In this episode of the Greenbook Podcast, host Lenny Murphy speaks with Robert Moran, a market research and public opinion expert, about the evolving concept of the American Dream and its impact on businesses. Robert shares insights from his career in political polling and consulting at Brunswick Group, explaining how the American Dream has shifted from a focus on material wealth to one of self-actualization and independence, especially among younger generations. They explore how these changes affect consumer behavior and marketing strategies, highlighting the importance of authenticity in connecting with modern audiences. The conversation also touches on cultural reflections of these shifts in music and the enduring symbolism of the "open road" in American life.

You can reach out to Robert on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Robert for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, Big Bad Audio.

Transcript

Lenny: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. I am your host, Lenny Murphy. Thank you for taking time out of your day to spend it with us. And as usual, by ‘us,’ I do not mean my multiple personalities; we do have a guest. And, you know, so Bob Moran is our guest, and I’ll get to his bona fides here in a second, but sometimes it just takes me back. And early on in my development as whatever the hell I am, in the research space, there was somebody who was leading the pack, and that was Bob. And I remember a diagram that he had made around the epochs of insights. And I think I probably still have that around somewhere, looking at the evolution of technology and the impact on business. And I was a little jealous, and was like, “Why did you come up with that? That’s really cool. I need to come up with something like that.” [laugh], and we became friends, started playing off each other. And it’s just been fantastic to watch his career, which he’s going to tell you about, and then have him on the podcast. So, Bob, there we go. I’ve given you this grand and glorious opening. Now, tell the audience what they really need to know, other than my geeky fanboy intro.

Robert: So, for the audience, I’m a market research and public opinion research expert. I follow American public opinion very closely, and I do a lot of writing about and observations on evolving American public opinion, among many other things. And then today, we’re going to talk about the evolving American dream, which is something that I’ve been locked onto as a researcher for a very long time. So, I’m excited to talk about it.

Lenny: Well, let’s talk about your experience at Brunswick. So, I didn’t give your titles; you are a partner at Brunswick Group. Maybe give the context on why you focus on this as part of your day job as well.

Robert: Sure, sure. So, I’m a partner at the Brunswick Group. Brunswick Group is a large global management consulting firm. We focus on special situations for corporations, and I am a research-driven consultant. Lenny, you and I talked about, sort of, the evolution of market research. You know, I’m a good example of that, right? So, I’m a person with a research background, but working with a team of consultants to help clients, usually in some kind of critical situation, and using all the skills and tools that we talk about in market research. But I’m not sure that I would be classified nowadays in the market research space as much, but yet that’s the world we’re in. And so, I think it’s a good example, it gives market research people a good example that there are many different paths available to them.

Lenny: Absolutely. Because you went from Edelman to Brunswick, and have just, kind of, moved up the food chain, if you will, from impact. Because as you don’t know, Brunswick, I mean, a lot of your clients are governments.

Robert: Well, large corporations.

Lenny: Large corporations? Okay.

Robert: Large corporations. That’s right. But I did start my career off in political polling, which I think taught me how to work very quickly, but also made me acutely focused on, sort of, how shifts in the way society thinks about things will then end up, down the road, impacting business. And that’s a little what we’re going to talk about today.

Lenny: Yeah. Well, that’s a good segue. So, you had reached out because you had posted on LinkedIn, I think, on this topic. And I thought, you know, as we’re heading into political season, and we’ve—for our listeners, we’re not going to get into specifics of any party-oriented stuff. That’s not the point. It’s politics as a dynamic and as a trend-forcing component. So, Bob, what you wrote was fascinating. Why don’t you talk a little bit about your view, and we can dig in from there.

Robert: Sure. So, the issue or the topic of the American dream has been something that I’ve been following for a very long time in my career. If you go back in time, Chrysler ran a Super Bowl ad that was considered, sort of, jingoistic, maybe a little old-school years and years ago, and it created this very, sort of, bimodal reaction. But some of it referenced the American dream. But in referencing the American dream, it was more referencing the idea of, sort of, the old American dream of physical wealth, security, that kind of stuff, defining it more in terms of resources. And so, years and years ago, I ran some focus groups, just out of sheer curiosity, trying to understand how Americans then were processing the idea of the American dream. And it turns out that even back then, people were already shifting in their idea from the American dream, from it being unitary to being plural and individualized, and from it shifting from a focus on physical resources, like having a car, a house, and things like this, to really self-actualization. And that’s what we’re seeing in the data, more or less, now. There’s a lot of little fun wrinkles in it, but if you fast-forward today, there is still a general view that there is some kind of a thing called the American dream, but people want to define it within a range much more of, like, self-actualization. And I think very importantly for commercial reasons, there’s a frustration that people can’t quite achieve what they consider the American dream, or feeling like it’s out of reach. And I think that’s obviously a challenge in our political system, but also for businesses. And maybe an opportunity. An opportunity as well.

Lenny: So, it’s interesting, last night, my 15-year-old daughter was working on a—she just read the Great Gatsby, and she had to go through a summary of that, and she asked, “Dad, what is the American dream?” She had to define that. And I thought, well, growing up, at the highest level, it’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, life and liberty, that’s pretty easy, but what I’m hearing from you, and what made me even think about that in the context of the Great Gatsby is, that definition of the pursuit of happiness, that is certainly shifting from our generation—we’re of an age growing up in the seventies and eighties, right, that concept to my children. I’ve got an almost 30-year-old daughter. Her definition of what that happiness is, is radically different than mine. And even, you know, the younger kids, as they’re evolving radically different from hers. So, is there something driving this generational shift that is a piece of this, kind of, redefinition of the American dream? And if so, what does that look like?

Robert: Yeah, I think there’s a couple things at play. So, first of all, I think there are several versions of the American dream. The original concept of the American dream was much more like you were thinking: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, right? And the term gets coined in the early-20th century, right around the depression. But I think most people—and I was raised by my grandparents. It’s very interesting. They defined the American dream as the accumulation of physical wealth, and the reduction of fear and concerns about their physical well-being. Like, I will have enough money to get through. I will have a house with a roof over my head, I will have a car in the driveway, and I have enough money for groceries, and life will be okay, right? And hopefully, the kids can do better than me. That was basically the American dream. Now, in that era, we were in an industrial era, and we had three television stations. We had a mass consumer economy that we created—that was engineered by very smart people at the end of World War II. And basically, it broadcast that material idea of the America dream. In a way, we were just so successful at creating so much wealth in the American economy that we, kind of, like, basically broke ourselves into a new prison, right? Like, houses are increasing in square footage. If you compare—Lenny, you and I are roughly the same age—if you compare how we live now to how we lived as little boys in the 1970s, it is light years—

Lenny: Yeah [laugh].

Robert: In terms of physical wealth, technology. Not necessarily better, by the way, but it is light years different.

Lenny: Yes.

Robert: Right? And the amount of wealth that the American economy has thrown off is staggering, right? So, people aren’t necessarily solving for, like, some of those super basic needs anymore. Of course, the world is becoming middle class, which is a bigger issue. But what they’re now trying to solve for is meaning, and the challenge we have with meaning is that a lot of the institutions that helped us engineer a sense of meaning have been on the decline. And so, now people are really trying to sort out what that means. So, we’ve moved from a mass industrial, mass scale, unitary, physical, one America dream to many individualized, long-tail American dreams, chasing that pursuit of happiness that you talked about. Now, I would say that I’m not convinced that actually the pursuit of happiness makes people happy. I actually suspect that what gives people meaning is, sort of, being, sort of, connected with other people and feeling a sense of challenge, and a reason to get up in the morning, but we’ll put that aside for a second. What’s happened, especially with younger people, is they’re less worried about some of the material trappings of what a middle class life looks like. They’re less interested in having families to begin with, but they’re much more interested in having control of their lives. So, it might be more on the liberty side. And so, that’s where it gets interesting. So, for example, I’m sure you’ve had other guests talk about, sort of, younger folks focused on side hustles, you know, the gig economy, being able to—and all of these things are how they can build a life that is not dependent on others, and they can be the most self-actualized they can be. So, that’s roughly the idea of the article I wrote, which is pretty heavy in polling data, which I won’t bog us down in, but that’s the big picture.

Lenny: Our listeners can’t see me nodding along, but you can. And there’s lots of other—even in my own life, as an individual, and as a father, and as a business owner, et cetera, thinking about these trends of looking for purpose, meaning, and splitting the hairs between, you know, oh, look, you know, great house, nice car, blah, blah, blah. But those are means to an end, not the end of themselves. And so, how do we instill this idea of finding purpose, and connection, and value in the lives that we lead overall? And that is a very individualized thing, so radically different than the group identity component. So, we have this generational shift. We also have, kind of, macroeconomic changes that have been happening. Obviously, everything post-2020, even post-great recession, these big dynamic drivers of these changes, the decline in religion as a organizing principle, isolation that came post-2020, it’s a big mishmash of things that seem to be impacting this idea of the American dream, and often seemingly in conflict, potentially, from a kind of group perspective. So, what does that future look like when we’re just—all this stuff is kind of wrapped up there, and there’s no consensus as a country, particularly for the United States, and understanding what those things are and unifying around that?

Robert: So, I think for businesses—so this podcast is for researchers who are largely working in businesses—most people listening to us have a sociology background or are pretty conversant in it. So, there’s a concept in sociology called the inner subjective, which means the things that we kind of agree on, whether we exactly know what they are or not, we kind of agree on. So money, right? It’s paper, it’s worthless, but we all agree it has value, right? And values are all inner subjective. They’re all these things that we agree on. So, if you think about it, if you unpack the American way of life, for example, we would probably all have the inner subjective of freedom of the press, right to a fair trial, trial by jury, freedom of religion, and on and on and on. We would have all these things that we would add into that cabinet that we would call, sort of, the American way of life. I think one of our challenges, then, as marketers and market research people is, in the old days, you could run an ad that could appeal to people’s sense of, sort of, like the American dream as a thing. And we all agreed on that inner subjective. And so, now that makes it much more complicated. I throw in another wrinkle, which is that we also have a large immigrant population in the United States, and we always have. And immigrants, especially Latinos, are defining the American dream somewhat differently, more in the traditional sense of accumulation of wealth and assets. And so, this is interesting, too, is that at the same time, you might have parts of the younger population migrating towards an idea that the American dream is about self-actualization of the individual, and not necessarily about physical wealth. You do have some communities that have immigrated here that have a much more physical definition of the American dream. And that, of course, makes sense, given the context. I think the scarier wrinkle in this—and I allude to it in the article that I wrote for Mensa Bulletin—is that it occurred to me one day, I was walking through Savannah, Georgia, and I saw some graffiti that really stopped me, and I wrote about it in the article. And it says, “An expletive, the system.” So, we don’t want to use the bad words on the air, but it says what everybody is thinking with the F-word. And that got me thinking about the individual that probably wrote that, feeling very frustrated in their life. But also there’s a huge percentage of Americans that feel the same way because they don’t feel like the, “system”—air quotes—is delivering that American dream. And there’s plenty of polling data on that, you know? The decline in perception of the American dream, the feeling that it’s frustrated. And so, that leads me to the fun point I would like to make on all this, which is that a huge part of the article I wrote actually references rap and R&B lyrics, and country lyrics, too, and it turns out that some of the smartest people commenting on the America dream are rappers. And we’ve got lots of quotes from lots of great lyrics. And it’s surprising how many songs in contemporary rap are about versions or thinking about the American dream. But I even go back to poetry in the 1920s citing this, a feeling of the frustrated American dream, for example, for Black Americans in that time period. So, what’s so interesting, and got me thinking about this from a market research standpoint, is there is a lot we can learn in terms of anthropology from the lyrics of contemporary music, especially rap. And also nowadays, country, which has really blossomed and gone in a very different direction than older country. So, I hope people read the article because I think they would find it absolutely fascinating to think along.

Lenny: No, it’s a great article, and we’ll [post that 00:16:19]. Remember about a year ago when, “Rich Men North of Richmond”—Oliver Anthony—when that song just, boom, came out of the blue, and I thought at the time it was amazing to watch, I mean, a guy with his guitar in Virginia, but captured something to that eff the system, right, that frustration of the American dream. And here was a man—and if you—listeners, it’s a great song on many levels. It’s also a very challenging song on many levels, but that’s really not the point. It was one of those perfect capturing the zeitgeist, or at least a piece of the zeitgeist at that moment for a large chunk of the population, and that struggle across the population to find commonality, right, to find something that said, look, what we’re doing isn’t working for whatever reason. It’s a whole other conversation to get into why or why not it’s working and who’s to blame, and it’s almost irrelevant. The point is, folks were frustrated, and this guy just captured that lightning in a bottle. And that’s the important finding, from my standpoint, my perspective, and for marketers as well, right, that we can’t just go on, kind of, Pollyanna, that, you know, a lot of people out there are pretty frustrated for a variety of reasons. And it’s not the job of Coca-Cola to provide meaning to somebody’s life, right, [laugh] but we have to recognize that some folks may struggle with that, and that that affects their purchase behaviors. That’s a tightrope that’s difficult to walk, across the board. So, how do you channel this into recommendations to your clients from that standpoint, this sensitivity of this flux that we are in as a country on finding commonality of experience, of aspiration, and what that means?

Robert: Yeah, I do think the country really struggles with finding what are the things that we have in common and how can we get there. And you’re right. I love, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” It’s great because, sort of, corporate country realized, “Oh, wow, this is what country music used to be, where people actually talked about things that were real in their lives,” which is what rap has basically always been—

Lenny: Right, right.

Robert: Which is kind of cool. So, maybe country is coming back to that.

Lenny: Did you see the rap artist who took that song and redid it?

Robert: No.

Lenny: Oh, there was this whole subgenre of rappers taking that and going with it.

Robert: That’s awesome. But that’s what American country was in the old days. It commented on literally everything, just like rap does. So, I think that it’s interesting because you have, we’ve gone through this phase where corporations have thought about how do they market with a purpose in mind. And there are some companies that just more founder-led, founded more recently that have an obvious purpose and are basically aligned with that, and the business is almost an outgrowth of that, and that makes sense, and that’s truth in marketing, and that’s authentic to them, right? But there are other folks, there are other brands that, they’re just, sort of, trying to layer on some purpose-based marketing, whether it’s true or not. And I think that’s a challenge. I think people can sniff authenticity really well. And you’re talking about younger people earlier. I think they want authenticity, so whatever that is, being authentic about what the actual purpose is. So, I do think you could see the rise of a lot of, sort of, micro-brands that do have purpose, sort of, arc-welded into them or coded into their DNA because they’re small, and they haven’t sold to a larger company or anything like that. So, I could see a future in which larger holding companies and brands are challenged by all of these little, sort of, smaller, purpose-driven brands. And, you know, exactly where I’m going here. So, I think that is a very interesting issue right there. The other question is, you know, will we have, sort of, a rise of localism again, where people want to do, sort of, economic gardening, where they want to reinvest in their hyperlocal, even if it costs a little bit more? I think that may be a very real, may be a very real thing. But in terms of marketing, we also have the issue of then just how do you market knowing that—I mean, look at the world that we have right now. So, we have a lot of consumers very frustrated at increases in prices, inflation, feeling really stretched and having ambitions, but feeling frustrated in those ambitions. And so, how do marketers address that? I think that’s a really interesting question. And I agree with you. I think there’s almost this, sort of, strange sort of world of advertising where we don’t get gritty in terms of who we’re trying to actually get to buy products, and we create these, sort of, gauzy ads that feel good. They might be good to win awards or something, but like, but are they really hitting the target for where people are actually at right now? I’m not sure that’s true, you know? People are frustrated because eggs cost a lot. I will finish with one very basic thing I learned in political polling, which is the American people are not stupid. Like, they’re actually very smart, and if you’re not speaking to their regular life, you’re kind of losing. So.

Lenny: There’s so many places we could go with that and conscious of your time and as well as our listeners, so we’ll save that for another conversation. But you’re also a futurist. So, you said, “All right, I’m going to end with this,” but I’d like you to take it a little bit further. So, put it on your futurist hat. What do you think this looks like from just a macro-dynamic standpoint over the course of the next few years? Just best guess.

Robert: Sure. So, I think the first thing you’re going to see is you’re going to see an increased focus on side gigs, hustles, all that kind of stuff, and an increased focus on independence and building the life that individuals want, even if it might not exactly fit, sort of, the classic consumption pattern. And this is a challenge then, for housing, for insurance, for you name it, for all kinds of different stuff. But if you’re a young person, and your idea of the American dream is to be able to travel, and experience other cultures, and live a life that gives you flexibility, and you’re willing to leave money on the table, and you’re not necessarily interested in settling down, that means that, you know, you’re talking more about, sort of, housing for single people. You’re talking about a more mobile workforce. You’re talking about banking services that have to be more agile for people who are moving money from different side gigs, all that kind of stuff. So, I think that’s one part of where we’re going in the future, is a lot of single people who are not necessarily settling down. They’re looking for self-actualization as opposed to amassing of assets. So, I think that’s a very big space to plan [unintelligible 00:23:38]. I think then you’re also going to see a subgroup of folks that have some similar views on the American dream wanting to amass assets, and have, like, a single family home and everything, but wanting to take a lot more of their life into their own hands. You see this in the simplicity movement, you see people—like, the rise in searching for, like, can I have chickens on my property to get eggs, right? Fresh eggs, and stuff like this. There’s all that stuff right now.

Lenny: Well, that’s what we did, right? I mean, we became homesteaders, so. Yes.

Robert: Exactly. Exactly. And then finally, I think we can’t forget that America is, was, and will be an immigrant country. And so, I do think you still will have a lot of immigrant populations who are coming here from a range of countries in Latin America, Africa, et cetera, who will define the American dream in the traditional sense of amassing of assets, of wealth, and passing it on to the next generation. And so, I think you’re going to see that as, sort of, the third segment of folks, that, the very traditional segment. And that’s why I kind of—I did a little detour in the article and talked about Karol G, who’s a famous Latin singer, and about Latin Americans and their views coming to the United States. And so, you know, Karol G says, you know, “Tomorrow will beautiful.” And that’s part of the American dream, too.

Lenny: It is. Well, and fundamentally, I think maybe the commonality that we could all focus on is the human element, that we all want to have our children’s lives better than our own. Now, that better definition, it’s going to be in flux, and I would argue it always has been, you know, to an extent. So, the era of the media that we live in, it’s more fragmented, it’s easier for microcosms to exist now, but that solidification on, we just want to leave the world a better place than we found it for our loved ones, maybe that’s something that everybody could focus on to kind of filter through what these individual applications may be. So, there’s my uplifting message for the day [laugh].

Robert: I love it. I love it.

Lenny: Bob, this is great. We should have you on more regularly because we don’t touch on these type of things very often. We’ve had Grant McCracken on, we’ve—you. I think it’s important that periodically we just have folks that their job is to pay attention to the culture, pay attention to the world, and help us all, kind of, filter that in because it matters. So, thank you for taking the time, thanks for the great article, and thanks for catching up.

Robert: Thank you.

Lenny: Where can people find you, Bob?

Robert: Well, you can find me on LinkedIn, and I post the article on LinkedIn. The article is also on Mensa’s website, so you can go there and read it. And I’d love to hear what people think.

Lenny: Yeah, I don’t think we said that you’re a card-carrying Mensa member, so the—

Robert: I am.

Lenny: You are. That’s a first. I don’t know. We’ve had smart people, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a Mensa member on before. All right, anything else that you want to pass on to folks?

Robert: Well, I want to close with something that I wrote about in the article real quick, which is that at the end of it, I went back to the game of Life, which reached its, sort of, peak popularity in the 1960s, but people still play today. And it assumed a number of things. It assumed that you had a little car, and that you had the pink peg, and the blue peg, and you drove around—a predetermined path by the way—you accumulated assets, and you ended in a cushy retirement, if you got lucky, if you played the game well. But I think that’s not exactly where people are today. However, the one thing that remains is the idea of the open road. So, life is based on getting in a car with another person and making a life, and the idea of the open road. And so, what’s fascinating is social researchers ask people about the American dream by giving them pictures—like a card sort or a picture sort we do in focus groups—and one of the pictures they immediately locked onto was the open road. And I think that goes to a very strong part of our culture, which is exploration and independence, being able to chart your own course. And so, I do think that may be another place that marketers can focus on: self-determination, being able to get in the car and drive.

Lenny: There you go. Well, you said earlier that the freedom, that’s the core element. All right. Well, Bob, thank you so much. Really appreciate the time. And thank you to our listeners. I want to give a shout-out to Natalie, our producer, to our editor, Big Bad Audio, and to our sponsors. And that’s it for this edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Take care. Bye-bye.