[Podcast] The Brand Mindset with Ezequiel Abramzon

Ezequiel Abramzon is a brand strategist who spent 20+ years working as an executive at Disney as a marketer and strategist running digital across LATAM and later overseeing global creative from the UK.

He now lives in Spain where he works as a consultant helping entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies transform the way they see their business by unlocking their brand mindset.

And brand mindset is the focus of this episode.

We explore what a brand mindset is and why businesses need it.

We go deep into the 6 traits of a brand mindset and explore how to develop each trait. We also pick Ezequiel’s brains on how to keep a mindset on track – both for yourself and your team.

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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.

Well, hello folks, and welcome to JUST Branding. I am really thrilled this time to have with us Ezequiel Abramzon. He’s a brand strategist.

He’s spent over 20 years working as an executive at Disney as a marketeer and a strategist running digital across Latin America and then later overseeing Global Creative from the UK. He’s a wonderful chap. I’ve met him through various things.

Most recently, the Level C Masterclasses. I think he’s a wonderful, wonderful guy. And I think you’re going to get a lot out of what he has to say.

He currently lives in Madrid in Spain, where he works as a consultant helping entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies transform the way they see their business by unlocking something that we’re going to be talking about throughout this episode, their brand mindset. Ezequiel, welcome to the show.

Thank you guys for having me. Hi, Jacob. Hi, Matt.

This is actually surreal. I watched your show so many times with legends like Marty, Chris Doe, Michael Johnson, and something went wrong here because I ended up with…

Well, no, not at all. I think you’re very humble, but you’ve got a lot to give. We’ve worked alongside each other through some of Marty’s master classes, and I know the way that your brain works, and it’s an interesting place.

So I’m looking forward to getting it out on the table, if you like. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? But getting it out on the table and dissecting it with our audience.

So, yeah, looking forward to that. So let’s talk about, just quickly, just to kind of give folks a bit more into your background, because it’s not every day you meet somebody who spent 20 plus years in the corporate system at a place like Disney. Tell us a bit about your story, Ezequiel.

How did you get into Disney? What was your growth trajectory like there? And then what’s happened since?

I usually explain my career in three acts. The first act was me as a young freelance artist and a graphic designer. I started very, very early, studying fine art, illustration, animation.

I did a lot of things in the arts arena when I started freelancing as a teenager. And then I studied graphic design in the University of Buenos Aires and started working for companies on design and communication.

This is in Argentina, right?

Where you went to school. Yes, Buenos Aires. And then across multiple jobs that I had and in many, many industries, I ended up freelancing for Disney, drawing the characters and designing some stuff.

When, and then they offered me a job which kicked off, kicked started the second act in my career, which was 22 years at Disney. Most of those years in Latin America as the head of digital, I helped with the digital transformation since we launched the first websites in the nineties. I joined the company as a creative, approving creative through fax, and I left leading virtual reality projects.

And in the middle, we did a lot of things.

We’re gonna need to explain what fax is for a lot of the people on our show.

That’s your job.

So how would you explain fax, Jacob? That’s quite an interesting thing. How would you explain a fax machine to someone?

Do you even know what that is yourself?

Putting in paper into a machine and it gets transferred digitally across, I don’t even know what technology it uses, but over the waves somewhere. And that paper arrives-

And then the person on the other side.

Gets printed out at the other end.

Yeah, it’s like a photocopy, but instead of you getting the copy, someone else get it.

And I remember it was tediously slow and just like it was like a really, really slow printer. And then it came out the other end like missing letters and it’s like nothing came through or doubles came through.

Yeah, and it printed badly, didn’t it? It was always like the print was rubbish on it. Oh man, so I’m so pleased, so thankful we’re on this side of history now because that was a painful experience.

Most of the young people listening to this show, which sounds really old and patronizing, but they’ll never have to worry about. So there we go. That’s how it started.

Ezequiel almost came out of the arc with fax machines. And when he left, he was approving stuff via the modern technology of email. Brilliant.

Didn’t you say VR?

Oh, VR? Approving in VR?

What?

Yeah, long range. Long range. And in the middle, we were like, as I said, as a startup within the corporation because we started pretty much everything digital for Latin America at Disney.

We launched the social media operation, the online marketing, the advertising, the digital distribution of content, mobile downloads and subscriptions, virtual worlds and video games and pretty much everything for our region, bringing the best from Disney to the digital world. And all those years, we were, as I said, we were immersed in a kind of a startup culture relating with a lot of startups from the dot-com era to the newest projects. I participated in dozens or hundreds of demo days across the years.

I mentored a lot of companies as the Disney executive helping those companies. We even launched a startup incubator within Disney for many years. And I traveled around the world collaborating with Disney offices around different markets or regions.

And I learned during all those years that something went wrong. When I looked at how Disney was working and when I saw how small companies and media companies outside were actually doing things, I recognized it was a big problem. And when I left Disney to kick off my third act as a, again, an entrepreneur and freelance brand consultant, I left in 2020, October 2020, during the worst part of the pandemic.

So I decided to start helping or solving that problem as a consultant.

So what was the problem, Ezequiel?

Yes, you’re right.

You just set that one up for me to ask, didn’t you? I could just tell.

I was speaking. So the problem was, or is, that I guess the majority of businesses don’t have a strategy. They have no idea or no plan to win long term.

And they go because of multiple reasons, the context, the, I guess, many, many facts around the people that lead or the financial situation or the country they are in, the investors they have, the rush that they don’t stop to think. So in my work, I encourage everyone to not only have a brand strategy or a strategy to win in the marketplace, but also click and change the way they see their business by developing what we call the brand mindset.

Yeah, before we dive in, we always like to start with definitions of brand and what brand strategy actually means to you. So how do you see it before we get into the nitty gritty?

Okay, you mean definitions like a brand and-

Yeah, just your point of view, your lens on brand and brand strategy. What does that actually entail for, your clients or who you work with?

You’re not going to get any innovation from my definitions. I love the way people define it. So I adopted them.

I like to explain brand as what people feel about a product, a service or organization. Marty, even Matt, with the meaning people attach to things. I think it’s a great one as well.

What else? Branding is what companies do to shape, nurture and grow those brands. And brand strategy is the overarching plan to actually create or manage to have meaning, evoke those feelings and actually make money.

And what about this idea of brand mindset? Obviously you talked about the way people see things and the plan to win. Is there more to it than that?

How do you, well, first of all, what’s the high level on brand mindset? And then maybe how do you break that up into components?

So, this is maybe silly, but I think entrepreneurs are super heroes. And I see myself as Edna Maoul from The Incredibles. I don’t know if you watched that movie.

So I’m here to help them develop that superpower.

Is she like the fashion designer? Now you mention it. Now you mention it.

I reckon with a crop of hair and some chunkier glasses. Yeah, I love it. You are Edna, I love it.

Her work was actually develop the suits for them to express their superpower. In my case, it’s actually helping them develop that superpower, which is the brand mindset. That’s silly thing, but yeah.

A brand mindset is for me very important. And I define it as the set of principles, beliefs or attitudes that shape how you think about your brand and how you make decisions about your business. And I’m not going to go neuroscience or psychology.

You can read Carol Zwick, Mindset, the book that’s amazing. It’s going to teach you about growth mindset and how that is very important for life and business. I’m talking more superficial part of it, which is a brand focused one.

So if a client asks you, what’s the brand mindset, how would you simply communicate that to them?

Well, I give a certain definition. I also explain the… So here’s the way.

I see brand strategy as the hardware and the brand mindset that the software, right? So as a hardware, you don’t change your computer every single day, right? You buy it and you have it for three, four years.

That’s the strategy, the hard part, which is you stick to a plan for years and you try to develop things to actually achieve your goals. But then you update your software. Every single day you have something to make the performance better.

So you need to make decisions all day. And that’s what I believe is the software. So you need to update all the time.

It’s a training exercise. And I define these six traits that help us identify that we are actually exercising that mindset.

I love that analogy. We’ve heard a lot of analogies on here. And I think it’s a great way to communicate brand and talk about some complex things.

But we haven’t heard the hardware software one just yet. So it’s good to hear that. All right, well, let’s get into the six traits that you refer to about brand mindset.

Sure. So should I list them and then we go one by one, but it’s first, self-awareness. You need to be, you know who you are.

Cost customer centricity, long-term thinking, clarity, inspirational and experiential. Those are the six.

All right, we can make them down further. So should we start at the top?

Yes. So with the self-awareness, you need to know who you are, what you stand for. And within this bucket, yes, purpose, core values, which are very attached.

I tend to work core values really tied to purpose, not after the mission. You know, we always have this order, purpose, vision, mission, and then let’s talk about the values, but values are actually more attached to purpose and are a way, a driving force for you to be loyal to that purpose. And then your objectives and your plan.

The context of how your company or your business, you know, political, economical, societal, cultural, legal, environmental, there are many, many things that are shaping and you need to be aware of what’s happening around your business, your market, whatever surrounds your production and the type of product you make, right? What people think about you also is something that we are going to talk about, but being aware of the situation, the strengths, the weaknesses, and more importantly, you know, you know who you are, but you’re also aware of what you are not, which is something very difficult for people to define. Yeah, it’s very easy to say, yeah, we are funny, we are innovative, we are this or that, but how can we define what we are not?

So it’s a boundary that you respect and you also follow. I think for being really aware, you need to be data driven, which is also something that people struggle to, looking at the numbers, because it’s boring sometimes, it’s difficult to read. Sometimes you have too many figures or things to look at and you don’t know how to select.

So looking at the numbers, whatever it is for your business, it’s important. So you are aware of where you are.

Can I ask a quick question there? Self-awareness, really interesting to consider if there’s any gaps. So like, do you ever go into organizations and you mentioned there’s a problem.

I know we’re in one component here, but I find personally from my work that the self-awareness of a lot of clients or a lot of leadership teams is lacking, right? So they might have their own view or leaders in a leadership team might have their own view or their kind of functions view, but then awareness of what’s going on across the business or in different regions across the world, that’s lacking. And so how do you find that?

Do you find that self-awareness is a major issue?

It is, and the alignment between the self-awareness of different individuals in the organization. I know you guys talk about alignment across the teams throughout the years. In order to define a strategy, I usually ask five questions.

The very first day I meet someone, the usual five questions of strategy, which some people have four, some people have six. I do five, very obvious one. Why are you here?

Who do you serve? Where do you play? How do you win?

And how do you grow? Right? Those five, you get the picture and people probably know where these questions go.

And most of the business leaders can’t really clearly and confidently answer those questions. They interpret the answer. They don’t have a right answer.

They try to think about the question. And the fact that they’re thinking at that moment, for me, it’s a check that they’re not self aware. They’re not completely convinced.

Yeah, they’re not confident. They’re not completely clear about what that is. And particularly when there are several people in the room, they start discussing, no, we are not that, or oh, good way of putting that, right?

So yeah, that’s how I actually check. It’s like when you, you know, long time ago, Jacob, you’re young, but you know, you open the truck or the car and you check the oil, you know, how much?

We’ve had fax machines, we’ve had oil checking, what is going on? Yeah, no, it’s true.

A vintage episode.

Yeah, yeah, this is the vintage episode. But yeah, so yeah, you pull out, it’s called a dipstick, isn’t it? You pull it open and you can see roughly where the oil level is.

Yeah, in the car.

Now you have sensors and computers telling you, hey, put some oil, right? But long time ago, you actually check that manually and then you had to measure how much time you had. So this is kind of a check on self-awareness, I guess.

So here’s another quick question for you before we keep going. Just on that check front, let’s say you’re working with a big organization, how do you get a sense check of that? You’ve got lots of people, like practically, I mean, as a consultant, like how do you start to unpick that, to give people a sense of how aware they are?

Good question. I think by building a cohesive culture, you actually make people more aware of what you stand for and what you want for the business in the future. I always advise to start with the job posting, to establish the culture and the brand and the strategy you have.

The interviews and how you conduct the questions to your candidates and hiring process and the onboarding, way before they start working and building your brand, you’re actually building the brand already with people and making them aware of your values, your culture, and maybe not spending that time into the past, but also your future, right? And also processes and systems, people systems and business systems for you to cross pollinate information across the silos of the organization, which are terrible in big companies. People from one area to the other are unaware of what others are doing and they’re working the same business for the same customer, which makes no sense for me.

It comes back to that alignment, right? No one’s clear, there’s no clarity between the team and the leaders and customers and employees. So I was gonna ask, before we move into the second part, values you talked about before and how you work on values first before leading into the purpose of the vision.

So how do you actually have that discussion about values with the leaders of the organization?

That’s a tough one, because I’m bouncing right now. And I think recently, Mara and I talked about this. There’s a thing with us working on strategy that sometimes you think about the values of the brand that we want to establish, but sometimes they’re already leaving values in the company that are not necessarily scanned and understood and people from human resources would argue that we should start by reading what is in the air and defining how the culture is working instead of just imposing PowerPoint, bullet points, that these are new values.

So it’s a very, very difficult task that we as a strategist or a consultant, we need to really dig into because we might be failing on imposing values that are not necessarily inherent to how people operate in the day to day. And at the same time, not just defining those values, but developing processes to identify the attitudes and the behaviors that you’re expecting from people that are tied to each of those values, which is also something very important for the documents that you’re going to deliver after. Okay, if this is our value, what are we expecting to see in the organization to recognize that those values are active, working or not?

Yeah, like living the brand. It’s one thing to write them down in a PowerPoint, as you said, but how do you integrate that into the business? How do you live the brand is very, very important.

And as you said, it’s very complex. That’s why I was curious on how you got to that point and how you actually ingrained it into business.

Yeah, that’s such a good point. And it’s such a massive challenge. And as you say, Ezequiel and I have had a few conversations about this in the past, just obviously outside of this forum.

But the thing that I kind of think is the other thing to throw on the table, if you like, is that there’s the values of the culture internally, right, which, as you say, HR people like to take a census, take a census check of what’s already there. The struggle as a strategist is we’re trying to move the organization, often trying to move the organization to a place of further relevance or better relevance for a customer segment, right? So if we’re at point A at the moment, we need the business to begin to move towards point B.

And the challenge that you’ve got is that there’s a whole change management piece there, right? And the biggest thing is that there are things that we value, right? And rightly so.

It’s got to be authentic, right? But as a strategist, we’re also thinking about, well, what does the customer value, right? So you’ve got these kind of two sides to the coin.

There’s the expression of the culture, which you don’t want to break necessarily. And then you’ve got the expression of what does the customer need. And so I don’t know what your thoughts are on this, Ezequiel, but it seems to me that values are only useful if we’re using them, as you pointed out, to kind of think about, or what is the outcome of our behaviors for the customer?

That seems to me to be the key part of building a good brand. So there’s this kind of sort of rich tapestry of thinking between there’s us and what we believe and what we’re going to hold ourselves accountable for. But also there’s our customer and what they want and what they need and the experience that they’re really expecting.

And if we can exceed that and improve it, it will be a huge value to the customer. So what are your thoughts on that? About the customer side of things as well as our own.

It’s very interesting. I think customers are more interested on the outcome of your values and on your values per se. So for example, we expect the innovation from Apple, not that employees are innovative.

So I am buying the innovation and the value that provides to me is not how people work at Apple, but the actual product and the service. So we tend to say that brand is built from within or inside out. It starts within the culture and then we, you’re right.

But then we create values for customers and then we try to impose them for the company. So that I’m struggling right now. So when I left Disney, I started, you know, like someone wants to climb the Everest.

What do you do? You train for years, right? So when I left Disney, I realized that I knew so much about big corporations and big brands and global approach.

The bar was, it is very high for me. But when it comes to small companies, not everything applies. Although the example is great, but the practice needs to be adapted.

So I started studying and reading hundreds of books. I did courses. I crave knowledge to actually find the best tools for what I do.

And the thing that I struggle the most is how we build values. That’s probably an open discussion.

Well, if anyone’s got any thoughts on that, jump in the comments. If you’re watching on YouTube or message us on LinkedIn or whatever, we’re always interested in hearing if anybody else has any other thoughts on that. I think you’re right.

I think it’s a sticky situation. It’s not always clear. It’s not always simple.

There is no playbook. You’ve got to deal with existing people, existing cultures, existing teams. And it depends on what your strategy is and where you need to orientate the business towards and the customer needs.

So there’s a lot of kind of unknowns. That’s the beauty of this work, I find anyway, is that it’s just challenging. You don’t know.

You can’t just… There’s no silver bullet to plug into your brand gun to shoot at somebody and done. And the other kind of thing just to throw into the mix in terms of complexity is I often find it’s never really done.

So you could be working with a business for a couple of years, but then the market context changes. So you then have to rethink certain things and you’ve got to be self-aware around what’s happening around you, like you said, Ezequiel. So hugely complex, not easy, but the principles of values and purpose for me are helpful in order to make decisions and to assess how we’re doing.

So great. All right. How about we dive into the next one?

Hopefully we won’t spend all that time on every single one. Ezequiel is thinking, flipping out, I’m going to get a grilling here.

How about a can of worms with the values conversation?

You did, Jacob. But that’s what you do best. There’s worms, there’s cans and Jacob’s the opener of.

So what we’ll do is we’ll move into the next one. Ezequiel, what is the next one? Remind us and then talk to us about your approach.

Customer centricity. So putting customer in the center. That’s another one that we tend to say, put on the PowerPoints and the presentations and the keynotes.

We talk about these, but how do you execute it? What are the attitudes and the behaviors within the company or the business that you need to have? So first of all, it’s an obsessive level of detail to understand what’s the problem that you’re solving.

I believe that by understanding the right problem, you have 80% of the solution. I think someone very smart says something like this. And putting customers in the center of every decision that you make in your business and in your strategy and in the meetings, you will be like a customer avatar sitting in every single meeting and in the table or someone in your organization, probably the chief brand is going to represent your customer in the boardroom by bringing up whatever customer representation is when it comes to projecting revenue and new markets and different approaches, campaigns, and really acknowledging that everything you do is for them and not for your own inspiration, right?

So you show this principle by doing some research. You are always trying to learn about what consumer behaviors are, and there’s a lot of science, neuroscience, psychology, behavior of science, a lot of sciences working in our favor, giving us new data and new information, new reports that allow us to learn about them. There’s also old-fashioned but very useful practices like interviewing your customers, reading their reviews, responding to their messages and having a real conversation with them, not just assuming what they think, because your PowerPoint says that they want this, ask them.

So being really open with your customers and putting your customers in the center is the second one that is very important.

I think you’re referring to, correct me if I’m wrong, but market research in a way, understanding the customer on a deep level, wants, needs, fears, desires, all that. So how do you actually get to that root cause and how do you get to know the customer on that deep level? I know you mentioned a few things like interviews, but how do you actually really understand their problem, not just a surface level problem?

Well, I’m not an expert on research, but I recommend that you trust and hire the experts that do this. For example, I remember that at Disney we did tons of research. Disney has a lot of resources, offices around the world.

So we were used to every other year to get a lot of insights from global and local studies about what people think or feel about our characters, our core brands, about the industry, the media entertainment industry, the adoption of new technologies and how, because Disney is a company, of course, is 99 years old. Next year is a big party, 100 years old. So it’s a really mature but also very, well, it’s a third one, long-term thinking company.

So it’s really slowly understanding the behavior of your core customers. In our case, in the Disney case, it was the family as a whole, kids or adults, to understand what customers like or dislike and also, you know, maybe scanning your competition and seeing what others think about other characters or other brands as well, conducting focus groups, online panels, questionnaires, small surveys, post-mortem acquisition questions as well. So there are a lot of tools.

Again, I’m not an expert, but I’m sure you guys know a lot of legends on the marketing side. Actually, I watched an episode about a behavioral guy that you guys interviewed recently, very focused on the execution, understanding those customers as well, right?

I’m glad you mentioned the competitor, because it is a combination of the classic Cs of understanding your company and the customer and your competitors. So if you can understand all of that, then you have a better understanding of how to position your brand, a product or service, because you have tapped into that knowledge. So there are so many different ways.

I was just curious on how you got to in that deeper problem of the customer. But yeah, market research, it’s tough. A lot of small businesses take things on a hunch.

They don’t do the proper research. So at least what I’ve found is you can learn from the competitors, the marketplace, and interview customers to help inform your decisions or create better decisions.

Yeah, I love that. And I think the other thing to perhaps mention there is, you’re absolutely right, Ezequiel, the best thing is to hire experts like businesses or consultants that are set up to do that research and are trained to do it. What I found with some of my smaller clients is that what is just helpful is to just do it, right?

Just get in front of customers. And the other thing that I always sort of think, and this goes back to the point of relevance, right, is that things change over time. Like you said, like Ezequiel, I think it was every year you said that you had some insights.

That’s what you need to do. You can’t just do it and go, right, we know what the customer wants forever. Things change.

So keep checking in, keep a cadence of that going.

And not only every year or every other year, but actually the same questions over time, because you see the evolution of your information over the years. It’s not just changing the questions every year. So you don’t have a parameter or a context to actually compare.

I met with a lot of entrepreneurs that come with a great idea to be positioned, let’s say something for the elderly people, a solution for a problem for other individuals. And I say, okay, how many, where does this insight come from? Oh, I talked to my grandmother and she, her pain, right?

As it’s one person, so if you want my money as an investor, bring me a thousand interviews with the customer, and then we can create and understand the size of the problem as well. So also for early stage companies, it’s very important to go out and confirm the problem with the real people that we are, your insider guts.

Yeah, and it works for B2B as well. I’ve got one client in the building industry that is a massive building contractors here in the UK. And weirdly, they hired me to do their customer forums and to kind of interview customers.

And I actually quite enjoy that kind of work. And they built a whole strategy around some insights that we found, and then they built the strategy, they’re running at the strategy, but then, you know, thankfully for me, it’s a nice little contract because every year I’ve got some time with the same sort of group of customers or at least from the same businesses that they operate with to keep checking in and create an insights report, then their leadership team reviews on a yearly basis, which I think is, you know, amazing for, you know, to put the customer at the center. That’s the sort of thing that I think every business could do, whether they’re huge or whether they’re just, as you say, early stage startup Ezequiel, just to kind of sense check how things are going.

All right, what’s the next one? What’s trait number three?

What’s long-term thinking?

Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Yeah, it’s kind of self-explanatory, but you have a vision, right? Most of brands, when we start building the strategy or you have a plan, you have a vision, that sometimes within the context of a business, you can actually do it five, 10, 15 years maybe, probably impossible for 15 months. Let’s try 10 years.

How the world looks like and what is your plan to actually get there in the right way, correcting the course within the short term. That’s a very important byproduct of the short term, which is the short term doesn’t deviate you from the long run. So your decisions in the short term are always in the context of what you want in the long term.

So you don’t go like the horses, they go with this, I don’t know what you call it in English. They can look out.

Blinkers, I don’t know what they call those. Yeah, they’re like blind, they’re like, they blind them from looking to the side, right?

Yeah, I’m talking about horses again. It’s vintage, I told you.

Vintage, we left horses a while ago and we’ll let cars go. Anyway, move on.

So yeah, you look at the floor, you’re running, right? Looking at the floor and you don’t know where you’re going. Maybe you’re ending up in the wrong place because you didn’t look up to see the direction.

So you actually need to make decisions that are going to help you get there faster or slower. Or stronger, right? Understanding the value you provide over the years and how that value is going to evolve.

I always say that markets are dynamic and we tend to take a picture of the competition right now and the mapping of how things look, right? The access and everything, but then in six months that could change. But we put it on the plan and then we go for that.

And after three years, we didn’t look at that and the market changed. New players and new subcategories or the value that customers see in that market or that category changed and moved away. I always give the example of a zoo.

In my time, a zoo was a family outdoor experience. Now it’s forbidden for kids. Kids don’t want to go to zoos because it’s a jail for animals.

It’s perceived as a wrong experience right now, right? Or fair codes, right? It’s an animal that you’re wearing now.

But in the past, it was a status sign. So value changes with time, and you need to really think and assess how that evolves with time.

And just to draw on your Disney experience, and you said they’re a very long-term thinking company. So I’m just curious to, you know, what were some strategies that they implemented to ensure that they’re always on point and they’re, you know, looking into the distance without those blinkers?

Many, many examples. So Disney wouldn’t be where it is if it didn’t adjust first. Think long-term, right?

We tend, every year, we tend to assess a five-year plan. We, as managers, I was a general manager of a business, P&L responsibility, and I had to explain to my superiors, you know, global executives, how I was thinking to make money in the next 10 years. There are equations, there are multiple factors around it, but in the digital business, it’s very difficult to project 10 years, but I had to.

That was the exercise, but in the movies or in the parks or every business, we had to present a plan and actually explain reasonably, how are you going to achieve those objectives, right? Based on the research, the past businesses, things that were going there. When, if you look back, the experience in the parks was very different from the ones we have right now.

Now we have bands or wrists that you can pay everything, that you can actually secure your itinerary, so you make less lines before what wasn’t there. Innovation happened all across the company and it was planned in a way to make improvements, to learn from the information that we had.

We discussed this with a guest just recently about Disney’s innovation. The same story about the bands, but yes, thank you for sharing that insight. Did you want to go into number four?

You need to be resilient. In other words, you have a plan long term, but things change, so you need to adapt to that change and move on and have patience. Don’t rush it.

The thing long term is actually not rushing. It’s living it the way it is, talking to your investors if you’re a startup, to trust you and wait for the market to evolve and following the trends in the right moment. So the next one is clarity, being clear, which is something that every business person needs to have, particularly the ones that is leading a brand.

So you are self-aware and you know where you want to go and you know who is your customer. Now you need to express that very clearly. What’s your uniqueness and what’s the value that you provide to them?

What’s your position in the marketplace? Who’s competing with you? You need to have that clarity and express it.

You have to have a plan to communicate that. What’s the messaging? What are the resources that you have?

All of these tools that are available for you. And clearly, why do you need this? How are you going to use it?

What are you going to say? Where are you going to say it? To whom?

The definition of everything you need needs to be clear. Sometimes in the interviews or during the process, I ask questions and people look at them and say, I don’t know, where is that? No, it has to be clear.

The clearer you are, the better for the business as well. That’s one of the things that I try to work with.

You rattled off so many big topics there, positioning and messaging and value and differentiation or uniqueness. So they can all be unpacked. I’m not sure where we want to spend that time, but maybe we…

Yeah, but clarity is the outcome that a lot of strategies give or promise after the strategy, right? But what is clarity? How are you clear?

You know, after you have a clear document in your hands after the process, whether if it’s from Monday to Friday, you have a strategy of four months, you get that, you put it on your desk, three weeks later, how do you read that? Are you, do you understand what it is? How are you going to make decisions later?

You know, this mindset is going to help you, but you need to make sure that you have clear ideas and you express that.

Well, clarity is so powerful because we talked about alignment earlier. I often find that, you know, one thing that, I work in a lot of B2B environments, and one thing that I think people struggle with is they get really jargon heavy and very technical, right, about a lot of stuff. And sometimes that’s needed, particularly on a product marketing basis, right?

But at brand level, you know, we should be aiming for clarity and simplicity of concept that then all of the products or the service or whatever can then ladder into. But without that clarity, I think you’re absolutely right, without that clarity, you know, how can you assess whether something is on, is correct for the future, the long-term thinking of the brand or not? You can’t because you haven’t defined that.

You haven’t got that razor sharp clarity. And maybe one leader has a form of clarity in their mind and another one has another form of clarity. And then there’s confusion between the two.

So you’re absolutely right with all of these principles. I’m really seeing how it comes together, yeah.

Oh, imagine that you’re a CEO of a mid to big company and you go to a town hall and you give a speech and people don’t understand what you say or where you go. Right, they didn’t get the message. They didn’t get, it was too long, too vague.

And then they go out of that town hall and you lost the opportunity to align everyone behind whatever your idea is. Or you’re a tiny company pitching for an investor. You have five minutes to pitch the idea and get $1 million.

If you’re not clear what you need or what you want, you get out of that room without the money and without the credibility as well. So you need to be clear.

What we do as strategists is really simplify. We get all this information, all the ingredients and try to get down to something pure and simple. And that’s really what we do.

We give clarity to our clients and align leaders, the team and everyone. So, all right.

So next one is inspiration or inspirational, right? So it’s about storytelling. If you can’t inspire people within your organization and people outside your organization, you’re definitely doing something wrong.

So you need to build your storytelling. There are many, you know, actually, Manu, you wrote a book about storytelling and how to create. I’m not going to give you a theory about storytelling, but after two decades at Disney, I kind of have it on an actual basis and I read a lot.

And you need to build a story. You need to select the characters in your story. I like to share, you know, there’s a quote about Disney.

Disney used to create the movies considering three things. It’s an amazing, a great story told through adorable characters and always telling the story with an advanced technology. So every movie that you saw from Walt Disney was, he adopted a new innovation to tell the story better.

You know, color, sound, multiplying, you know, you can track the evolution of the innovation at Disney through every single movie. So what is your innovation? And what’s the story?

Who are your characters? You know, the hero, the guy, the villain in your story, which as strategies, we tend to use these archetypes or the hero journey or whatever tools you use, but get your story straight so you can engage, you can inspire people inside your organization to build the culture and empowering and innovating whatever you do. And also inspiring people outside to work with you because if your story is inspirational, people are going to want to work with you and want in, right?

Also, I guess it’s very common now that if you’re responsible, if you talk about sustainability, if you have a purpose that is related to saving the planet, saving humans, go to space, that is inspirational per se. There are topics or causes that inject a storytelling into your brand, which I don’t see why not to jump into one if it makes sense to your customers or to your product. But that is a speeder.

How do you say a fast track to your storytelling? Adopting someone else’s, something bigger and you being part of it.

Oh, there’s so much value in that. From a leadership perspective, sometimes you meet leaders and you just think, you’ve just got tired. You’re just getting down with PowerPoint presentations and reports to the board and you’ve lost your love.

And you come in and you start working them through and they go back and they find their inspiration. And once you get that spark, it’s so powerful because as you say, they’ve got to excite the people underneath them. And I always say to the clients, this has got to be something that is authentic and exciting to you as leaders.

But also when we’re recruiting a receptionist on the front desk, who’s going to greet people when they enter your building or enter your store, they’ve got to be also, there’s got to be something in it for them as well. So like, what is that? What is that story?

And you’re absolutely right, Ezequiel. Story narrative, it excites, it inspires. And I love that.

I think that’s so crucial. So, you know, great component there. What’s the last one, Ezequiel?

The best, I guess is the best topic. It’s the experience or being experiential. So of course you need to build an experience for customers to get the idea, to feel the product, to experience it, to feel things, but you need to be experiential in your mindset.

You need to always thinking how that experience is going to be lived and breathed by your customers. When you think about the best way to create a brand experience, I believe that the probably the most common example is the brand identity. And when we say brand identity, 90% of the people will think about visual identity and that’s fine because 70% of our, I guess, stimulating things in the body go through the eye.

That’s why brand identity is perceived as visual. But you need to think about your brand for the six senses. How is the sound of your brand?

How your brand smells? Is there a touch experience, unboxing, or the type of product you built? Is it a taste?

If you have an office and you have a commissary or a bar, or a coffee corner, can you build a taste for the culture? Maybe thinking about it. If you close your eyes, and I put something on your ears, and I put you inside of a McDonald’s store, you’re probably going to guess where you are, or entering a Starbucks.

It smells unique, it smells different. You may like it or not, but it’s developed. It’s part of the experience.

When you walk through the park, you listen to music. You have something that you recognize with the eyes shot. And that’s part of the Sixth Sense’s, sorry, Five Sense’s experience.

Sixth Sense is a movie, so.

Where you see dead people and stuff like that, which is not what we’re advocating here on JUST Branding. But no, experiential, really good point. How do you experience the brand?

And I guess that’s the outcome. Like we talked about outcomes earlier, but you’ve got to be thinking about the output of the strategy. But somebody said, I don’t know, somebody very clever said that your strategy is only ever as good as your execution.

So if we’re talking about putting customers at the center, like you were saying, and we’re going to create value for them, what does that actually look like? And then how do you make that happen? And I think that’s a really good point.

I check this by asking, what are the emotions that your brand wants to evoke? It’s a very plain question, very simple, nobody knows.

Love it. Brilliant. What a great question.

There we are, full of nuggets of wisdom there. So, wow, the six components of Abram Mindset. Ezequiel, thank you so much for that.

Now time is slowly slipping away. We had tons of other questions to kind of ask you, but I think perhaps we’ll just sort of, just have a quick final kind of check-in on this one. Like, how do you, so say you set all of these, you’ve got them defined, you’ve got the clarity.

Going forwards into the future, how do you ensure that say leadership teams, they keep their mindset on track, they keep referring back to these things, they keep them alive? Because one thing is the excitement, the inspiration over something initial, but where, but how does it keep going over, look at Disney, for example, they’ve kept going for 100 years, as you say, and they always still feel it’s fresh, still feel inspirational, still feel, they’re putting out experiences which are still relevant to people. How does that keep going?

Where do we get the longevity from? What are your thoughts kind of on that, then we’ll sort of wrap up?

Well, I think it’s like the earlier metaphor, right? Why you need to continuously update your software. And that will be probably maintaining and constant conversation, checking in.

You know, if you’re a leader in our organization, ask your people how the brand is going. How are they thinking? What are we learning this week?

Should we change something in their strategy on a constant or not every single day because you’re going to end up in a loop, but maybe every other month to think how things are going. Are we on track? Are we practicing all of these things?

Talk to, you know, if you’re a CEO, talk to your intern, for example, interview. I used to interview everyone in my organization. I had hundreds of people.

Every once in a while, I would talk to the lower levels of the organization to check if the communication from the top down would get there. And I would ask certain, I would say, magical questions to check if the cascade went down correctly, but you need to be there. And also understanding that you are going to be always on a beta state because things change, things evolve, and you need to be always updating.

What else? But yeah, it’s never complete. I believe that a brand is a living thing.

It’s an organism that you need to feed. And it’s not a, I used to say uniqueness is not a state, it’s a journey. So you need to join that journey and evolve with your customers and always checking in how things are going.

Nice.

All right, so Ezequiel, where can people find you?

Oh, I’m everywhere online, every single.

He’s everywhere. He’s everywhere. The Brand Mindset exists everywhere.

You can go to hellolalo.com, which is my consultancy’s website or LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn.

Can you say hello, yellow?

Hello, hello.

Hello, hello.

I pronounce it like hello, hello, which is quite a cool thing.

So do you want to spell that for folks, Ezequiel, so they can check you out?

Hello, Lalo, L-A-L-O.

Brilliant. I was going to say one other thing as well, because I know stuff about you that you’ve not mentioned. And you are an artist as well.

And you have an artist studio. I know we’ve not touched on that. Do you want to just drop that?

Because I think people will be interested in your art. So just drop that one.

Sure. Well, I use a name, a different name as an artist, is Ezec, which is E-Z-E-K. And you can look for me on Instagram or ezec.studio as a website as well.

Or you creative folks out there, just check that out. It would just give you some inspiration. It’s very creative.

I know that’s not the subject of what we’ve been talking about today, but you know, you like to, like, yeah. And I am a big fan of Ezequiel’s art. So it’s great to get that out there.

Well, look, so we’ve covered a lot of ground. The Brand Mindset, wow, what an amazing kind of episodes this has been. Thank you so much, Ezequiel, for coming on and sharing that.

We look forward to kind of keep it in touch and seeing how things grow over the coming years. Or I guess the kind of final question is, is what are you looking for next? Like, what is your kind of, are you looking for clients?

Are you looking for, you know, consultancy work? How do you, what’s your sort of, what’s your sort of focus at the moment?

Oh, yes, I just started my third act as we discussed. I have friends, we talk about like, we are going to live a hundred years. I’m 47, so I’m kind of young.

If I’m going to believe a hundred years, I have tons of-

Plenty of oil in the tank to use as an expression.

I could start, you know, being a doctor or an architect or a mechanic, I don’t know. But in terms of run, one advice that I want to give is study, you know, learn every single day. I devote hours and hours every single week to learn new things.

And I’m very curious, and I’m particularly on the science of brand, how what I call the EQ of branding is going to evolve, the emotional intelligence of companies and brands, how the artificial intelligence, behavioral economics and technology is going to, you know, change this. So I’m going to dig into technology as a tool for brand people to leverage, not just the thinking.

Nice, and when you’ve got to the bottom of that, reach out to me and Jacob. Let’s have you on to talk about the EQ of brand when that’s done. Look forward to that.

Ezequiel, thank you so much. Take care of yourself and have, you know, thank you. We appreciate your time.

Thank you guys for having me.