May 24, 2020

Jamie Gordon: Chief Disruption Officer* at The Mighty Shed: on the role of social scientists in business and the ways empathy can serve both business and humanity

42 minutes

Jamie Gordon is a social scientist and consultant whose body of work includes a couple of decades worth of insights and strategies that have been put into action by a global community of brands, corporations and the agencies that serve them. With a B.A. in Anthropology and a M.A. in Applied Sociology both from the University of Central Florida, Jamie has extensively implemented ethnography in the marketing industry as a brand and innovation strategist reaching out to clients through human and cultural insights, storytelling and futuring. Among the many clients she worked with are: The Coca Cola Company, Powerade, Cambell’s Soup, Heineken, Unilever, Ford, Google and EBay. Jamie considers turning insights and strategic implications into empathetic narratives that motivate behavior change to be her main mission.

Jamie takes us through her journey of becoming a cultural strategist working for the biggest corporate names – a path, she says, that her younger self would not have imagined. Yet she is loving every bit of it and is sharing with us her enthusiasm for the job she does in which ethnography is her main tool to make a difference. How did Jamie move from research to innovation? A social scientist has the rare ability to become a practitioner of many tools and marketing can be the place where we can actually change the world in many ways, says Jamie. She shares examples of how has she managed to bring humanity into business and what methods she relies on to get her insights to have a real impact. We talk about the power of storytelling and the potential of anthropology.

*at the time of this recording, Jamie was a freelance strategist. In February 2020 she joined the amazing team at The Mighty Shed.

Mentioned in Podcast:

EPIC, https://www.epicpeople.org/

Consumer culture theory, https://www.facebook.com/groups/213134458706536/

AC Nielsen, https://www.nielsen.com/be/en/

The Soulful Project, https://thesoulfullproject.com

Social Media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandsherpa/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebrandsherpa?lang=en

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