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
