[Podcast] Top Brand Building Mistakes with Jacquelin Lieberman

Learn what NOT to do when it comes to developing your brand. Listen in as we discuss with brand strategist, Jacquelin Lieberman, the most common mistakes brands make as they grow & market their brand. This is a juicy episode, where we discuss the brand purpose, core values, uncovering brand truths, brand management, creating value and so much more. If you want to learn how to create an enduring brand that matters, this episode is for you!

Jacquelin Lieberman is the founder of the brand strategy consultancy, BrandCrudo. She’s honed her no-B.S.-approach to marketing strategy over the years guided by one belief – when you make brands more human, you connect them to more people. Throughout her career, she has developed a narrative-based approach to traditional strategic planning to uncover the brand truth that resonates with audiences. She has worked with many brands, most notably for many of Unilever’s iconic brands, Beech-Nut, General Mills, and most recently with Happy Family Brands and fintech disrupter, the Alternative Investment Exchange. Jacqueline applies both art and science to understanding human insight and interpreting findings in order to unearth the real reason people should care about your brand. For Jacqueline, it’s all about finding a brand’s raw truth and making it matter.

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Show Notes

• BrandCrudo
• Jacqueline’s LinkedIn
• Jacqueline’s Twitter
• Jacqueline’s Instagram

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Hello, folks, and welcome to JUST Branding. Today we have Jacquelin Lieberman with us from New York. She’s the founder and lead strategist of BrandCrudo, which she set up two years ago, and she’s had some amazing success with clients like Subway, Happy Family Organic Baby Food, and Columbia University.

And before that, she was the head of brand strategy at Story Worldwide, and she worked with brands such as Unilever, General Mills, Google, and Lexus. So she’s got a wealth of experience to share with us. Jacqueline, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.

Well, it’s great to have you on. And I think it’s going to be an interesting conversation because we’re going to be talking about stuff that Jacob loves to talk about, which is when stuff goes wrong.

Uh-huh.

So we’re going to. Yeah. So the topic we’ve selected to discuss with you is why most people get brand development wrong.

Um, because it is a tricky, a tricky area, isn’t it, for businesses and organizations? And so I’m really excited to dig into that with you in just a second. But perhaps before we do that, let’s start with some definitions just so that everybody kind of understands the lens through which you look at sort of things through.

So perhaps I could ask you, what would your definition of brand development be? Sure.

Um, if I pull back for a second and just think about branding, to me, the definition of JUST Branding is the exercise of expressing a brand through the lens of the people who are running it and body it. And, you know, what I mean by that is that, you know, the brand is there are the humans behind it. So it’s the founding story, you know, so there’s always a human behind a brand.

And whether the founder is, you know, 100 years ago in that story, or it’s about a startup a year ago, there’s always a reason why it’s there. And there’s a human behind that. And then there’s all the employees, every single employee who actually works there.

I mean, they’re the voice of the brand. So they’re the ones responsible for it. So I think the development of all of that is really just being able to constantly cultivate a brand with care, looking at it through the lens of how are we expressing ourselves to people, and really always kind of be conscious of everything that you say.

People are listening and they’re watching and you just need to be conscious of that. So I think it’s the development of how you express yourself. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I love that. Cultivate with care.

It’s a great line.

Yeah, really good. Really good. All right.

So yeah, obviously, you know, Jacob and I super, super aligned with that, with that type of way of looking at brand. And, you know, when you do look at it that way and you think about the founding story and you think about the voice of the brand through the people and you think about it, the way it shows up in the marketplace, you realize how valuable a brand can be to a business, don’t you? Because you can really, you know, it really is.

You use that word cultivate, like, if you’re not cultivating it, what are you doing with it? You’re doing something, you know, something awful with it, you’re destroying it.

Exactly.

So let’s think about then, and maybe I’ll get you to throw maybe one or two ideas up. In your experience, you know, and I’ve introduced you with a wealth of experience here, what do you think people get wrong? You know, what are the things that you’ve seen in your career over the years where you found this is something that a lot of people are not getting right?

Well, how long is this podcast supposed to be? There’s just so many examples, but all kidding aside, I mean, I think, honestly, the biggest thing that I have seen over and over again, and I mentioned the founding story is that there’s leaders who don’t respect the brand’s history because it doesn’t fit in a neat little box with their current objectives. And it’s not about telling a heritage story all the time.

It’s not about that at all. So like I said, the brand could be 100 years old. It’s not that we’re constantly leading with, oh, this brand’s 100 years old, and this is why it was founded and all that stuff.

But it’s just, we know as strategists that there’s core tenants behind that origin of why it was founded. There was a reason why a product was introduced to the market because somebody thought there was a need and a service to give to people. So there was value behind that.

So all of that is captured somewhere in the brand’s history. And a lot of times, leaders come in and they look at it and they want to reinvigorate the brand and they have all good intentions, but they end up creating a brand out of nowhere, out of thin air, as opposed to just going back to the origin, pulling out the interesting, really cool nuggets and bringing those to light as opposed to saying, let’s just think about who we want to be this year. And that just makes me crazy.

There’s no reason to sit in a conference room in the fall of every year of saying, all right, so let’s do planning for the next year and who are we going to be and what are we going to say? And those are the questions you should not be asking yourself. It shouldn’t be, let’s reinvent ourselves every single year just because it’s a new calendar year.

So I think the founding story and the history, I think, is one of the biggest things that brands tend to ignore because of the leadership that’s there. Because if they weren’t a part of it, they find that it’s not important.

Can I ask you a question? I’m going to push you on this. Jacob wants to ask questions.

We all want to ask questions. I’d love to. I’ve got an answer to this, but I’d love to hear just hear from you.

Why shouldn’t we be doing this? Why shouldn’t every year, like we do with the marketing plan for the next year and our business imperatives or whatever we do, why shouldn’t we be like, oh, let’s rethink our brand purpose and vision, mission and values every year? Why not?

Well, I mean, it’s kind of like saying to yourself, I’m going to change my personality for 2021. I’m just going to randomly be a completely different person than I am now. And I’m going to expect all of my family and friends to still love me and respect me because I’m going to have completely different viewpoints and personality and behavior.

And I expect no one to blink because of that. And that’s what a brand does, you know, essentially.

What a great example. Yeah, because, you know, for me, I was going down in my head, I was thinking, yeah, it’s just confusion, isn’t it? Confusion for customers, confusion for employees, you know, no long-term stability.

We just flip-flop in all over the place. It makes the leadership team seem weak, you know. So there’s a lot of great reasons.

But I love that example of, like, if you just suddenly showed up and you were, like, a completely different person with different viewpoints, how weird would that be? Jacob, you’re going to have weirdness. Jacob.

It kind of rose back to what you were saying about a human. There’s always a human behind the brand. So the relationship there is so key.

I was actually going to see if we could dive deeper in terms of the, I guess, some examples of maybe some experiences that you’ve gone through where they didn’t actually or they were reinventing too frequently or they didn’t respect the brand’s history.

Yeah. Well, I can’t mention the name because it’s still in progress. But let’s say, suffice it to say, it’s a casual serve restaurant chain.

And it’s been around a long time and it’s well known. And there really is a strong origin story. And the leadership and through workshops, this kept coming up as I’m facilitating workshops of kind of, you know, with the leadership team.

And it was a new leadership team because the founder had passed. So the founder very much was not just the founder, but also operationally very important. So that human passed away, new leadership gets shuffled in.

And they wanted to start like it was a brand new day, understandably, so that they wanted to hit the reset button. So there’s no reason why you can’t hit the reset button, but they wanted to literally be something that they were not. And they wanted to, you just can’t forget 50 years of some kind of history, and you can’t forget the human being behind the brand.

Because I always liken it to thinking about, it’s like much like our upbringing as people. It’s like good or bad, it shapes our views and it shapes our behaviors. So whether or not we had a great upbringing or a difficult one, or whatever that is, it makes us the people we are today.

So that to me also is the analogy for the brand. And you can’t just walk away from those things. And again, doesn’t mean a reset button is not needed.

It doesn’t mean that their marketing shouldn’t be refreshed and all of that stuff. But to ignore the elephant in the room literally was, I felt, just kind of not the right call.

Just ignoring their DNA, really.

Completely.

Yeah. And I often find that if you do manage to dig into those, sort of the origin story, as you sort of mentioned it, as you say, it’s not that you’d want to lead with that forever, but it’s rich picking grounds for heritage brands. Because if you can work out, and this is the question I like to kind of go into those conversations with when I’m doing that research, what was broken with the world that made this person put their money and their time and their life on the line to bring this business to birth?

What was bust? What were their drivers? And even if it’s a group of people, what were they trying to do here?

And often if you pair that back enough, you can find kind of quite meaningful concepts which can apply even to today, even if it’s a 100-year-old brand. So I was working with a B2B brand recently and I sat down with the board, which was a family-run B2B business global, but bizarrely, but they were in the UK here. I sat down with the two very elderly founders who were a husband and wife sort of team.

And now the business is turning over millions. And I sat down with them and I had a good two, three hours with them. Well, I didn’t sit down with them in the current environment.

It was Zoom, if you like. And we went through what was broken, what made you start it. And we managed to find three or four buckets of…

Well, afterwards, after I kind of analyzed what they said, I found three or four buckets of very rich insight sort of categories that drove them to begin the business. And then I presented them back to the leadership team of today. And they were like, wow, that is literally what we’re about.

That is amazing. And that’s how you can do it, as you say. But if you level it up conceptually, it doesn’t mean that, you know, you have to go back into the Victorian era and say, you know, this was broken with Victorian England.

But you can find a concept, you know, like, for example, one of the ones in that example was they liked to blaze a trail, right? It was my summary of what they were saying drove them. And what a great thing to them today.

We want to blaze a trail. Well, you know, and so then that’s a motivating force that’s true to the DNA. So have you got any thoughts about, you know, how then we go about solving this problem?

So I’ve thrown one at our listeners. What about you? What sort of processes or methodologies might you go through just to kind of pull those insights out?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of what I do is, I mean, very similar to you guys is definitely facilitate workshops. And really what those are really designed to do is extract information from the people of the brand. So it’s not about us standing in front of the room and saying, you know, let’s talk about how great and smart we are.

It’s about asking the right questions to make sure that they’re answering them in a way and saying, well, tell me more about that. And what do you mean by that? And when you say entrepreneurship is part of your brand DNA, well, tell me a little bit more about that.

And so part of my process is whether I’m facilitating, you know, an in-person workshop or a Zoom meeting or even just one-on-one interviews, a lot of what I do is, you know, I kind of think about it as like a brand excavation, you know, really just kind of unearthing and digging and doing this archaeology dig to just kind of get to what I call the brand truth, you know. So understanding, you know, it might not be pretty, it might not be the truth that everybody wants to bring to life, but that’s our job, right? Is to make it to make it sound a certain way, look a certain way.

And it doesn’t mean, you know, like we said, like it doesn’t mean that the founders face has to be, you know, all over every piece of branding. It just means that if there’s a core strand of DNA that you find that’s interesting and you find that through the interviews with people, whether it’s the founders or you’re reading up about the brand, and there’s usually if the founders are at least not there or not alive, there’s usually always somebody there at the company who has is close enough that they’ve been there a long time that they’ve, you know, embody every piece of the brand and that’s the person you need to get to. And it doesn’t matter what role that person is.

It could be they’re an R&D. It could be that they’re, you know, someone’s, you know, executive assistant somewhere. It doesn’t matter.

You need to kind of get find that person and talk to them and ask them the right questions. I mean, so that’s kind of what I do a lot of.

So what are the right questions?

A lot of them are, why? I usually start with understanding about brand values, like what people think their values are of the brand. So, because that’s when you start to, that’s when you start to weed out the company line versus really what’s happening.

So if I’m asking about, so tell me what the core values of are your brand what they are? And they’ll say, oh, well, quality, definitely quality. Everything that we do revolves around quality.

I’m like, great, you know, every single one of your competitors say that too, right? So why don’t you tell me a little bit more about why exactly quality or trust is part of your DNA? And this is, I have a funny example from my past life working at the agency.

We had Green Giant from General Mills, great brand, you know, and at the time they were thinking about killing off the giant, literally making the giant just kind of be a logo and that’s it. And Betty Crocker used to be a person too back in the day, but now she’s basically just resigned herself to just be a logo and no one talks about Betty Crocker. So they were going to do the same fate for the giant and we ended up having these types of questions.

And one of their values they said were trusted brand. And I said, well, again, I need to call you out on that. So let’s talk about it.

And I ended up hearing a story from now, meanwhile, this was midway through the day from a VP who hadn’t said, I don’t think three words the entire time, but then he ends up coming in dropping the mic. He ends up saying, he’s like, well, we do have these relationships with our farms in Mexico. And really, we’ve had these, they’re generational.

We’ve had these, people think that we just outsourced to Mexico, but we have generational relationships with these families and we know them. And we literally take the seeds from our farms in Minnesota and take them and give them to the Mexican farmers so we make sure that it’s the same seeds that we use and cultivate here, that they’re the same product and they’re grown in the same way in Mexico. I’m like, nobody knows that about you.

That’s an amazing story. Now I can see why trust and care is part of your DNA and why you would think that. So just saying trust doesn’t really mean anything anymore to consumers.

You have to do a lot more of the showing and telling. So that was a really good example of somebody really adding so much context around just this one simple word, but giving me a really clear example to answer my question of like, why? What do you mean by that?

Tell me more. And they ended up saying that and I was like, okay, now he doesn’t have to speak for the rest of the workshop. He’s already earned his place.

I love that, I love those questions and how you’ve explained how you’re really looking for that. I mean, you’ve mentioned this word a few times, truth, which is a big word that I love because you’re right, consumers, they won’t have the wool pulled over their eyes anymore. They want authenticity, they want meaning, they don’t want veneer and fakeness and corporations to say one thing and then do something else.

They’ll vote with their wallets. So, I think it’s absolutely the right approach to take. What do you think, Jacob?

Yeah, I love how you facilitate on the key word you said there was facilitate and you uncovered the truth and you had to ask those questions using why. And it’s a similar process that I go through and asking why, why, why. And the further you go down, the further you excavate, the deeper you go and that’s when you uncover the truth.

So I loved everything you said there. The values, the values that you mentioned. I also find out a great exercise because they always say quality, trust and innovation, but like, what does that actually mean?

What does that mean? And I love how you share how you actually get deeper. So thank you for sharing that.

Oh yeah, of course. It’s true. Quality, trust and innovation are always three.

That’s always in there.

That is so true. Jacob, we should put like together a fake brand strategy deck, right? With standard vision, mission, purpose, statements and three brilliant values.

And just basically say, there you go. We’re offering out for free from JUST Branding for every organization that wants to be a me too. Anyone else, come hire Jacquelin Lieberman or Matt Davies or Jacob Cass.

We could actually go in and say, this is actually you right now. We can predict what you’re gonna say.

Yes. That’s funny.

Cheeky, cheeky. Right, so let’s move it on. Let’s move on, let’s shift gears.

Got anything else that you see that goes wrong? I’m just gonna keep asking, I’m gonna keep asking this question all episode.

Yeah, I mean, so I think the other thing is when there’s too many people involved in I think the care and the cultivation of a brand and its messages, it just cannot be in the hands of a million people, you know, I think that, and I know that there’s huge global brands out there, you know, so of course it’s easy when it’s, you know, a small brand and there’s huge global brands out there, but I think there’s a point where you have to, you know, make sure that you have a tight knit group of brand stewards who are solely responsible for the authentic, you know, authentic, you know, communication of your brand and that team of people. So it doesn’t have to be one person. It could be a team of people.

If you’re a huge brand, they need to be the ones that they’re the filter, you know, they’re the gatekeeper. They’re the ones that talk to the global agencies and brief the global agencies. You know, they’re the ones that are, you know, either writing the briefs and reviewing creative and should never be in the position of seeing something out there and cringing, you know, just because it’s not in your country, you know, and it’s, you see it’s being interpreted someplace else.

So I think that there’s, you know, it goes, it goes wrong when there’s either a lot of people in the mix or they’re, or they have, you know, for a global brand to have every country kind of have their, it’s okay to obviously have your own context and it needs to be localized, but there still needs to be that master brand voice that everybody needs to, you know, follow. And unless there’s somebody watching it, it can go off the rails very, very easily.

Yeah, absolutely. What do you think about the, the, the position that, that I think I’m hearing a few popping up of Chief Branding Officer and what do you think about that? What do you actually think of that?

Look at that. We’re so aligned, Jacob. We’re so aligned.

What do you think about that, Jacqueline? Like as a concept, businesses on their, you know, right at the top on the C-suite have CBO.

I, I, I would be a total, I would be in total support of that because I think, you know, you know, the CMO is the one that’s looking at the communication and how, you know, how the message is being communicated. But, you know, the message is meant to change based off of your marketing and business objectives. So the CMO is focused on making sure that, that that happens, but there still needs to be, you know, whether it doesn’t matter if it’s, you know, the end of 2020 and we’re in the middle of a pandemic and we need to pivot, you know, our marketing strategy and all that stuff, of course, you have to be able to flex to do that.

And that’s, I feel like the CMO, but the CBO would really be the one responsible to making sure that there’s still, you know, the filter for all of that change in communication. You know, it still needs to go through that lens of the brand. And yeah, if you can have that Chief Brand Officer, I feel like that could be a good step in the right direction.

Do you guys agree with that or do you hate the CBO idea?

We agree. We’re from Marty Neumeyer fanboys, so that’s what. Yeah, we are.

So yeah, Marty’s on a massive push with his Level C stuff to get CBOs into boardrooms, you know, and controversially, you know, there’s a lot of discussion. In fact, I was looking online just today, there’s a lot of discussion on, you know, where that should sit because there’s a school of thought that says marketing should report into brand. And obviously the traditional model was that branding was a kind of a tiny little subset within marketing and basically consisted of doing a few logos.

So, you know, I think branding is taking on a whole new momentum, the importance, as you’ve pointed out within this episode of cultivating and nurturing the brand and having that long-term strategic view of the meaning that customers are gonna attach to this organization and the products and the services and the offering and the experiences that come with that. With the long-term nature of that is becoming so important. So yeah, we’re on board.

We’re ready to go with the CBO. So you heard it here last, but yeah, let’s do it. All right.

What do you think about that, Jacob, about too many people getting involved though in the brand and in the brand management?

I was actually, I had a question here too. I wrote down for Jacqueline to how many is actually too many.

I don’t, I couldn’t give you a number, but I mean, I think, so if it’s a global brand, then it should be one person from each country say, rolling into that chief brand officer, as kind of the, I still think that the chief brand officer would then be again, that gatekeeper to making sure that the brand is still presenting itself in an authentic light, but being able to flex globally. So, I would say at least one person from each of those countries that it represents and then if it’s, just say all in one country, then I would say a handful, literally a handful because it’s just almost impossible to be able to have this relationship with the brand and know it inside out and being able to truly get to know it. So, I feel like it’s almost like when you think about your core group of friends, it’s kind of like you have other friends and you have other people you work with, but you have your core group.

And I feel like it’s the same kind of concept.

And the history.

Yeah, exactly. You have a history and you know, you can almost predict what each other’s going to say. I feel like it’s almost the same thing.

Can we actually get into, I know we’re talking about bad examples, but a brand that’s actually doing this very well, managing their brand very well across countries, what brand comes to mind for you?

Well, I don’t know if YETI is global. It could be now, not sure.

The coffee mugs, is that?

Yeah, I just love the YETI brand. They make a mug where you keep your coffee hot or cold. The first thing that they’ve done was they’ve done that in a way that it actually works.

I don’t know why it’s been so hard to have cups that keep things hot and cups that keep things cold and coolers that don’t leak. I don’t understand, apparently, it was very hard. But YETI finally came to solve it.

You don’t have to worry about getting in your car and going to work and spilling coffee all over you because the rim band has shrunk in the dishwasher and now you’re wearing your breakfast. Apparently, that was hard. Now it’s not.

They started with brand efficacy, good old-fashioned efficacy of just getting the right product and getting that right and then what they’ve done is they’ve created a surround sound around their brand of just people who are outdoor enthusiasts, yes, but then they’ve even just they talk about like they embody, they have music, they support music artists, they believe in storytelling and it’s the stories of the people who are using their products. So, it’s not just about like, oh, I need to fly fish and now I can appreciate having one of these mugs. It’s just about saying there’s a lot of people who use our products and we’re going to tell the stories of those people and highlight them in cool ways and they just do a really great job of it and it’s a really good example of like, it’s not a brand or product that you think about every day.

It’s not like you’re getting into your car and that’s an important big purchase. It’s a mug, but they just do what they do and they do it well and they don’t try to be anything that they’re not. They’re not posing to be something that they have no business being.

It reminds me of a smaller scale of Red Bull actually. So Red Bull did align themselves with the action sports and all of that and it just sounds like yeah, they just align themselves so right to their truth, right? So I think it’s a great example.

Another one I was thinking of before when you’re talking about the brand’s history was Dove Soap in terms of where they come from and their essence and their DNA, which hasn’t changed for many, many, many years. And they’re just such like one of the probably the most popular soap brand out there. Because of that, they know who they are, they know who they’re targeting and they can just communicate that so well and nothing’s changed.

So that’s why they’re the most loyal soap brand out there.

So I know, isn’t it amazing?

Yeah, it really is.

Well, I mean, and that’s it. That’s Dove is a great example of, you know, landing on a human insight and pivoting off of that same insight for over a decade, you know, so just because, you know, it’s a new calendar year doesn’t mean that they’re not only they’re not going to be about real beauty and anymore. So it’s, you know, they just are able to pivot off of that year over year and, and it’s, you know, so that that’s the, the chief brand officer, right, that’s that’s the that’s the role of the CBO and the chief marketing officer, their role is to make sure that that same human insight gets re expressed in weird and wonderful and creative ways every single year, and keeping our interest and that’s, you know, that’s what it’s all about.

Yeah, I love that re-expressed, that’s a good term.

No, it really is. I love it. Just on this.

I think the Yeti brand is such a good example of that brands, you know, are not about products anymore. And you mentioned Red Bull, Jacob, you know, you’ve got to really think bigger than I want to flog you a product. You’ve got to think about, you know, what community you’re building, your customer, your tribe, as we often call it, what are they, who are they, and why are we making them stronger?

And how can we bring them in and, as you say, build a network effect of people that love us and really help them with their problems? So I think it’s a great, two great examples there.

I just did an interview recently. And one of my guests, he described a brand as being a set of promises to other people. And when I heard that, I was like, God, I’ve never really heard it in that way.

But it’s so true that a brand is more than a product. It’s more than a service. It’s a set of promises to other people.

So it’s like, keep your promises. It shouldn’t be that hard. But the second that a brand is not living up to their promises, that’s exactly when they start to get called out by savvy consumers because they’re just not living up to what they said that they were going to deliver.

Absolutely. By the way, is that your podcast, Uncooked, that you’re mentioning there? So we should probably give you a little plug for Uncooked, which is a marketing podcast run by Jacqueline.

So check that out, folks. She said to us before we came on, I’ve called it Uncooked because it’s raw and unpolished. And I looked to Jacob and thought, that’s exactly how we roll.

So, so I’m sure we’ll like it, raw and unpolished.

Let’s see if we can get one more in of something that’s broken, and then we’ll sum up towards the end. What else do you think is broken?

I think probably, you know, I think leadership at whether you’re an agency or brand is that, you know, it’s so easy to kind of lose focus on the bigger picture, because we’re so myopically focused on the task at hand. And it’s hard to, when you’re so myopically focused on that task, it’s hard for you to think of yourself and of your brand of saying, am I adding value? You know, is this marketing message actually adding value to people, or am I just in this churn of a marketing engine, just producing stuff?

Because I have a list I need to check, I have a boss who’s breathing down my neck, I need to get this campaign out. Whatever that is. And I think, you know, I think we fall into that trap of being that marketing engine, as opposed to, you know, pulling back regularly, not just once a year, not just twice a year, like every, you know, month, every couple of weeks, every time you’re about to hit send and post something and publish something.

I feel like anybody who’s in charge of doing that should be asking themselves, is this post going to add value to the people that we’re communicating with? And if it’s not, then that means you’re just talking about yourself and it’s going to go unnoticed and it’s going to go fall on deaf ears and all with good reason. So I think, I think you just getting into that, not being in the practice of asking ourselves, you know, does this add value?

I think is probably the other big one.

You define value. We often talk about value, but what does value actually mean for a brand?

I mean, I think to me, it’s always about, again, it’s why does this product or service exist, right? So while there might be a lofty answer to that brand purpose, you know, that sounds really great, but sometimes at the end of the day, there’s some utility to a product. It’s like at the end of the day, Dove just wants to be able to, you know, make people clean and smell good and look good and all of that stuff.

So I think the value is going back to, are you delivering on your brand promise? So if the promise of the product is being delivered, then that’s the box that you check. And then there’s the higher value, right?

Which is like, what do people really value about you as a brand? So there’s the product value that you’re delivering against. And then there’s the brand value.

Like, are you being of service to me? Are you helping me out? Are you making my life easier in some way?

I think value now is even looked at from the lens of service for brands too. It’s like, is your brand being of service to people? When we think about the traditional use of influencers and how it has like a little bit of a stink to it when you think about that word and how it’s been used.

With good reason it had a stink because as soon as the pandemic hit and everybody was housebound, you immediately saw when they had nowhere to go, nothing to talk about, they had no value. So it was a perfect example of getting called out for, you’re literally just getting paid to hold this product and go out to dinner and be seen somewhere. But when they couldn’t do that anymore, it just was so obvious that it’s like, yeah, this is why sometimes that tactic just doesn’t work anymore.

So I think value also means being of service.

I love that. I think as well, you’re absolutely right. If we’re just broadcasting sales messages out all the time, and obviously there’s a place for that.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’d subscribe to basically never doing that. But I just think if that is all you do all day, the problem that we’ve got as consumers is, the latest stats, if I remember recently, were something around one of the most high-end amounts of messages that we see a day.

There was a sort of a range between 6,000 to 10,000 messages that we see as consumers on our phones. Obviously, we’re not going out as much as we used to, but when we do go out on the billboards and everything, but 10,000 a day. This is the problem.

We have absolute clutter of people trying to sell us stuff all the time. We’re sick of it. We really are.

So I think marketeers, they have a problem if they’re here, if they see their job, as you say, part of the engine, just churning stuff out. If they don’t stop, if they don’t think where’s the value in this, then they become part of the problem. And the competitor that thinks strategically, that thinks brand, the competitor is going to overtake them because that competitor is not going to be talking about product all the time.

That competitor is going to be talking about the community that they’re building. You know, the stories of their community, how, you know, to go back to that point about Yeti, you know, to how, you know, how Bob goes out and when he goes hunting or whatever, and he uses his Yeti Cup and, you know, how he has a great outdoorsy life or whatever. And then, you know, Red Bull, and you’ve got pictures and stories of them sponsoring cars, you know, that are winning races and, you know, BMX bikers that are flipping over insane things.

You know, that’s adding value, that’s adding to entertainment or whatever it might be. Yeah, when you have a brand sort of strategy, when marketing reports into brand, if you like, that’s where you get more power, that’s where you get more traction because the marketing team then can actually leverage some of that more rich strategic stuff to help build value, as you put it in the brand, rather than just buy this stuff, buy this stuff, buy this stuff, because it’s so boring.

Amen. Amen. I agree.

I did get a bit excited there, sorry.

Yeah, I saw that. It was very fast.

I was like, yeah, I know.

Well, Jacob, I don’t know if you had anything else to sort of add to that, or if you wanted to raise anything.

No, I want to summarize where we started. So always respect the brand’s history and not have too many people involved and don’t lose focus on the bigger picture. There were like three core topics we really touched on.

So we went really deep on these three, which is great. And I really do appreciate your time and your insights, Jacqueline. Before we wrap up, can you let our listeners know where they could find you?

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, it’s been a pleasure to speak with both of you. And as I said, as a fellow strategist, it’s so much fun.

Geek out.

Yeah, we could geek out on strategy all day long. So people could find me at brandcrudo.com or look me up personally on LinkedIn, Jacquelin Lieberman. And yeah, those are the two main places.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for stopping by. And we’ve thoroughly enjoyed that. As I say, Jacob really likes to talk about when stuff goes wrong.

It’s kind of, I don’t know where it…

I had no idea.

Yeah, we had Christo on the other day and he was like, he basically said that he said to me, and we’re gonna have Christo on and we’re gonna talk to him about, what was it? What did you get us to talk about?

Mistakes, regrets.

So basically anything, so listeners, if you ever hear a positive kind of podcast title, that’s probably come from me. Anything depressing and doom and gloom is probably gonna be Jacob’s.

Pretty sure you coined this one.

Oh, actually I did. I’ve shot myself in the foot there. We’ll move on.

Jacquelin, thanks so much for coming on. It’s been chaotic as usual and it’s been raw and unpolished, but we love it that way. And you know, it’s really great.

So thanks so much. And genuinely those insights and those stories and you’re an inspiration. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much for having me.