[Podcast] Disruptive Innovation + Purpose-Driven Branding with David Aaker

David Aaker is the author of over 100 articles and 18 books on branding, business strategy, and marketing that have sold well over one million copies.

Hailed the “Father of Modern Branding”, David is a true authority on branding and we’re incredibly humbled to have him here on JUST Branding.

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In this episode, we focus on two of his recent books…

The first is “Owning Game-Changing Subcategories” which focuses on disruptive innovation & growth in the digital age.

And the second is his latest book, The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding: Signature Programs that Impact & Inspire Both Business and Society.

As a JUST Branding listener, you can grab a free eBook version here.

Tune in to understand how brands can break through with disruptive innovation and the “must-haves” for growth in the digital age.

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Plus, how brands can maintain relevance & connect with future consumers through purpose-driven branding while avoiding green-washing.

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Show Notes

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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, and welcome to JUST Branding. We have David Aaker with us today, very exciting. David Aaker is the author of over 100 articles and 18 books on branding, business strategy, and marketing that have sold well over 1 million copies, which is incredible.

Hailed the father of modern branding, David is a true authority on branding, and we’re incredibly humbled to have him here on JUST Branding. There’s a lot we could discuss with Dave, whether it be his Aaker model, the 20 principles of branding, or creating signature stories. However, today, it’s none of those.

Instead, we’re going to be focused on two of his recent books, one of them that’s not even out yet. So the first is going to be Owning Game-Changing Subcategories, which is focused on disruptive innovation and growth in the digital age. And the second is his upcoming book that I mentioned, The Future of Purpose Driven Branding, which we speak a lot about on this podcast.

It’s about signature programs that impact and inspire both business and society. So it’s a really, really awesome conversation coming up. So somehow we’re going to fit disruptive innovation and brand purpose in one episode.

We’ll see how it goes. So without further ado, please welcome the father of modern branding, David Aaker. Welcome.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Hi, welcome. It’s Matt here. What do you think about that title, the father of modern branding?

You’re good with that?

Are you happy with that?

No, it wasn’t my idea. And it’s, yeah, I don’t need to have it. So, but anyway, it is what it is.

Phil Cotler, Phil Cotler, I think, started that. And so pretty much I never, one of my rules is don’t ever contradict Phil Cotler. Just go with the flow.

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Brilliant. Well, I’m curious, like, how did you get into writing a book on growth in the digital age?

Well, actually, there’s two stimulants. The first one, the first impetus was I did a study in Japan on beer brands in Japan. And I found that over a 35-year period, there was almost no change in market share.

All these new products and all these promotions and all this advertising, it just didn’t make any difference. I mean, Cairn was 60% market share for 35 years, plus or minus 1%. It was staggering.

And Asahi was around 10%. And then, in 1985, Asahi came out with SuperDry. And they created a 10-point market share change in a year and a half.

It was the most extraordinary thing ever. I mean, they had a different tasting product, and they went after the young, the cool, and the Western. And, you know, Caron and relied on the classic strategy.

You get to have the user. And that was older male. And so anyway, about eight years later, they passed Caron in market share.

And really extraordinary. And so I started looking at other categories, you know, yogurt, water, computers, software. And again and again, what you see is that when there’s a spurt of sales, there’s a perturbation that’s always because something has transformed the market.

And I call it create a new subcategory because, you know, the Blue Ocean Book and others, they always talk about, it has to be a new category. But it turns out that’s pretty rare, but new subcategories is not rare. So that was kind of the impetus.

And so I started writing the book and as I got into it, I realized this is really a book about disruptive innovation. And all these great authors and books on disruptive innovation never mentioned Branding.

Could we just define how you see a subcategory? What exactly is a subcategory for our listeners?

Subcategories defined by what I call must haves. So somebody has come up with an innovation that a reasonable segment in the marketplace believes that it’s a must have. They don’t buy anything else, or at least they’ll go out of the way or pay more to buy this vehicle that has a must have.

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So that’s what defines a new subcategory. If you’ve developed a must have, if you develop something that really creates a strong preference, that then defines a new subcategory. So light beer, Asahi Light, define a new category.

And anyway, that’s how you define it. So it starts with having, and it doesn’t have to be a product innovation. In the case of Asahi Dry Beer, the product was probably not as important.

As their thing, this is the beer for young people, for Western people, for cool people. And it’s not for your father or your grandfather. And so that could be equally important or it could be the only must have.

So anyway, that’s how I define a subcategory.

Well, let’s get into these must haves. How do you actually own a subcategory? How do you have a breakthrough to become one of these?

Well, that’s a really good question. And I have some chapters on the book on how you find subcategories. And the general answer is there’s no formula and there’s no one path.

You know, there’s at least a dozen paths and they divide it into two categories. One is you sort of start with your offering and your relationship to customers. And you say, how can I add something that’s going to be so important that it will be a must have?

We’re not talking about marginal innovation here. We’re talking about transformational innovation or at least substantial innovation. So, again, it can be product oriented, it can be hardware oriented, but it can also be service oriented.

It can also be brand personality oriented. But it means that, you know, I’m comfortable with Patagonia because they share my value. And so I just feel better in a Patagonia store.

And that would be, they can create there for a subcategory. So the other source of must haves is the marketplace. So you look at the customer experience and you examine it.

And, you know, Matt, you’ve done this dozens of times, I know it. And you find out source spots where the customer is frustrated. It’s not a good experience.

And if you can correct that, if there’s some way uncomfortable with you or your product, then you try to correct that and that can lead to must haves. So that’s sort of the marketplace driven source.

So you said those four, we’ve got covered marketplace.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You come back to the fact that disruptive innovation in all these books and articles by, you know, Christians and really great writers, the Blue Ocean book.

But they don’t mention branding at all. And so the first role of the first branding job is to become the exemplar of the subcategory, the one that the brand that represents the subcategory. And so a side drive here is represents that super drive here subcategory.

And the second thing you have to do is position the subcategory. And the reality is people are a little uncomfortable with that because it seems like you’re building the marketplace that others will enjoy, other competitors. And people are just uncomfortable.

And they’re also uncomfortable about not touting the brand’s benefits. And because that seems to be such a that’s part of the brief, right? So why would you instead try to build a category?

And so it’s a little bit different job. You have to maybe become the the subcategory thought leader, or maybe you create a personality that the subcategories attached to. But you need to position the whole subcategory.

You got to look at it that this is competition is different. You’re not competing against other competitors. You’re not trying to make your brand prefer.

You’re trying to make other competitors not even relevant. So your brand is the most relevant or the only relevant brand. So it’s a relevant competition, not a preference competition.

It’s not my brand is better than your brand. It’s my subcategory is better than your subcategory.

Yeah. So David, do you advocate the idea that you, I mean, you mentioned the marketplace and you mentioned looking and digging in your offering, but do you, in both of those, it seems to me that what you’re saying is, you have a very sharp idea of the customer or the buyer, and then you try and, or you look for innovation, you look for ideas to create huge value to transform and own that subcategory so that you are really relevant. Is that a fair way of putting it?

We put the customer at the heart of what our thinking is about.

That’s right, but it’s not so much the customer, because when you transform the subcategory, create a new subcategory, you might attract different customers that weren’t, you know, weren’t ready to buy the old stuff, but the new stuff breaks down their barriers, and so now they will be a customer. So it’s not so much, you’re not trying to make your existing customers happier. You’re trying to create a new binary use experience.

You’re creating a different world. And so, again, of course, it’s a shade of gray thing, but you’re not in the preference game. It’s not my brand’s better than your brand.

So you’re not focusing on the customer to try to improve his experience, creating a new experience. So this isn’t something you do every day for every brand. And this incremental innovation is a role to play, to stay relevant mostly.

So this is a step above that.

So let’s say you do own a subcategory. If we can use Asahi as an example, they found it. Now they’re owning it.

How do you actually keep it that way? With so many competitors coming in, how do you still own it?

Well, let me go on to these other two pillars of disruptive innovation. The third branding role is to scale, to scale really fast. We used to teach in our MBA classes the idea that you start out by pricing and then something new high to recover your marketing cost.

But that doesn’t work. You’ve got to really scale fast. You’ve got to be like Amazon was.

You’ve got to disregard profits. You’ve got to find investment. You’ve got to lose money.

But you’ve just got to build your customer base really fast. Especially in the digital age, especially in the high tech age, you can’t go slow. And that’s a branding job.

You’ve got to create this customer base. You’ve got to over invest. And that’s all about branding.

And the fourth job is you have to build barriers. And so that gets to your question, Jacob, you need to build barriers to others. And one barrier, of course, comes out of your positioning.

If you have a really strong position of the new subcategory that’s driven by your brand, that’s a huge barrier that anybody else can only be a me too. The second thing is you have a whole big batch of loyal customers. That’s a huge barrier because the best customers are taken.

But there’s other ways you can have continuous innovation like Prius, for example, owned their subcategory for 12 years with virtually no competition. The most extraordinary thing, they sold 12 million cars or something, no competition at all. But one of the ways they did that was to innovate.

So every two years they’d have something new and so they didn’t stand still. And people would zero in, we want to get into this, we want to be relevant for this new subcategory. And by the time they did, it was moved on.

And there’s also a branded innovation, like Uniqlo has these branded things like Heat Tech, for example. These are garments that will keep you warm because they stay warm. The cloth does.

And they invented that and they branded it. And you go to Uniqlo because that’s the only place you can get it. And so a branded innovation can be an important part of barriers.

Thank you for explaining all of that. Matt, did you have any other questions before we cross over?

Well, I guess it’s just kind of a thought on how do businesses get comfortable? You mentioned people feel uncomfortable in certain parts of this, and I work out there in Consolencyland, and it’s very rare that you find people or clients that are willing to go outside of the norm, to go outside of their comfort zones. Some of them know that they’re sitting in a sea of sameness, and they understand they’re in a red ocean, and they know that to stand out and to be successful, they have to step out of that, but the reality of doing that is quite difficult for people.

So I just wondered if you had any thoughts or tips on how do you know it’s the right thing to do, and how do you persuade people? Because often you’re stepping into completely new territory, and businesses predominantly get scared about that. So any tips, any thoughts on how you persuade someone that now is a good time to do this?

No, it’s really tough. And being innovative and creative is tough. And it’s also a conditional on the timing.

Steve Jobs, one of his greatest skills, maybe his only skill was timing. He knew when to come out with a product. And almost always he came out with a big successful product.

Like two years after, somebody had failed on the same thing. So he didn’t think of the idea. He wasn’t a pioneer, but he made it work.

So there’s so many examples of people that got products that thought that was going to be the new wave. And it didn’t turn out to be, or it took so long. It took 20 years, so it didn’t have much impact for a long time.

So it’s hard. I mean, you have to do a lot of analysis. You’ve got to accept some risks.

But I think that in general, people spend too little of their risk capital on big risks. They’re much more comfortable with incremental innovation. So if you have an organization that has a lot of businesses, all these businesses will have incremental innovation that’s going to pay off for sure.

It’s something you want to do and that soaks up all the money. But you’ve got to do some moon shots. You’ve got to try because the payoff is so big.

If you have a chance and you turn your back on it, you’re going to regret it.

Yeah. I also think, would you agree? I mean, I find it’s a leadership mindset and that bravery to get through, because it’s not easy.

I just imagine stepping in front of some of my clients and saying, we’re going to overspend deliberately to scale fast. They’ll just be saying, the finance people will just be like, well, when are we going to see return? What’s going on here?

I had a conversation this morning actually with a university faculty approached me, and they said, look, we’re struggling to recruit students because we sit in this band in the UK. Basically, all our courses are the same as eight different universities in the UK. We’re all offering exactly the same thing.

The only difference that we can come up with is the fact that we are located in a different place. Is that our thing? But we’re all not satisfied enough.

I said to the lady today, I said, you need radical innovation to stand out. If you’ve got a leadership team that are behind that, I said, what’s their appetite? If you’ve got a leadership team ready for that, I think we could do something really special here.

What does the university course of the future look like? She got super excited and hopefully that will pay off. But it seems to me the mindset of the leadership team is so crucial.

Are they looking to be brave? Are they looking to step forward? Because if you’ve got that, then you can start really working with them in these areas.

I don’t know if you’ve shared that similar experience, David, in some of your work. Yeah.

The CEO makes a huge difference. I encourage you to look at Berkeley Haas. They’ve created a whole new subcategory of schools.

They’ve stepped up to very distinct from Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, and Chicago. They develop four principles that they operate the school by. It’s just a phenomenal success.

Take a look at Berkeley.

I certainly will now.

I worked with someone at Berkeley Haas, an innovation consultant who came out of there.

Oh, I see.

David, did you have any other things you would like to add from that book before we jump ship?

No, I’m good.

The next topic, the future of purpose-driven branding, which is your book coming out in October. That’s correct, right? The future of purpose-driven branding, let’s get into that.

What is purpose-driven branding?

Well, it starts with the fact that employees want to have a professional life that they’re proud of, that they feel rewarding, and increasing sales and profits just doesn’t cut it anymore. That’s especially true of the younger employees. They won’t even go to work for companies that have that attitude.

Then a lot of customers are more comfortable with brands that have shared their values. Even if only 10 percent of the customers feel that way, that’s a difference between success and failure. Then even investors are coming around, and I don’t know, a huge percentage of the assets under management are influenced by what people do to solve society problems.

That’s one thing. The second thing, you start about purpose. What is purpose?

Steve Jobs had a great purpose, building insanely great products. That’s really expiring and aspirational, but it’s still at the bottom core, it’s all about sales and profits. That’s just not good enough anymore.

What I say is that companies really have to have a purpose that allows or encourages programs that address society challenges. The fact is these challenges are huge and visible and really almost existential, and it turns out that companies have something to offer. They got resources, they got know-how, they got agility, and accumulatively, they can do a huge amount.

Really, it’s amazing what they are doing already, but they’re nowhere near reaching their potential. But my take is that it’s just not enough to have a company that has grants and volunteers and energy goals. That’s enough.

You really have to do something that’s more tangible and more visible. So what I argue is what you need is signature programs. These are branded programs that really address some problem that people understand.

It’s real, it feels real, it taps an emotional element. They do that with a program that has credibility, that has impact, that actually delivers, it makes a difference, and then they build a brand for that program. A brand that guides it, a brand that inspires, a brand that communicates because you got to communicate and so on.

And the fourth thing, you get a brand that enhances the business in some way. So that’s the first thing. And the second thing is that if you have a social program, no matter how good it is, if it’s sitting out there as an orphan, it’ll be at risk.

And if people just say, this is sort of a dead weight, we’re spending $50 million at a really good cause, we feel good about it, but we can’t afford it anymore. We have to cut it back. So what you have to do is integrate it into the business strategy.

There was an article in The Wall Street Journal, I’m writing up a blog about it. How about Hellman’s Mayonnaise, which came out with a program to cut food waste. They run some ads on that program, and some finance guy was quoted in The Wall Street Journal saying, they need to stick to the fundamentals of business.

They shouldn’t be spending time on food waste. Well, what a misconception. This is their business.

This is such a part of it. This is a 100-year-old brand. That’s been talking about taste for a century.

You’re telling me that they could get some energy out of anything they could say about mayonnaise. They have this program, Make Taste Not Waste. They ran a Super Bowl ad, and then he showed some linebacker whose name coincidentally was Mayo.

It really was. He would in this ad tackle people that were just about to throw away food. One of them was a grandmotherly woman and he just slammed her.

That thing was one of the top five ads in the Super Bowl, and it got suddenly four billion views. I mean, not only that ad, but the campaign around the waste food got four billion views. Let’s think about that for a minute.

What if you spend that same money talking about how tasty Hellman’s mayonnaise is? Would anybody watch it at all? Would it make any difference to anybody?

But you see what this brand is. It gives the brand a lot of energy. I mean, four billion views, that’s a lot of energy, and it elevates their image.

I mean, this is a brand that’s really trying to do something about food waste, which is a critical problem in the midst of all these people that are hungry.

I have no idea why, but the thought of somebody rugby tackling an old woman just, I don’t know why, it just makes me feel very happy. It’s just such a strange…

Yeah, it’s really a… It took a big risk to do that, to put that… I mean, this is Hellman’s mayonnaise.

This is grandmother’s product. I mean, this is what your grandmothers do. And he just smashed it.

One thing that you said, David, though, I just wanted to sort of highlight, just because I think I believe very powerfully in it. And that is, you get it. I don’t know if you’ve…

There’s a lot of kind of critics out there of purpose as a concept. Hardcore marketers like Mark Ritson and Brian Sharp tell us that people don’t buy because of the purpose of a brand. And they go all the purchasing factors and they back it up with a load of research.

However, my counter to that is always, well, not at the surface level, we don’t buy for purpose. But if you are trying to rally your team and excite and inspire your team and recruit top talent and retain top talent, all the points that you said about making sure that you have a relevance behind what you’re doing that’s beyond profit. If you’re trying to do that, you really need to articulate a clear purpose.

And then the, so that’s the first point. And the second point is, you try and do anything in business, anything at all without a clear purpose. And I think you struggle because particularly if you’re an international brand, you’ve got to rally multiple teams.

You’ve got to have purpose. So actually customers do experience purpose. They might not buy specifically or put themselves down on a survey to say, I bought Coca-Cola because of Coca-Cola’s purpose.

Actually, they do say that, but they don’t do it. I mean, most of them don’t do it. But again, it doesn’t take, you don’t have to have most of them doing it.

If you have 10% doing it, that’s huge.

That’s enough. Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah.

But so I thought that was a real key point that you sort of mentioned the internal side of this, particularly to retain talent, particularly for millennials and below in terms of age, is so important. Because you could work anywhere for a lot of organizations now. The power has shifted to the employee.

So you’ve got to give more, and everyone can work for high wages. Well, a lot of people have that blessing. So how do you retain that in a particular certain industries?

That’s where purpose becomes so important in my view, in order to succeed. So I see you nodding. So I think we’re aligned on that.

And I think that was just, I just wanted to highlight that from your answer. I think it’s so crucial.

I also believe that it’s so important to integrate these programs that are driven by the purpose into the business model. And now part of the way of doing that is through the employees and their ability to recruit and retain. But it also has to do with market energy and market image.

I mean, people don’t understand the value of energy. I mean, the brand energy is so important. I mean, you can measure that as well.

How would you measure it?

Well, you can do with some experimentation is the best way, but you can also do it with longitudinal analysis. But anyway, it goes back to the innovation, this disruptive innovation stuff. If we’re trying to do is to make us the only relevant brand or more relevant than we used to be.

And that’s where energy comes in. I mean, if you have a brand that’s got so much energy, that’s the only thing you think of when it comes to mayonnaise. You’re at a big disadvantage.

And if you’d lack that energy, yeah, same-o, same-o. It’s boring, it’s your grandmother’s product and so on. But if it’s top of mind, it’s something you think about, you’ve actually shared with others this ad, you have energy and therefore relevance.

Relevance, actually, I define relevance as the visibility and credibility. And so Hellman’s, of course, already has credibility, but they, like anything 100 years old, they need energy. And you don’t get it, you don’t get it outside of these social programs.

Can I talk to you about those programs, those signature programs, just for a minute? You sort of mentioned brands should have a few of these that are interlocking and that they should kind of continue on. How do you see those sort of working on a practical level?

Can you talk us through the process of how you would advise brands to look at these social programs, to know which ones to choose? How do we make decisions to really go for those things?

Well, that’s a really good question. A lot of these programs came from somebody in the organization having an epiphany. They had an interaction with a homeless or they famously, Bill Gates, somebody said, did you know that people are dying from a disease that we can fix?

And it just took them off. A hundred billion dollar journey. But that’s how it started.

So there’s some spark somewhere in the organization. And it all starts with a purpose. Because if you don’t have a purpose that accepts or encourages these programs, it’s not going to go anywhere.

But if you have a purpose and they say, we need a program to fulfill this purpose, where are we going to get it? And this little spark, what you would ideally like is a program that can use your resources or know-how and a program that has enough overlap and feels like a fit so that it can be integrated into your program, into your business model well. And people don’t feel contrived at selling or whatever.

But sometimes, you know, it’s pretty hard to do that. I mean, if you make suppositories or you make, you know, some really boring product, it’s hard to do that. So another way is just to get passionate about what this program is all about and to make a commitment that’s long-term and to put a lot of energy into the fundraising events.

And in those events, your name is always on top and it’s always associated with the program. And so like Thrivement is a financial services company that’s always had an arm in making people do better. They’ve got a program called Be Generous or Generous Investing or something.

And the idea is you give part of your wealth away. But they started about, I don’t know, 15, 17 years ago to be a habitat of humanity. And they’ve got all their clients and employees, you know, have contributed eight or nine million hours of volunteering to build homes in Africa and elsewhere.

And they’ve all done local fundraising for Habitat. They’re the biggest supporter of Habitat. And Habitat’s got a hundred major supporters.

And 20 in the legacy category, that’s pretty big time, but Thrivement is on top. So they give them, I don’t know, 20, 30 million a year and all this volunteering hours, all these events, and they make their financial services. They had nothing to do with homes or construction, but they’ve got a passion.

And Habitat started off with a kind of a church background.

That’s kind of how they started, and that’s how Thrivement started as well. So they share some values.

Greenwashing is a topic that comes up when you talk about purpose. So how do you avoid greenwashing, I guess?

That’s really a good question. So the whole point of, not the whole point, but any role of a social program should be to support a business. So therefore, greenwashing says you’re only in this to support the business.

So you have to walk a fine line. You really have to show your passion and commitment. That’s one way to show it’s not greenwashing.

If it was just greenwashing, you probably wouldn’t be in it for 20 years. You probably wouldn’t be committing all these resources, and you probably wouldn’t be so visible about it. So that’s one way.

Another is to become really a student of this social need and be involved as an intellectual leader, a thought leader, as well as simply somebody that’s applying its know-how from business. And the closer it comes, the fit is really good. So if you have mayonnaise talking about food waste, that’s a pretty good fit.

So then there is less of a problem.

Can I come in there? I think just from some recent projects I’ve been working on, I think what I find is if you rally the leadership team around an authentic purpose, what I would then do, and it’s similar to what you’re saying here, David, is it’s all very good. We can put a veneer out and we can say whatever we want.

But the proof is in the pudding, as we say here in the UK, right? It’s like, OK, so how do we prove to not only ourselves, to our teams and colleagues underneath us, to our supply chain, to our partners, but also to our customers, how do you prove that that’s true, right? So this is a fun workshop exercise that you can do.

Prove it’s true, right? So we come up with a purpose statement. Everyone says, yes, that’s brilliant.

We whack that on the wall and say, OK, prove it, right? So what are we doing right now? So there might be some stuff that goes up on the wall.

Next step is, OK, what could we do? And that is where I find you get a rich kind of array of ideas, particularly from leadership teams, where they are connecting potential activities, signature programs, as you’ve turned them, to the purpose. So if we’re really trying to create a better tomorrow or do whatever the purpose statement is, then we can really start leaning into that and connect it.

And I think for me, that’s the logical connection. You can’t just greenwash something. We’re doing it because it links to our purpose.

That’s the reason. And if we understand that and we can communicate that powerfully, then it isn’t just a veneer. It’s true.

And I think that’s crucial.

You typically start from your business and your strategy and your current image as an organization, and then you say what would fit in here. But if that doesn’t get you anywhere, first of all, one of the problems is that, I was with the Board of Insurance Company for a long time. We looked for this for 12 years and never found it because all the programs we found were relevant to a small, they were really programs that had a box around them.

They affected very few people and they were of interest to very few people. We could never find one that was expansive enough. So, of course you would prefer something that’s closely related to your business and is broad enough to be meaningful to society and to your customer base and your employee base, but that’s not always going to happen.

And if it doesn’t, you can take Thrive and say, let’s do Habitat. We’re already involved. A lot of our customers are doing it anyway.

Let’s build on that.

You mentioned in your book there’s five branding must-dos and the blurb I read. I’m curious to what they are.

As you both know, there’s 50 branding knobs you can turn. And so I sort of looked, sat back and said, what are the ones that are not so well known and so forth? And so I identified five.

One is just to have a purpose that allows or encourages social programs for starters. And I think a lot of people have a purpose they wrote 10 years ago, they’ve forgotten about it, and it’s really business focused. And also I use purpose and mission interchangeably.

The second was to use stories. And as you alluded to, I wrote a book on creating signature stories. And I’m a big believer that you need stories to communicate because they work and facts and descriptions don’t.

The third thing is to develop brand communities. And so those are a group of people that share an interest or a nativity or something. And like Thrivent has a brand community around Habitat for Humanity.

It’s unbelievable, they got 1.4 million people involved. And they got all these customers that are forming groups to do these projects. And actually, not all of them are having that for humanity.

They got, you can do a project to raise money for whatever you’re interested in or to volunteer for whatever you’re interested in. But by far, the biggest one is Habitat for Humanity. And then I have what’s, then I said, you consider scaling.

You know, I know some terrific nonprofits that have this great idea. They’re very successful. And 20 years later, they’re very successful in the same little footprint as they were 20 years ago.

So they’ve, the impact is pretty modest. It’s very localized. And, you know, one example is this company, this nonprofit that started only seven or eight years ago to deliver showers to the homeless.

Two years ago, they converted their whole mission to, instead of doing that, to sort of encourage and support and train others to do it around the world. And there’s 80 or 100 now around the world. And the impact they’ve had versus what they were doing themselves is just incredible.

And the finally one is, I said, get a Silver Bullet brand. And that’s a brand that’s a brand, an energizer, differentiator or source of credibility. You know, if you ask yourself, what’s special about your program?

And they start describing something that doesn’t have a brand, there’s probably an opportunity to put one on. And this shower company came up with the, they branded a work style. If you can imagine that, they called it radical hospitality.

And that means you treat your clients as if they were a friend or a colleague and not as somebody that’s homeless. And so radical hospitality, gosh, it just means so much, it does so much, it communicates so much. And they just use it so well.

And there’s a lot of companies or nonprofits or programs within companies that have a hidden potential brand.

Yeah, that’s genius. I love that. Thank you for sharing those examples.

Matt, did you have any other questions?

No, not really. I think we’ve covered an awful lot. I think it’s been an absolutely fantastic discussion.

And David, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for all the books you’ve written over the years. Looking forward to reading your next one when it comes out.

And I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be. I guess kind of sort of a closing kind of question that we like to ask is, you know, where do people find out about you? You know, and, you know, when where’s the new book going to be released?

How can people get access to it? Any thoughts like that?

Anyway, here’s the cover of it.

Oh, it looks lovely.

Yeah, there it goes. Yeah. Yeah, I had a lot of fun helping to create this cover.

It’s fun working with graphic people. Gosh, they’re so they’re so fun to work with.

I disagree. Working with Jacob’s a nightmare. So that’s the book.

Great. Where do people connect with you? Find out about you.

Do you have a website? Are you on social media? Or do we just wait for the book to come out?

I blog regularly and I think it’s davidakar.com where you can go to theprofit.com and my Akron branding blogs are there. So yeah, I think davidakar.com gets you there also. And so you see my blogs and if you can just put my name to Amazon or any other Barnes and Noble or something and my books will come up.

At least some of them.

Awesome. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom and all your books as Matt said. Thank you so much again.

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