[Podcast] Brand Strategy Frameworks with Sarah Robb

What are the strategies propelling the world’s top 181 brands to the pinnacle of global success?

In this enlightening episode, we delve into the comprehensive research conducted by our esteemed guest, Sarah Robb.

She has meticulously analyzed 181 leading global brands, uncovering the strategic nuances that drive their market dominance.

Plus, we explore her revolutionary “Unselfish Framework,” a tool designed to empower brand builders.

This framework demystifies the complex questions of brand development and provides a structured approach to finding the answers.

If you’re seeking clarity in branding and wish to cut through the BS, this episode is must-listen!

Tune in for a deep dive into the art and science of brand building, with a focus on brand strategy frameworks, guided by the expertise of Sarah Robb!

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**Limited Time Offer**

Sarah has generously offered our listeners 10% off her Brand Strategy Academy, a clear, practical online course that breaks through the jargon and equips you with the process and tools you need to develop world-class brand strategies.

Visit the link above and enter code ‘JUSTBRANDING’ for 10% off.

 

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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, everybody, and welcome to another episode of JUST Branding. This time, we have the wonderful Sarah Robb with us. Who is Sarah?

Sarah is an independent brand strategist and course founder, but she has an amazing background. She has a background at WPP Fellowship. She’s also worked as Senior Director of Strategy at Landor.

She’s worked globally. I think you’ve done some work in Japan, haven’t you, Sarah, which is amazing. And she’s a bit of a, would I say, a self-confessed brand strategy geek.

She’s apparently studied, and I’d love to… We’ve not verified this on JUST Branding, but we’d love to. She’s apparently studied the 181 most valuable brands in the world and their strategies.

She created the Brand Strategy Academy a few years ago in 2020 to give people the confidence and clarity to do brand strategy properly. She still does that. And she still works with independent clients all over the world from, I think we’ve got here, the A to Z of industries from accounting to zoos.

I quite like that. She sent me that, by the way, folks. I can’t take credit for that, for that clever bit of copywriting there.

And you’ve worked with brands such as Pepsi, EY, Oracle, Smirnoff, to name just a few, and also worked with Viagra, which I find quite amusing that you put on the list of brands that you said you worked with. So, and you’re in London. Anyway, enough about that.

Just wanted to say, Sarah, thanks for coming out of the time and to come on the show. Welcome.

Thank you. It’s really great to be here.

First of all, before we get into things, we’re going to be talking about a framework which you have been heavily involved in designing. And we’re going to call it the Unselfish Brand Strategy Framework, which is intriguing and mysterious all at the same time. But before we get into that, it’ll be great to know, just give…

I’ve obviously given you, given the listeners, a rundown of the typical kind of things that we would do to introduce you. But tell us a bit more about you. Tell us about your background and how it is that you’ve come to now be on the JUST Branding Podcast.

That’s a big question. So I think, like you said, brand strategy has been my passion and obsession for 23 years. I started off on that WPP fellowship and it was fabulous because you could work any of the WPP companies in any country.

So I started in market research and then went into advertising and planning, but really found my happy place in brand strategy and branding. And that’s really been everything I’ve done for 23 years. So I’ve learned through the agency world, but there are some challenges, I think, with agency models and agency frameworks and ways of working that made me want to set up on my own and do it independently.

And I think that’s where that huge study of brands came in, because I really wanted to figure out what was the right framework. I think we get so obsessed with these frameworks, right, in brand strategy. And at that point, I was very obsessed with the right framework.

So I did this huge, huge study to figure out what do all these brands actually do? What do their strategies look like? And what are the right labels to use?

Should you have missions and visions? All of this stuff that I’m sure you’ve heard from many people on the podcast. Yeah, that geekiness is still very much part of what I do.

But I think what we’re going to get on to later is, I think, trying to make sure now that everything I do is helping the business and the people in the business. And I think that’s been my biggest transition. I think when you start working in agencies, you’re all about the work and you’re all about that culture of the agency.

And you’re selling that agency’s differentiation. And then I think there was a point for me anyway, where I looked into the eyes of clients and I just saw them being bemused, you know, like, what are you guys talking about? Like, why do I need a visual brand driver?

We are Novartis Oncology, you know, and there’s these points where you just think, what am I actually doing and how am I actually helping? And that was a big turning point for me, I think, just realizing I needed to do it myself, my way, and to do it in a way that a CEO finds useful and not just a marketing department. And yeah, I can talk about that for hours, but that’s been sort of the big pivot points for me from agency into being independent.

No, amazing. I’ve also done that pivot myself and I ran my own agency and I was also in that trap. I think the agency model is very challenging.

And as you say, like, I don’t know, I find it a lot, as you say, very difficult to justify certain ways of doing things from the client’s perspective. I think when you’re in that world, you kind of look at it and go, of course, we’ve got to do this process and it’s locked in. And you’ve got teams on standby waiting for the previous phase, the waterfall phase to finish.

But the thing is, who gets lost in some of that process driven stuff? It’s the client. Something changes in the client’s world.

The agency can sometimes find it difficult to change their machinery to adapt. Mid-project, for example, and there’s things like that where I do feel like there are massive challenges in the agency side. And it ends up sometimes, as you say, the client’s not getting really what they need out of the process and gets more complicated than perhaps it needs to be sometimes.

But then not all the time. It is a place for agency. Don’t get me wrong.

But it is challenging.

You said things were broken in the agency model. So what’s your, you know, you’ve been in the week.

I think in some agencies, to be clear, I think the the challenge with the agencies is the profit margins that you’re being held to when you work within them. And so the time to actually be able to expand your knowledge and develop thought leadership, push things on, you know, it’s very hard to find that time when you’re actually in that world. I think the other thing that’s it’s not broken, but it’s difficult from a client’s perspective is that agencies are usually selling and then deliverable, right?

That most agencies are not just pure strategy agencies. There’s usually a deliverable of design or environmental design or advertising. Or, you know, there’s usually something that where they make most of their money that the strategy seems to be designed for.

Right. And I think so sometimes one of the huge things I see missed out from agency work is an understanding of how the brand impacts employees and culture and values, because they are thinking of brand strategy as something that is driving design and driving that brief into the designers on how to create the identity. And, you know, you can’t think of brand in such a narrow way.

If you do not equip the C-suite with a way of understanding how to engage employees on this journey because they are the ones delivering the brand, they’re the ones delivering the actions more than, you know, the advertising. There’s a whole other ton of stuff that needs to be done to back up the promise of a brand, right, of what you’re saying the brand’s about. And if your strategy isn’t thinking about that and equipping them with this beautiful cohesion of how does brand relate to customers, but how does it relate to employees?

And it’s just about how does brand drive design? And I think that is a limitation. It’s not broken.

You need the design, but it’s a limitation. And I think sometimes that’s where agencies struggle and where sometimes I’m brought in because the brand strategy isn’t really complete. You know, there’s a bit missing and the CEO says, well, I don’t know how to talk about this to my team.

I don’t know how to talk about who we are as a culture and how we need to act in order to deliver this. So I think that’s where sometimes in many agencies, the model is slightly too limited. And it’s understandable because it’s about what they’re selling and it’s about where they make their money.

But it doesn’t always help. Like you said, Matt, you know, it doesn’t help the client always. And it doesn’t always give them everything they need in a strategy.

Yeah. The strategy becomes a bolt on to the creative at the end. Yeah, I find that.

So I work with a few agencies and occasionally I get that sense. Occasionally, like, hey, like, I’m only at the table to tick the box that we’ve done the strategy before we get into the design, which is really where everybody, including the client wants to get to. And I’m like, no, we can’t go there because the design and the creative phase is an expression or it should be an expression of the strategy.

And if we’ve not nailed the strategy and it’s not quite right, then we’re going to it’s going to be awkward further down the line. We’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot. So, yeah, and there’s always that healthy tension and sometimes in projects like that.

But I think you’re absolutely right. I think when a detaching strategy from execution is painful for, you know, for people sometimes to get their heads around and to actually implement. But once you’ve done that, like you have, Sarah, like the freedom it actually gives you to actually then create real value for clients, I think is phenomenal.

So, OK, let’s move on a little bit. You did this study. How long did this take?

181?

It took me almost a year and it was in conjunction with an agency at the time called the Assembly, which were a really, really cool London based agency. I don’t know who sadly disbanded now. And so my thought was after leaving the agency world was that I just wanted to answer some of these questions in my head once and for all.

So I would have done it anyway, but it was very helpful that it was also, you know, a joint project where they commissioned me to do it. And so, you know, it took months. It takes about two hours per brand when you know what you’re doing and you know where to look.

And you’ve done it hundreds of times and there’s 181 brands. So that’s the math. It was great.

I loved it. It’s very hard to do again. I tend to do it by just following the top 35, 36, you know, across all the time.

By 181.

So at the time, there are three global brand valuation studies, right? Global ones. You know, there’s some American biased ones, but there’s Brand Z, Interbrand and Brand Finance.

And regardless of what you think of their methodologies, you know, they are the only huge studies of how you can actually value what a brand is worth. So my thought was, if I want to study brands, where’s my subset? Which brands am I going to look at?

So that seemed to be a very sensible place to look, right? You know, they’re making the money, they’re well regarded. All these methodologies bring in customer insight, future trends.

So there’s real validity to the way they look at them. So at the time, when we looked at all three, there happened to be 181 brands across, because obviously there’s overlap on some of them. Not many, really, considering, you know, you would hope there’d be more overlaps.

It shows the methodologies are really quite different. But yeah, so that’s where I got my subset from. You know, and you could argue it’s the right lot of brands, but, you know, you will never get to this perfect list.

But that’s how I approached it.

And at a high level, I know we’re going to go into the framework. What did you find? What did you discover when you did that?

Did you find that they all had very similar elements? Did you find they were all very, very different? Like, what was your overall impression?

So I went in mistakenly thinking about labels, right? I wanted to figure out, do they have a vision? Do they have a purpose?

Do they have, you know, and it’s not, and I realized it’s just not about that at all, right? That actually there is no consistency in labels. So whoever’s spouts off about, you know, you must have a positioning and you can’t have a purpose, you must have a mission, you know, you wouldn’t, that is just this circular nonsense conversation where there’s never going to be an agreement.

But where there is commonality, and this is where I derive my framework from, is really, there are some core questions they all answer, all the best brands answer. And one is, you know, why do you exist? Typically it’s called a mission.

Often it’s called a purpose. Sometimes it’s called a vision. Sometimes it’s called a north star.

You know, again, that doesn’t matter, but they all answer this, why do we exist question. They all answer in a very succinct way, what do we do? And, you know, typically that’s positioning, but you know, they don’t always call it that.

They all answer in some way, shape or form, who are we? And how do we do things? Typically it’s called values.

Typically it’s called behaviors, but not always. You don’t have to call it that. You know, sometimes principles, beliefs, but they have an articulation of who are we as people working here?

And how do we go about things in a better and different way than others? And then they all answer, which is harder to find, but some sense of how does our brand look, feel and sound? So they all have some set of phrases or attributes that help to guide, you know, design and in all aspects of the meaning of design and identity and advertising, you know, how the brand is sensorially brought to life.

So that was the big finding for me. And it was great because I just had all of these answers to all of these, you know, why statements, all of these answers to values. And you can start looking at which are the most common values.

I mean, this is where I get geeky about all this.

It’s a deep rabbit hole.

You know, what percent? Use the word mission. And yeah, so, but that was the, the revelation was, forget about the labels, answer the questions.

If you answer these questions, you are building this strong foundation and all the world’s best brands answer these questions in some way, shape or form.

And was it done in a similar order?

What do you mean in all, in all?

Everyone, you know, starting with why is always touted.

Well, yeah, not always, right? They don’t, right? It’s always a messy world, isn’t it?

You think that the purest, the purest would say, you start with why and you build out. And that’s how I would always do it, right? Because if you start with why, then your values are supporting, how on earth are we going to deliver this why?

And I think when these things are all separate, you really miss cohesion and that’s a big part strategy, right? Cohesiveness. But, you know, they don’t always do that.

You can see recently brands have been missing a bigger sense of why they’ve been bolting it on. You know, like McDonald’s, who’ve added on this idea of we feed and foster communities. They never had that notion until a couple of years ago.

Their brand was always about finding feel-good moments, making feel-good moments easy for everyone. That was what their brand idea was. It was called a mission, but that was more of what we do.

And you can see they’ve bolted on this idea of why we’re doing this. And there’s obviously issues with this, you know, that you get the further you take those and the more social good you pretend you’re doing. If you’re not doing it, it’s difficult, but it doesn’t always happen in that order.

But you can definitely see the bolt-on why statements coming in over the last five years of the brands who haven’t really had that bigger sense of why we’re here. And some are great.

It’s interesting how you mentioned at the start, like one of the things that you’ve noticed is the internal sense of being, if you like, for the brand. And that, you know, we were talking at the start about that there’s potentially a hole in the agency model because it’s getting to the sort of the output. It’s usually a marketing output or an outward facing thing.

And then actually there’s a hole because the business, if it’s doing it properly, really wants to own it. And it has to be exuded through the organization and owned by the people. And so isn’t it fascinating that you just identified some of these more purpose driven statements, which I kind of feel give a sense as an employer, you know, an employer brand, like this is our purpose.

This is why top talent should come work at McDonald’s because we’re feeding communities, you know, that kind of angle. And it makes more sense, it clarifies it. So before we go on, I’ve got a question because we always ask this.

How do you define brand? Like, because we’re talking about brands, but what is a brand to you, Sarah? We love to ask that.

Yeah, for me, it’s two things. It’s a set of associations and assets. I think the latter part has been forgotten about a little bit recently, but the associations, right, is, you know, brands are literally associations in people’s minds.

That’s it. I mean, they are in memory nodes, you know, you can test this out by asking people simple questions like, you know, if I gave you 50,000 pounds after this podcast and you could buy a car, which car would you buy? People have an automatic, you know, they think, oh, I’d buy a Mercedes.

And why would you? Because like it or not, you do have this set of associations around these brands. You know, you think it’s faster, you think it’s more comfortable, you think it’s more stylish, whatever you think is the truth, right?

Brands live in people’s minds. So they are also those assets. And I think this is where I see a lot of people are moving away from this.

And I find it a little bit frustrating because you hear all this stuff on LinkedIn. Brands are not logos. Brands are not design.

You know, and actually they are as well, right? Because if you bought a brand, like if you wanted to buy the ninth brand, right, it would cost you three and a half billion dollars, according to these valuation states, but you wouldn’t get on any of the stuff, but what you would get is the right to use the assets, right? The right to put that swoosh on your stuff, you know, the right to use that nickname, the right to use these identity elements that they’ve spent millions building up over time.

So they are associations in people’s minds, and that’s what you’re buying, right? You’re buying all of that equity, and you’re buying all of these positive things that people think about the brand, but you’re also buying the assets that are around it, right? Because you’d be using those to build the brand.

So I think sometimes we walk away, and it’s kind of trendy to walk away saying, you know, like, they don’t really matter. They do matter. You know, the brand identity matters because it’s what gets the brand noticed, and it’s what builds familiarity, and it’s how you actually trigger these associations and connect them.

If you put something out there about you want your brand to be known for speed, but no one sees it because they don’t recognize your brand or they associate it with somebody else, or you know, you guys know this, you’re so brilliant at what you do, but so to me, it’s the two things. It’s associations in people’s minds and it’s assets. And yeah, that is the simplest way I describe it.

And the other thing I often get people to do, which helps is just if you get, like I do this when I teach teenagers in the summer how to build brands, right? I do this little mini course. And if you just draw a circle and you write folk and you say it gets 90 seconds, you have to write anything that comes to your mind in terms of Coca-Cola, anything.

And you see everyone’s is different. And that’s right, because that’s your associations about the brand, but you see things like happiness and you see red and you see fizzy and you see… And all of these things are literally like these mental nodes in people’s minds, right?

And they’re not just kind of concepts around joy or happiness or family holidays or they’re also things like red and the font and the bottle shape, you know? And I think that just sort of in a really easy way shows that brands are both of these things. They are associations and they’re assets.

And the strategy job is to decide what you want those associations to be, right? Because otherwise they’re just anything, right? You’re not controlling, you’re trying to shape these associations and that’s as much as you can do.

I think we’re up to 83 episodes in. Not one person has ever said associations before. They’ve always said, it’s like created in the minds of the consumer, but no one’s really broken it down to nodes or association.

So it’s kind of a different lens that we haven’t heard about.

I know Marty talks about feelings, and I think you do have that immediate gut feeling, like on that question of which car would you buy, right? But it’s more than that to me, because you then dig into actually, why do you have that feeling? Like, what are those associations?

And you do have concepts that come up, whether they’re really simple ones, like I feel Volvo’s safer, or I feel BMW’s faster. All of these things, they’re not accidental, or they shouldn’t be accidental. And this is what brands are doing.

They’re trying to make sure that those things, in people’s minds, are the things they want them to be. Yeah, so that’s how I explain it.

Or as Matt would say, shape the meaning in people’s minds.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but associations, I’m kind of liking that. That’s a lovely definition there, Sarah, really good. Yeah, I talk about meaning a lot.

I think it’s the meaning people attach to you. But yeah, we’re all saying very similar things, but I think that you take it that step further when you sort of explained about the associations and the memory triggers and all of that stuff. It’s just so true and fantastic and very helpful.

So thank you. So let’s talk about now the brand strategy framework, the unselfish, as we’ve started to call it, brand strategy framework. Basically, why we’re starting to call it that, folks, is that when Sarah sent it through at first, she was like, oh, it doesn’t really have a name.

And I was like, let’s call it the unnamed brand strategy. She’s like, no, that’s rubbish. Let’s call it the unselfish brand strategy.

So we’ve now branded the framework, which I’m quite excited to be played a very small part in. But talk to us about that. And, you know, what are the high-level components and perhaps we can dive into some of that as we go through.

The high-level components are those questions, right? So it’s answering the questions. Why do we exist?

What do we do? Who are we? How do we do things?

And how do we want our brand to look, feel and sound? That, to me, is the framework. You can then call those things whatever feels appropriate to your client.

You know, I was working with the Corinthian group recently in her luxury hotels, and the chairman’s been there for over 50 years, and he has talked for 50 years about the spirit of Corinthia. And I would have been an idiot to go in and say, well, you can’t use the word spirit. You have to have value.

You know, it just, he wouldn’t have used it. It wouldn’t have worked. What needed to be done was to help him articulate what is that spirit, right?

Like, how do we help people understand and immediately grasp what sort of place it is to work here? And how do we do things and who are we? So it’s answering those questions to me.

And the reason I’m saying it’s an unselfish framework is I think so many of these frameworks out there are very much about you as an independent strategist or you as an agency differentiating yourself. And I’ve sat so many times with clients helping to pick agencies and you see them all coming in. And I know why it’s not, you know, they would need to differentiate themselves.

So they come up with the brand onion or the, you know, an acronym for their process. And I think I understand why, and it’s hard to differentiate yourself, but I don’t think that is thinking about the customer. And we talk about that in brands all the time.

It’s not thinking about that client. You do not get a CEO standing up talking about a brand onion. They’re never going to do that.

They want to talk about why we’re here. How do we do things here? You know, who are we?

And so I think that’s why I’m calling it the unselfish or selfless framework that I’m trying to make it help the client and helping the client means giving them useful, simple language that they would actually say that they will actually stand up and feel comfortable talking about to their 20,000 employees rather than a model that’s about me differentiating myself. And that causes a problem for me because I have to build my brand too. And you know, you said, what’s the name of it?

And I was like, I don’t have a name because I really feel this, my job is not to be branding the thing for the client. It’s to be helping the client. The anti-framework.

Yeah.

The kind of anti-framework. Does it help me? Possibly not, but does it help the client for sure?

So I, that’s just how I operate.

And I absolutely love this approach.

Yeah. It’s going to be a pretty hard acronym on selfish.

I need another name. Come on, Jacob. Give me another name.

Scrub on selfish. We’ll rebrand it by the end of the day.

Yeah. I mean, it’s just a question-based framework, really. And I can’t pretend these questions are ones I’ve invented and no one has ever said, you know, why do we exist anymore?

But it’s just proven out. You know, you see it in the data that if you have all, you know, there’s all sorts of great research now showing how having a clear answer to that, why can improve market share, competitiveness, employee retention, employee, you know, there’s so much great stuff that you can talk to a business about these questions and say, you need this answer. And here’s some hard metrics and numbers and financial, you know, numbers about why it’s important for you to answer it.

And that’s the language of the C-suite, not like visual brand drivers and, you know, onions. And, you know, it’s like they just don’t want to talk about that.

No, I absolutely love this approach. And I have a similar sort of set of questions that I go in as a solo consultant. And I think that if you try and crowbar clients into your own, you know, boxes and framework, as you say, you lose them, right?

And it because it can become overwhelming for them. They don’t want to be starting to be reeducating their stuff about this stuff. And it can be detrimental because ultimately, as you mentioned at the start, what are we trying to do with strategy?

OK, we’re trying to make it simple. We’re trying to help them with these associations and craft them and to really kind of start to manage that meaning. And if we add additional things in the way, it can become difficult to do that.

So I really love it. It’s much more organic and it frees you up a little bit to kind of use the language of the C-suite, use the language of the business. And so it’s super smart.

So I really, really love it. Should we tuck into those questions a little bit though, a little bit further? Because I guess there’s tricks of the trade to help brands answer those questions in a way that is then useful and meaningful for the strategist moving forward.

So let’s start with why do you exist? Like, how do you help a business or brand to begin to kind of unlock the answer to that question?

I think this is the very underrated aspect of process, right? That everyone wants to talk frameworks and outputs and what does it look like? And is it in a pyramid?

But really, and the reason I created this course is how do you teach people to do it? Like, what are the steps? Because like you said, right, the strategy, it should set a direction.

It should help people make decisions, but no one is going to follow a direction. If they don’t buy into it, right? If they don’t understand what it is and how you got there.

So the process to me is more important than the framework. Because you framework, you know, you just need to answer the questions, but how do you answer them in the right way? And how do you get everyone bought in?

So I think there are three, like to me, three parts of it. There’s, you know, there are criteria that have strategy have to meet. And one is relevance, what Kantar would call meaningful, but it’s about is, how is this brand relevant to the needs of the customer and the employees?

And people forget the employee bit, but what, you know, what is this doing for people? How is it helping them? What job is it performing for them?

How is it helping them in their lives? What benefit is it providing? It’s all of that world of, you know, how is it relevant to people?

And then the second question you’ve got to answer is, you know, how is this brand sufficiently differentiated from competition? And we could talk about differentiation for hours, I’m sure, too. But, you know, like how, where is the differentiation here?

And it doesn’t always have to be something that only that brand is doing, because that is typically impossible, you know. And I think if people have in their framework, it must be a brand that only does this, you are really going to get that answer. And I think it sets a bar that is unrealistically high for most businesses.

And that makes me kind of unpopular because it’s all about differentiation, but really, it’s about knowing what your strengths are and which of those strengths are better. And you can build on more than competition and which are more credible to you. Which of them do your capabilities support more?

So the relevance, the sufficient differentiation and authenticity, right? You’ve got to be able to back it up. You can’t be putting something out there that your brand can’t deliver on or isn’t going to be about or hasn’t got the capabilities behind or isn’t true on the most basic level.

So to me, the process is about getting insights into those three areas, relevance, differentiation and authenticity by doing some research of which there are multiple ways to do it. But research with customers, research with employees, research with leadership, with competitive analysis and really digging into the business itself and its capabilities.

Excuse this minor little interruption. We don’t usually do this, but we do have a special announcement. Sarah has recently released her Brand Strategy Academy and we wanted to let you know about this.

It is an online course that’s going to teach you the ins and outs of brand strategy in a no fluff way. So if you’ve been listening to this episode, you understand Sarah’s approach. You can take her course to learn more, go a bit deeper.

She outlines all the processes, all the tools and she gives you the support you need to elevate your brand strategy career. So if you’re interested, go to brandstrategysarah.com and the best news is that she is generously giving you guys 10% off. All you have to do is enter the code JUSTBRANDING in the checkout.

So back to the show, we’ll go through them and I guess we can go back around.

So all of that stuff at the beginning informs all of the questions. So in that research with employees, you’re digging into, you know, how does it feel to work here? Who are you when you’re at your best?

You know, so your questions in these bits of research are designed to answer all of these parts of the framework. So you’re not repeating research, right? But and it’s from that fodder in the research that you’re then crafting the answers to the questions.

So I think to me, they’re not separate pieces of work. They’re one piece of work, one piece of research and insight gathering to then help you then answer those questions. And it’s then about the questions you ask.

Yeah, I think we missed that section, right? We forgot to mention, we just jumped straight into why, but before that, you have to understand, you know, why are we here and what insights do we have to uncover and how are we going to get those insights to properly inform and answer those questions.

Right. And not only that, like, I think if you think about this from a big, like, I’m working with a big accreditation, a global accreditation. I work in sexy industries, but like an accredited, they are credit, they are credit accountants globally, my client, they’re massive all over the world, India, China, whatever.

And the thing is, when you’re trying to engage an organization that is massive, you’ve got to think about this. I’d love to hear your thoughts, Sarah, on this from the perspective of almost like change management, because what you are doing is you’re affecting change in the organization. And obviously that comes from the leadership.

They want change. There’s a particular commercial driver putting in this instance it forward. But when you do change management, what you have to do is you have to bring people along with you for the ride, right?

You can’t just from the top down dictate, right? We’re going to completely change what we’re all about. Like that doesn’t happen.

You know, it just, and even if you did, it wouldn’t get bought. People wouldn’t understand it. They wouldn’t buy into it for years.

And it’s an uphill struggle. However, if you think about this from a change kind of program and you say, look, we’re starting in this stage where we’re gathering information, we’re seeking answers to these kind of core questions and we’re using research to do that. Someone from the strategy team, Sarah, is going to reach out and you may hear from her.

You might see a survey go around, but then once we’ve done that phase, we’re going to move on to the next phase and the next phase and so on until we get to the promised land at the end, which is this brand new us kind of scenario. Now, employees, even if they’re skeptical, even if they don’t think about it much in their day to day lives and their jobs, now at least they know you’ve signaled that that’s coming. And so you keep up that communication.

And by the time you get to the end, if you’ve done it well, you’ve brought everybody along with you. And so they understand the decisions that have been taken along the way. They might not necessarily agree with them, but they might at least understand them.

And I think that’s what that sort of research phase about the relevance, differentiation, authenticity areas that you were talking about perhaps might add to the process. Would you agree with that, Sarah? Got any thoughts on that?

I totally agree, Matt. I couldn’t agree more. I think you have to bring employees on the journey.

I will not name names, but I’ve just seen a piece of work from a massive agency where they only talk to leadership about the brand. You’ve got to open the forum because it’s the employees company too. And you’ve got to listen to different voices.

You’ve got to know what the reality is for middle managers and people on the ground as much as it is what the leadership think the business is about or where they want it to go. And in doing that, then it just makes the whole process easier. Because like you say, people, it’s not some shock or worse, something people ignore.

And they just see some tada, PowerPoint slide. You’re like, this is our new strategy. And they’re like, okay, that’s lovely.

I’m going back to my day job. It’s just you have to bring people along. And employee research to me is critical.

You know, the best brands do like, and even in, you know, I’ve obviously worked in companies with 200,000 people and IBM, when they did their values, they researched everybody. They did a survey, 110,000 responses and they read them. And they, you know, an AI will help us today, actually read them more quickly and find the patterns.

But it shows that, you know, you believe and you understand that it happens on the ground. And we talk about frameworks. It’s part of strategy.

It’s the actions that need to be taken afterwards that are just more important, right? And if you don’t help people understand and bring them on board and take them on that journey, then you don’t get those actions. People don’t behave differently.

They don’t innovate differently. And that’s as much brand building as, you know, changing the logo, which doesn’t always need to be done, you know?

I want to throw a couple of curveballs at you now, just to challenge you, because, you know, it’s been way too comfortable. You’ve been way too awesome until now. So two thoughts.

What would you say, for example, to a leader who would say, look, you know, I want to take the business in a new direction. Frankly, we can talk to employees, but, you know, I know we need to move, you know, into this new space. It’s not going to…

I don’t think it’s going to add much value to what we’re about to do here. So that’s one. And also to kind of add it into that, you know, that works with organizations that are large and who have been around a while.

But let’s say Jacob and I are going to start up a new SaaS company, right? There is no employees. It’s just me and Jacob.

How would you go about that? So in other words, the skeptical leader who wants to take it in a completely new direction or the startup that doesn’t have that fodder, as you put it, to tackle and see. What are your thoughts on those two scenarios?

Skeptical leader of a big company. If they want to take the company in a different direction, they need to understand the gap. They need to understand where are they now in terms of people’s perceptions, customers and employees, and hence what are they going to have to do to shape the culture, to drive change in order to reach this holy grail land where they want to go.

If you don’t understand the gap, then you don’t know what to do. How are you going to drive that journey forward? That would be my answer to them.

Yes, you still need to reach out to employees because you need to understand whether this future vision of yours is realistic. How realistic is it? What level and degree of change is needed?

If all employees are acting and behaving in this way, or they think the brand is about this now, or they expect this and you want to take them here, then you need to understand that. You need to at least have that clarity on where you are today and hence how you need to move. The founder-based new startup thing.

I do a different process in that case. I teach it on my course. It isn’t the same process.

It can’t be the same process. You don’t have customers, but you often do have people who you’ve road tested or explored your concept on. It’s rare that you meet an organization who wants to hire a brand strategist who hasn’t done any kind of interaction with their potential customers.

It just doesn’t happen. You don’t have a product unless you’ve done that. I worked with a Kickstarter-backed product recently called Etto, which is this amazing wine decanter.

I don’t know whether you’ve seen it. It’s now everywhere. If you have one glass of wine and you know that the oxidization will start to spoil the wine, they have this beautiful, really designed decanter that you pour it in, and it has a vacuum press on it so that it will store for easily up to two weeks, and it’s still just as good as it was in the bottle.

These guys had a Kickstarter-backed campaign to get the funding to develop the project because it was incredibly beautifully designed. So we reached out to those Kickstarter customers. They weren’t customers per se, but they’d had prototypes, and there were people we could talk to about why they were backing it.

What was the benefit going to be in their lives? Why did they think this is valuable? So you can still typically reach out to some people, even though people say, oh, there’s no customers, but there are people who you’ve tested the product on or you’ve spoken to.

Then it’s the founder’s story. So for you and Jacob, I would be doing a lot of work into, I write this kind of founder’s journey, and I get founders to separately fill in this journey. And it talks about where they started, and it almost replicates that Joseph Campbell’s seven stories, like the peaks and the troughs and the challenges you meet on the way.

And I get them to write that out. And sometimes that’s really helpful because they’re actually really different. And it was a little bit like this with this Eto, because it was Tom and his wife in their garage, you know, actually creating this thing.

But they had different motivations. There was different sort of senses of the brand and how it should feel. So I use the founder story to build upon, because that’s what you’ve got at that point, as well as the product, obviously, and its features and functions and benefits that you can ladder from.

So yeah, there will be two different, very different approaches.

I think that folks is why you can’t just have one framework, one process that always works for every single, in every scenario. I think you’ve just explained that perfectly, and I think that’s the pitfall. You’ve got to be able to adapt as a strategist to the scenario, right?

And so I was so pleased you said, oh, I would do a different process. I’m like, yes, because otherwise, you crowbar every client into your process, into your framework, and if it’s not relevant to them, it’s not going to be good for anyone. So I love that you just explained it in that way and super smart about the founders’ stories becoming the heartbeat of that startup brand.

Super smart. Okay, so I just want to get a little bit more depth on those questions that you asked at the start, because obviously they’re quite high-level questions. Typically in the unselfish framework, what comes out?

I mean, I assume you’re still producing some sort of strategy deck to help answer those questions. What are the nuances that you would tend to put into that deck under each of those questions?

So there are parameters around things like the why that I would always be pushing for. So I think the best why statements, the best answers to why, actually speak to employees as much as customers, and that’s quite hard to write. But if you can have one answer to why we exist that also speaks to employees, you immediately have this cohesive story of the employer brand, which I hate the term, but the way in which you talk to employees about the benefits and the customer.

So Microsoft is a classic good example of this, about we’re here to help organizations and people achieve more, and something along those lines. But you see that and you’re like, okay, that’s just as much as about people internally and helping them achieve more in their career and progress as it is about the customers. So I always push hard for the Y to be something that can work for both.

And ideally for like a broad sense of community as well. And that’s quite a hard thing. And sometimes it works and sometimes clients can’t get there.

And we, you know, but that is always my benchmark of a good Y. You know, and there are probably ways to do it, about, you know, laddering. You know, I often give a ladder to my clients and I get them to try and write the Y as well as me writing the Y.

Cause you know, at first it shows it’s not that easy because they think, oh, you know, just throw something about, make a positive difference. And you know, but also you can show them how other brands have built from functional things up into like higher level emotional benefits and community benefits. And then you can start to say, you know what, that’s too far.

We’re not saving the whales, right? You know, you can start to use a tool to sort of say, where on this ladder should our Y really be? And really use it as a debating tool.

So I quite like that approach. And it really gets, I get leadership to fill that in. And it’s very helpful.

And then it also then allows the debates to come up through a tool rather than through an argument. You say, well, actually in these Y statements, I’m not going to say who’s written which what, but you know, you’re really in disconnect here about what you’re really trying to do. So things like that really help get to the Y.

And then things like the values, I think now it’s not advisable to write one word values, you know, and this nice data, I love a bit of data, but there’s some great studies out there that sort of show that 60% of companies have innovation, you know, collaboration, you know, these words that integrity, respect, accountability, there are these words that you think, oh, these sound great, you know, and actually…

One I come across is honesty.

Honesty, yes, yeah.

Like, who’s gonna go, do you know what? You know, I’m really looking for this honest organization to work for, or this honest organization to do business with. It’s just so obvious, like, you’re right, like crafting something that’s more meaningful to the brand is much more important.

Yeah, and you can be, I think people get a little bit afraid in big global organizations to use language that isn’t easily understood immediately. And I think that’s a mistake because you can explain and translate everything. Like Airbnb, one of their values is be a serial entrepreneur, serial spelled C-E-R-E-A-L, like the breakfast flakes, right?

No one’s gonna understand that in the Philippines immediately. And that’s fine because, you know, the point is to be able to tell a story that engages employees into what, you know, and that is much more powerful than saying be innovative, you know, like, what does that mean? It builds in this backstory of the company and the founders and how entrepreneurial they were and how they created these serial brands in the Democratic and Republican, you know, they’re just story and it really starts to ingrain a type of behavior and it really connects people to a value much more than just saying innovation or innovative.

And so I think there are ways to really push clients on writing these values that feel much more authentic to who they are, that are often based in a heritage or founding story, which too many brands walk away from too quickly. And that really is important, I think, for employees to feel grounded in something and for a brand to be building on the past rather than chucking it all away all the time. And so like a couple of words or phrases or ways that I would push people to fill in that section, to create that rather than just say, let’s be honest, accountable, collaborative, helpful, customer-centric.

The stuff that sounds easy and everyone nods along to, but I think isn’t serving the client. Because you’re people joining, you look at the values too. There’s data now saying that if you’re going to join a company, it’s really important to join someone that has this set of share values.

And if you’re looking at seven different hotels and they’ve got exactly the same values, it’s doing nothing to help you make that decision. Brands are a choice for employees as much as they are for customers. So I start pushing in that way in that answering those questions.

How about what do you do? How do you help people answer that? Because that sounds like, again, it’s like one of the most easiest questions to answer in the world, but I imagine it’s not that easy when you talk into it.

What do you do to help them answer? What do you do?

Well, I’m doing it for a really great client at the moment. What do I do? I talk to employees, first of all.

I talk to business, talk to leaders, talk to customers. I share what people have said about kind of the themes that have come out, you know, and then I start to try and push those things to be more distinctive where, if they are not. And I’ve listened really hard because I think I’m working with this luxury hotel chain at the moment, and it’s one of the best brands in the world.

And it’s not about changing them. It’s about capturing what is already brilliant. And I think if you listen and you give space for those stars of the organization to talk, you will find like these phrases that they use that actually are more human and more natural about how they actually interpret the behaviors underneath these big value statements.

And I try and pull as much of those as possible. And I try sometimes to, I always give an option that is quite tailored to the brand. Like I’m thinking of things like using some languages within the category.

So making this up, but if you’re talking about hotels, like room and keys and using some languages around that world they’re in, but also links to the values is an interesting option. You can always show something is a little bit more quirky that you have to think about a little bit more, but they go, oh, actually people might remember that more. It might feel more like us.

And stories like the Corinthia example, the chairman would tell a story about magnets, about how the iron filings in a magnet, I mean that although there’s all these different filings, the way that there are ranges that we all pull together and that’s what we need to do as a team. And he would use this analogy of the magnet all over. And so I wrote an example with the magnet in the values.

And no one would understand that first. You know, be a magnet, right? You’re like, what?

But you know, then there’s a story, there’s a, so I’ll always share options like that too, alongside the more, not more hygienic, but the more, a safer approach. Because again, it depends on your client and the CEO and how they want to shape their company too. So, does that answer that question?

It’s tricky you’re answering it, right? What do you do, Matt? What do you do?

Well, to answer, it’s very similar. I think it’s about listening, really good listening, isn’t it? And, you know, with the advent of AI, it’s an absolute blessing, because, you know, you can gather a lot of information and assess it in even better ways than perhaps we would have done even a couple of years ago to draw out themes and commonalities.

And I’m doing a lot of that, you know, surveys and reviewing things. But, yeah, just to touch on one point, you know, there’s a kind of magic to strategy, which comes in the application of the process and the alignment that it can bring, not only for leaders, but also for whole organizations. And I think, for me, what I try and do is, on any of the sorts of things like this, I’m trying to get to a point where you’re establishing where people are aligned, like you mentioned earlier, and you’re trying to find where people are not aligned, or where it’s not so clear, or where actually they might be aligned, but what customers have said is completely out of kilter with what they believe their Y is, for example, or their differentiator is, or whatever.

And then you need to explode the areas that are not all in sync and then help clients to provide an answer. What do you do? I guess, on that question, one of the key things that I look for is the classic value proposition scenario.

It’s kind of like in terms of what do we do? We provide widgets for machines. Okay.

But why is that useful? What’s the value that you’re bringing to the party? So I always try and answer it in the…

or get clients to begin to answer it in the context of the value proposition, why that’s helpful, why that matters, and so to bring it on. And once you start doing that, they’re like, oh, I’ve got to really… I don’t know, there’s always a disconnect.

And I think that adds a lot of value then in terms of the way that that brand is framed. What do you do, Jacob, when you’re looking at stuff like that, in terms of what you do?

So asking why, and then why again, and then how come, and then why, or how did you come to that? You just have to keep asking, and you go deeper and deeper, and you get more insight out of them, and then you connect the pieces. And whether or not that’s through a survey or in person, it doesn’t matter.

I think also I go for a walk. And I think the other thing about strategy is…

I know it’s going to be some radical thing there.

This is the biggest… An unselfish walk.

Honestly though, I know it sounds just a simple thing, but there is a level of creativity in this. There are some creative leaps you have to take in your imagination about how you take all this fodder and put it in something that works for the client. I think if you just spend an hour reading all of this fodder and then you go for a walk with your phone in your pocket, but not answering it, that’s when I often get those little nuggets.

I will speak them into the phone so I just don’t lose it. But there is this less process-driven piece of strategy where you need these little great ideas or turns of phrases and where all of these things have to connect in your mind somehow.

Honestly, just go for a walk.

Often in the midnight, often in the shower, but most often for me in nature on a walk. So I always do that.

I don’t know if listeners have heard of this, but there’s a book, a small book, it’s called How Do You Get Ideas, right? I think, hang on, is it called that? Where is it?

I’m trying to find it now. Maybe I’ve got crazy. I think it is How Do You Get Ideas, and it was by James Webb Young, right?

And he goes through a five step process of how to get amazing ideas. And he’s an ad man from the 60s, I think, or something. And I was reading it the other days.

It’s absolutely fascinating, but it’s exactly what you said. So you gather the material, right? You kind of mentally digest it.

And then you allow a period of time to incubate that. So you just allow it to ping pong around in your mind. You almost like step back from it all.

Allow it to ping pong around. And then at some point, you know, an idea will come. As long as it’s kind of in the background of your mind.

When you try and force it too much, really, really hard. I like the walk thing. And I am glad I’m not the only one that talks into their phone.

Usually I’m in the car and like driving.

I’m like, get this down, get it in my wife’s like, what the heck is going on? And I’m like, just get my phone, get my phone. You say it.

And then you’re like, oh, just a breath. I gave birth to it. It’s done.

It might not be perfect. It takes time. And then you’ve got to go refine that idea.

That’s the kind of the final step is to refine that. But that’s how it works. And I always think it’s really funny as well.

You know, we talked about agencies, you know, you’ve got, you know, this kind of sort of process and stuff like this, but it’s messy. It’s never like they always see processes that are like, first, are we going to do this? Then this, then this, then this.

It’s like, mate, once you’ve been around for a while, you know that it is never as simple as this process.

The ideas don’t happen like this. The ideas happen here and here. I think also that like the non-negotiable, I always put in proposals is two weeks between ending the research, at least two weeks and presenting.

Like, because you’ve got to have that time to percolate. And there’s nothing worse than having only two days to write a strategy when you’ve just finished reading. You can’t do it, like you don’t get to a good result.

Seriously, we should probably touch on that because, you know, if you squeeze your team too much again and again and again and again and again, like they’re going to break and they’re going to leave and it’s not fun. So, you know, I think that’s a good spacing. That piece of work correctly is so important.

Final bit. And then I’ve got one kind of final follow up question, I think. But final bit on the process.

You know, there’s this like, how do we look and sound kind of element? How do you approach that? Because as I understand it, you don’t do the creative anymore like yourself?

No, I’ve never done the creative. I wish I had your skills, guys, at design, but I do not.

Jacob’s the one. I hardly do any now myself. But in terms of that, how does that kind of show up in the process then?

What do you do? Do you work with other agencies? Do you work with in-house teams?

How does that last bit get answered?

All of the above. I think the great thing about Lander is it really did train me in finding ways to write something that acts as visual inspiration for designers. You need to give the design team the whole strategy and explain it and talk them through it and show them some customer.

Get them involved as early as possible. But you also need to write a handful of, for want of a better word, attributes. People call them personality traits.

Things that will then inspire a feeling of the brand. I think that Lander gave me great training in figuring out the types of words that work there and the type of words that aren’t at all visually inspiring anyway. But always working with, ideally working with designers much earlier in the process, always starting to, you know, the people I work with all the time, agencies I work with for a client, but bringing them in and briefing properly and really, really taking a long time to immerse them in what’s come before and not just giving the piece of paper.

The piece of paper is important, right? The briefs are important. But, you know, let them feel the customer, show them, like, listen, to find them clips of the customer talk, like, give them a sense of that world you’re trying to build and the reason you’ve got to these things that you’ve got to in the strategy.

And so those words, I do write a set of words that help to inspire, like, design and copy. But I think it’s more about tweaking those words with the team, if you’ve got a team or the designer, and then briefing them properly and being there for those first, at least the very first presentation, where you’re doing this transition across to the design team, if you’re stepping out as a strategy.

Being on both ends of the spectrum there, what I always found useful on a brief was understanding the reason why those attributes were given. Like, friendliness, like, why are we trying to be friendly here? And that was often missing in briefs.

That’s a really good point. Yeah, yeah.

Look, we’re coming towards the end of our time together. It’s been such a fascinating discussion. And what I kind of wanted to sort of finish with was like really your top tips for, you know, going through this process.

Like, do you have, could you give us three top tips for example? Sarah’s three top tips for brand strategists going through these processes. What would you say?

So for a brand strategist who already has done this for a while, my top tip would be, you know, think more about your end client and use language, whatever your framework is, you know, use language that they will use and engage them on business conversations and business decisions and actions that need to be taken that go far beyond marketing. Don’t think you’re writing a brand strategy for a marketing team. Think of your brand affects the whole business.

And I think for people who like designers or copywriters who are sort of dabbling around the edges of brand strategy, I’d say just take a course. I don’t mean to plug mine, take any decent course, right? But take a course that teaches you the practical stuff, not just the framework.

Everyone just gets so obsessed about this end deliverable, like my framework and mine. You’ve got to understand the process. You’ve got to understand how to bring the client along on the journey.

You’ve got to understand the type of research you need to do and the questions you need to ask and how you actually lay that out in an eight week process and how you should price it. All of this stuff, if you just get that stuff from somebody, that will just speed your whole process up, your whole business up, you will just be more confident, you’ll be clearer, you’ll be more relaxed because people are cobbling together a process all the time. It’s just not necessary.

Just get the tools, get equipped, and then you can do the fun bit, writing the thing and doing the research rather than panicking about how should I do this and not being confident doing it. Brilliant.

All right. Final full-on question, Jacob. I’ll leave that one to you.

Yes. Where can we find you and your course?

Oh, you can find me on brandstrategysarah.com and my course is on there, Brand Strategy Academy is on there too. Yeah. It’s great to talk to you both.

Really.

Thank you. Likewise. I think we’re all fairly kicked out on this one as well.

It’s not just yourself.

I’m not alone.

At a super time. Thank you, Sarah, for coming on. All the best and keep up what you’re doing and we’ll keep in touch.

Brilliant. Thanks, guys.

Thanks.