Category: Audience

Greg Dolan of Keen Decision Systems joins us to demystify Marketing Mix Modeling. Greg explains how Keen’s AI-driven model offers real-time insights and simulations, facilitating financial optimization and long-term brand value creation. Greg emphasizes the need for continuity in marketing, citing case studies that illustrate how going dark can result in loss of profitable demand. Learn how MMM supports decision-making with Keen’s predictive and prescriptive planning outputs.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Greg Dolan: There’s a big difference between what was traditionally marketing mix consulting and what we do. The use case for both marketing teams and agency partners is that they’re using this as a planning tool that they can understand and simulate outcomes and then execute those plans and be able to validate the original plans through the system. 

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Today’s media environment is increasingly complex, with a myriad of online and offline channels available to marketers. Understanding hybrid consumer journeys and the effects of advertising in newer channels like retail media is a significant challenge. Economic uncertainty, tighter privacy regulations, and the death of the cookie have all renewed interest in one analytical tool, in particular: marketing mix modeling, or MMM for short. It promises to provide marketers with a holistic approach to planning and media optimization by combining data from multiple sources to generate historical analysis and future marketing planning scenarios. To discuss marketing mix modeling, we’re joined today by Greg Dolan, the co-founder, and CEO of Keen Decision Systems, an Inc. 5,000 software-as-a-service company whose unified measurement and optimization platform enables brand marketers to make data-driven decisions. Prior to co-founding Keen, Greg had brand and corporate strategy experience at CPG companies, including Kraft Foods, Campbell Soup Company, Nabisco, and Mondelēz. He frequently contributes to research publications and is a guest lecturer at UNC Keenan Flagler Business School, teaching MBA students advanced analytics. To discuss how marketing mix modeling can help brands understand the effectiveness and efficiency of their marketing investments, Greg is joining us today from Keen Decision Systems’ offices in Durham, North Carolina. Greg, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS! 

Greg Dolan: Thanks, Adrian. It’s great to be with you.

Adrian Tennant: I gave a brief description in the intro, but can you tell us more about your background before co-founding Keen Decision Systems?

Greg Dolan: Absolutely. My background really led to the creation of Keen, so I started my career as a consumer packaged goods brand marketer. So I worked in the food industry at Nabisco and then Kraft Foods and the Campbell Soup Company, and I was primarily in general management-focused P&L management of brands. I had responsibility for large marketing budgets. And my biggest lever in generating profitable demand was marketing. And unfortunately, I had, you know, old fashioned marketing mix, where I had a marketing mix study that was delivered, you know, once a year, about six months after the data was delivered to the consultant. It gave me a report card of what happened in the previous two years, but it didn’t give me a good understanding of what I do next. And as a P&L owner, as someone managing a business, I really had to understand, you know, “How do I make better decisions based on the information I have?” So I was lucky enough to meet my technical co-founder, John Busbice, who had been doing marketing mix analytics for the pharmaceutical industry, and he was tired of putting together the marketing mix presentation, a 200-page PowerPoint deck, and delivering it to marketers for it not to be used for decision making. So we felt together there was an opportunity to disrupt the market, develop a next-generation solution that was delivered through software, and not only really focused on just measurement, but more importantly, started to guide decision-making as information became available, and really tie that directly to the financial outcomes that the brand was being held accountable for. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, in the context of today’s still uncertain economic outlook, an article you wrote for Quirks recently discussed the shortsightedness of companies slashing their marketing and advertising spending. Greg, why is it important to maintain long-term branding efforts regardless of the prevailing economic conditions?

Greg Dolan: Well, as marketers, we know that marketing drives value and value over time. And I think that this is missed in a lot of traditional marketing analytics. So what we’ve been able to do as a system and as a software application is account for the timing impact of marketing. So in our system, we were able to build in long-term effects and really understand how each dollar of marketing is impacting both short-term revenue and long-term value. And what we found was – and this is supported by Ehrenberg-Bass and others who really, you know, focus on continuity of marketing – is that when you cut marketing, and you go dark and even flight the business in intervals, then you’re not in front of the consumer. And that marketing that you have put into the marketplace and deployed starts to decay, and it takes that much more spending and time to get the same amount of volume back. So it’s more expensive over time to build back after you’ve gone dark and cut budgets and not invested in the consumer. 

Adrian Tennant: I probably gave an overly simplistic description in the intro, so could you explain in a bit more detail what marketing mix modeling is and how it differs from the kinds of research and reporting that brand managers are likely already receiving from their marketing teams or agency partners? 

Greg Dolan: So there’s a big difference between what was traditionally marketing mix consulting and what we do. In the past – and again, I was a consumer of the traditional marketing mix – every single year, you would go through an exercise with a consultant where you would deliver to them your financial data, all of your marketing activity data across your marketing mix. So your TV data, radio, all your digital, your trade for the CPG world. And those consultants would build a custom analytics model, primarily time series regression. So they’re looking at the correlation between all of your activity and spend and your sales. And they would deliver that analysis in a PowerPoint presentation that gave you a report card for how the brand or business had done over the past two years. And that is an exercise that’s recreated and basically, done over every single year, created from scratch. So it was helpful in terms of, “Hey, I have an understanding of what worked in the past,” but it wasn’t, as I mentioned, as you know, helpful when it came to making the next decision and understanding what you do next. And that’s really what we are looking to disrupt. So the brand manager in the past would use that as validation for what happened in the past. What we’re trying to do is really pivot that from measurement to decision-making. So we know in this world where it’s a lot more complex, there are a lot more channels, a lot of silos within organizations that it’s important to have an omnichannel perspective when it comes to planning your marketing. So we are focused on bringing in all the information that we can bring to bear. So that’s a combination of the traditional time series data that you would give to a traditional marketing mix, but combine that with industry knowledge through our proprietary marketing elasticity engine, which serves as an information base for our models, but also any other analytics that is being done across the organization, whether that’s MTA, or copy effectiveness studies, or A/B tests or any of that information that can also inform the model. So we’re bringing the full knowledge state to the table in order to inform not only what happened in the past but, more importantly, on a real-time basis. “How do I make the next decision? Where am I going to get the most significant return on the next dollar invested? And how do I show continuous improvement for the brand looking forward?” So the use case there for both marketing teams and agency partners is that they’re using this as a planning tool that they can understand and simulate outcomes and then execute those plans and be able to validate the original plans through the system. So it’s a continuous planning, execution, and validation system.

Adrian Tennant: What typically prompts brand marketers to seek out a marketing mix modeling solution, do you think?

Greg Dolan: Well, it’s becoming a lot more complex to understand all the different pieces of marketing, and how do you balance the top of the funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom of the funnel? I think what we’ve seen is that, you know, where we’ve had the best luck understanding impact is at the bottom of the funnel. And, you know, those revenue-driving transactions. So, what we know is that there’s a lot of complexity, a lot of fragmentation across the funnel. It’s as important to have a balance at the top of the funnel as it is to have a heavy investment at the bottom of the funnel. So brand managers and marketers, in general, are looking to understand the full impact of the marketing mix on financial performance. And that’s been largely something that marketers haven’t been able to demonstrate. And that’s one of the reasons why, You know, CMOs have a very, uh, short tenure in the C-suite. They’re not able to demonstrate with accountability the impact of the decisions that they’re making across the marketing mix in service of those financial objectives they’re looking to achieve. Really closing that marketing proof gap, being able to understand, “I’m putting a dollar in all these channels, what does it mean for the value that I’m driving for the organization as well as the short-term impact from a revenue perspective?”.

Adrian Tennant: What are some of the most common use cases for MMM? 

Greg Dolan: The primary use case – and it’s a little bit different for the way we approach it. So we approach it from a decision-making perspective, and we’re working with clients and agencies to develop a decision frame around what decisions they’re looking to make. And the best way to think about that is in terms of a hierarchy. So if I’m the CMO of an organization and I have a lot of different brands across my portfolio, the first decision I want to make is understanding, “How much do I put behind brand A versus brand B?” And then, we can get to lower levels of granularity. So, for brand A, maybe I want to understand sub-brand A versus sub-brand B and then across all the channels within each one of those brands. So it becomes a deeper and deeper understanding of how all of the marketing pieces, all the marketing channels, are contributing to the financial outcomes. And that’s really the primary use case for us: in a brand-based, macro-down perspective, around marketing mix from an omnichannel perspective. But then we can get to more granular use cases. So an example would be, a huge use case in CPG right now is understanding retail media and how that plays, you know, across retailers in interaction effects with shopper marketing and trade. And how potential retail media investment in, say, a Walmart impacts Target and other retailers. So we’re able to build models at the level where decisions are being made and give unique perspective on how to optimize those resources. 

Adrian Tennant: Marketing mix modeling has traditionally been offered by large well-known marketing and shopper measurement companies, and it can often be several months before clients are presented with a model. These engagements also typically require a six-figure investment. Greg, your disruptive approach considerably compresses the traditional timeline and reduces the cost with a system designed to provide real-time insights. How do you achieve that? 

Greg Dolan: Well, the secret is software. So we realized early on that the market was moving a lot faster then a human could actually inform decisions. Back when I started my marketing career in the late nineties, you know, I had a decide between tv, radio, and print, right? So there were a couple of channels, we could take the time. There were long lead-time buys, right? A lot of upfronts. And we were able to do that, and it was perfectly fine to have, you know, a report that was provided once a year. And as digital became more prevalent and that fragmentation started happening, and then we got into shopper marketing on the CPG side. And then there’s retail media. There’s more and more fragmentation, and the buying cycles are shorter. So you can’t make decisions or understand impact without technology and without the right amount of data to be able to support that. And if you’re looking at a pure consulting model, it’s cost prohibitive because each model is very expensive, to your point, north of six figures. So technology had to drive efficiency there. So we were able to build a model that leverages information, ingests and maps information in real-time, builds models with the click of a button. And then you have a historical perspective that’s based on the latest information and a foundation then to run planning optimizations and look forward and start to build, you know, prescriptive plans based on the latest information, based on a learning model that embeds machine learning and AI into that decision-making process. So really all enabled by technology, and the ability to quickly ingest and map data, when it’s available into something that’s actionable that the marketer can though go execute.

Adrian Tennant: Keen recently published details of a study that reveals the most effective flighting strategy for linear TV advertising. Greg, could you share with us what you learned? 

Greg Dolan: Absolutely. It’s fundamental to the math in our system. So as I was talking about before, you know, we’ve accounted for long-term effects in our models. So in our marketing elasticity engine, we have different decay rates for every single marketing channel you can think of – so for TV versus radio, print versus couponing, and some of the shorter transaction-driving tactics as well. So we’ve built, based on that, a response curve weekly into the future. So we know exactly, based on both internal and external factors, what the point of diminishing returns are for a given channel, including TV. So we can see what the marketer is giving up from a revenue and profitability standpoint by going dark, right? So if you’re flighting, and you’re two weeks on, two weeks off, or three weeks on, three weeks off, those three weeks that you’re off actually, there’s an opportunity cost that’s created where you’re giving up profitable demand. So we’ve been able to show the power of continuity, and the impact that has on building value over time. And as I was talking about before, when you are dark, it’s more costly to then get back on, get in front of consumers, and have that spend drive profitable demand in the short-term. So really it is all about driving continuity of activity as a means to continue to build, as marketing decays over time.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Greg Dolan, the co-founder and CEO of Keen Decision Systems. Artificial intelligence is currently very much in the news, but at Keen Decision Systems, you’ve been using it for several years. Greg, how does the inclusion of machine learning impact your platform’s predictive and prescriptive planning outputs?

Greg Dolan: So we think about ourselves as an AI decision-support agent, right? So the system is based on the fact that the model will learn from new information as it’s ingested in the model, right? As we were talking about before, old-fashioned, more traditional marketing mix is a point-in-time analytics exercise that’s recreated every year. So there’s no learning from the new information. It’s actually a new analysis. Ours is actually built and additive over time. So our model is based on, you know, thousands of data points over time from our marketing elasticity engine that’s built on with every new model that’s published in the application. So marketers using our system are learning from the rest of the industry as they go, but also new data that they ingest that’s their own as part of their custom models. So every single data point that comes into the model teaches the model based on that data point. So the marketer is constantly making decisions based on the newest, most recent information.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you’ve mentioned it a couple of times: a patent-pending feature of your platform is the marketing elasticity engine. Greg, can you explain what that is and how it supports the optimization of marketing investments across different channels?

Greg Dolan: So it’s the best industry information possible. So we built our models based on Bayesian regression, which means that there’s prior information that becomes a starting point for all of our models. So we’ve built this database that’s initially populated with about 40 years of academic research. How much does a GRP for TV deliver on average for typical brands and businesses across industries? We’ve then built in this automated mechanism where every single elasticity is blinded and informs the elasticity engine. So, when we publish a model, we learn from the changes in the data patterns and signals for businesses across industries. It helps to infuse the marketing mix model with more information, more relevant information, we’re able to source from businesses across industries. So it actually makes the model, you know, more predictive and more prescriptive over time. The other aspect I’ll just add is that, we can use that information to simulate marketing channels that have not been executed in the past. So if the brand is considering as an example, investing in a new social media platform, we will have an elasticity in our engine that can form that initial investment. So you can actually simulate, if you’re looking to optimize a fixed budget, you can simulate the allocation for a new channel, and we could see exactly where we’d pull those dollars to be able to fund that new channel.

Adrian Tennant: So that’s very powerful – if a client is considering adding a new channel to the media mix but has no prior data of their own, Keen Decision Systems’ model can predict their performance.

Greg Dolan: Correct. And then, as we get experience in that channel, so we execute the spend and we then incorporate that new data in the model, the model will adjust based on that data signal, and the actuals coming out of the market. 

Adrian Tennant: Does your model typically allow for factors such as pricing changes, new distribution partners, the broader economic environment such as inflationary pressures, and seasonality? 

Greg Dolan: All of the above. So you can’t really forecast the right investment plan or forecast, you know, the top and bottom line without a good understanding of the external factors that are impacting your business. So we incorporate all of those into the model, and their key factors that contribute to what the right amount of spend is and what the impact of that spend is across channels. You know, a good example obviously, is COVID. I mean, as we went in, we really leaned in with our clients, with all that uncertainty, incorporated a hundred-year pandemic into the models. So we were able to see in real-time as the pandemic unfolded, you know, how behavior was changing, how channel performance changed, and we were able to make changes with a lot of agility through that time period that, you know, helped the brands grow even in the face of all that adversity. 

Adrian Tennant: What types of data integrations does your platform support? 

Greg Dolan: This was always historically the biggest challenge for marketers. With marketing mixes, you know, the heavy lift associated with collecting data. So we’ve spent the last, you know, 10-plus years really focused on the data problem and have as much flexibility in ingesting data as possible. So we have APIs, so we’re able to connect into data systems. We have data connectors that are connected in, so all of your major platforms can connect directly into our system. And in the absence of that, we’ve developed some CSV templates that can be automatically uploaded and mapped. And we have smart mapping within our application, so based on how we’re modeling and at what level we’re bringing the right amount of data into the system to quickly model and build plans.

Adrian Tennant: How frequently are Keen Decision Systems’ models updated?

Greg Dolan: So it depends on the client’s decision cycles, as we call them. You know, how often are they looking at marketing and understanding marketing performance and then making any changes to marketing? So the system is set up to update every single time there’s new data. But on average, we see clients that are updating quarterly. Some of our clients are as they get more accustomed to the model and leverage it more their decision-making have moved to monthly, which also then can inform their monthly forecasts, for the business as well. So as often as, new information is available, they can update them. But it also depends on when the information will be utilized for decision-making.

Adrian Tennant: Typically, what’s the margin of error for revenue forecasts generated by your system? 

Greg Dolan: So generally, it starts pretty accurately. As I was mentioning before, we use a lot of data, a lot more data than just time series data to inform our models. So a combination of the marketing elasticity, priors, as well as other analytics, as well as the time series and financial data, actually leads to more prescriptive and predictive models. So on average, to start, we’re less than 4% error. And as the model learns more over time, through the course of our relationship with brands and businesses, that will tighten even further. And the more we get to know the business and can incorporate the right information, that will tighten as well. 

Adrian Tennant: Greg, could you walk us through some case studies that illustrate your platform’s capabilities? 

Greg Dolan: Sure. I mean, we work with a pretty diverse group of clients. So we’ve built the system to be industry and data-agnostic. So, you know, we’ve worked with clients anywhere from direct-to-consumer cleaning products, to golf grips, to food delivery systems, right? So there’s a lot of different brands we work with. The primary use case really is around financial optimization. So, you know, on the DTC cleaning products, we really wanted to get to a monthly optimization cycle with them using the platform to refresh data channel optimization, timing optimization. And for that brand in particular, and this is the key that I’ll mention across all the case studies I’m going to talk about, we’re able to identify pretty sizable financial opportunities. And in this case, we’re able to identify a $33 million top-line opportunity. So there are real dollars and cents once you understand where the waste is, to be able to reallocate and optimize. You know, I mentioned the frozen food delivery company that we work with. You know, they had some challenges from COVID. During COVID, you know, a lot fewer people were going to restaurants, a lot more people were getting food delivered to them. So their business really peaked as they went through 2020, but then had to cycle it in 2021. So our role changed from ‘20 to ‘21, where we’re helping them to fuel the growth in 2020, but then had to identify how to cut back in 2021, right-size the investment to make sure that we’re still optimizing the ROI, and able to drive some growth even though there were external headwinds. And then, you know, the example with golf grips, right? They were looking to, one, get a lot more impact with the same budget. So we’re able to show them a path to optimize both their timing and their mix of spend across channels to drive –  and I know it’s going to sound crazy – but a 344% increase in ROI increased revenue by $14 million. So real dollars and cents, real value being driven, just knowing in real-time where the dollars are most effective and where you can step on the gas and invest more.

Adrian Tennant: Over the past several weeks on this podcast, we’ve been examining how brands grow, discussing some of the universal laws established by the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Greg, how does Keen’s analysis reflect or support Ehrenberg-Bass’s principles?

Greg Dolan: So we talked a little bit about continuity of spend and I think, paramount to Byron Sharp and How Brands Grow is making sure that you’re constantly in front of consumers, and as broad reach as possible. And I think that’s what we’ve scientifically proven out as well. So you can’t be dark. You have to be in front of consumers. You have to maintain continuity and consistency in your spend to be able to continue to drive growth in the brands. And we, given that we have that long-term effects viewpoint of how businesses grow, we’re actually able to show the layers of rock. And we have a chart in our system that show layers of rock and how marketing year after year is building value over time. And that’s very consistent with what Ehrenberg-Bass would promote as well. 

Adrian Tennant: If IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners are interested in learning more about marketing mix modeling with Keen Decision Systems, what’s the best way to get in touch with your team? 

Greg Dolan: Please reach out via our website, www.keendss.com and you can request a demo or an introductory conversation, and we’d love to share more.

Adrian Tennant: And if you’d like to see some of the platform’s capabilities, follow the link to the short video included in the transcript for this episode. Greg, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Greg Dolan: Thank you, Adrian, I really enjoyed it. And again, we’d love to have a conversation with anyone that’s interested in more background on Keen.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Greg Dolan, the co-founder and CEO of Keen Decision Systems. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation along with links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select podcast from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

With 43 million rental units in the US, it’s crucial to stand out from the crowd. Bigeye’s Tom Mahoney and Rhett Withey discuss property marketing strategies for today’s competitive housing market and share insights about building successful multi-family and student housing brands. Learn about Bigeye’s 4-step process for creating distinctive property brands, including logo creation, designing color palettes, and drawing inspiration from nature and neighborhood elements.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Tom Mahoney: I think building a brand that can reach a wide audience range can certainly be challenging in the property world.

Rhett Withey: A lot of times, people forget that a brand is not just a logo. You can’t just slap a logo on every single item and say, “Here’s my brand.”

Tom Mahoney: Now more than ever, there’s a need for strong marketing to help set a new community apart from the rest. 

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. The rental housing market makes up a significant segment of the US housing industry, with over 43 million rental units, according to the US Census Bureau. Rising single-family home prices and interest rate hikes also make multi-family housing a more affordable option for many people. At the time we are recording this, it was just reported that the median price for a single-family home is around $416,000. Meeting strong consumer demand for rental options increases the number of multi-family developments, which in turn makes the market itself more competitive. Property developers and management companies increasingly need to find ways to differentiate their properties to attract tenants. This includes offering unique amenities, of course, but also creating compelling brand identities and marketing strategies focused on specific markets. For this episode, we’re joined by Tom Mahoney, Bigeye’s Account Manager dedicated to guiding engagements with our clients in multi-family, active adult, student living, and co-living community development and management. Tom has built a career in real estate and property management with a focus on sales, marketing, and customer relationship management. Prior to joining Bigeye, Tom worked on the client side as an assistant property manager for Greystar for over five years. And before that, he was a leasing professional at Carter Haston Real Estate. Tom is joining us today to discuss the role that creative services can play in differentiating properties and ensuring they’re fully leased. Tom, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Tom Mahoney: Thank you for having me, Adrian. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, Tom, I gave a brief description in the intro, but can you tell us about your background? 

Tom Mahoney: Yes. As you mentioned, I was in the property management industry for several years prior to joining Bigeye. I worked on 13 total properties during my time, including new lease-up projects, takeovers, and stabilized deals. I also worked on varying types of communities, including garden style, mid-rise, and downtown high-rises, mixed-use developments as well. Back in 2017, I obtained a North Carolina Broker’s license to learn more about the real estate industry as a whole. I do have a bachelor’s degree in marketing, so it seemed like a natural transition to take my experience in the property industry into a property-specific role within a creative agency.

Adrian Tennant: And we’re very happy to have you. So Tom, what does your role as an account manager at Bigeye entail? 

Tom Mahoney: I oversee all property-related accounts here at Bigeye. I am the main point of contact for our clients, while also working directly with our amazing creative team to help the projects stay on track and ensure that we are building brands that will help these projects stand out in a very competitive and sometimes oversaturated market. 

Adrian Tennant: Based on your experience before joining Bigeye and now as our lead account manager for property projects, what are some common challenges faced in property marketing?

Tom Mahoney: I think building a brand that can reach a wide audience range can certainly be challenging in the property world. For example, upscale, high-rise buildings in a metro area tend to have everyone from young professionals to empty nesters living in their communities. So how do you market your building to a younger demographic to make it seem hip and cool while also reaching an older demographic that wants a luxurious, quiet, downtown living experience? I saw communities during my time in property management lean too far in one direction, resulting in prospects thinking certain communities were quote-unquote too old or too young for them. This limits your prospect pool and makes it harder to reach and maintain stabilization. So building a brand that says we have something for everyone can certainly be a challenge. 

Adrian Tennant: Do you typically see differences in how the team approaches multi-family versus student housing projects? 

Tom Mahoney: The initial process tends to start the same for our team, but along the way, they do start to differ. Student housing has a much more defined target audience, while multi-family projects may be trying to reach a broader audience. Student housing projects also tend to have a foundation that is already somewhat established. Most, you know, want to incorporate the university colors, their sports teams’ mascots, or maybe historical landmarks that are found around the university. For multi-family projects, our team really needs to dig deep into the location of the new development, to build the new brand from the ground up to make sure it not only fits but is elevated from other brands in that area.

Adrian Tennant: Bigeye has developed a four-step process to consistently deliver differentiated creative solutions for our clients. Could you give us an overview of what the process looks like? 

Tom Mahoney: So the four phases of our process are discovery and audience, naming and identity, the brand campaign, and implementation. The first phase of the process, discovery and audience, I believe, is the most important. This is where we build the foundation for the new brand by learning everything that there is to know about the community details, the location of the property, the audience, and the creative direction that the client envisions for their new community. 

Adrian Tennant: And of course, this is the phase that I’m often involved with too. Typically helping set the strategy by using syndicated data sources and sometimes primary research to understand the demographics, attitudes, and behaviors of the types of renters we’re targeting in the area. As you know, sometimes we’ll identify groups that over-index on particular behaviors or participation in specific sports that can provide some preliminary insights for the creative team to explore with the client. Uh, but we also run qualitative mobile-based research studies, inviting residents to record their impressions of an area, point out places of interest, and even chat with us in real-time as they review our proposed creative and messaging concepts. Then, of course, we hand that back to you for the next stage.

Tom Mahoney: Yeah, so continuing in phase one, we do go through a series of creative exercises with the clients as well, to create brand adjectives, brand mentors, and a personality for the new brand. For example, we recently worked on a project in Miami, where the brand adjectives included vibrant, energized, captivating, and bold. While some of the brand mentors were Selena Gomez, Jimmy Choo™, a BMW 4 Series, and a vacation to the Dominican Republic. This was the foundation of a brand that is targeting young working professionals that want to live in a high-growth, prime location that’s walkable to local conveniences like shopping, dining, and nightlife. So learning about the location and the target audience allowed our team to create a brand that fits in the Miami market, but also feels like a community, that’s unlike anything else in that area.

Adrian Tennant: Tom, the next part of our process is naming and developing a brand identity. Can you walk us through how Bigeye approaches this phase of a project?

Tom Mahoney: So in this phase, we take everything that we learned in phase one during the discovery and immersion session, and through our research to establish the new name for the community. We develop their logo and create a color palette that will be further developed in the brand campaign. So here’s where we really start to lay the visual groundwork of the brand.

Adrian Tennant: And how does the creative team come up with unique and fitting names for each community?

Tom Mahoney: The naming process is always fun for our team, as we really have the opportunity to take a deep dive into the location and conduct a lot of our own research to find a name that really fits the brand we are creating. We named a student housing project in Gainesville UFORA, but we spelled it with a “UF” at the beginning to associate it with the University of Florida, but also fits the brand personality of a state of euphoria. So we try to create unique names that can really work on a lot of different levels. This is our most time-consuming phase as we have to ensure that the name is not used elsewhere, that there is great domain availability for the new name, and that this new name will resonate with our target audience, not only during the lease-up process but in the future as well. Our terrific creative team, led by our VP of Creative, Seth, they’re not only looking to just come up with a name that sounds like an apartment community, but names that we can build a strong brand story around. I’m always impressed by how the team can take the information from phase one to create multiple unique name options for the client. 

Adrian Tennant: Yeah, me too. Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, branding influences many aspects of our daily lives, our food choices, clothing preferences, vehicle selection, travel decisions, and even vacation accommodations. So it makes sense that when it comes to relocating and seeking an apartment to rent, it’s familiar and distinctive property brands that capture our attention and are more likely to be considered and visited. To discuss the role that creativity plays in the branding process, we’re joined now by Rhett Withey, Bigeye’s Art Director, who has a decade of experience developing creative solutions for our property clients. Rhett, it’s nice to have you back on IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Rhett Withey: Thank you for having me back, Adrian. Always a pleasure. 

Adrian Tennant: Could you walk us through the process of designing a logo? What are the key considerations you have to keep in mind? 

Rhett Withey: Well, usually, we have a discovery meeting with the client, and that’s when we really dive into the client’s thought process on what the brand and what the logo they have in mind. So we usually find brand adjectives and brand mentors. We ask some really fun questions like, “If your brand was an animal, what kind of animal would it be?” And really start to try to get our clients’ creative juices flowing and make it a fun environment for them to give us more candid details that they may not necessarily give in a Google form, let’s say. After that, we look online for some inspiration at some other similar brands that they identified with, finding highlights of aspects of designs that they might potentially, enjoy. And we put together a mood board of different brands, different colors, and different elements of logos across the entire design gamut. From there, we make a black-and-white logo first. We always do black-and-white logos because if a logo is going to be successful, it will work in any color. That means if a single color is successful, then it’s gonna be a great logo. After that, we then do a color exploration where we will deliver a handful of different color concepts. Same thing around the client’s feedback that they gave us in the discovery meeting. So we’ll look at color theory and try to match those color palettes with their brand adjectives. And from there, it’s just happy client, deliver files, and big success!

Adrian Tennant: How do you handle feedback and revisions during the design process? 

Rhett Withey: Well, if they’re giving us feedback in the meeting, I try to have the best poker face I can possibly have while I’m internally screaming! But most of the time, our clients are pretty good, and I’ve been around the block long enough to know that, as a designer especially, which I always tell young designers, is to not take anything personally. I know that we spend hours and hours and hours on crafting something, and we’re so used to the show and tell like, “Hey, look what I made!” That, feedback can be tough sometimes, but remember, it’s not for us. It’s for our client. So as long as they’re happy, then you should be happy. 

Adrian Tennant: Is there a logo you’ve designed for a property that you are particularly proud of?

Rhett Withey: Yes. So it’s not one particular property, but it’s a neighborhood district. When we did the logo for the Hourglass District, I was particularly proud of that one because that was, basically, my stomping grounds where I grew up, and it was really cool to see that a developer revitalizing this one particular area of Orlando that was kind of depressed and ignored. And making it into something cool where people want to be, and then inviting us to help be the ones that, set the tone for the design of that corner, of that little neighborhood district. So that one was a very special, close-to-my-heart project that I worked on.

Adrian Tennant: In what kinds of ways do brand assets contribute to the overall identity of a property?

Rhett Withey: A lot of times, people forget that a brand is not just a logo. You can’t just slap a logo on every single item and say, “Here’s my brand.” A brand is all the intangible elements, like the color palette, the little tiny, brand extensions, like maybe a swash, or a brush stroke or some sort of illustrative element that ties into the logo and ties into like the messaging and photography, like all those pieces and all those items will come together and create the overall brand. It’s not just your logo. 

Adrian Tennant: How do you approach the design of other brand assets, such as illustrations, icons, or patterns?

Rhett Withey: So we usually will try to find certain elements from the logo that we designed. So in one case, it might be an icon. If we have an illustrated icon, then we might pull that icon out and make patterns, or maybe we do some sort of badge where the icon is centered, and there’s type circled around it. in the case of hourglass, we use the icon in different illustrative ways with different textures and different, images cropped into the icon and, bits and elements like that. 

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

Lydia Michael: Hi there. I’m Lydia Michael, the author of Brand Love: Building Strong Consumer Brand Connections. Reflecting my experience as a multicultural marketing and brand strategist, Brand Love is for any marketing and brand professionals, entrepreneurs, and those who oversee brand messaging, communications, and other consumer-facing strategies. Whether you work for a big or small brand, the book is designed to provide you with actionable strategies to grow and build any successful brand. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25 percent on a print or electronic version of Brand Love by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all products and pre-orders and applies to Kogan Page’s free paperback and e-book bundle offer. When you order directly from Kogan Page, shipping is always free to the US and the UK, so to order your copy of Brand Love go to koganpage.com. And thank you!

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Tom Mahoney, Account Manager, and Rhett Withey, Art Director, who work with Bigeye’s clients in multi-family, active adult, student living, and co-living community development and management. Rhett, what’s your process for creating or developing a color palette for a property? 

Rhett Withey: So usually, when I develop a color palette, I will again go back to the creative brief and the initial discovery meeting we have with the client and look at those brand adjectives. So if they say, the property needs to be calm and serene, well then I might incorporate color theory like blues and beige to bring those calm and serene elements in. We take a lot of influence from nature and the surrounding neighborhood of the property. So if it’s a property that’s located in North Carolina – in the backcountry of North Carolina, not necessarily the city – we’re gonna look at the mountains. We’re gonna look at the type of trees and the type of leaves that are on those trees. Maybe it’s not the green that’s year-round, but maybe it’s the brown or the red that the leaves change in the fall. Elements like that are very, very particular to the property.

Adrian Tennant: In your experience, what kind of impact do color choices have on how a brand is perceived? 

Rhett Withey: Well, color is probably one of the most important parts of a brand. Can you imagine Starbucks, they have the green right now, if they were magenta, completely different feel than what you’re used to with Starbucks? Or even McDonald’s, yellow and red. You know, that yellow and red feeling of happiness and bright, but what if McDonald’s was lime green and orange? Completely different feeling and vibrant and a different kind of energy. 

Adrian Tennant: Bigeye’s creative team typically develops guidelines for photography and logo usage. Why is consistency important for maintaining a strong brand identity?

Rhett Withey: The more often your audience sees your logo in a consistent way, the more obvious it is going to be and easier for you in the future to get your message across because they correlate this look to your brand. So if you’re constantly changing or like adding little elements or tweaking the logo in this and that way, and there’s no consistency, then you’re losing that familiarity with your audience. 

Adrian Tennant: Tom, how do you ensure that the overall brand identity aligns with the target audiences and stands out in competitive markets? 

Tom Mahoney: In phase three, we merge the name story, graphics, language, imagery, and tone of voice to bring the brand to life. This is a highly visual phase, showcasing the possibilities that lie ahead in expressive conceptual environments and examples. This is where we can make a project that is, say, a high-rise in downtown Denver targeting young working professionals look and feel completely different than a high-rise project in Atlanta that has a similar unit mix and amenity offering and is targeting a similar audience. We know no two projects are truly alike, so here we build a new brand that makes its own mark.

Adrian Tennant: Do you have a couple of examples?

Tom Mahoney: I mentioned that high-rise in Denver versus a high-rise in Atlanta, which is an example of projects we have worked on recently that were very different because of the geographical locations, even though they had a similar target audience. And then, we worked on a project in Sugar Hill, Georgia, which is roughly 40 miles outside of Atlanta. But for that project, we created a brand that had more of a main street feel, that is completely different from the downtown feel of the Atlanta project. So even though they were both around the Atlanta area, the two brands were just very different in how they looked and how they felt.

Adrian Tennant: Well, the quality of the implementation is critical in bringing branding to life. Could you explain how Bigeye executes this phase? 

Tom Mahoney: So the final phase, in our process is implementation. In this phase, we take everything that was established with a new brand and apply it to everything from collateral pieces to social media graphics, signage, website design, and more. This is where the onsite team can really use the brand elements that we develop together to help launch the new community and set it up for success both immediately and in the future. 

Adrian Tennant: You mentioned onsite partners. Who are they typically?

Tom Mahoney: So this will typically be the property management team, including the onsite leasing team and their marketing department. But it can also include signage vendors, print companies, and website designers, that take the designs that we have made to create the physical pieces for the property. We want to ensure that these designs look just as good when they’re produced, as they did when our designers were creating them.

Adrian Tennant: Well, as I’m sure anyone listening can tell, Tom, you are very plugged into the industry. What emerging trends are you seeing in property development? 

Tom Mahoney: So there’s a lot going on in the property world right now. There’s been an extreme amount of growth in the multifamily industry in the past few years. In 2022 alone, there were 420,000 new units nationwide. I read an article recently that stated that there are currently 7,700 planned apartment units, 2,600 that are under construction, and another 5,100 that have been announced in Charlotte, North Carolina alone, between now and 2025. So this is in an area that already has a lot of options to choose from. New supply is currently outpacing demand for the first time in years, leading to the highest vacancy percentage since 2020 during Covid. Rent prices have decreased in 48 of the 100 largest cities in the country from this time last year, that’s according to the National Apartment Association. So I believe now more than ever, there’s a need for strong marketing to help set a new community apart from the rest. Everyone has a pool and a gym. Free coffee in the morning for the residents. So how do you reach prospects that can go online and find 12 other options in the same area, knowing they’re only likely to visit maybe four to five communities during their search for a new place?

Adrian Tennant: Well, you made the move from client side to agency. So Tom, what advice would you give someone wanting to pursue a career in agency account management? 

Tom Mahoney: I think finding something that an agency works on that you are passionate about is very important. I’ve always had an interest in the real estate world, so being able to help create brands in that space has been amazing for me. Also, find an agency that is an expert in what they do. Property is one of the main pillars for Bigeye, so it gives me full confidence in our creative team on each and every project because I know they’re going to create something special for the client. So that certainly helps make my job a bit easier.

Adrian Tennant: Now, I know this might be like having to choose a favorite child, but do you have a recent project that you are particularly proud of or one that was especially well received by a client? 

Tom Mahoney: So this may be your most difficult question yet, as we have had the opportunity to work on some really amazing projects recently. This may be cheating a bit since it involves more than one project, but our work in the mid-city district in Huntsville, Alabama, has been a great example of how to build different brands in the same area. We currently have four projects that we are working on that are all right next door to each other, that are all being developed actually by the same client. All four are completely different. We have been tasked with building brands for a more traditional multi-family community, but then also a loft-style community, a community of micro-units, and the first fully sustainable apartment community in the southeast. So what our team has been able to create for these new communities is truly amazing. Being able to build new brands that are so different, even though they are in the exact same location, has been really impressive to experience.

Adrian Tennant: Rhett, do you have a property project that you are particularly proud of?

Rhett Withey: So, my favorite property project that I helped work on was probably Infield, which was a property in Kissimmee on an old baseball facility, and baseball is my favorite sport. And one that I’m very passionate about. So it was fun coming up with street names and baseball jargon and lexicon to use in messaging and headlines and bringing in some deep cuts for baseball knowledge into the branding. 

Adrian Tennant: Decades of marketing effectiveness data show us that long-term awareness-building campaigns build strong brands. The consistent use of distinctive visual and auditory assets that become uniquely associated in buyers’ minds with the brand drive higher rates of growth in most consumer categories. Now focusing on long-term branding typically results in lower acquisition costs and higher customer lifetime values. Tom, based on what you are seeing in the market, do you think branding will become a more significant factor in the multi-family industry, especially among the larger players? 

Tom Mahoney: Absolutely. With a growing number of households opting for rental properties, the competition among multifamily property management companies is intensifying. Establishing a strong brand identity can differentiate a company from its competitors and attract more renters. There are also rising consumer expectations as well. Renters expect a positive and memorable experience when choosing a place to live. A well-established brand that offers desirable amenities, excellent customer service, and a sense of community can meet these expectations and build loyalty among renters.

Adrian Tennant: If IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners are interested in seeing examples of the types of work we’ve been describing today, what’s the best place to find them? 

Tom Mahoney: The best place would be our Bigeye property website, which is Bigeyeproperties.com. We also have a few work examples on our agency site, Bigeyeagency.com. You can also submit a contact form through either site to get in touch with our team to discuss any of this further.

Adrian Tennant: Tom, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Tom Mahoney: Thank you for having me, Adrian.

Adrian Tennant: Rhett, thank you for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS again.

Rhett Withey: Thanks, Adrian. Anytime that you need me to ramble about design, I am here to do it!

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to both of my Bigeye guests this week. Tom Mahoney, Account Manager, and Rhett Withey, Art Director. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation along with links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at Bigeyeagency.com – just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. And if you’d like to see more of Bigeye’s creative work for properties, take a look at Bigeyeproperties.com. Thanks for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

An interview with Jay Mandel, author of Brand Strategy in Three Steps: A Purpose-Driven Approach to Branding, Bigeye’s featured book for July. Jay discusses how after leaving corporate America, he spent five years teaching, consulting, and coaching – and why he wanted to reflect on his experiences in this book. Blending marketing principles with personal insights, and guided by candor, curiosity, and collaboration, Jay explains how to adopt a more meaningful marketing mindset.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Jay Mandel: I wrote the book to give people permission to show up fully to marketing, and give people the tools that I have found to be very effective that basically make it really difficult to separate yourself out from your work. It’s about being a meaningful marketer. 

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us for this first episode of our twelfth season. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes of this podcast, consumers have become more conscious of the social, environmental, and ethical implications of their purchasing decisions, with younger consumers, in particular, prioritizing brands that align with their personal values and beliefs. We’ve also heard from experts in sustainability about the importance of changing consumer habits and mindsets, plus the opportunities for marketers and brand owners to create meaningful change. Our Bigeye Book Club selection for July is Brand Strategy in Three Steps: A Purpose-Driven Approach to Branding. The book explains a new way of building a meaningful brand strategy centered around identity, intention, and authenticity in implementation. The book’s author is Jay Mandel, the founder of Your Brand Coach, a brand management and professional coaching company. Jay is also a corporate trainer for the Association of National Advertisers, a member of the faculty at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, and an adjunct professor of marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology. To discuss some of the ideas, thought exercises, and case studies described in Brand Strategy In Three Steps, Jay is joining us today from his home base of New York City. Jay, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS! 

Jay Mandel: Thanks for having me. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, congratulations on the publication of your first book. What prompted you to write Brand Strategy In Three Steps?

Jay Mandel: I went on this entrepreneurial journey after I was in corporate America, and it’s been a five-year entrepreneurial journey that started with teaching and consulting and coaching, and over the last five years, I’ve taught thousands of students marketing strategy, but I didn’t find that the textbooks that I was reading and using were adequate based on the reality of marketing today. And to be honest with you, I didn’t want to write a textbook. but I wanted to have an experiential book that really encapsulated my experience as a corporate person, my experience as an entrepreneur, and my experience as a person who’s watching the world of marketing transform right before our eyes. And I took inspiration from the great Seth Godin and other people in this world, and I really created a modern-day book that brings not only together this idea of marketing. The way marketing should be, but more of this personal approach that I’ve been living by myself for the last five years where I’m bringing more of myself into my marketing, and that starts with my core values. So when I define the core values of candor, curiosity, and collaboration, in 2018, that was basically the seed that led me to this book, five years later. 

Adrian Tennant: Jay, why is purpose-driven thinking essential for brands today?

Jay Mandel: Well, I don’t know, um, if you ever have this feeling that, someone is disingenuous or some company is disingenuous or someone’s just taking from you, I get that feeling all the time. I feel like there are things that we are paying for that we would’ve never thought to pay for in the past. Like for example, the way tipping is these days is, a little bit out of control in, my mind. And I just got to thinking as a business, the burden of proof that you are in it with the customer that you are adding value is a lot different than what it was in the past. Where in the past, you’re like, “I sell a widget. It costs this much, and people will buy it.” But now, with almost every product there is today, people are looking for something more, and they’re doing a lot more research, and it’s much more helpful if you feel that the company that you’re working with is in it with you. So, you know, I don’t like cliche purpose, meaning the purpose that is manufactured like we’re going to be celebrating every made-up holiday. That’s not purpose. Purpose is more along the lines of, “This company was built for a reason, for a particular audience, and I’m going to tell a story that connects with what my audience wants and needs.” 

Adrian Tennant: Brand Strategy In Three Steps is organized into 10 chapters. The first of these is The Meaningful Marketing Mindset. Jay, how do you define meaningful marketing? 

Jay Mandel: Meaningful marketing is the feeling you get when you are making a difference. That’s the long and short of it. There are plenty of people that are in marketing that don’t really understand the difference between a strategy and a tactic. If you don’t understand the difference between a strategy and a tactic, you can’t do meaningful marketing. When you have an overarching purpose, and you are out there doing good in the world, and you feel good about it, then it’s meaningful. So you talked about the ten chapters of my book, and the way my book is organized is a lot different than a lot of other books in the world. I don’t even know if there is a book that exists. My premise for being a meaningful marketer is that you need to know who you are first. And so I told you that my core values exercise that I did in 2018 was a pivotal transformation in my life: Candor, curiosity, collaboration. Those values help me choose who I engage with, who I don’t engage with, what job I take, what job I don’t take, and what people to hire. And my belief is that those core values need to translate into a promise that you are going to make for yourself and for other people. And that’s the simple marketing promise:

My product is for people who believe ____,
I’ll focus on people who want ____, and
I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get ____.

That is Seth Godin‘s Simple Marketing Promise, and it is such a good, simple marketing promise that it helps me every time I start a project. When you’re a purposeful marketer, when you’re a meaningful marketer, you know what your customer believes. And when you know what your customer believes, you also know that they don’t believe that they want to buy from you. They believe that they need something in their life that maybe you have to offer. So my product is for people who believe that air conditioning is absolutely essential on a hot day. That’s a really important belief statement, but that’s not your product. That’s the answer. The answer is that they want to be comforted, they wanted to be cool. And when you say then, okay, my product is for people, believe, I’ll focus on people who want, then you could start to get into what your product offers and how you can help the person, to, achieve your purpose and their purpose.

Adrian Tennant: As you’ve mentioned, the five chapters which make up the first section of your book, explore identity, inviting readers to reflect on breaking down personal barriers and determining who they are as people and as professionals. Jay, why was it important to include this in the book? 

Jay Mandel: When I worked in corporate America, I felt like a little bit of a shell of myself, in many, cases. I always remember when I worked in corporate America that I would have to put on Twitter or Facebook or wherever I was posting that whatever I say and whatever I do is not the reflection of my company. And I always felt quite awkward about it. I felt like I wasn’t fully showing up. I felt like I was just a representative of the company. And I feel that times are shifting these days I feel like the social media landscape, the younger generations, the way that they engage, and the reality of the world that we live in today, it’s much harder to separate that. And what I realized is that the sterile way that a lot of corporations go about doing business is not the same way that you or I would post on social media when things happen in our lives. So if you start to think about these corporate settings, and they’re posting stuff, and it’s just a schedule, and they’re saying, “Okay, well, today’s National Ice Cream Day and tomorrow’s National This Day.” What are you actually doing when you’re posting your content? So really, what I’m trying to do in this book is basically say, “You know what? You need to find a place to work where you can show up and not be afraid to be who you are. Then you need to be able to translate that fully showing up into something that will allow your corporate social media or your corporate communications or whatever it is you’re putting out into the world, to feel a lot more sincere than what a lot of the bigger legacy companies out there are doing.” Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of companies out there that are quite sophisticated and have really nailed the way of marketing, where it’s customer-focused, and you’re really adding value, and you’re not trying to sell, and you’re really following a modern-day buyer’s journey. But, there are so many companies out there that really are just talking to themselves, and no one cares. So that’s really what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to bridge the gap of being an individual, being a person, being a person who has a personality and an opinion, and being able to share that opinion in whatever setting you choose to work in. 

Adrian Tennant: In the second chapter, you write about how marketers’ empathy and self-awareness can help us to understand our audiences. Could you give us an example drawn from your own experience? 

Jay Mandel: Absolutely. I’m working with a client right now, called Agile Brain. And Agile Brain is an assessment that helps people to understand emotions. And, the way it works is it’s a fast-moving assessment, and it goes so fast, and people are frustrated, “Why is it going so fast?” But the reality is that they don’t want you to think, they don’t want you to think about your answers. And when you don’t think about your answers, you get to the truth. As I’m doing my marketing strategy for this client, I can’t help but think about my life and my son and the experiences I have with my son to really get to know who he is and, understand him. He has ADD, and Autism, and that work is literally making my life better. When I do the work for Agile Brain, I am literally inserting myself in a way that is purely empathetic to the people that are struggling in this world that don’t really understand how emotions affect them. And I literally think of my son. And I think of all the other people in the world, you, me, everyone who is post-pandemic, you know, still trying to figure out what life in 2023 looks like. And I’m able to do that because I showed up to this company as myself. They hired me because they wanted me and what I had to offer, and the way I presented myself. And then I’m able to really bring that empathy into every conversation I have. So not only do I do better work for this client, we can have fun doing it as well. And we could really deliver work that could change the world. But if you go into upsetting and you are just saying, “I’m just doing a money grab here, and I’m just going to take this,” usually it doesn’t work out. People can sense it, they could smell it, that you’re looking to make money. When I needed to make money the most, in the early part of my entrepreneurial career, I was unable to sell. The reason I was unable to sell was because I didn’t have the confidence, I didn’t have the methodology, I didn’t have the experience, and I didn’t believe in myself enough to really, command the sales conversation. But now that I have taken the time to do the work on myself, I’ve taken the time to really do the work to understand who it is that I could potentially get into business with, and I have a standardized, repeatable methodology that could be customized based on who I’m engaging with, which is basically the book. Now I have the confidence that no matter what situation is put at me, I’m going to understand myself, and I’m going to understand my client, and I’m going to understand my audience because I’m going to do the work, and I’m not going to rely on cheap tactics to convey the message. 

Adrian Tennant: As you’ve mentioned a couple of times, to achieve long-term brand growth, you believe marketers need a clear understanding of the difference between strategy and tactics. Do you have an example that you think helps differentiate the two? 

Jay Mandel: Yeah. there was a Marketoonist cartoon, that I always use in class, and the cartoon says, “So what are we doing?” “We’re going to do Facebook, we’re going to do YouTube, we’re going to do Instagram.” And then the person says, “So what are we doing on those channels?” And then they say, “I don’t know. I’m going to figure it out later.” A lot of people say that strategy is, “I’m going to do Facebook, strategy is “I’m going to do Twitter,” strategy is, “I’m going to do Instagram,” or strategy is, “I’m going to do an event.” No, those are tactics. A strategy is an overarching approach, a vision that leads you to a place. And there’s this thing that I use that’s from this guy named Julian Cole, who is an internet strategy person that I follow, and he calls it the Nesting Doll Strategy. And basically, what the Nesting Doll Strategy does is – it’s like a target. And on the outside of the target, it talks about, “What is in it for the customer?” And then you’re able to figure out how you, as a brand, by doing what you do, deliver value specifically to that customer. And so with any project that I’m working on, I really try and deconstruct the project to look at it from the perspective of if this strategy is effective, what place are we going to take the customer from and to? And then as a result of taking the customer from that place to that place, then the money comes in, then the adoption comes in, then all that stuff comes in. But it’s more of a customer-first strategy when you think about helping people to achieve something remarkable. And then you profit as a result of that help. That’s strategy. 

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

Each month in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, the Bigeye Book Club features interviews with authors who are experts in consumer research, retail, and branding. Our featured book for July is Brand Strategy in Three Steps: A Purpose-Driven Approach to Branding by Jay Mandel. The book walks readers through a new way to build a meaningful and authentic brand strategy focused on identity, intention, and implementation. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25% on a print or electronic version of this month’s featured book by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all Kogan Page products and pre-orders and applies to their free paperback and e-book bundle offer. Shipping is always free to the US and UK when you order direct from Kogan Page, and it helps the authors too. So to order your copy of Brand Strategy In Three Steps, go to KoganPage.com

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Jay Mandel, the author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection, Brand Strategy In Three Steps, A Purpose-Driven Approach to Branding. In chapter six, you write about Edward Bernays, often referred to as “the father of public relations,” and you described the four elements Bernays felt were essential for creating a successful brand. Now, Bernays was active in the early and middle years of the last century. How can contemporary brands apply these elements, especially in today’s digitally-driven marketing landscape?

Jay Mandel: Well, what Bernays did, you know, was not stuff that we would be proud of today. He used symbolism and really took products that were not necessarily good for people, like, for example, cigarettes. And he literally did his research and really determined the root cause of why cigarettes were not selling, men versus women having cigarettes, et cetera. And he did this event where he – I think it was the Easter Parade – and he created these things called torches of freedom. If you look at modern-day marketing and you look at the stuff that you’re seeing on TikTok, and you look at the way that people are using these psychological details, the reality is, as I studied Bernays, I realized that nothing has changed in the way we market. You know, it’s really understanding your audience. It’s creating a movement. It’s creating symbolism. So a lot of the things that I did, based on my experience, reading about Bernays, talking about Bernays, I don’t care that he was a PR guy versus a marketing guy. The idea of understanding your audience and creating a movement and really, you know, helping people to participate in the movement, which will lead to an increase in adoption of the product. That’s all he was talking about. And so that’s why I found it important to include. in the book. 

Adrian Tennant: You suggest that one role of an agency is to create tension between stakeholders and team members. Jay, can you unpack this for us? 

Jay Mandel: Sometimes, when I worked with agencies in the past, I felt like I was the smartest person in the room. Sometimes when I worked at agencies, I felt like I wasn’t at all. And there were these strategists that were in there, and they were looking at the work that we were doing from a perspective that was just leaps and bounds beyond what anyone could see or believe. And as a corporate person in the corporate world, we are so stuck and bogged down with stuff that doesn’t really help a consumer to understand anything better. As a corporate guy, I was constantly partnering with legal, constantly partnering with all these people. It was too much reality to be effective at times. And so what I look for the agency to do is to suspend reality and to be so effective and believe in it so much that it causes the clients to also suspend reality a little bit and deliver something that truly, can achieve, meaning, for the customer, the client, for everyone. And so those are the best agencies that I’ve worked with, and that’s what I try and do. When I do work with clients, I really try and get them into a space that is just a little unsafe compared to the box of where they work, just to imagine what the possibilities could be.

Adrian Tennant: To what extent did you reflect your own experiences and those of your clients at Your Brand Coach in planning and writing your book?

Jay Mandel: Well, the book includes The Yanovsky Method, and it’s sort of funny that I call it The Yanovsky Method because I’m really acting like a marketer. I literally invented The Yanovsky Method. One day, I’m like, “Wow, the outline that I use for all my clients is the work of my partner, Jon Yanovsky. And it’s good, and I want to include it in the book.” So I created The Yanovsky Method, and that’s the way we do market research that leads us to an insight and leads us to a strategy. And the work that I do for Your Brand Coach is literally what the book is about. So if I’m working with a client, whether it’s an individual or a company, I always start with the core values. Then I always do the simple marketing promise. Then, depending on the depth of what the client needs, then I start to dive into thorough competitive analysis marketing, analysis of who they are, what they do, how they speak, and what their tone is. And that’s all in the book. And when I taught it, over the years, which is part of my career, I realized where people’s eyes glossed over, I realized where people, got perked up. And so that sort of iteration and refinement of my approach and perspective is very much alive in that, in the book. And by the way, it’s a movement. So I know that, you know, at the end of the book, my movement is exactly what we’re talking about here. It’s about being a meaningful marketer. That’s what I wrote this book for. I wrote the book to give people permission to show up fully to marketing and give people the tools that I have found to be very effective that basically make it really difficult to separate yourself out from your work. 

Adrian Tennant: In addition to working with clients, you teach students about marketing. What advice would you give to more seasoned creative and communications professionals, whether agency- or client-side, who want to make a greater impact with their work?

Jay Mandel: Well, the advice I would give you is to get out of your comfort zone. You know, I was that person that was scheduled to be with a bunch of middle-aged and older people for the rest of my career and, not question that, not question anything about the diversity and the perspectives of the people that I was engaging with until I defined those values. Now, as a professor who’s taught at several universities, I’ve experienced so many things that are just above and beyond anything that I ever thought I would experience. So I think that it’s incumbent for marketers to do exactly what we’re doing right now, which is to talk to other marketers but to talk to other marketers that are outside of your comfort zone. I was teaching segmentation in a university class, and I mentioned this in the book, and I said, “So let’s segment – who is he? Who is she?” And the person in my class said, “It’s not a he. It’s not a she. It’s a guy that doesn’t know, and he wants to wear the lip balm,” and that was a really humbling experience to sort of look at my perspective of how I was teaching segmentation and realize that with all the changes in how our society is acting and behaving and all the sort of way that we share these days, it’s fluid. It’s much more fluid than anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. So how can I reflect that in my work? Well, it just becomes second nature when I’m sitting with 10 students last night for three hours in a conference room, solving a big problem in a way that I wouldn’t have solved it had I just been in a corporate office setting. So my advice to a seasoned marketer is get up, get out, talk to people, get uncomfortable, and also share your perspectives. As a coach, my, advice is that you know, you’re not going to get a job or another job. There are plenty of people that are out of work in marketing these days that are very talented, creative people, okay. And those creative people are not going to get a job by going on a job board and just applying, because there’s just so much in the way of that. The way that seasoned professionals get a job these days is to network, and it’s not networking when you need a job. It’s networking when you don’t need a job as well, so that when the time comes and you need the job, you don’t have to make that awkward conversation that’s like, “Oh, hey, can you help me get a job?”. No, that’s not what you talk about. What you talk about is, “Hey, I have something valuable to share with the world. I’m going to post it on LinkedIn. I’m going to post it on Substack, I’m going to post it to the world. I have a content calendar, I have an editorial voice. I’m doing all the things that I would do if I were a client or if I were your agency. And I’m going to demonstrate to you that I’m adding value. And when you see that on a regular basis, then you contact me when you need me.” But as a marketer these days, I’ve done a lot of thinking about like cold outreach, and I think in our world of a services business, I think that cold outreach is incredibly difficult to do. And I think there’s a lack of trust, but there isn’t a lack of trust when someone introduces you to someone they know and says, “Jay is the guy to take you from where you are to where you need to be.” And how does that happen? That happens from constantly showing up and always being open to whatever it is that the world may give you on any given day, and keeping up with people and showing genuine interest. And when they experience that, and they’re part of your circle, they’ll just call you and say, “Okay, now it’s time. I have some work to do. Let’s do it.” So that’s the advice. Always be aware that your work and your livelihood can change, especially in this industry. Most people that I know in the world of marketing have had many, many, many jobs. You always need to be aware that you could be on the market, and you need to pave your way. So I went extreme, and I created all this new life for me, and I created a diversified career with teaching, coaching, consulting, and every day is different, but, you could do that with side hustles as well to be an insurance policy in the event that something unpredictable happens in, your world. 

Adrian Tennant: What do you hope readers will take away from Brand Strategy In Three Steps? 

Jay Mandel: I hope that people will take away core values. And when I say core values, I’ve talked to many people who have read the book already, and then they’re like, “Oh, you really wanted me to create core values?” Well, yeah, I did. So, I’m giving an open invitation to anyone who listens to this podcast. If you read the book and you put forth a good effort in trying to define those core values, but you find yourself stuck, or you find that you want to review those core values with me, just LinkedIn message me or message me on my website, and let’s talk about them and how I could challenge you in a way that will force you to do a more effective job at your core values than if you were to just do it alone while reading the book. So what do I want people to take away? I want them to take away that everything that’s in the book is stuff that I did, and it was difficult for four years. It’s still difficult in my career, but I am at an inflection point right now with my career in life, and I am ready to take on what’s next, and this book represents that methodology. and if I could do that and start with my core values and then make a simple marketing promise to myself, then create a book like I did. So can you. So my message to you is, I want you to believe that you could do more than what your, job, which might be, “I am just a social media expert”. No, you’re more than that. You are doing meaningful marketing, and sometimes you’re going to need to connect the dots between, you know, what your assignment is and what the bigger mandate of the marketing is. 

Adrian Tennant: If IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you and Your Brand Coach, what’s the best way to connect with you? 

Jay Mandel: The best way to connect with me is on my website, jaymandel.com. There is a free consultation link. You could click it, and I’d be happy to meet with you and talk about your core values or whatever it may be. But I live on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I am, publishing on LinkedIn daily. I’m engaging with people and so if you just message me on LinkedIn with a thoughtful message, just saying, “Hey, I read your book,” which is better than a lot of the messages saying, “Hey, do you need a new assistant in the Philippines to help you?” It’s like, “No, I don’t, I have enough of those inquiries!” So you know, if you write a thoughtful message to me, I’d be more than happy to respond and engage and help you. 

Adrian Tennant: And if you’d like to read Jay’s book, Brand Strategy In Three Steps, as an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you’ll receive a 25 percent discount when you purchase a print or electronic version online at KoganPage.com. Just enter the promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout. Jay, thank you very much indeed for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Jay Mandel: Thank you for having me. This was a true pleasure.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Jay Mandel of Your Brand Coach and the author of this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection, Brand Strategy In Three Steps. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation along with links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at Bigeyeagency.com – just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. Thank you again for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye. 

Experts in sustainable development, retail, innovation, and consumer behavior explore the challenges and opportunities for marketing sustainability. We discuss topics including the shift to a purpose-driven economy, the advertising industry’s impact on carbon emissions, and ways in which brand marketers can influence eco-friendly consumer choices with verifiable claims. To receive a 25 percent discount on books published by Kogan Page, use promo code BIGEYE25 at KoganPage.com.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Renee Hartmann: Sustainability is becoming much more important to the consumer. the days of retailers and brands not thinking about sustainability at all are almost over

Marley Goldin: Deepening our commitment on an individual scale to sustainability can actually make a change over time. 

Rohit Bhargava: We could do exactly what you said, which is reverse some of the impact that’s happened on the environment 

Solitaire Townsend: We’ve now been given our marching orders by the climate scientists in terms of the role of our industry.

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising. Produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Here in the US, temperatures have been surging as greenhouse gasses trap heat in the atmosphere, and combine with effects from El Nino. We’ve also faced severe pollution caused by extensive wildfires in Canada, resulting in smoke-filled skies and air quality warnings. On July the fourth, global average temperatures reached a record high of 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s 17 degrees Celsius, making it the hottest day since record-keeping began in 1940. When it comes to tackling the climate crisis, survey data from Ipsos reveals that less than one-fifth of people worldwide believe humankind is capable of and committed to resolving climate change, just 17 percent. Our guest a few weeks ago was Solitaire Townsend, a sustainability expert, and the co-founder of the award-winning agency Futerra, which focuses on sustainable development. Solitaire believes we must shift our thinking on climate change from the context of fear and despair to one of hope, purpose, and confidence. And it’s a theme she explores in her book, The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future, which was the Bigeye Book Club selection for June. I asked Solaire to explain what a Solutionist is.

Solitaire Townsend: A Solutionist is a solver of problems, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. I discovered the term, and I applied it to those of us who are working in this field because we didn’t have a collective noun. We were change-makers, or we were sustainability people, or we were social entrepreneurs, or we were just business people doing sustainability. But, there wasn’t a word that really summed up this huge growing thousands, if not millions, of business-minded, sustainability-focused, purposeful people who are out there using the power of the business sector to actually make a difference in the world. And so the word solutionist sort of sprung upon me, and I applied it to myself first to remind myself of every day what I’m supposed to be doing. So, as well as co-founder of Futerra, I’m Chief Solutionist. And before the book came out, I noticed there were about 11 other people using it on LinkedIn. So as a word, there’s about 11 other people using it. Now, post the book, there’s about 10 pages of people using it. There’s over a hundred people who are now using the term for themselves in terms of identifying as a solutionist.

[Music]

Adrian Tennant: In today’s episode, we hear from past guests who might also be considered Solutionists. First, combining food ideas and tips for an attainable, eco-friendly lifestyle, Marley’s Menu is a web-based collection of recipes that promote sustainable living. It’s the brainchild of Marley Goldin, a mom, foodie, creator, and qualified environmental scientist. I asked Marley about her belief that people can live a modern lifestyle while still making sustainable choices.

Marley Goldin: Yeah. So what I really mean by modern lifestyle is kind of the convenience we’ve all really grown to, really have ingrained into our lifestyle. So, food is available to us regardless of its seasonality or its regionality. Or maybe single-use plastic that is targeted to be more convenient for the consumer. And, what I’ve found is that that modern lifestyle or that convenience that we’ve grown to know and love, doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with sustainability, and what that means is the idea of sustainability can sometimes be overwhelming to consumers. And I think because of that, a lot of people think, “Oh, I can’t make a difference” or “What I do doesn’t matter,” “What I do in my own household isn’t gonna really move the needle.” And I think it’s important for people to realize that yes, while we do need systemic change on a higher level, deepening our commitment on an individual scale to sustainability can actually make a change over time. It can make an impact. So what we’re doing, not only over time, can make an impact in our own individual lives, but it can also, you know, encourage other people around us to be more sustainable. And it can increase demand for more sustainable practices within corporations or within governance. So, what I mean by that is: Yes, it can be overwhelming, and yes, we do need change at a higher level, but that doesn’t mean that what we’re doing doesn’t matter in our own individual lives.

Adrian Tennant: So Marley, how can consumers be confident that the food they’re purchasing is from sustainable sources or ethically produced?

Marley Goldin: Mm-hmm. I think, what we’re touching on here is greenwashing, which is, you know, when marketers use buzzwords like “sustainably sourced” or “responsibly sourced,” “all-natural,” terms that aren’t necessarily regulated, so can be used by anyone without any evidence to back those claims up. And it’s used as a technique to sometimes over-exaggerate or even trick consumers into thinking that the practices that these brands are using are environmental friendly when they’re sometimes not. And, you know, that’s a problem because even people seeing like a green label or packaging with like a tree on it. Sometimes they just automatically assume that this is a safe choice in terms of sustainability. But, what people really need to realize is that these terms are not regulated at all. So I think the easiest way for consumers to be more confident that purchases they’re making align with their ethoses, I even do this at the store, like I’ll take my phone out and do a quick Google search of the brand. And if a brand is really sustainability-focused, oftentimes their website will have a whole page dedicated to sustainability and the practices and the steps they’re taking, the goals they have for sustainability. If you get a brand that just says sustainably sourced or all-natural and then you Google them and there’s nothing more on their website at all about those practices that actually give you proof that these are real things that they’re trying to make a difference on, you can safely assume this might be a way of the brand greenwashing. So aside from doing a quick Google search and doing your own little research, you can also look for a certification. So within food that would look something like a Rainforest Alliance certification, Fair Trade, in coffee and chocolate, you can look for UTZ certification, USDA Certified Organic, Non-GMO Project. When it comes to seafood, we have Marine Stewardship and Friend of the Sea, and these are all just certifications within food. So outside of food, other brands can have other green certifications, and if you’re interested in learning more about that, you can just do a quick Google search of green certifications for business, and you can see lists of different certifications that you can look for on different brands, and the process to getting certified is pretty rigorous. So if you’re seeing any of these certifications, you can feel confident that the brand is sustainability-focused. 

[Music] 

Adrian Tennant: Renee Hartman is the co-author of Next Generation Retail: How To Use New Technology To Innovate For The Future, our Bigeye Book Club Selection in March. I asked Renee about consumers’ post-COVID priorities.

Renee Hartmann: I think when you talk about the consumers and how things have changed, you know, the number one thing consumers are wanting products that are sustainable and they want the selling methods to be sustainable too. So sustainability is becoming much more important to the consumer, and we think the days of retailers and brands not thinking about sustainability at all are almost over, and consumers are really looking for that. 

Adrian Tennant: Well, sustainability is the focus of a chapter in Next Generation Retail, and you acknowledge that it can be daunting to navigate the sheer volume of issues that fall under the umbrella of sustainability. You also cite a statistic from Challenge.org which finds corporations that plan with climate change in mind secure an 18% higher return on investment than those that do not. Renee, what are some ways retailers can achieve more sustainable business practices?

Renee Hartmann: Yeah. I mean, you know, we talk about different ways that companies can look at sustainability and I think, one of the people that we interviewed through the book, his name was Andrew Sullivan, and he really made some good points. He kinda, he focuses on sustainability and his point is you have to look across every aspect of all of the business. It’s not just one person’s job, it’s not a sustainability officer’s job. It has to be something that goes back to the CEO and has to be infused throughout the organization. And so, we encourage everybody to look at all different aspects of it. So in the retail store, it could be everything from looking at the types of lights that you have in your retail environment. How can you make lower energy use? How can you reduce waste in your packaging? We talked to another interviewee who talked about automated checkout and how that freed up time from the checkout person to go out and do shopping, and then when you deliver it to the customer, you’re using routes that are using less energy. You’re using electric cars, things like that. So even everything down to, you know, delivery can become a more sustainable option. And then looking at the product, we always talk about looking at the product backwards, right? Look through the circular part of your supply chain. Would people wanna reuse the product? We’re seeing retailers all the time are actually starting their own areas for resale of products themselves. So people who have used the product and wanna sell it back, they’re actually creating marketplaces for that themselves. And of course, obviously going through the entire supply chain, right? In terms of, you know, how can you reduce waste, how can you reduce energy, how can you use better materials? We’re even seeing, we have a chapter in the book on blockchain, and we’re even seeing people use blockchain and sustainability efforts as well. So I think it’s really, you know, examining every single piece of the business and really just thinking through, how can everything be more sustainable? And then we always talk about reporting it, right? You know, one of the areas that we’ve talked about is some brands I think are a little bit shy to talk about their sustainability efforts because they’re worried about greenwashing, they’re worried about consumer backlash. But really, the more that you’re reporting to your employees, to your customers, to your suppliers, it keeps you accountable. And so really having these methods to track your sustainability efforts, and of course, nobody can get there overnight, but to have an ongoing vision and something that’s created from the top of the organization is really important. So, sustainability, one of the things that makes it so hard, I think, is that it really can be affected through every part of the organization. And it really does take, a sort of an organization-wide, real mandate to make it become a reality.

[Music] 

Adrian Tennant: So, how should companies design and develop sustainable products and services? Thomas Klaffke is the head of research for the Amsterdam-based firm, Trend Watching, leading the team responsible for mapping out global consumer trends and insights. I asked Thomas about the framework Trend Watching has developed to facilitate purpose-driven innovation.

Thomas Klaffke: Throughout the last couple of years, we’re seeing a move more towards what we call the purpose economy. To really, an economy that of businesses that solve the big problems that we have, and that’s why we call it purpose-driven innovation methodology. And the idea here is that you still have, on the one hand, three pillars that we look at. One is, as you were already saying, as a quite innovation lab is innovations. Then, we look at what we call basic human needs. So, what kind of basic human needs is this innovation really satisfying? Because it’s basic human needs are never changing. They’re quite certain, it’s something. So, as an example, you have, like, convenience there or safety. It’s very general kind of principles. And, the third pillar is drivers of change. So these big, major shifts that are happening like urbanization or climate change. So we bring these three things together: drivers of change, the innovations, and the basic human needs. And out of that, we look at what are some consumer expectations that are emerging from that. So for example, you could ask yourself like, “Okay, if consumers are using this product, or are seeing this ad, what would they expect from other companies after that? So, this is kind of the questions that we ask, and the new framework that we add to that is the impact bit, basically. And here, we’re using two kind-of things that are quite, one of them is quite known, which is the UN SDGs, UN Sustainable Development Goals. These 17 goals for sustainable development in the world that we’re using as basically like a purpose filter. So on the one hand, we are mostly looking at innovations that relate to these 17 UN SDGs, and are then looking at all of these other elements. And on the other hand, we also use another framework, called the eight sustainability principles. It’s from a bigger work of a Swedish scientist and sustainability expert called Karl Henrik Robert, which is called The Natural Step Framework, and he talks about these eight sustainability principles that are basically rules that you have to abide by in order to bring sustainable innovations to the market. And we use those basically as a filter when we teach our clients our methodology and when we go from looking at trends and turning them into innovations or into opportunities, and these principles are these rules. You could say, for example, don’t extract from the earth, don’t produce harmful substances, don’t recreate nature, don’t overwork people, everyone’s voice should matter, help people to self-develop, don’t discriminate, and celebrate diversity. Now of course, you won’t find a lot of innovations right now that really check all of those boxes, of course. Yeah, this is also not what we want to do. Like, we don’t want to completely say that we have these rules, we even have these SDGs and that’s where we should focus on totally. But, we’re using it more as like a mental exercise to think differently about what we’re doing and what the impact of our actions will have, and just doing that already helps you come up with, I think, more creative ideas also. But also, most importantly, ideas that are really fitting to I think today’s world into this purpose economy.

[Music] 

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

Each month in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, the Bigeye Book Club features interviews with authors who are experts in consumer research, retail, and branding. Our featured book for July is Brand Strategy in Three Steps: A Purpose-Driven Approach to Branding by Jay Mandel. The book walks readers through a new way to build a meaningful and authentic brand strategy focused on identity, intention, and implementation. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25% on a print or electronic version of this month’s featured book by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all Kogan Page products and pre-orders and applies to their free paperback and e-book bundle offer. Shipping is always free to the US and UK when you order direct from Kogan Page, and it helps the authors too. So to order your copy of Brand Strategy In Three Steps, go to KoganPage.com

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. You’re listening to a special episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS, exploring sustainability. Just before the break, we heard Thomas Klaffke from Trend Watching describe a framework for purpose-driven innovation. Sharing a background in consumer trend analysis, Rohit Bhargava is a serial entrepreneur and the bestselling author of nine books on marketing and innovation. Rohit joined us on the podcast to discuss his latest book, The Future Normal, a section of which focuses on how humanity will survive beyond the next decade. I asked Rohit if he saw ways to slow down or even reverse the current trajectory of climate change.

Rohit Bhargava: There are some. And, so some of the ideas that were presented in this third section of how humanity will survive need to be further future-ranging in terms of solar geoengineering, for example, where we’re looking at ways of cooling the earth artificially and all the ethical issues that come with that. There’s a great entrepreneurial company called Daily that makes shoes out of recycled bags and recycled plastic bottles. And I just got my pair that I ordered. It took a while to come, but now I just got my pair. And, so trying out a lot of those types of technologies that have potential farther into the future was really fascinating. One of the trends that we wrote about in this section specifically was what we called inhuman delivery, and that was an interesting exercise for us because it was basically about drone delivery, which is a topic that’s not necessarily new, although it’s not mainstream. I mean, most places don’t have drone delivery yet, but it has a lot of issues attached to it too. Do we really want all these drones flying around overhead, and you can picture the dystopian landscape of just walking down the street and having all these drones in all these places. But what was fascinating about this one is that I was, we started to look at the test cases of it. First of all, using a platform called What Three Words, which is a platform that allows you to map the entire grid of the earth into one cubic meter squares and give every one square meter space, a three word address. You could allow drones, for example, to deliver things to people who are standing in the middle of a forest or standing at a place that doesn’t have a physical street address. So that’s transformative to allow drones to deliver. But the huge opportunity is really to allow drones to deliver to places that are hard to deliver to. So we tend to think of innovation as, “Oh, it’s gonna happen in the city first. It’s gonna be like this urban thing first, and then the people in the country, the rural customers will be left behind.” And what was interesting about this one is that it was actually the reverse. The drone delivery may take off for rural environments much more quickly because it is the best option to be able to get delivery of packages to people in far flung areas, but also, essential medicines, vaccines, things that are difficult to transport in other ways might start happening through drone delivery. And obviously there’s more space out there as well. So you don’t have this issue of other things flying overhead or trying to navigate buildings or things like that, that make it difficult to enable this sort of delivery. So sometimes when we started looking at these innovations, what you think about innovation, the assumptions we make, “Oh, it’s gonna happen for this group of people first, and then these other group of people,” turn out to be exactly the opposite.

Adrian Tennant: Sustainability is a theme that appears several times in the pages of The Future Normal. What are some of the most interesting or inspiring examples for you?

Rohit Bhargava: You know, I would say that there’s a lot of talk about net zero, or like having zero impact. And the final chapter that we concluded the book with actually, was titled Beyond Net Zero. And the reason we called it Beyond Net Zero is because there’s some really interesting examples of companies looking at ways of creating things that have a net positive impact on the environment. So instead of just saying, “Oh, we didn’t have a negative impact, and we’re at zero, we’re indifferent.” What some of these companies are starting to say is, “Well, we could make the world better through the process of the work that we’re doing. Through the process of taking seaweed, for example, we can remove more carbon from the air and we can make the earth a better place.” And to me, like this idea of the climate positive vision as opposed to just do no harm, which has kind of become the standard, was really an interesting evolution because what it said is we could do exactly what you said, which is reverse some of the impact that’s happened on the environment by unlocking these new methods of making things, of making products, and of making them in a way that delivers a net positive to the earth.

[Music]

Adrian Tennant: Returning to the role of marketing and its impact on carbon emissions, a typical online advertising campaign produces around 5.4 tons of CO2 equivalent, which is approximately one-third of the annual carbon footprint of an average American. Now this data is from the UK-based ad tech company, Good-Loop, which distributes ethical advertising in premium placements and allows consumers to make donations funded by the advertiser in return for watching ads. I asked Solitaire Townsend whether models like Good-Loop’s can be as effective in terms of reach and engagement compared to traditional models.

Solitaire Townsend: So I think what Good-Loop is doing is super fun and I really, really enjoy seeing the growth of what they do. But, I am gonna push back for a second. Because the impact of our industry actually isn’t the direct carbon impact of our adverts. If you are advertising through Google, if you are advertising through Facebook, if you’re advertising through Instagram, or on any of the major platforms. Actually, there isn’t a significant carbon footprint because all of those major platforms are already using renewable energy for their data centers. So a lot of hand wringing, which was very appropriate a couple of years ago isn’t really the case anymore. So, what I wouldn’t want anyone to do is to think that the footprint of our adverts are what matters. What matters is the brain print of the messaging within them. So whilst as every industry should, we need to clean up our house, and we should have probably cleaned up our house some time ago in terms of our own carbon footprint. That’s not what is called the material impact of our industry. The material impact of our industry is what we are asking consumers to do, not the carbon footprint of our adverts.

[Music]

Adrian Tennant: Michael Smith is an applied cognitive neuroscientist and management professional with a deep interest in sustainability. He’s also the author of the book, Inspiring Green Consumer Choices: Leverage Neuroscience To Reshape Marketplace Behavior. I asked Michael what brand marketers need to do to encourage consumers to shop more green.

Michael E. Smith: Brand marketers need to make their sustainability claims more trustworthy and transparent if people are going to be more accepting of those claims. They also need to focus more on highlighting the immediate and concrete functional benefits of their products. And then more as a secondary consideration, focus on the more long-term and abstract environment mental benefits. Because at the end of the day, if we’re not getting our needs satisfied by a particular product or service, we will explore other ones. So, shoppers need to be convinced that whatever their primary need is be it taste or health or identifying something aesthetically pleasing, they’re not going to go after the secondary needs. Also, they need to ensure that their offering has some degree of mental and physical availability. Byron Sharp, in his book, How Brands Grow, emphasizes that having something top of mind as a brand and have it physically available where you’re shopping, are the keys to increasing sales and growth of your brand within the broader category, and this is as true for sustainable brands as it is for any other brand. And then, I think marketers really need to get comfortable with letting go of the notion that just because somebody filling out a survey says they’re willing to pay more for more sustainable products, doesn’t mean when the rubber hits the road, that that’s true. Some people can be distracted by a discount on a neighboring product that they find at the shelf. And many people, the majority of the population, really, especially these days, don’t have the resources to spend more money on fulfilling their product needs. And so, I think there needs to be a greater emphasis for marketers marketing more sustainable products to do everything they can to achieve price parity with the competition if they want to have more success in this sphere. 

[Music]

Adrian Tennant: Our Bigeye Book Club Selection for May was Purposeful Brands: How Purpose And Sustainability Drive Brand Value And Positive Change, written by Sandy Skees. Reflecting there over three decades of expertise in management consulting and strategic communications, I asked Sandy about the challenges of communicating purpose and sustainability.

Sandy Skees: There are two things I want people to understand about communicating purpose and sustainability in all kinds of communications, from advertising and marketing through to corporate communications, all of it. The first is these are very complex dimensions of a business that require a whole range of communications across all of your owned, earned, and paid channels. There’s so much complexity in what a company is doing to reduce its carbon footprint, for example, or reduce its greenhouse gasses, improve the way it manages water, all those things. Highly complex. This isn’t just one report you’re gonna issue. You need to be communicating it over and over throughout the course of the year. Think about on-pack as a place to communicate those messages. Think about it on-shelf, on your website, on your socials. This is a complex story that needs lots of ways in, et cetera. The second thing I want you to know is that the language you use to tell the story runs the spectrum from highly technical, highly factual, extremely transparent, very detailed, and data driven all the way up to inspirational, aspirational, and visionary. A CSO that I’ve worked with who I love dearly who’s been a leader in this space for years, she said, “It’s up to us to set the highest order vision of the kind of world we want to create with our business. That we have to both set that vision and then explain in scientific terms how we’re gonna get there.” And that is a very interesting communications challenge. We need words that are aspirational and pulls people along with us as a business and a brand, and we need highly technical information so those who are trying to really understand the progress we’re making can find the facts in the things that we’re saying. 

Adrian Tennant: What advice would you give to other creative and communications professionals looking to make a positive impact on sustainability and climate action?

Sandy Skees: I think there’s a couple of ways. One is, in the way in which we depict people in commercials, in ads, in visuals. Can we have a recycling bin somewhere in the shot, for example? Can we have two people who are chatting instead of each holding a disposable coffee cup? Maybe one’s rinsing out the peanut butter jar to throw it into the recycling bin. Like, all those social cues that we as creators have access to. Yep, we can change behavior very subtly or using those subtle behavior cues, you know, in the shot and think about how do we do that? How can we use this commercial for, you know, hand soap? Maybe we show the person washing their hands and turning the tap off in between soaping up your hands, like it’s all those little behavior cues that will drive behavior change. So I think that’s number one. The second thing, and I actually said this, I was a guest speaker at a very large food and consumer goods packaging company. I was a guest speaker for their Earth Week all-hands employee kickoff, and what we were talking about was product innovation. Brand managers are always looking for, what’s the next product we’re gonna bring to market? We’ve got a budget, we’re in the innovation pipeline. We’re thinking about, you know, let’s go with a vanilla flavor this year. Let’s add vanilla. And my question to them was, “Hey, instead of a new flavor, how about using that capital and developing a bottle that’s based on bioplastics, not petroleum plastic?” Like, let’s let the innovation not necessarily just be one more SKU on the shelf, but improve the SKUs that we have. Or, if people are currently enjoying your products in a particular form factor now today, which involves packaging that they peel away and throw away, what might be an innovative way they could enjoy what you make in a completely different form factor that you haven’t thought about yet? That’s a product innovation and a marketing innovation that can have both social and environmental impact. Another is, are there swaths of the market that you’re leaving out? We were working with a yogurt company that was looking at places where there were food deserts, and a food desert is a place where communities that are economically challenged don’t have access to healthy foods. And so what they were looking for is, “How do we get our high-quality yogurt in convenience stores and bodegas and other places that are, that the choices for consumers are less?” So they had a product strategy that had a social dimension to it, and I think those are all ways that we, as marketers, communicators, brand strategists can use what we do. It’s how do we leverage our communications vehicles and platforms, and then how do we think about the products that we’re using? 

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Adrian Tennant: As we’ve heard, there are many ways to join the ranks of the Solutionists. To conclude, let’s hear what Solitaire Townsend believes are the key contributions advertisers can make to reshaping public perception and encouraging more sustainable behaviors. 

Solitaire Townsend: Actually, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC – which some folks might have heard of, who are the sort of preeminent scientists around the world – every seven years they come up with a big report about what we need to do about climate change. And for the first time in 20 years, they actually included our industry in that, which is quite a big deal because that will trickle down through governments and will trickle down through regulation to us pretty quickly. There are two things that they said that they needed from us. One is they need us to not greenwash, to not support destructive industries, to not advertise the problem, and to avoid climate misinformation. And, that is a difficult and true challenge for the industry. On the other side, they said sustainable lifestyles. We are the people who can show that living in a more sustainable way, eating, traveling, clothing, buying in a more sustainable way is desirable. That’s what we are good at. And so there’s a whole chapter in the IPCC report that goes into how can we as marketers, for example, make plant-based eating much more desirable, help people to transition towards, electrifying everything in electric cars, help people desire different ways of consuming, particularly consuming better quality and less repairing of vintage. There’s a whole section in there around how we travel and making it so that people can feel that actually perhaps that they don’t need to take their car for a 15-minute trip, that they’d be able to walk for it. So they set out 61 behaviors that would make a significant difference to climate change. And they call upon us, the marketers and the influencers in the world, the people who affect society, to help make them desirable and to help change behaviors. And so, you know, we’ve now been given our marching orders by the climate scientists in terms of the role of our industry.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks to all the guests who contributed to IN CLEAR FOCUS. In this episode, you heard Solitaire Townsend, Marley Goldin, Renee Hartman, Thomas Klaffke, Rohit Bhargava, Michael Smith, and Sandy Skees. You’ll find links to these contributors’ details in the transcript for this episode on our webpage at Bigeyeagency.com – just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. And you can save 25 percent off print or electronic versions of the books by Solitaire, Renee, Michael, and Sandy when you order direct from Kogan Page. Use the promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Brainsights’ CEO Kevin Keane discusses leveraging consumer brain data for creative effectiveness and optimizing brand integrations through salience, storytelling, and support. Based on consumer research, Kevin also reveals new data on the power of audio branding and explains how brands can imbue fresh meaning with the strategic use of sonic assets to support memory activation. We also discuss the roles of extrinsic and intrinsic attention and the future of insights and data.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Kevin Keane: Think about attention as a visual and an auditory mechanism; both need to be considered in order for creative to be effective.

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising. Produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been examining some of the ways brand managers and agencies can leverage learnings from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, the world’s largest center for research into marketing. Now, a few weeks ago, Professor Jenni Romaniuk joined us on this podcast and explained some of the laws that underpin brand growth and the role that distinctive brand assets play in creating category buyer memories. Our guest this week applies those principles to evaluative research, helping clients assess and optimize creative effectiveness by measuring moment-by-moment consumers’ unconscious brain responses to brands in the context of TV advertising, placements, and sponsorships. Making a return visit to IN CLEAR FOCUS, Kevin Keane is the founder and CEO of Brainsights, an insights platform and consulting company that leverages neurotechnology to reveal the drivers that motivate consumer behavior. Today, Brainsights has amassed one of the world’s largest databases of commercial neuroscience data with hundreds of brands, tens of thousands of ads, and more than 150,000 hours of video content analyzed against more than 30,000 respondents’ brains. With this data, Brainsights advises brands and creators on crafting more effective and inclusive content to deliver business growth. Prior to founding Brainsights, Kevin held leadership positions at Havas Media and MediaCom, where he set up its business science practice, delivering big data management, econometric modeling, and technology solutions. Kevin’s pioneering neuromarketing work at Brainsights has been recognized and featured in Canadian national newspapers, broadcasters CBC and BNN, plus prominent tech blogs. To discuss a unique approach that combines Ehrenberg-Bass principles with neuro-based research, I’m delighted that Kevin is joining us today from Toronto, Canada. Kevin, welcome back to IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Kevin Keane: Thanks for having me. 

Adrian Tennant: Kevin, you were a guest on this podcast back in 2021. For anyone who didn’t catch that episode, could you give us an overview of Brainsights’ approach to evaluative research and how it differs from traditional methods?

Kevin Keane: Sure. Using a custom-built neuro measurement platform, we measure people’s brain wave activity as they consume content, media, advertising, experiences, and as such, what we do is we bypass many of the biases that are introduced via self-report mechanisms and understand the unconscious drivers of decision making.

Adrian Tennant: What are some of the principles drawn from Ehrenberg-Bass’s research that you’ve integrated into Brainsights’ methods?

Kevin Keane: Sure, so first and foremost, from an E-B perspective, it’s really the primacy of memory and recall in buyer situations, the portrayal of buyer situations and customer needs. And advertising is great, but how much memory encoding is occurring in those moments? That’s something that our measurement platform can evaluate quite precisely. And then furthermore, you know, there’s obviously principles of distinctive brand assets. We’ve been exploring the optimal ways to present these to activate memory stores most efficiently and effectively. And also, through our research and metadata analysis across a range of different brands, categories, and assets, we’re trying to get a read on if all distinctive brand assets are created equal, really to put a measure on that. You know, what we’re doing is measuring the passive, automatic, and unconscious response of consumers at very granular intervals, so we can help brands understand whether those assets are being presented in the optimal way and how they can optimize based on what the consumer brain activity response is telling us.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you’ve recently published a couple of white papers about brand integrations. First, Kevin, could you define what an integration is? 

Kevin Keane: Sure. It’s the embedding of branding and products into entertainment content. So think of it like, you know, anything from product placement to brand entertainment, aural mentions of brands and products, pay for reviews, these kinds of things.

Adrian Tennant: And in your experience, what typically prompts brands to consider integrations versus regular TV spots or other forms of advertising?

Kevin Keane: There are a few reasons why brands would pursue this. Ad avoidance, ad skipping is sort of chief among those, but more sophisticated brands are realizing that, more or less, all media nowadays is basically skippable. So they’re building entertainment divisions in that knowledge that in order to build connections with consumers first you really need to appeal, attract, entertain, educate, otherwise add value to them so that you’re attracting them in, instead of interrupting.

Adrian Tennant: Your reports reflect consumer brain data collected with Brainsights’ IntegrationEQ. Can you explain what it is, and how you use it to measure the effectiveness of brand integrations? 

Kevin Keane: Yeah, so I mean, listeners can think of IntegrationEQ as a neuroscience-brand lift report, right? So you’re combining a brand lift with neuro measurement to understand both that high-level impact of exposure on key brand metrics, as well as the underlying mechanisms driving that response through the Brainsights measurement of attention, emotional connection, and encoding to memory. One of the issues that we found in looking at brand integration, was that there was always kind of a tug of war between the brand and agency and the publisher, right? Things like, “Oh, there’s not enough brand, there’s not enough branding in this. Like, I want my brand to be on screen for, you know, 5, 6, 7 seconds,” or whatever it happened to be, right? And so you get this kind of tug of war. “Well, no, that’s gonna alienate our audiences.” But actually, what we’ve found is that time on screen doesn’t have a lot to do with effectiveness. It, more so, is about how that time is spent on screen, whether or not you’re telling a meaningful story, whether or not you’re activating that. And so we built a framework around how brands can ensure that their integrations are effective.

Adrian Tennant: Well, reflecting Brainsights’ data, one of your white papers is The Three S’s Of Successful Brand Integrations. Now for this report, you undertook a meta-analysis across 18 consumer categories with 40 brands, and over 200 individual brand elements, with brain data captured from over 1,400 consumers, resulting in over 20 billion data points. A key takeaway from the report is that just one out of every six brand integrations achieves what you define as high or top performance, that is, delivering objective brand and business results. So Kevin, what are the three S’s, and to what extent do they reflect Ehrenberg-Bass’s laws of brand growth?

Kevin Keane: Yeah, so the three S’s refer to salience, storytelling, and support. And you know, salience is really, prime among this, right? And, this is really the reflection of E-B laws of brand growth. It’s really about ensuring that the brand integration is branded, and it reflects a key buying occasion or customer problem. And this is where, you know, some clever storytelling will come in because you do need to balance that entertainment aspect with the commercial aspect. But, I think we’ve seen successful integrations where brands play the hero of the story they’re solving: the customer need, the customer problem. They’re thoroughly branded, and, you know, they’re enjoyable. And that’s where the storytelling piece comes in. Support really reflects how that is activated in the same kind of way that a sponsorship requires media support activation so that people understand that the sponsorship actually exists so that those memory associations are being established and refreshed. This is what we mean by the three S’s and how they reflect the Ehrenberg-Bass principles.

Adrian Tennant: If only 17 percent of integrations resulted in favorable business outcomes, what should brand managers consider doing differently to ensure their executions are effective? 

Kevin Keane: Yeah. So, you know, one of the challenges of brand integrations is how do you ensure that it stands out without alienating people, without people thinking that, “Oh, man, I didn’t tune into this show for a commercial in the show. You know, I’m skipping those things. I’m going, and, you know, making some tea when the ad pod comes on,” or whatever. So it’s really about nailing those three things, right? You need that brand salience, but you also need to understand that people are tuning in for the storytelling. They’re tuning in to be educated or entertained or informed. And so, if you’re not satisfying those key media or entertainment customer needs, you’re gonna fall on your face. And so, I think this is where brand managers need to consider, just as partners and publishers need to consider, the other partner in this. Which is, you know, fundamentally the audience. And really look to those three S’s to manage that tug of war that I mentioned previously about, you know, brand on screen, no brand on screen, how long is it on screen? It’s about salient storytelling and support and understanding that there are three parties to this relationship.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you’ve also published a couple of papers discussing brand lift and the advantages of measuring implicit and neural data. What are the generally applicable rules that Brainsights’ work suggests for effective branding?

Kevin Keane: In terms of general rules, in so far as how they relate, specifically say to advertising, we bring them back to our three metrics: attention, emotional connection, and encoding to memory. Attention is really about how are you drawing people in? A lot of the chatter, I think, in the industry is about what you might call extrinsic attention. So attention as it relates to media, which is obviously important, and critical even to get eyeballs and ears on advertising. But there’s also intrinsic attention, the type of attention that is generated by the creative itself. The hook, specifically, if we’re talking about, you know, video or audio, the hook of an ad is absolutely critical. And there are attention windows that we educate our customers on. And those attention windows really relate to the things that you need to do in the opening few frames, the opening two seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds in order to hook and maintain that attention. And then obviously, too, there’s the relationship that attention has, for example, to emotional connection, right? So, you know, we tend to pay attention to the things that we care about, the things that resonate with us, the things that activate that our memory stores. There’s a relationship that occurs between those two things. Some of that can be solved by paying attention to the extrinsic attention associated with media, but a lot of that also has to be the onus of the brand manager, the advertising agency, to really craft stories that are engaging people and carrying them through. So as that then, kind of coming back to effective branding, there’s a probability focus, I think, that we also take to advertising and branding in advertising. Some brands want to focus more on the story and less on the branding. Our position on that is, well, you know, let’s say you have 30 seconds, and three seconds of those are branded. Well, then you’re really relying on people to be really tuned in and really remembering those three of the 30 seconds. And, if you’re using one out of 10 of those seconds as branded seconds, the odds just aren’t in your favor, right? So, but if you were using, say, 27 or 30 of those seconds as fully branded, or even partially branded through the use of colors or, you know, other types of cues and mnemonics, then you’re in much better shape. Your odds are just a lot better in consumers taking something away from that. So, I think what we do here is introduce really strong principles of storytelling, looking at how attention, emotional resonance, and memory store activation work together, but also play on data and probability and saying, “Look, you know, you’re better off branding as many of those moments as possible in a meaningful way, than you are gambling, rolling the dice, and hoping that your final three seconds or whatever it happens to be, is your payoff and your branded moment.”

Adrian Tennant: So think about ways to integrate distinctive brand assets throughout a spot, reinforcing colors or a fluent device if there is one, that would be the way to go?

Kevin Keane: Absolutely.

Adrian Tennant: Are there any other How Brands Grow-related findings that you want to share with us?

Kevin Keane: Gosh. I mean, you know, one thing – I mean, this is less specifically How Brands Grow, on the Byron Sharp side, more Jenny Romaniuk, like distinctive brand asset side – but we’ve been doing a lot of research into the role of sonic branding, and comparing the power, for example, of jingles in activating memory stores versus other branding assets: distinctive brand characters, logos, voices, colors, that kind of thing. And you know, just the portability of a jingle and the earworm ability of a jingle, I think, is just – it’s such an underutilized but very, very powerful, mechanism to brand sound. And I think that it’s underexplored. I think that we’re now seeing a little bit more of a renewed interest in that space with the over, call it over-screenification or over-visualization of media. There’s a growing consciousness or awareness around the power of sound. And if you can nail, one of those earwormy jingles like Burger King with the Whopper Whopper, for example, very recently. But if you can nail that and own that, then it’s a very powerful place to be for a brand.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

Each month in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, the Bigeye Book Club features interviews with authors who are experts in consumer research, retail, and branding. Our featured book for July is Brand Strategy in Three Steps: A Purpose-Driven Approach to Branding by Jay Mandel. The book walks readers through a new way to build a meaningful and authentic brand strategy focused on identity, intention, and implementation. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25% on a print or electronic version of this month’s featured book by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all Kogan Page products and pre-orders and applies to their free paperback and e-book bundle offer. Shipping is always free to the US and UK when you order direct from Kogan Page, and it helps the authors too. So to order your copy of Brand Strategy In Three Steps, go to KoganPage.com

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Kevin Keane, the founder, and CEO of Brainsights, a Toronto-based consumer neuroscience platform and insights consultancy. Kevin, last time you were a guest on this podcast, we talked about sonic elements and Brainsights’ finding that audio has the ability to cut through in a media landscape saturated with video content. Now, since then, you’ve collected more consumer brain data that offers new clues about how to optimize sonic elements as part of a brand’s distinctive assets. Could you share some key takeaways?

Kevin Keane: I mean, one surprising takeaway for me was when we looked at peak memory store activation when different assets were on screen – and really peak memory store activation is what is the max level that consumer segments are hitting in terms of memory store activation in the brain – we compared that across different assets. We noticed that jingles were outperforming distinctive brand assets, and we’re looking at dozens of these things on both sides. Everything from, the M and M characters, to the Geico Gecko, to Percy The Penguin – a distinctive brand character of a bank up here in Canada – and then, you know, comparing that to very common jingles in Canadian brands, but also, Whopper Whopper also, you know, Juicy Fruit, from the eighties and nineties. What we noticed was that, if you’re looking at mental availability and you’re looking at that being underpinned by memory, by instant recall, by the power that a brand asset has in activating memory stores, jingles is kind of the top of the pop, right? Like it outperforms distinctive brand characters more often than not. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that, you know, that means that you should dump a whole bunch of money into jingles and kick your distinctive brand characters to the curb. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m just saying that I think because of that earworm potential, the portability in your brain of a jingle that might just pop in, it basically becomes free space in your mind – something that you might say over and over. I’m not sure if it’s the same in the US, but “Love that chicken,” from Popeye’s, right? Like, is one of those really, easy to recall jingles that just kind of pops into your brain, like, you know, and then boom, all of a sudden it’s like, “Yeah, I should go to Popeye’s for my chicken sandwich,” or whatever happens to be. One of the other key takeaways, and one of the ones that I just loved learning about, was how brands can imbue fresh meaning and significance into their sonic assets. So, there are a couple of really interesting examples here. The famous ba-da ba ba ba from McDonald’s, we studied that quite a bit, looking at how consumer brain activity responded to that sting. And the McDonald’s team did something really interesting with that during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, they engaged, I think, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to redo that sting in their style, and we screened that for consumers, and we measured their brain activity as that was happening. And we saw just huge levels of memory store activation, and emotional connection in those moments. And it was such an incredible example of how a brand could take a cultural moment and approach it creatively to imbue and refresh fresh meaning into a sonic asset like that, which I thought was like really amazing. There’s another example that I’ll just share real quick. It was on Intel Inside. They did an ad, you know, ba-ba, ba-ba, like that is their sting. And they anthropomorphized the sting, and they did it by visualizing energy inside of things. So that could be a toaster oven, right? Like as you’re waiting for your grilled cheese to grill or whatever, and the person waiting for the grilled cheese to grill. I don’t even know if this was a scene. This might be the next iteration of this ad. But like, you know, the person waiting for the thing to grill would be like ba-ba, ba-ba. The one that was definitely in it was an ultrasound, right? So you have a baby inside a belly and is like ba-ba, ba-ba, maybe the dad is like looking at this and does that to himself, right? And I just think it was such a beautiful way to take that sting and the tagline and bring new meaning to it. And when you looked at people’s brain activity as this was happening, you just saw, like you know, incredible levels of emotional connection and memory store activation concurrently happening, which to us suggested that new meaning was being imbued and the existing associations being refreshed. So, you know, something that is often considered to be like an add-on at the end of an ad, you know, to kind of aurally extend branding can actually take center stage as well, and agencies and brands can get creative with that. Like obviously, they want to maintain the integrity of the mnemonic, but there are ways that you can imbue fresh meaning into the sting, through those types of creative methods. So, I just got really excited about it, and I thought it was like a really beautiful creative way to bring like fresh thinking to something that, I think, for a lot of people, it might be an afterthought, you know?

Adrian Tennant: Brainsights’ key metrics are collected every two milliseconds in response to communications, and tagged with over 150 content metadata variables. Your measures are also incredibly granular, including focus, cognitive load, persuasiveness, encoding, connection, and, as you’ve mentioned, attention. Now, since we last spoke, attention has become a hot topic thanks in part to the work of former Ehrenberg-Bass professor, Karen Nelson-Field, who went on to found Amplified Intelligence. Kevin, what’s the role of attention in creative effectiveness? 

Kevin Keane: A fundamental, fundamental role in creative effectiveness. And this kind of comes back to what I was saying before about extrinsic and intrinsic. So extrinsic would, in my mind, the way that I would think about it would be, relating to media, does the media that consumers are viewing, or consuming, or listening to, is there a high attention, or low attention to it? Oftentimes, attention in media circles relates to visual attention. The other piece I think that needs to be coming off of a discussion with sonic branding has to be auditory as well. Because, obviously, there are ways that you can pay attention. Ways that attention can be hooked in that are auditory in nature. So that needs to be considered as well. So extrinsic relating to media attention is fundamental in creative effectiveness. The other pieces are about creating hooks in the ad itself that are native to the environment that the ad is placed. A TikTok on TikTok, a tv ad on tv, that are considering the attention environment and creating hooks that are drawing people into the story, and retaining people and drawing them through, so that a brand message can be delivered. So, this is a really long way to answer your question, Adrian. But the role of attention and creative effectiveness, I would say, consider both extrinsic, i.e. media, and intrinsic, i.e. that which can be achieved with the creative and the message itself. And also, you know, think about attention as a visual and an auditory mechanism that both need to be considered in order for creative to be effective.

Adrian Tennant: A couple of weeks ago, Connie Braams, the Chief Digital and Commercial Officer at CPG giant Unilever shared that the majority of its growth is coming from long-term brand-building efforts. She also talked about incorporating performance marketing in a creative commerce revolution, saying quote, “If we apply creativity throughout the end-to-end consumer journey, we know we can bridge the gap between performance and brand, and we will have found a way to be first in mind, first to find, and first to cart,” end quote. Kevin, Connie seems to acknowledge Ehrenberg-Bass’s mental and physical availability model in her comment, but what’s your take on the long-term brand versus short-term performance media debate?

Kevin Keane: So I have a couple of thoughts on it. The first is that I feel like it’s a false dichotomy oftentimes. I feel that brand versus direct response, it’s to me almost as if the direct response message has or carries no branding in it, or, you know, there’s no direct response that may result from a branding message. So I think that it’s oftentimes positioned as this or that, when I think it can be both. There’s this concept from James Hurman, another effectiveness guru, about future demand. Now future demand could be five years in the future, it could be five minutes in the future, right? And I think that it’s important to do brand building, obviously, and building out salience in buying occasions, meeting specific customer needs, and ensuring that you own those buying occasions so that when a buyer finds themselves in that scenario, your brand comes to mind first before anybody’s. Equally, I think that you know, I completely understand the need to activate in-market buyers in a way that can more meaningfully hit quarterly targets. There’s also, like, just the necessity of hitting sales goals and moving the business forward. So I think there’s obviously space for both. I got another kind of guru in the space like Mark Ritson’s “Bothism” framework of thinking where I think, you know, going after The Long And The Short Of It – apologies for all these different, you know, obvious references to a guy like yourself, Adrian – but you know, there is a need to balance, and you can do that without setting one against the other.

Adrian Tennant: Kevin, where do you believe insights, data, and research are headed?

Kevin Keane: Where I think insights is going, and I think this is really important for the creative, the advertising, the branding community. There’s been a lot of talk around, you know, following Cannes, the decline of brands or the disappearance of brands and the primacy of AI. And you know, I think that unique data sets – if everybody’s using the same data set and the same set of tools and the same large language models, I, you know, and the same prompts, I think you’re gonna get the same work, right? You’re gonna get more of the same. And I think what I’ve learned over my career is that this is the opportunity for creativity actually to stand out. You know, if everybody has the same access to the same stuff, and equally, it’s creativity in a broad sense. It’s not just about creating unique ads. It’s about taking a different perspective, and that different perspective can come from insights and research. It can come from a unique, different data set. It can come from the mashing up of disciplines that hadn’t necessarily been mashed up before or surfaced in any particular way. So I think, you know, the future of insights and data and research is the same kind of future that advertising has. It’s about innovating, staying ahead, and bringing that unique perspective that keeps you ahead of what everyone else is doing.

Adrian Tennant: If IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you and your work at Brainsights, what’s the best way to connect with you?

Kevin Keane: www.brainsights.com, or, find us on LinkedIn, which is where we post a lot of our thought leadership. For example, and this is a shameless plug right here, Adrian, but, we did look at this science of Cannes-winning creative recently, which I think is really interesting, and it kind of gets into some of the principles that we were discussing here about attention, emotional resonance, memory storing, coding, you know, really strong storytelling, and linking the cultural with the contextual with the creative – it’s pretty cool!

Adrian Tennant: Excellent. And we’ll include links to the reports we discussed today in the transcript for this episode. Kevin, thank you very much for being our guest again on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Kevin Keane: Thanks for having me.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Kevin Keane, the founder, and CEO of Brainsights. You’ll find a transcript of this episode with links to the resources we discussed today on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select podcast from the menu. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for joining us for IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Josh Bernoff, author of “Build a Better Business Book,” shares insights about writing and publishing successful business books. Josh offers tips for planning, outlining chapters, and eliminating writer’s block. He discusses co-authoring, ghostwriting, and publishing models. Josh also provides expert advice on promotion and timing marketing efforts effectively. For readers and aspiring authors alike, this is a rare opportunity to hear from an accomplished industry insider. 

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Josh Bernoff: If you look at any really effective business books, they’re full of descriptions of the people who are doing these things, the experiences they had, when they succeeded, how they failed, how they recovered from failure. It’s what makes the book readable and interesting. 

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. In partnership with business publisher Kogan Page, once every month, the Bigeye Book Club selects a title focused on a particular aspect of marketing and discusses key ideas with the book’s author. Our selections have included books about brand strategy, consumer research, retail technology, shopper marketing, AI, and analytics. For readers, business books can provide unique insights into industry practices and offer advice drawn from an author’s personal experience. Books can also empower their readers to make better-informed decisions and implement effective strategies in their own lives. For their authors, business books can be a powerful channel for disseminating unique perspectives and thought leadership while acting as springboards for authors’ careers. Many become public speakers and are sought after by media outlets for their knowledge and opinions. Today’s guest is an expert on how writing business books can propel authors to prominence. Josh Bernoff has collaborated on more than 45 nonfiction books, which have generated more than $20 million for their authors. He’s the author of eight business books, including the bestseller, Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies, co-authored with Charlene Li and published by Harvard Business Review Press. Today, Josh works closely with non-fiction authors as an advisor, coach, editor, or ghostwriter, and shares his knowledge about the non-fiction book market with readers of his daily blog. Josh’s latest book is entitled Build A Better Business Book: How To Plan, Write, And Promote A Book That Matters. To discuss this new, comprehensive guide for nonfiction authors, I’m delighted that Josh is joining us today from his home in Portland, Maine. Josh, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Josh Bernoff: It’s great to be here. I’m looking forward to speaking with you. 

Adrian Tennant: First of all, it truly is a pleasure to talk to you since I’ve been following your work since Groundswell was published back in 2008, and your book, Writing Without Bullshit is a well-thumbed desk reference. 

Josh Bernoff: That really was a turning point in my life when I co-authored Groundswell with Charlene Li. Prior to that, I was an analyst at Forrester Research, but, Charlene and I were both analysts really made an impact with that book, Groundswell sold 150,000 copies, and I decided to focus on the authoring side of things. And so, since that time, I have been almost exclusively focused on writing, working with authors, and in general, business books and how to make them successful. 

Adrian Tennant: Now, whenever I’m interviewing authors on this podcast, I typically ask what prompted them to write the book they’re discussing. You surveyed authors to inform some of the information you provide in Build A Better Business Book. So Josh, what are the primary reasons people write business books?

Josh Bernoff: The really primary reason that people write business books is to share the ideas that they have. We did a survey and asked that question, and that was the number one thing. And in general, if you look at what they’re trying to accomplish, everything follows from that. It’s all a question of how you generate influence and visibility for your ideas, and that can translate into all sorts of ways to generate revenue from speeches and consulting or an academic career. But, really, it’s about having an idea and getting that idea out there where people can get a look at it.

Adrian Tennant: And why did you write yours?

Josh Bernoff: Well, I have been working with authors exclusively since 2015, when I left Forrester Research. I’ve worked on, at this point, 50 book projects, and people keep making the same mistakes and steering into the same ditches. They don’t understand how publishing works. They don’t understand how to plan content. They don’t understand how to market their books. And there’s this series of practices for this that are, you know, the right way to do things. So I just thought, I need to take everything that I know here and put it together in one place as a comprehensive guide for authors. And, you know, that starts with the insight that most people don’t understand, which is that business books are stories. And, once they understand that they’re telling a story, everything follows from that. 

Adrian Tennant: In Build A Better Business Book, you observe that more experienced, published authors tend to think of their books as more than just books. Can you expand on this? 

Josh Bernoff: If you spend six months or a year working on a book, then it becomes like a family member. It sucks up a lot of your time, and it’s something that requires constant nurturing. That means that you need to, in the beginning, work on ways that you can feed content into it. You know, collect research, collect case studies. You need to dedicate the time to assembling it and getting it to be excellent. And, I think one thing that people tend not to do as much as they should, you have to continue to get it out there and promote it. But the other thing about a book is that, like a family member, it continues to give back. It creates visibility for you. it creates a reputation for you. It makes it possible for you to give speeches or to open doors with clients. And, as a result of that, it sort of defines who you are in the marketplace. One simple way to put this is that we’re all familiar with the idea of content marketing, that if you create useful content it draws people to your content, and then, boosts your reputation. I would say that a book is basically the largest possible lump of content marketing. It’s a concentrated way to draw people to you, boost your reputation, and enable you to succeed based on that. 

Adrian Tennant: In the third chapter of Build A Better Business Book, you assert that for an idea to be solid enough to base a book on, it has to have consequences. Can you give us some examples that define book-worthy ideas and how to come up with them? 

Josh Bernoff: Mm-hmm. Certainly. The example I use in that chapter is from Charlene Li, who was my co-author on Groundswell, and then has gone on to a successful career, and she wrote a book on disruption called The Disruption Mindset. Now, there are a lot of books on disruption, but she had a unique perspective on what disruption is, which is that you must focus your company not on the needs of your current customers, but on the needs of your future customers, sometimes at the expense of serving your current customers. Well, there’s an idea that has consequences because it means changing what your focus is. When I talk about ideas, the litmus test here for an idea is that it has to have three qualities. It has to be big, right, and new. So big means that it has consequences. You don’t want to write a book about something that doesn’t have a whole lot of dimensions to it, or consequences for a lot of people. Right means that you can justify it because anyone can come up with some conspiracy theory, but either by statistics or case studies, you need to provide evidence that your view of the world is actually accurate. And more important than those two is new because there’s no point in writing another book about the same topic that everybody has already written about. I don’t want to see another book on search engine optimization, right? But, what is your new spin on that? Maybe if it’s search engine optimization in the age of ChatGPT. Okay, now there’s something new. Or what is content marketing, and the intersection of that with podcasts. You need to be able to say, “This is the first book that…” “The first comprehensive book about all topics in marketing,” or “The first book that talks about how AI is going to change branding.” And so if you can complete that sentence, “This is the first book that…” then, you know, that it’s new enough to actually, potentially base a whole book on. 

Adrian Tennant: Continuing the theme of ideation, how do you recommend authors come up with a great title?

Josh Bernoff: There’s a method to that, and the first thing you need to understand is what a title is, because people don’t understand that. A title is a handle. So if I give you a great title, if I say something like, The Tipping Point, in the absence of Malcolm Gladwell’s actual book, that doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s when you connect it to the idea that it begins to have some resonance. So a title is a unique combination of words that connects to the idea. And to get at that, you need to get the part of your brain that has unique words and stimulate it. The method that I use, and I’ve done this with a lot of authors, is, I have a meeting with the author and a third person. The third person is a stand-in for the audience, right? So if you’re writing a book for marketers, it would be somebody in marketing. And then, I just ask the author to explain their concept, and I listen carefully for unique combinations of words, things that I haven’t heard before. and so there’s where I reflect back and they say, “This book is about this,” I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s boring. I’ve heard that a hundred times.” They’re like, “No, the unique thing is this.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. Wait a minute. There’s something I haven’t heard before.” And I use two other very sophisticated tools. One is an online thesaurus, right? Because sometimes the words that you hear are not exactly the right words, but you look at similar words. And the second is the universal search engine for book titles, which is called Amazon.com. So you go onto Amazon.com, and it’s really great if you come up with a title, but if that happens to already be the title of a popular book, especially in your space, then you can never own that in searches, and that means that it’s not the right title for you.

Adrian Tennant: Authors Rohit Bhargava and Emmanuel Probst have been among the guests on this podcast recently. Emmanuel’s book Assemblage was published by IdeaPress, which, as you know, was co-founded by Rohit and focuses on business topics. In Build a Better Business Book, you discuss the three main publishing models. Josh, what are they, and how should an author select between them?

Josh Bernoff: Okay. So yes, there are three models which are traditional publishing, hybrid publishing, and self-publishing. So traditional publishing is what everyone thinks of. You pitch your book to a publisher, they accept it, they give you a book advance, right? They pay you money upfront, and then the book gets published and put into bookstores. And certainly, they are business books that are done this way that continues to be viable, and it is the way to have the most impact is to work with a traditional publisher. But people need to understand that requires creating a book proposal, which is a major effort, and that a lot of books that get pitched that way never get picked up. So there’s certainly no certainty that you’ll get picked up. Also, very important it’s nearly always 15 to 18 months after you pitch the book that it finally gets published. And a lot of people don’t want to wait that long. The hybrid publishing method is working with a publisher that you hire. And while this used to have a negative connotation, increasingly now, it is a viable way to publish books. So Rohit at IdeaPress is an example of a hybrid publisher. He does an excellent job. He published Charlene’s book that I mentioned earlier. And, my own publishers, another hybrid publisher, this is Amplify. I’ve ghostwritten two books that they published, and now, Build A Better Business Book is from them. And there are a number of these companies that do a fine job of this kind of thing. The advantage of that is you can go faster, typically is more like six to eight months between when you sign the deal and when you publish, as opposed to the 15 to 18 months. Other than that, exactly the same level of quality. You get a much higher royalty per book, but of course, you’re paying upfront for producing it. So if you sell a lot of books, it’s actually more profitable. But if you don’t, you won’t have the advance to pocket. The third thing you can do is self-publish, which is really easy to do now: take a book, get help from people to basically lay out the pages, upload it to Amazon through what they call Kindle Direct Publishing. Or you, there are other people like Ingram Spark that can do this and then you’re a published author. And that is the fastest way to publish a book, but it has significantly less impact. Because of the fact that anybody can self-publish that way, often books of this kind vary in quality. You have to have, you know, really good partners for things like page layout and covers, or else the book doesn’t look that great. And, of course, it is rarely possible in that situation to be available in any sort of distribution channel, like a bookstore or an airport bookstore. It’ll be available on Amazon and probably nowhere else. And, that’s still one way to make an impact. It is the least expensive and the fastest way to get out, but it also, you know, has less influence than hybrid-published or traditionally published books. 

Adrian Tennant: The second part of your book is all about research and writing. Now you were Senior Vice President of Idea Development at Forrester, a global market research company focused on technology and digital customer experience. So it’s perhaps not too surprising that you see value in research. Now even if authors have a strong understanding of the topic they’re going to write about, in what kinds of ways can research support the planning and writing processes? 

Josh Bernoff: I think you can’t write a good book without research unless it’s say a memoir about your own experience because you need to basically prove with as many facts as you can that what you’re saying is true. And research divides pretty neatly into two parts: primary research and secondary research. So primary research is things that are in your book that have never existed before, and that includes, for example, if you do a survey, or have some other source of data that you’ve collected that can be really interesting to do. There was a great book that came out a little while ago called Everybody Lies, that was based on data from Google searches that had all sorts of startling information in it. And, of course the other kind of primary research is interviews, where you find people who are doing interesting things. You interview them, and then you quote them. The secondary research is web research. It’s, you know, going on the internet and finding stuff, and you have to be very selective because some of it is credible and some of it is not. But you can assemble studies that you find there, quotes, information from other books, and you can basically, put together evidence that supports your case. And the combination of this primary and secondary research is what makes you credible. It’s what makes people read what you’ve written and say, “Okay, they know what they’re talking about.” Otherwise, it’s a series of unsupported statements, basically a manifesto, and you’re like, why should I believe any of that? 

Adrian Tennant: You believe that case studies and specifically human stories are absolutely essential in business books. Can you explain why these are important ingredients?

Josh Bernoff: Yeah. It’s interesting that the first time I figured that out, the Groundswell book I wrote at Forrester was not the first book I proposed to write. I was going to write a book on the future of television, which I was the expert on at the time. It was full of all sorts of interesting insights. I wrote the book proposal. I sent it to the agent. The agent said, ” I can’t sell this.” And I said, “Why not?” And he said, “There’s no people in there and there’s no stories. Business books are made out of people and stories. This reads like a research report.” And of course it did because I was used to writing research reports. But I was like, “Oh, people, people in stories, I can do that.” So I started to realize that was central. And if you look at any really effective business books, they’re full of descriptions of the people who are doing these things, the experiences they had, when they succeeded, how they failed, how they recovered from failure. It’s what makes the book readable and interesting. And I would say when I work with authors, the biggest issue they have is that they haven’t put in the work ahead of time to collect these case study stories. And, if you’re like, “Okay, I need to turn in the manuscript in three weeks, I don’t have enough case studies.” Oh man, you are in terrible shape because it, it’s a long lead time to find these things. In Build a Better Business Book, there’s actually one case study per chapter, open every chapter with a case study. And so you hear about what it was like to get a cover done, or how Phil M.  Jones used all three of those publishing models at different times, or how Charlene came up with the idea for her book, how Jay Baer was so successful with a book that he wrote called Talk Triggers, and you learn from these things and they’re much more believable and it makes the book much more interesting.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s talk a bit about how you recommend authors approach the writing process. In Build a Better Business Book, you describe something called a fat outline. Can you explain what this is? 

Josh Bernoff: Yeah. Let me start by saying that one of the biggest mistakes authors make is to start by writing. because they’re like, “I’m an author, I’m going to write!” And then they’re like, “I feel blocked. I have authors block, I have writer’s block.” Well, of course, you do because you haven’t thought enough about what you’re doing! There are basically two kinds of writers, and I have stolen this nomenclature from fiction writing. They’re called planners and pantsers. Planners figure out exactly what’s going to go in, into something before they write, and pantsers write by the seat of their pants. And I’m telling you that it’s much more efficient to be a planner than a pantser! So what does that mean? It means, if you’re going to write a chapter, first of all, the chapter has to answer a question. So that’s where you start. This chapter is going to answer the question, “How will artificial intelligence affect my marketing plan?” Then you assemble various pieces. You know, there’s going to be a case study, there’s going to be, you know, research that you’ve collected. There’s going to be argumentation, there’s going to be a framework for thinking about it. There’s going to be advice, and this is where you take all of the pieces that you’ve got and assemble them into a fat outline. Now, a regular outline where you just have you know, headings, the subheadings and subheadings. Really easy to write and totally useless because you can’t really tell if that’s any good. A fat outline has actual content in it. It’s got quotes and pictures and basically anything that you’ve assembled and you rearrange those things until they are in an order that is appropriate for the chapter. And that doesn’t tap into the fear that people have about writer’s block because rearranging things in an outline doesn’t feel like writing. That doesn’t get into your imposter syndrome. Now, if you’ve done the fat outline, now when the time comes to write, you’re like, “Okay, it says the first thing to write is this.” So you write that. Okay, good job. Now go have lunch. Now you come back, and you’re like, “Okay, what it says the second thing I should write is this framework. Okay, I’m going to write that.” And, you don’t have to follow the fat outline slavishly. You can change things around, but with that framework in place, it is much easier to create a chapter, and it’s much more likely to flow, and you’re much less likely to cry tears of pain while you’re doing it. 

Adrian Tennant: What should always be included in the first chapter of a business book?

Josh Bernoff: The purpose of the first chapter of the business book is to get you to read the rest of the book. And, that means that you have to scare the crap out of people. There are two ways to scare the crap out of people, and they are called fear and greed. So fear is, If you don’t do the stuff it says in this book, bad things will happen. So for example, if you were writing a book about data breaches and cybersecurity, the first chapter would be about fear. “Oh my gosh, I better get ready for this because my company could be destroyed.” And greed is, “You’re going to be more successful if you follow this.” So like a productivity book, “Oh, I can get twice as much done in a day if I follow this. Oh, that sounds really good.” Or,  “I can, you know, get twice as many leads. That’s worth doing.” And so, you describe the problem you’re solving and then use this fear and greed to describe the consequences of the problem. And then, at the end of the first chapter, you have to give people a solution. So it’s like, “What do I do?” Okay, well this is the solution. And at that point, you don’t have every element of the solution in place because it’s just an introduction. But people will read that, and they’re like, “Okay, I see what you’re getting at. Now show me how to do that.” That’s what the rest of the book does. 

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

Each month in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, the Bigeye Book Club features interviews with authors who are experts in consumer research, retail, and branding. Our featured book for July is Brand Strategy in Three Steps: A Purpose-Driven Approach to Branding by Jay Mandel. The book walks readers through a new way to build a meaningful and authentic brand strategy focused on identity, intention, and implementation. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25% on a print or electronic version of this month’s featured book by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all Kogan Page products and pre-orders and applies to their free paperback and e-book bundle offer. Shipping is always free to the US and UK when you order direct from Kogan Page, and it helps the authors too. So to order your copy of Brand Strategy In Three Steps, go to KoganPage.com

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Josh Bernoff, the author of Build A Better Business Book: How To Plan, Write, And Promote A Book That Matters. So far, we’ve been making the assumption that the person with the idea for a business book comes up with its title, determines the best publishing model, and does the research and writing alone, but that’s not always the case. So Josh, can you talk a bit about the roles that co-authors and ghostwriters can play?

Josh Bernoff: Certainly, and my first three books were co-authored, my most recent two books were, solo authors, just me, and I’ve ghostwritten three books. So I’ve now personally gone through all of these processes. People think that having a co-author means that they’ll be able to divide up the work and they’ll have to do half as much work. If you don’t plan it right, it’s twice as much work if you have another author because of all the necessity to coordinate. So this is where it really pays off to be a planner and not a pantser because you and your co-author need to agree on what’s the main idea of the book. Agree on what are the chapters. Agree on who’s going to do the research. Agree on who’s going to do the interviews. Agree on who’s going to do the writing. Maybe you write the first three chapters and they write the next six chapters, and what process you’ll use to review what the other person is doing so that you can make sure that it hangs together as a single book. And, if you are efficient at that, if you have a systematic process in place, then you can have a book that’s faster and better than it would’ve been with just one author. But if you don’t plan that properly, you’ll just end up, you know, duplicating a lot of effort and being upset that the other person doesn’t somehow magically understand what you want. And one more tip here: don’t have three authors. It’s terrible. You get politics, two against one. It is just, I just think it’s a bad idea. Now when it comes to ghostwriting, sometimes the person with the idea doesn’t have the time to create the book or maybe doesn’t have the skill to be a good writer, and they hire somebody else to do that. And that also is something where if you plan the content carefully and the writer knows where the source material is coming from, right? I mean, I. Ghostwriting doesn’t come from the stratosphere. It comes from a very specific set of content that you’re sharing with a ghostwriter. If you do that, then the ghostwriter writes to your specifications, and you end up with a book. But you also need to plan on how you will review what the ghostwriter creates and make sure that it aligns with what you wanted to say. If the ghostwriter is inexperienced, or the collaboration isn’t planned out properly, then that process can go horribly awry. And I have to say in the three ghostwriting projects that I’ve done, in one, the two authors had a very clear idea of exactly what they wanted. I wrote to their specifications, and then they edited it often saying, you know, “This is wrong. No, change this.” And that was great. In another one, the guy basically had short conversations with me and then said, go write it. And I did all of the research and all of the writing myself. And then he would read the result and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s good.” That was the total feedback. The one I did most recently, it was a management consulting company and they had a whole bunch of slideware, you know, presentations and I had to basically try and tease out the main ideas out of that and turn that into a book. Three very different processes. And in general, I find that when it comes to ghostwriting, there’s not one standard way to do it. It has to be custom designed based on who the authors are and what the ghostwriter is capable of doing. 

Adrian Tennant: A book isn’t usually published directly from the author’s first draft. What part do editors play in getting a manuscript ready for publication? 

Josh Bernoff: The job of the editor is to tell you what’s wrong with you, right? So this is something I do often. I am an editor, and I’ve of course, worked with other editors. And, the editor is answering everything about the book from top to bottom that needs to be better. So that might start with, is the idea solid? It might go on to, are the chapters structured in a reasonable way? And then, you know, within each chapter, is each chapter organized in a reasonable way? Is it interesting to read? And then you get into the writing. You know, I would say, this is going to sound shocking, but half of what I do as an editor is to rewrite sentences that are written in the passive voice. Because people are just used to writing that way. And it’s very hard in a business book to understand what you’re supposed to do if it’s in the passive voice. The people don’t realize that they’re repeating things. In one book that I edited, they use the word ‘leverage’ like, 300 times. I’m like, “You know what? You’re stuck on this word, and people don’t know what it means. We need to get that out of there.” So all of those are possible things that an editor does, and then it is the job of the author to try and respond to those suggestions, while still maintaining the soul of the book. I want to point out something that people may not realize, which is that it’s traditionally been the role of the editor at the publishing house to do this. But increasingly now, publishers want a publishable manuscript. They don’t want to edit it. They don’t have the staff to do that. So even if you have a traditional publishing contract, you’re likely to have to hire your own developmental editor to get the book to where it needs to be. 

Adrian Tennant: When we discussed his most recent book, The Future Normal, Rohit Bhargava mentioned some of the ways that he and his co-author had used AI tools to support their writing process. Now, they didn’t use AI to write the text of the book but rather to generate ideas for visual elements and identify potential weaknesses in their arguments. What is your advice for writers? Should they use tools like chatGPT, and if so, how? 

Josh Bernoff: I definitely agree with what you just said, you can’t let a tool like chatGPT write your book. Because whatever you can say about the pros that chatGPT creates, it’s generally boring. There’s a quality that human writers have that AI writers do not have, and that quality is called ‘wit’. So, its turns of phrase. It’s the way you structure paragraphs. It’s little jokes that you include. It’s personal asides. These are the things that make a book come alive, and none of that is going to come out of AI. Now that doesn’t mean that AI is useless. It can be very useful to help you solve a problem. So you’re like, “Okay, here’s a bunch of texts that I wrote. What do you think are the five main ideas in here?” Hmm. Well, those weren’t the five main ideas that I thought they were. Maybe I need to go back and restructure this, you know? Where do you see duplication? That’s the kind of thing it can help with. I recently did the title exercise that we talked about earlier. I took descriptions of some successful books, plugged them into ChatGPT and said, give me five book titles that would match a book with this description. And there were some terrible, boring titles in there, but there were a few that were like, “Wait a minute. That’s really interesting”. So, yes, it didn’t find the answer, but it did help with the process of creating the answer. And,  I did find that to be a useful tool to have. You know, nobody faults you for using a spell checker to check your spelling. Well, this is just another tool that you have that you can use to benefit your writing process.

Adrian Tennant: Build a Better Business Book, received advanced praise from many previous IN CLEAR FOCUS guests, including Rohit Bhargava, Mitch Joel, and Melanie Deziel. In addition to talking about their books on podcasts like this one, what are some of the ways that authors can promote their business books? 

Josh Bernoff: You need a systematic plan for promotion. The biggest mistake that people make is to not promote or to not put much energy into promotion. Cause they’re like, “This is a great book. People will find it.” You know what? They won’t. So, this means that you need to have a plan, and every book promotion plan is going to be different. It depends on what the author’s resources are, whether they have the ability to hire publicity staff to help, whether they have connections. It’s “Oh yeah, you know, my sister-in-law works on the Oprah program.” ” Oh, good for you. You have a resource that other people don’t have. At that point, you basically want to do everything you can to get the word out. And I have five initials that will define what that plan is: it’s PQRST. P is positioning: what is, the audience and what kind of a book is it. For example, this is a how to book for Python programmers. The Q is the question, what’s the question that this book answers? You know, how can I balance my career and my family would be an example of a question. And then R, S and T are sort of the operational elements of it. R is reach. How are you going to get the word out to as many people as possible? Appearing on podcasts is one way to do that. S is spread. How are you going to get that to resonate? What will you give to people that they can share? Bits of video, infographics, blog posts, you know, comments on news articles. And the T is timing because, in contrast to other forms of marketing, book promotion is a time limited activity. You want to hit people as many times as possible in a period of about a month before and a month after the book publishes. And that way there’s this sort of, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” And then they forget, and then they hear about the book somewhere else, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I remember hearing about that. Oh, I should get a copy of that.” And then they forget, and then they tune into somebody’s podcast and they’re like, “Oh, there it is again. You know what? This thing is everywhere. I have to get a copy.” And that only happens if all of those mentions are happening within a limited time period. 

Adrian Tennant: Are there any promotional tactics that you feel first-time authors should definitely avoid? 

Josh Bernoff: There’s one very expensive thing that doesn’t usually work. It’s called a bestseller program, also called a distributed buying program. So you might ask yourself a question like, “How can I get on the New York Times bestseller list?” The New York Times bestseller list is created by polling a bunch of bookstores to see how many copies of books are sold. One way to do that is to just be really popular, and a bunch of people buy your book. That’s the normal way. But you can also do that by paying a company to make it appear that there are a whole bunch of orders by ordering the book, from a whole bunch of bookstores, and then, for example, getting those copies and giving them out at speeches that you’re giving. Now, if you just imagine what it would be, typically you might need to sell 5,000 copies in a month to get on one of those lists. Okay? So that’s 5,000 copies of the book bought at a retail price of, let’s say, $25 apiece. That’s $125,000. Okay? That would be one way to become a New York Times bestseller. As long as the New York Times doesn’t catch on that you’re doing it and then disqualify you. So enormously expensive and not always effective. Plus, if you get caught doing it, you look like some kind of a shady character. So that’s one thing I’m very much telling people: Don’t do that unless you have an enormous amount of money!

Adrian Tennant: Josh, what are some of the ways you’ve seen business books work out really well for their authors? 

Josh Bernoff: You know, the definitions of success are so variable. It really is unique to each person. So, for example, Charlene Lee, my co-author on Groundswell, left Forrester Research, started her own business, partly based on having the reputation of having written this book on social media, built that whole business up, was very successful, and then sold the business for what I’m sure was millions of dollars. That’s one way to generate success. Not everybody’s going to have success at that level. The book Outside In that Forrester published about customer experience generated, you know, thousands of potential clients for them who wanted consulting help. There’s people like Jay who have, are getting, you know, more than $10,000 of speech and speaking 50 times a year. There are people who use the publication and the reputation that they get from it to get an academic position somewhere. Be a college professor. Some books generate leads. I edited a book on artificial intelligence. It didn’t sell that many copies, but it’s specifically about how corporations need to align their sort of data to be prepared for artificial intelligence. One lead that came from that book might generate a 2 million consulting contract for that author. So, these are all possible ways to succeed. And you notice I haven’t mentioned book sales here because book sales are typically not the most important way that people make money. The people who are making a lot of money from book sales are already making a huge amount of money from speeches and other successes that came from the book.

Adrian Tennant: Is there anybody who shouldn’t write a book? 

Josh Bernoff: If you think this is going to be a simple, easy process, then you shouldn’t write a book because it’s not. First of all, if your idea is the same as other people’s ideas, then we don’t need another book on that topic. So don’t write that book. If you are in it for greed. If you’re in it to be like, “Okay, I’ll write this book, and then I’ll make all this money.” No, that doesn’t work. Books succeed because they are helpful to readers. Nobody wants to read a book, which is about me, me, me, how great I am. And, people who are not willing to put in the effort, into the ideas, the research, the writing, and the promotion, if they don’t understand that level of commitment, then they probably shouldn’t write a book. Eighty-seven percent of the people in my author survey said that they were glad that they had made the choice to write a book. So it’s been a good decision for most people. But there are also people I talked to who are like, “Oh man, I had no idea, and I really shouldn’t have even started.” 

Adrian Tennant: So, Josh, as we come toward the end of the podcast, how should authors approach writing the final chapter of a book?

Josh Bernoff: You know, that worries a lot of people, the final chapter. I look at that, and I’m like, “Ha! No, that’s the easy part.” Because consider who’s reading the final chapter. Anyone who gets to that point and has not given up believes what you’ve said already. So they’re in the palm of your hand, and the people who have given up aren’t going to read it, so it doesn’t matter what you put in there for them. So now you basically want to take what the book says as a platform and go further. What will this mean in the future? How will this change the world? What is the next set of steps that people should take after they’ve done these things? You know, just take the idea further, and I’m going to unabashedly say where this is stolen from, which is my former employers at Forrester used to have a thing at the end of research reports called WIM: What It Means, which was taking the idea further. So that’s what we’re doing is basically taking the idea further. In several of these book processes, what I’ve done to create those final chapters is we do a brainstorming session with a bunch of smart people, maybe eight or ten, and we just say, “Here’s what the book idea is, what are the consequences of this?” And if you have eight or ten different smart people, you’re going to get a bunch of really interesting ideas there. And you’re like, “Okay, here’s five of these that I can really use.” And that becomes the material that forms the last chapter.

Adrian Tennant: Josh, what do you hope readers will take away from Build a Better Business Book? 

Josh Bernoff: What I hope that they understand, more than anything else, is that business books are stories. So if you understand that the whole book is a story and that the book is made out of case study stories, then you’re on the right track. And if you haven’t gotten that message, then you’re not likely to be able to be on a path to success. Beyond that, what I hope that people will do is – whenever they need to do something associated with the book, come up with a title, organize the chapters, figure out how they’re going to write something, do research, get a cover done, deal with copy edits, get the marketing plan –  there is a chapter in there for each of those things, and so they can basically go and dip in and say, “Alright, this is where I am right now. Here’s the best advice on what to do about that.” I just want to save people from pain. I’d say that a third of the endorsements I got were from authors who said, “Oh man, I wish I’d had this before. It would’ve saved me enormous amounts of trouble.” So you don’t have to have that experience. You can read it now and save yourself trouble before you get deeply into the process of writing a book. 

Adrian Tennant: If IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to know more about how to Build A Better Business Book, what’s the best place to start?

Josh Bernoff: My blog is very active – it’s at bernoff.com. If you go to bernoff.com/books, you’ll be able to see how to get the book right there. And if you subscribe to my blog, I actually publish something of substance every weekday. That’s five substantial blog posts every week. There’s a constant stream. I have answers there, and you can ask me a question, and then there’ll be a blog post the next day. That’s one way that I keep in touch with people. 

Adrian Tennant: Josh, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Josh Bernoff: It’s been great to be here, and I hope that this helps some people out there who are considering writing a book. 

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Josh Bernoff, the author of Build A Better Business Book. You’ll find a transcript of this episode with links to the resources we discussed today on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for joining us for IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of change agency Futerra, joins us to discuss her book, The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future. Solitaire shares insights about creating effective sustainability marketing and offers guidance on communications using a practical framework based on psychographics. We also explore a new green claims directive and the role of social media creators in promoting sustainability. Use promo code BIGEYE25 for a 25% discount at KoganPage.com.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS: 

Solitaire Townsend: I think, bizarrely, being one of the people working on the scariest, most terrifying issues of our time, like climate change, actually can be super fulfilling as an individual. 

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Last week we spoke with Emmanuel Probst, Global Lead of Brand Thought-Leadership at the research firm, Ipsos. Emmanuel discussed some of the reasons why consumers increasingly believe that in addition to producing and selling products, brands have a responsibility to bring about positive change in society and the environment. Now, when it comes to tackling the climate crisis, survey data from Ipsos reveals that less than one-fifth of people worldwide believe humankind is capable of and committed to resolving climate change, just 17 percent. Approaching one-third of all respondents say we possess the necessary technology but lack the collective resolve to employ it effectively. Among the youngest respondents, well over half – 56 percent – feel doomed and are questioning the value of long-term investments, such as buying a home and retirement planning under the belief that they literally have no future and will be the last generation. Their pessimism contrasts starkly with the attitudes of sustainability activists and environmental scientists who, despite their in-depth understanding of the severity of the climate crisis, remain positive that catastrophe is not inevitable. Today’s guest believes we can and must shift our thinking on climate change from the context of fear and despair to one of hope, purpose, and confidence. Solitaire Townsend is an entrepreneur, sustainability expert, and popular speaker at global events, including TED, COP27, and the World Advertising Federation. She co-founded Futerra, an award-winning agency that combines sustainability, creativity, and communications to make sustainable development happen. In her role as Chief Solutionist, Solitaire advises organizations, including IKEA, Formula One, Google, and the United Nations, on driving entrepreneurial sustainability. She’s also the author of two books. Her first, published in 2017 is The Happy Hero, How To Change Your Life By Changing The World, which explores how positive thinking about the future can inspire personal and global change. Her new book is entitled The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future, and is this month’s selection for the Bigeye Book Club. To discuss some of the key ideas in her new book, I’m delighted that Solitaire is joining us today from her office in London, England. Solitaire, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS! 

Solitaire Townsend: Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Adrian Tennant: As I mentioned in the intro, you are the co-founder of Futerra, the first agency officially named a climate solutions provider under the UN-backed Race to Zero climate campaign. Now, back in 2001, when you founded Futerra, sustainability was of marginal interest to many corporations. What led you to establish an agency focused on sustainable development?

Solitaire Townsend: I’ll be really honest with you. Most people do big business plans. They think through their strategy, and they set up their business with a very clear objective. I fell into a niche, so I had recently done a master’s degree in sustainable development, and that had involved meeting a whole set of business people, including the CEOs of Unilever and others. And on graduating, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this master’s degree, and some of the people I had met during doing they asked me to come in and do some consulting for them. So I did a bit of consulting, which led to a bit more consulting, which led to so much more that I had to hire a couple of people. Which led to eventually realizing that I’d tripped and fallen into a very successful small niche. And we had to – with the others at the time – we had to sort of retrofit a business into what was already a going concern, and in many ways, that energy is still with us, decades later. Sustainability is a movable feast. It’s constantly evolving. There are new things coming along, and we’re right there, we tend to be on the edge. We jump in with both feet to new ideas and new solutions, and then we work out the business plan afterward.

Adrian Tennant: How has Futerra evolved over time in response to the broader interest in sustainability?

Solitaire Townsend: So when we started out, we were very parochial in many ways. We worked exclusively in the UK. We ran some of the very first campaigns for the UK government. We designed the first climate change campaign that ever ran in Europe for the UK government. And, it was only after the first few years that we realized that business had a role to play in this. So actually, we weren’t working with a lot of businesses, we were mainly working with governments. And we started to work with people like British Telecom and with Unilever and with others in the very early doors of things such as sustainability reporting, which back then was called “environmental reporting” or “CSR reporting”. Very, very early stages of doing internal communications and in talking to staff about recycling and coffee cups, in the canteen, et cetera. And then that grew and grew. And as the issues and the public awareness have grown and as the idea of there being a small green niche, about 12% of people who care about this, has suddenly flipped on its head, and now it’s the minority who don’t care about this. And well over 70% of consumers are driven by sustainability issues. We’ve now started working with folks like Netflix and Google on massive global campaigns and on huge strategies with some of the biggest companies in South America and Asia. So in many ways, Futerra has grown up with the sustainability movement itself, and the work we’ve done has tracked along that. And as soon as something becomes mainstream – so as soon as sustainability reporting became something that lots of people knew how to do, and lots of agencies were doing, and the big consultancies were doing – Futerra stopped doing it because it didn’t need us anymore. Our job is to break ground on what’s new in sustainability.

Adrian Tennant: Your latest book is The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future. Solitaire, what is a Solutionist? 

Solitaire Townsend: A Solutionist is a solver of problems, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. I discovered the term, and I applied it to those of us who are working in this field because we didn’t have a collective noun. We were change-makers, or we were sustainability people, or we were social entrepreneurs, or we were just business people doing sustainability, but there wasn’t a word that really summed up this huge growing …  thousands, if not millions of business-minded, sustainability-focused, purposeful people who are out there using the power of the business sector to actually make a difference in the world. And so the word Solutionist sort of sprung upon me, and I applied it to myself first to remind myself of every day what I’m supposed to be doing. So as well as co-founder of Futerra, I’m Chief Solutionist. And before the book came out, I noticed there was about 11 other people using it on LinkedIn, so as a word, there are about 11 other people using it. Now, post the book, there’s about 10 pages of people using it. There’s over a hundred people who are now using the term for themselves in terms of identifying as a solutionist.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you are really tapped into something there. Of course, sustainability is a huge topic. Bigeye chose The Solutionists as our featured book for June, because you work at the intersection of sustainability and communication and address some of the marketing communications challenges from a practitioner’s perspective. Solitaire, could you give us a sense of what your book covers and why it’s relevant for brand managers and those of us working in advertising?

Solitaire Townsend: Absolutely. Yeah. And this is my industry – you know, I was very lucky to be named a sustainability leader of the Year by Adweek. I’ve spoken at the World Federation of Advertisers, at the CIPR, I feel that this is my community, this is my world. The book reflects that. So whilst it’s written for anybody in business who wants to have a career that matters, whole sections of the book are dedicated to communications and engagement, and also to the wider issues about marketing, of understanding market need and actually understanding where consumers are and what’s next. I feel that for those who want to raise the role of marketing inside their businesses or inside their organization, if they’re a governmental organization or a nonprofit organization, The Solutionists is for you. Because marketers, we should be at the forefront of our understanding where the market is going and what our consumers and our customers need. And sustainability is right there as an unfilled, as an unmet consumer need. Survey after survey, after survey, after survey shows us how deeply the public cares about it, how deeply they’re worried about it, how much they want to do something about this. Over 80 percent of the public say that they want brands to help them on this and to actually to work with them, to make a difference, both in terms of their own behaviors and they want brands to be giving them sustainable products. And that’s our job as marketers: to convince the rest of our organization that we can meet that need in a really commercially, successful way. So in the book, I go into that market need, I go into what sustainability is. I go through what the different opportunities are for different industries, from food to fashion to transport, and I have a whole section on how you communicate about this. So how do you actually market sustainability? 

Adrian Tennant: At the heart of how businesses can fix the future, of course, are people. Solitaire, what were some of the defining characteristics of the Solutionists you interviewed for the book? 

Solitaire Townsend: I got to meet some extraordinary people. I spoke to one of the co-founders of a new hydrogen business. Hydrogen could be a game-changer for how we solve climate change. I got to speak to the CEOs of companies like Cow Corporation in Japan, IKEA in Sweden, Austin Group, Grupo Bimbo. I got to speak to Bill Gates. And a few things, when I was speaking to all of these incredible change makers, including some indigenous people, including activists like Lilly Cole was, they were all happy! They were all really super positive, upbeat, happy people. And I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that they are working on the solutions, so they know that the answers are out there. They’re not sort of overwhelmed and scared by these awful, terrible things we’re all hearing on our TV screens that our kids are telling us about. That, you know, they don’t feel like sort of frozen and inadequate or impotent in the face of these issues. They’ve actually grabbed the solutions, and they’re doing something about it. So I think that’s one of the things which means that these are quite happy people. And then secondly, they really belong to a community. Once you start working on sustainability, once you start engaging with these issues around environmental issues and social issues and learn about them and start connecting with other people who are working on them within our industry, particularly within the marketing industry, it’s a really strong sense of community and support and people helping each other. It’s not, you know, an aggressive red and tooth and claw type competitive environment. It’s based on a lot of friendships, and so I think actually, bizarrely, being one of the people working on the scariest, most terrifying issues of our time, like climate change, actually can be super fulfilling as an individual. 

Adrian Tennant: Why do you think there is such a discrepancy between the optimism of those people you’ve met who are working in sustainability and the pessimism of the general public regarding climate change? 

Solitaire Townsend: I think that actually comes down to our industry and the greater sense of it. We are the communicators, we’re the storytellers of the world, within the businesses that we work in and within the profession of which we’re part. And actually, overall, we’ve done a really great job at communicating the problem. We know that one in five young people are completely fatalistic about sustainability now. We know that the vast majority of people around the world, in World Economic Forum surveys, put climate change and war as their two top concerns about the world. We’ve actually done a great job at scaring the bejesus out of people. And rightly so. This climate change, especially, I have no desire to undercut how genuinely terrifying it is, but the solutions are equally exciting. We’ve done a very good job of telling people about the problem and a very bad job about telling people about the solutions and the answers. And of course, the Solutionists, those who’ve decided to make a living, make a business, make a fortune, make a career out of sustainability and the solutions, we know how many answers there are out there. We know what’s working. So although the Solutionists know in detail how bad things could be, they also are more aware of the answers. And that’s why in The Solutionists, I go into what those answers are in detail. I hope people find a few surprises and a few things that they didn’t know was going on and that is available to solve some of these problems.

Adrian Tennant: In The Solutionists, you identify three types of change-makers: Architects, Accelerators, and Actioners. Solitaire, can you explain what they are? 

Solitaire Townsend: I love this framework, and all of us are a little bit of all of them. But most of us have got a preference. We’ve got a type that really reflects who we are and what we’re good at. And then we’ve learnt to be at least competent at the other types. So Architects are big-picture people. They look at the huge map of what’s happening in the world. They put things together in a way that haven’t been seen before, and they come up with a plan for the future. But sometimes they can get a little bit lost in those plans. They can sometimes struggle to communicate them, and they tend not to be very detail-focused, and they sometimes struggle with being completely finished. So I’m an Architect. I see these massive meshes around the world of how things could work and what the big, you know, 30,000-foot solutions can be. But I sometimes get lost when things become about the details. Then you’ve got the Accelerators. And the Accelerators are the people people, they pull teams together, they make sure everyone’s trained up. They identify the right person for the right job, and they keep people going on actually making stuff happen. And often, those accelerators tend to be overlooked in some other typologies of change makers because, you know, it’s all about the head, actually. The accelerators are about the heart. And if we don’t have those people, folks who are brilliant at generating and motivating teams, nothing ever gets done. Sometimes those accelerators can get a little bit lost in the team. They can sometimes get a little bit too obsessed about whether the team is okay or not okay. And they can sometimes struggle to take the hard decisions about the team, but without them, we won’t recruit or bring anybody else into this solution because they are the people people. And then the Actioners are the get things done as the completer finishes, “Just tell me what to do” kind of people. They don’t want to spend hours on big plans. They don’t want to game-plan everything and think about what their overall strategy is. They just want to get going, and they make things happen. If there is a problem, there is a solution. If there is a challenge, there is a way to overcome it. Or if you bring them something you’re struggling with, they will not only come up with a solution to it, they will try to make that solution happen. And they are the doers. Of course, if there isn’t a great strategy, if there isn’t a great plan, then the doers might keep going in the wrong direction. They actually do need the Actioners, they need to work with those Architects to make sure that all that wonderful activity that they’re doing is pointed in the right direction. So what you can see across those three groups is they need each other. And in the book, I go into how you can map out your team on this and even how you can map out perhaps some of the other teams that you work with, because particularly if you’re talking to your boss or to your client and you don’t know which type they are, you can definitely sometimes jar if you are of one type and the person you’re speaking to is of another, the way in which you tried to convince them would be something which would convince you. Actually, if you want to convince an Accelerator, you have got to bring them the people-based argument. If you’re going to convince an Architect, you’ve got to bring them the big strategy piece. And if you’re going to convince an Actioner, you’ve got to show them exactly what to do, not all the “why” about why they should do it.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

Adrian Tennant: Each month, in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, The Bigeye Book Club features interviews with authors who are experts in consumer research, retail, and branding. Our featured book for June is The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix the Future by Solitaire Townsend. Featuring compelling stories from top entrepreneurs and businesses, the book showcases how Solutionists are addressing our planet’s greatest crisis through sustainable innovation, highlighting transformative examples, including plant-based foods, net-zero technologies, and circular platforms. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25 percent on a print or electronic version of The Solutionists by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all Kogan Page products and pre-orders and applies to their free paperback and e-book bundle offer. Shipping is always free to the US and UK when you order direct from Kogan Page, and it helps the authors too. So, to order your copy of The Solutionists, go to KoganPage.com.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Solitaire Townsend, Chief Solutionist at the global change agency, Futerra, and the author of The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future. Solitaire, could you talk a bit about demographic versus psychographic approaches to marketing and promoting sustainable products and practices?

Solitaire Townsend: I find that the typologies, and the trying to understand publics on sustainability fascinating. Because we’re also used to using demographics when we’re working in marketing. In fact, a significant number of sort-of even sales tools online and our Facebook sales tools and our Shopifys, et cetera, all based on demographics, age, geography, reading habits, et cetera, et cetera. But when it comes to sustainability, sustainability tends to be about your values. It’s a different part of who you are, and often demographics don’t have very much to do with it. That the classic ways in which we’d categorize people start to fall down when it comes to some of these issues, which have got some morality and some emotion associated with them, such as sustainability. So in the book, I go into the psychographics, and it’s very much based on Jungian inner-directed versus outer-directed psychographics, and even the neuroscience in terms of how people process information. And what that tells us is that if you are talking to somebody who sees environmental issues as very much around their local community, around dog poo on the streets, or when cutting down local trees, and those are what they value – if they value those local issues –  and then you suddenly talking about climate change, you’re going to go way over their head. But if you’re talking to someone who values our global planet, who thinks of things on a planetary level, who are thinking about oceans rather than about local ponds, and you go and talk to them about cutting down a couple of local trees, they’re not going to care. Because what has that got to do with climate change? So to really understand what people value and what their values are that they hold is much more important when you’re trying to convince them on sustainability or if you’re trying to sell sustainable products, than classic demographics. And it’s where a lot of marketing campaigns around sustainability have fallen down – that although our traditional tools in our industry are useful, they are not without limitations when it comes to this very unusual topic around social issues and environmental restoration.

Adrian Tennant: What’s your advice for marketing organically farmed products?

Solitaire Townsend: So number one, understand who is currently buying from you. We all we understand that and what values they already hold. Are they buying from you because you are a local, organic brand? And actually, they are very much connected with the sense that you are helping from an organic perspective, protect and enhance and conserve the local farmland, which they can even imagine visiting there that they can imagine at that connection. That would mean that you’re selling to people who very much value organic from a local perspective, it’s actually helping to help their community. Or perhaps your current consumer base are people who believe that agriculture needs to transform on a global level, and they actually think about organics as being a sort of activist movement that’s challenging the status quo and thinking about things differently. In which case,8 you can see that those are two different sets of values. So if you go to a whole load of people who care deeply about organic farming in terms of the UK’s farming, and start talking to them about challenging Big Ag globally, they’re not going to care because they want to know what you’re doing in the local community. And if you start talking about sort of your little local farm and what it’s doing around butter in the neighborhood to a bunch of people who care about global issues, they’re going to go, “Oh, it doesn’t feel like it’s that impactful. Tell me about how you’re challenging the status quo.” So really understanding these different psychographics. And there’s a set of them that I go into in the book that can absolutely transform how we communicate about these things. Because a lot of marketers are sort of assuming, are making a whole lot of knee-jerk judgments about how people respond to these issues, which means I see the same mistakes being made again, and again and again. Not understanding the values that your consumer holds. Talking as if you are Greenpeace when you’re not – you’re a corporation! Overselling, overclaiming on sustainability because you think it’s more compelling, whereas in fact, actually, consumers really like humility when it comes to sustainability because they know the world isn’t perfect. So there’s a lot of sort of myths and traps around marketing on sustainability, which if you overcome them, suddenly you’re going to fly.

Adrian Tennant: You recently presented at a World Federation of Advertisers event. Solitaire, what topics were delegates most frequently seeking your advice on?

Solitaire Townsend: So the WFA [is a] fantastic organization. It was a gathering of many of the CMOs of many of the largest brands around the world, So, I did a series of sessions, and I did a lot of one-to-ones with folks, and there were a couple of things which was top of mind for everyone. One was greenwash. We’ve got a new greenwash directive that’s been proposed by the EU, which comes with very serious consequences, including losing 4 percent of your turnover or actually having the entirety of the revenue from a product taken away. So very serious consequences being put forward in terms of EU marketing. Here in the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority has really started to use its muscle after the Competition of Markets Authority, the CMA, said that 50 percent of green messaging in the UK was greenwash. So greenwash is top of mind. Also green hushing – so, the opposite of greenwashing is green hushing, which is when you don’t talk about sustainability, when you sort of keep doing it, but you are too anxious about greenwash or too anxious about pushback that you don’t talk about it, and then you end up with consumers thinking that you’re not doing anything or with new staff not wanting to come to work for you because you’re not talking about your sustainability. So that was really top of mind. But another major topic, and it’s something I’m working a lot on, is this exciting role of social media creators, TikTokers, Instagrammers, YouTubers, et cetera, on sustainability. Those social media creators are really eager to talk about sustainability. I know they are because some of those platforms have hired me to train up their creators on sustainability. So they’re super excited about talking about this, and they’re looking for brands with great stories to tell that they can engage with much more interest. They can engage their followers on sustainability topics. There’s a lot of anxiety about greenwash and greenhush, but there’s also a lot of excitement about the role of social media creators and brands partnering around sustainability.

Adrian Tennant: How can advertisers contribute to reshaping public perception and encourage sustainable behaviors?

Solitaire Townsend: Well, actually, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which some folks might have heard of, who are the pre-eminent scientists around the world. Every seven years, they come up with a big report about what we need to do about climate change. And for the first time in 20 years, they actually included our industry in that, which is quite a big deal because that will trickle down through governments and will trickle down through regulation to us pretty quickly. There are two things that they said that they needed from us. One is they need us not to greenwash, not to support destructive industries, not advertise the problem, and to avoid climate misinformation. And that is a difficult and true challenge for the industry. On the other side, they said sustainable lifestyles. We are the people who can show that living in a more sustainable way, eating, traveling clothing, buying in a more sustainable way is desirable. That’s what we are good at. And so there’s a whole chapter in the IPCC report that goes into how we can as marketers, for example, make plant-based eating much more desirable, help people to transition towards electrifying everything in electric cars, help people desire different ways of consuming, particularly consuming better quality and less repairing of vintage. There’s a whole section in there around how we travel and making it so that people can feel that actually perhaps they don’t need to take their car for a 15-minute trip, that they’d be able to walk for it. So they set out 61 behaviors that would make a significant difference to climate change. And they call upon us, the marketers and the influencers in the world, the people who affect society, to help make them desirable and to help change behaviors. And so, you know, we’ve now been given our marching orders by the climate scientists in terms of the role of our industry.

Adrian Tennant: Oil giant Shell’s media account is up for review, yet reporting from Adweek found that most media agencies they contacted would neither confirm nor deny that they’re pitching for Shell’s estimated $240 million-a-year business. Adweek pointed out that agencies who do pitch Shell risk alienating their existing clients who do have strong commitments to sustainability. And according to survey data from Glimpse and YouGov cited by Adweek, more than 60 percent of UK-based creatives aged 18 to 30 said working on high-carbon clients would be uncomfortable for them, while 40 percent indicated they’d refuse to work on high-carbon accounts. Holding companies like WPP and Dentsu are publicly traded and ultimately answer to shareholders. Solitaire, what’s your advice for ad agencies? How should they approach these kinds of ethical questions?

Solitaire Townsend: So for the start, I think it is a challenging situation right now because, you know, there’s nothing illegal as yet about those industries’ marketing, although there’s a significant number of countries and cities in the world where there are ongoing and actually passing through parliament, laws about, oil and gas companies not being allowed to advertising anymore. There are lots of industries that are perfectly legal, such as pornography or cigarettes, that we don’t allow to advertise because we don’t think it is in the public interest. And I suspect very soon, oil and gas advertising will go the same way. So where you are sitting in 2023 as an agency owner is, you’ve got this big, juicy fish that’s sitting there, but you are worried it’s laced with poison. In fact, if you grab that fish, of course, you’ll then be going into a contractual obligation over a number of years to continue working with an industry that is under extreme pressure, maybe even under legislative pressure, perhaps even with quite significant financial implications. And, of course, all of the activists are very aware that Shell has got that brief out and are waiting to sue the agencies that take it on, as they sued the agencies who took on the opioid accounts in the US. It’s a very difficult decision to make. What I would encourage every agency leader to think about at the moment is not what their bottom line looks like, and what their management accounts look like in 2023, and whether that would be a nice juicy addition to it, but whether in 2025, whether in 2026 and even going through to 2030, whether they think it will still be sustainable for them to be doing that work – because that’s what you are locking yourself into. At the WFA, one of the other big topics, along with sustainability, was the war for talent. We’ve got a real challenge with talent in our industry. We have a real problem with some of the recruitment of the brightest and the best into our industry because of course, if you are a fantastic, naturally wonderful communicator, a lot of young people are going into being social media creators and monetizing and commercializing on those platforms, rather than going into our industry. Do you really think you are going to be able to bring in the best account leads, the best planners, the best ideators, the best creators, if you are asking them to work on essentially a greenwasher? And I can say that without being sued because the ASA has said that Shell green washes. So you are literally, at the moment in this very, very, very challenging position. And if you truly believe that you are part of the solution, that your agency can be part of this amazing, wonderful role that’s been given to us by the IPCC of helping to sell a sustainable future, taking an account from a company that’s just been declared a greenwasher by the ASA, who has just said that they are not going to meet their net zero targets, who have just downgraded all of their commitments to sustainability, who have just closed their renewable energy business in the UK, to which the IPCC has said, must not invest in further oil and gas exploration and yet, they as an industry, has said they have no intention of not investing in oil and gas restoration..? Pick a side. Basically, you’re going to have to pick a side.

Adrian Tennant: If anyone listening who works in brand marketing or advertising would like to become their department or agency’s Solutionist, what’s the best way to start?

Solitaire Townsend: So I get asked this all the time and people go, “How can I get into sustainability? How can I get a sustainable job?” And they go online on LinkedIn looking for jobs with sustainability in the job title because they really want to work on purpose on climate, on solutions. And I always say, start where you are. That’s why I love the question you just asked me, because how do I become a solutionist within my own organization? So first up, get yourself a bit informed. Follow some of the solutionists online, read a few books. Make sure that you are aware of some of these issues. And you know, I’m so sorry, but sustainability is full of terrible terms, like Net Zero, et cetera, but they’re not as complicated as they sound. If you can, you just get yourself informed. And then, bring solutions. So if you’re a solutionist, your job isn’t just to bring solutions for the outside world. It’s to bring solutions internally. How can sustainability help your organization find new clients, find new customers? How can sustainability help with your recruitment? How can sustainability help save your organization money? If you start bringing those solutions inside your organization, then unless your boss is mad, they’re going to ask you to bring them more. So start where you are and start small and also do what you think is most fun, most interesting, most aligned with what you are good at. Don’t turn yourself into a martyr for the cause. Actually, if you are fantastic at creativity, then come up with some creative campaigns. If you are fantastic at finding ways to make money, make some money from sustainability. If you’re fantastic at engaging and driving staff, then bring your staff along and enthuse them with sustainability. Use the skills you already have internally. Inch them towards sustainability, and you are a Solutionist.

Adrian Tennant: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

Solitaire Townsend: I hope they’ll take away from The Solutionists that we all have a role in solving this. Now, within that, there’s two things. One is, it is solvable. We have everything which we need. And when you talk to the climate scientists about climate change, they are absolutely committed to the fact that we have the answers that we need. This is completely solvable. The chemistry is sort of to our advantage in terms of getting this fixed. So this is solvable, and it’s going to take everybody, not just experts, not just people with the job title, not just people who have studied this at college. It’s going to take everybody to go, “Do you know what? I’m going to be the person who puts my hands up inside my organization, and ask a question about climate change. Ask a question about social justice. I’m going to be the person who puts forward some answers and they might get shot down, but that’s okay cause I’m going to put forward some more.” If everybody takes that up, then we actually start to get a bit more of a hopeful future for our kids. And for anyone who’s listening, who’s sort of having to look into the eyes of their eight-year-old, I know what that feels like, and I promise you, it can be much, much, much better to have that climate conversation with your kids if you’re doing something about it in work, than the opposite.

Adrian Tennant: Solitaire, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to know more about you, your work at Futerra, or your book, what’s the best way to connect with you?

Solitaire Townsend: I have quite an unusual name, so it is quite easy to find me. So I tend to go under the handle of @GreenSolitaire. So color green + Solitaire on Instagram, on Twitter, et cetera. You can find out much more about Futerra at WeAreFuterra.com. And if you scoot over to the section called Thinks, we give away all of our thought-leadership, all of our research, all of our guidance for free. And, of course, please do look for The Solutionists in any good bookstores – I think that’s what you’re supposed to say!

Adrian Tennant: And we’ll be sure to include links to your books and reports in the transcript for this episode. Solitaire, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Solitaire Townsend: Oh, thank you so much for having me. You are truly a Solutionist!

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Solitaire Townsend, Chief Solutionist at the global change agency, Futerra, and the author of The Solutionists, How Businesses Can Fix The Future. You’ll find a transcript of this episode with links to the resources we discussed today on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Podcast’ from the menu. And if you enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for joining us for IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst, Global Lead, Brand Thought-Leadership at Ipsos, discusses his book, Assemblage: The Art and Science of Brand Transformation. Emmanuel explains why, to be successful, brands need to focus on three dimensions: shaping expectations, harnessing context, and demonstrating empathy. We also discuss contextual brand tracking and how understanding the occasions that drive the choice of one brand over another can be more beneficial than analyzing the competitive set.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: We understand that brands are no longer static, The meaning of a brand, the territory of a brand, evolves over time and, as brand strategists, we want to anticipate and we want to have a vision for how the brand is going to evolve in the long run.

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on the business of advertising. Produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Over the past few weeks, we’ve focused on some of the ways in which marketers can better understand category buyers and quantify their brands’ mental availability. We discussed testing distinctive brand assets and approaches to brand health tracking. Earlier this year, the global market research firm Ipsos published a study showing that consumers increasingly believe that, in addition to selling products, brands have a responsibility to bring about positive change in society and the environment. The study findings suggest that brands can grow by shaping consumer expectations, integrating context, and showing empathy. That study was led by our guest today. Dr. Emmanuel Probst is the Global Lead of Brand Thought-Leadership at Ipsos, where he works with Fortune 100 companies across a wide range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, and financial services. With approaching two decades of commercial research and marketing experience, Emmanuel also teaches market research at UCLA and writes about consumer psychology for numerous publications. Emmanuel is also a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author. His first book, Brand Hacks: How To Build Brands By Fulfilling The Human Quest For Meaning was published in 2019. His second book, published earlier this year, is Assemblage: The Art And Science Of Brand Transformation. To discuss some of his ideas in Assemblage, and ways to predict, measure, and optimize the success of brands through research, I’m delighted that Emmanuel is joining us today from his office in Los Angeles, California. Emmanuel, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS! 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Adrian, thank you so much for having me on the show.

Adrian Tennant: Well, I mentioned in the intro that you are the Global Lead of Brand Thought-Leadership at Ipsos. Could you tell us a bit about your career journey?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: I sure can. I started in market research about 17 years ago. I think what’s important is I started in market research and I’m staying in market research because I’m curious about why do people do what they do. And I feel what’s valuable to our listeners here is to say this industry is really all about curiosity. It’s about discovering new ideas. It’s about sharing knowledge. It’s about acquiring new knowledge. It’s about meeting new people, and granted, my role has evolved. Obviously, I’m in a more senior position now than I was when I started. What hasn’t changed is this enthusiasm for understanding people and the world around me, and this enthusiasm for meeting new people and learning from everyone. 

Adrian Tennant: What does your role at Ipsos entail? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: At Ipsos, I counsel brands on their brand strategy. We are here to measure and optimize brand performance, equity, and optimize activations as well. So at Ipsos, I work with our brand clients on what to do next and how to best measure what matters to them. And I also work on disseminating thought leadership about specific verticals. So it might be technology, it might be DTC, it might be CPG, you name it. And about specific methodologies and methods. For example, I’m very focused on our brand success framework. That is, at Ipsos, we conducted extensive research on research that shows that successful brands succeed through three avenues that are: shaping expectations, harnessing context, and acting with empathy. And so I disseminate this thinking. I evangelize if you will – I’m not a big fan of the term – through conferences and publications, and of course, podcasts. And, of our client-related or industry-related activities.

Adrian Tennant: Well, I mentioned in the introduction that you’ve written two books, your latest book is entitled Assemblage. Emmanuel, what prompted you to write it? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: What prompted me to write it is to take a step back, look at the world around me and think we don’t need any more brands and we don’t need any more products. What I mean by this is most people don’t care about most brands. The opportunity is to create a better connection between the brand, the products, and the audience. And the opportunity for brands is to make a greater impact than just selling products. Yeah, as marketers, we’re here to make a profit. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not a charity. Yet, we have the opportunity to make a positive impact on people and the world around them. That’s what prompted me to write Assemblage: The Art and Science of Brand Transformation. It is to say brands can no longer just sell products. Brands must also transform us, people, and the world we live in.

Adrian Tennant: Could you define what an assemblage is?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Yeah, absolutely. Assemblage is a term that is inspired by the wine-making industry. So when one makes a wine or champagne or cognac or whiskey or bourbon, you do so by assembling. That is, the winemaker picks and chooses from a wide range of samples. Think of different aging methods, different barrels, different grapes, different processes, and the winemaker assembles from dozens, possibly hundreds of samples, so that she or he creates a product that is unique and distinctive and on-brand. And the second thing that’s very important here is the real talent of the winemaker is not just to assemble it, it’s to have a vision for how the product is going to evolve, how the product is going to age. And in my view, we can do the exact same thing in branding. That is, we must assemble different attributes from the personal, social, and cultural attributes to create brands that will be successful in the long run. That is, we understand that brands are no longer static, just like wine – wine evolves over time. It’s the same thing with a brand. The meaning of a brand, the territory of a brand evolves over time and, as brand strategists, we want to anticipate and we want to have a vision for how the brand is going to evolve in the long run.

Adrian Tennant: Gordon Ramsey, DJ Khaled, and Picasso are all mentioned in Assemblage. Emmanuel, what’s the connection?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: They are all assemblers. And what I mean by this – which is an important takeaway for our listeners – is the artists, the chefs, the musicians we admire the most, they are talented, of course, but not necessarily in the way we may think. What I mean by this is the real talent is to assemble. That is to deliver on the artistic vision rather than necessarily creating the art themselves. So Gordon Ramsey doesn’t cook anymore, or at least not much. Neither does Alain Ducasse. Jeff Koons was a broker on Wall Street, and he had a team working for him to create his balloon dogs and all his cultures. He doesn’t necessarily do the work himself. Pharrell Williams doesn’t know how to read music. DJ Khaled is a music producer. And the point being is the talent of those people is to pick and choose from different samples, cultures, and attributes so that they assemble a product or a song or a dish or a sculpture that is compelling for the world to see. And as such, I prompt you, our listeners, to do the same.

Adrian Tennant: In the first chapter of Assemblage, you write about antiheroes, villains, and saviors. How do these roles relate to brands? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Well, in advertising, we very often rely on the archetype of the hero, which is fine. The limitation, though, is most of us don’t have superpowers. What I mean by this is most of us cannot jump from one building to another, and as such, the archetype of the hero is not so relatable. It’s aspirational, but not so relatable. What’s interesting, what’s valuable with villains, antiheroes, and saviors is, they’re all very relatable. What I mean by this, an antihero is someone who is going to accomplish something that’s heroic, yet it’s an individual who is flawed and he’s wrestling, if you will, with various issues. And we will side with the antihero as long as the antihero strives to improve. Also, because we know that we’re not perfect ourselves. And antiheroes include the likes of James Bond and Tony Soprano, and Don Draper; all are antiheroes. Then the savior. Well, it’s because the savior might save the world. And in a way, Jeff Bezos is a savior by promising a better life on Mars. And the villains are sympathetic in their own fashion. We want to like the villain in a movie, and we like a James Bond villain in a weird sort of way. And that conveys also very well in branding in advertising. If you look at General Motors, they relied on the parody of a James Bond villain to advertise their new range of EV cars. So those three archetypes are underrated, if you will. They show great potential for advertising and branding, whereby they’re not as common as the archetype of a hero, yet they are very relatable for our audiences.

Adrian Tennant: One chapter of Assemblage is titled, Perception Is The Truth, in which you write – and I quote, “In marketing, what matters is how people perceive the brand, not what the brand and product really are,” end-quote. Emmanuel, can you unpack this for us? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Yeah. Perception is the truth. This chapter is all about how do we understand the world around us? How do we construct our own truths? There is a deep dive on why do fake news catch on, and why “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway would say, are so powerful. And, from a marketing standpoint, as you said, what matters is how people perceive the brand, not what the brand and product really are. And what we want to understand here is, as people, as consumers, as citizens, we construct our own truths based on our perception of the world, based on the information we are exposed to. And what we discover in this chapter is, in a surprising sort of way, we construct our own truths based on what we want the truth to be. And this chapter helps you understand how we construct truth and, therefore, how to create a perception for a product, for a brand in marketing. Let me take an example for our listeners, Adrian, and think of a product like vodka. Think of a product like lager. Think of a product like light beer. Think of a product like bleach. All those products, with no offense to the great manufacturers, the truth is, even the brand owners wouldn’t tell the difference between Smirnoff, Absolut, and Belvidere. In fact, I spoke to a wholesaler a few weeks ago, and they did some blind testing of vodka. And the vodka that comes out first is Smirnoff, even though it’s half the price of Belvedere and Grey Goose. That’s all to say that those products, you cannot distinguish the products based on the products themselves. Thanks to branding, you create a perception for a product whereby Belvedere and Grey Goose are luxurious, and Clorox stands for quality because your physician relies on Clorox and not so much on Target’s Up and Up. So it is the opportunity for brands to create a perception for this perception to become the truth. And perception is particularly important in branding, let alone when one couldn’t differentiate the product otherwise than with recognizing the brand.

Adrian Tennant: Throughout Assemblage, you reference concepts from consumer psychology as well as interviews with industry leading marketers and include case studies of transformative brands. One of your observations, supported by research data, is that consumers report feeling increasingly isolated. What are some of the reasons behind this trend, and how do you think brands can address it?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: The more connected we are, the lonelier we feel, and here’s what I mean. Almost all of us have access to smartphones and social media and extensive messaging apps and wifi, and all those technologies to theoretically connect easily with people around us. Yet we find that sadly, younger generations, for example, that spend so much more time on social media online than anyone else, they have very few friends in their real life. In fact, most of them don’t have even one close friend that they could call at 3:00 AM, if you will. Sadly, in this generation that’s obsessed with how many likes and how many friends you’ll have on Instagram or on TikTok or what have you, the people having mental health issues the rates are higher than ever. Prescriptions for antidepressants are higher than ever, and frankly, very sadly, for people intending to terminate their lives, that rate is also extremely high. So that’s all to say, the more connected we are, the lonelier we feel. The opportunity for consumer psychologists, and I should say, more specifically brand strategists, is to create brands that will help people connect with the world around them. So keep this in mind: The brand and the product, that’s not the hero. Nobody cares. What’s important, and that’s what I mean by creating transformative brands, the brand needs to take the individual from who he is, to who he wants to become, that’s the opportunity for the brand to make a positive impact on my personal identity project: “Who am I?” and “Who do I want to become?” And by facilitating these connections between people, their close community, and helping people become who they want to become, that’s where marketing branding can make a positive impact on the world.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

Adrian Tennant: Each month, in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, The Bigeye Book Club features interviews with authors who are experts in consumer research, retail, and branding. Our featured book for June is The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix the Future by Solitaire Townsend. Featuring compelling stories from top entrepreneurs and businesses, the book showcases how Solutionists are addressing our planet’s greatest crisis through sustainable innovation, highlighting transformative examples, including plant-based foods, net-zero technologies, and circular platforms. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25 percent on a print or electronic version of The Solutionists by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all Kogan Page products and pre-orders and applies to their free paperback and e-book bundle offer. Shipping is always free to the US and UK when you order direct from Kogan Page, and it helps the authors too. So, to order your copy of The Solutionists, go to KoganPage.com.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Dr. Emmanuel Probst, Global Lead, Brand Thought-Leadership at Ipsos, and the author of Assemblage: The Art and Science of Brand Transformation. Earlier this year, Ipsos published a study revealing three keys to unlocking brand success, Emmanuel, can you give us an overview of some of the key findings from your report? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Yeah, based on extensive research on research at Ipsos, we took a step back and we wanted to understand what makes brands successful in the long run? Now I’m insisting on the strategic aspect of what we are looking at here because performance marketing, which is pushing traffic to your website this afternoon and sales tonight, that’s shallow, it’s not a strategy. So we looked at what makes brands successful in the long run across a wide range of verticals. At Ipsos, we work with CPGs of course, but we also work with financial services, tech brands, luxury brands, and B2B brands. So what we teased out from this research on research, that’s ongoing, by the way, is three dimensions are important for brand success. The first one is the opportunity for brands to shape expectations, not just meet expectations, not just manage expectations, but to shape expectations for the category and for the brand. And the second one is to harness the context. The context is what’s happening in people’s lives and the world around them. And the third one is to demonstrate empathy. And again, we’re going back to Adrian, what you covered earlier, that is to create this meaningful connection between the individual and the brand, one of the goals is for people to be less lonely, but that’s certainly not the only one. So, shaping expectations, harnessing context, and demonstrating empathy: these are really the three pillars of brand success that we teased out.

Adrian Tennant: Related to context, one of your findings is that consumers tend not to think of the competitive brands within a category, but rather situations or usage occasions. This reflects what we heard about category entry points from Jenny Romaniuk. What are the implications of your findings for advertisers and ad agencies? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Yeah, the work on category entry points from E-B (Ehrenberg-Bass), is really valuable. They make a great contribution to advancing knowledge in our industry. But back to what you said – in this chapter, what I cover really is people don’t think like brand strategists. Here’s the deal. Many brand strategists think in terms of their competitive set. In contrast, consumers most often think of alternatives, and also in many categories, not all of them, but in many categories, people don’t shop the category per se. People shop towards a mission they try to accomplish towards a job to be done. So let me get back to the vodka example, just because for some reason, we like to talk about alcohol today! But the point is, when one buys a bottle of vodka, he doesn’t think in terms of Grey Goose versus Absolut versus Belvedere. It’s driven by an occasion. So maybe you are going out tonight with close friends. Maybe you are going to host a backyard barbecue party on July 4th. Maybe you’re hosting an elegant dinner for your in-laws. Maybe you’re hosting a bachelor or bachelorette party. And in that context, you are going to buy, well, maybe more of a mixer type of vodka for your backyard barbecue party. And if you go out, you might not even know what vodka they mix with your orange juice at the club, and that’s completely fine. And in contrast, if you’re hosting a more special occasion, if you will, you might indulge in buying a bottle of Grey Goose or bottle of Belvedere because it’s going to look a lot more sophisticated in your bar. So that’s to say that you’re going to buy different products and different combinations of products for different occasions. As marketers and as brand strategists, the key to success is not so much to understand the competitive set as a standalone; it is to understand the occasions that drive the choice of one product or another, and that’s in chapter eight, The New Era of Brand Relevance. That means when choosing a product, we do not think of brands and categories in isolation. Really, we make our choice in light of the occasion and in light of the particular needs we associate with this occasion.

Adrian Tennant: You also identified the need for brands to act with empathy. Could you provide a couple of examples of how this might work in practice?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Yeah, I can think of Clorox, for example. No offense, but bleach in and of itself is a product that’s not exactly exciting! Yet Clorox managed to develop several ads, and several creative executions that demonstrate how Clorox will help you take care of the elderly. Clorox will help you keep your home clean for your family and for your children. And that’s where the product is taking on a different and important meaning. Bleach is not just bleach for me to clean my kitchen, bleach from Clorox is going to help me keep my family safe, keep my children healthy, and help me take care of my grandma, my grandpa, someone older than I, if you will. Another example will be Volvo. Volvo developed a great reputation for safety. And here again, Volvo doesn’t compete with Lamborghini. The point is not to drive a fast car and to show off. The point is to drive a car that’s reliable and that is safe for me and my family. So those are two examples of two brands. I can also think of Tylenol kind of the same angle here, where Tylenol did not push so much the functional benefit of, “I’m gonna take Tylenol to cure my headache.” Well, that’s fine. Importantly, Tylenol helps me care for myself and for the people around me, for the community. And I become a caretaker when I give Tylenol to a patient or to an elderly person, or to someone who is experiencing a headache or some discomfort. Again, that’s empowering. That’s an opportunity to transform me from who I am into who I want to become. A good person who takes care of the people around me.

Adrian Tennant: Well, in this context, what are your thoughts on the idea of brand purpose?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Yeah, look, brand purpose has been a buzzword in the industry for what, like call it, seven, nine years now. What has changed, in my experience, is a few years ago, everyone wanted to get on board with some brand purpose of some sort. What has changed is brands must now not just claim, but also demonstrate their purpose. I see in our studies at Ipsos that people, citizens, patients, and consumers are a lot more discerning than they were about brand purpose. And keep in mind that because of social media, people can react and will react straight away to your initiatives. If it doesn’t sound authentic, or intentional, they will talk back and they will cancel your brand. So in a nutshell about brand purpose, we went from claiming a purpose to demonstrating a purpose. Number two, I think brands need to adopt a purpose that aligns with their products and a purpose they can realistically deliver on. And last but not least, I feel that brands need to be intentional as opposed to just creating a bumper sticker. 

Adrian Tennant: Chapter seven of Assemblage is Citizens and Brands Are Activists in which you discuss the origins of the word, “woke,” which is, of course, very much part of current political discourse here in Florida and beyond. It’s currently Pride month and this year we’ve seen some consumers push back against Bud Light, The North Face, and Target, among others, as a result of their support for the LGBTQIA+ community. Emmanuel, how can brands act empathetically when caught in social and political cross-currents? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Yeah, and the honest answer is it’s not easy. It’s not easy because sometimes you mean well, and it does not resonate. It’s not easy because, as you said, you get caught up in some political debates. And importantly, it’s not easy because you have different regions that react differently to the same initiative. So here my advice is when you come up with an idea, again, don’t forget that as brand strategists, too often we are bubbled. What I mean by bubbled is we live in Los Angeles, in New York, in San Francisco, in Chicago, very often we live in progressive markets. Not always, but very often. And what seems like a great idea in a boardroom in Midtown Manhattan, or on Madison Avenue, to use a cliche, may not resonate in Columbus, Ohio, in Fargo, North Dakota, or in Florida. So the important step here, a crucial step, is to test the idea across different demographics and psychographics and across different test markets. And in my experience – the expression is not very elegant – but that will keep you out of trouble. That’s how I will put it. And then you have to be intentional and you have to be authentic. That is if you just decided last night that all of a sudden your brand is a perfect brand for the LGBTQIA+ community, well that’s very disingenuous. And I think people will read through this. Now, if your founder happens to be in a same-sex relationship and you’ve been supporting local LGBTQIA+ initiatives and associations for several years, and maybe you give a fraction of your profits to those causes, and so on and so forth, if you genuinely demonstrate your involvement and that you put your money where your mouth is, you have a much better chance of success.

Adrian Tennant: Could you explain the framework you’ve developed at Ipsos for contextual brand tracking, and maybe how it differs from traditional brand tracking?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Thank you, Adrian, for bringing this up because earlier in our conversation we spoke about context and I spoke briefly about harnessing context and we spoke about people shopping based on a specific occasion. On the jobs to be done, on a mission to accomplish, more so than considering a competitive set of products. Contextual brand tracking, that’s exactly what it does, is to understand, to assess the performance of your brand and to optimize the performance of your brand in the context of consumption. So let me take a really easy example. If you are Dunkin’ and you market a combination of coffee plus donuts at 8:00 AM, you have obviously a much better shot of selling that combo at 8:00 AM than you would at 5:00 PM or you would at 9:00 PM. My point being that this exact same individual, let’s say you or me, we both like donuts and we both like coffee, we are unlikely to buy a cup of coffee and a donut at 9:00 PM no matter how attractive the offer might be, versus we will be a lot more inclined to buy that same combo on our way to work at 8:00 AM. So contextual brand tracking is to understand consumption and brand choice at the moment of truth, at the moment of need, and that’s what we call the macro of a micro context. And the macro context is the world at large. So it’s how Pride month is going to influence your buying behavior. And the micro context is what is happening around you right now. And contextual brand tracking is for you to understand those two dimensions and to fine-tune your brand activations accordingly.

Adrian Tennant: Emmanuel, what do you hope readers will take away from your book? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: This book is optimistic, and this book is to tell marketers, brand strategists, market researchers, advertisers, no matter your level of experience, you may have 20 years experience as a C-level executive, or maybe you’ve been out of school for six months. It’s a positive message. It’s a book to empower you to make a difference. It’s a book to empower you to create brands that are transformative, to provide you with plenty of ideas to impress your clients, your boss, your associates, people in the boardroom, and the conclusion is called, Now It Is Your Turn. And it is to tell you well, 99 percent of us did not go to the top one percent school. It is to remind us that 99 percent of us were not born with a trust fund. We all have an opportunity to make a great impact with our advertiser clients, and among consumers, and the communities we cater for. And this book shows you how.

Adrian Tennant: If IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to know more about your book, what’s the best way to connect with you? 

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Thank you, Adrian. People can find the book on Amazon, of course, also in bookstores. The easiest way to get the book is of course on Amazon. Again, the book is called Assemblage: The Art and Science of Brand Transformation. And people can also connect with me on LinkedIn. So easy. My name is Emmanuel Probst with two ‘M’s, and I will gladly connect with you and address any additional questions you may have. I like connecting with readers and listeners. In fact, we’re going back to the starting point of our conversation, Adrian, whereby it’s all about curiosity, meeting new people, listening to new ideas. That means if you reach out to me on LinkedIn, I promise to return your message and engage with you in a form of interaction.

Adrian Tennant: And we’ll be sure to include links to both of your books and that report that we referenced in the transcript for this episode. Emmanuel, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS!

Dr. Emmanuel Probst: Thank you so much, and thank you to our listeners today. It was a pleasure connecting with you.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Dr. Emmanuel Probst, Global Lead, Brand Thought-Leadership at Ipsos, and the author of Assemblage, the Art and Science of Brand Transformation. You’ll find a transcript of this episode with links to the resources we discussed today on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com – just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. And if you enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for joining us for IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Exploring the rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence in marketing, we revisit conversations with recent guests, including Katie King, Renee Hartmann, Nick Wolny, Dave Kaye, Paul Sloane, Rohit Bhargava, and Martin Oxley. Conversations examine the ways in which AI is being used in sales and marketing, retail, consumer research, translation, and content creation with relevant examples and case studies. Links to the books mentioned in this episode are provided in the transcript.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Katie King: It’s about AI helping develop better products, as well as insights into what customers really, really want. 

Renee Hartmann: There is a company that was using AI to optimize pricing and grocery stores based on the expiration date.

Nick Wolny: I think AI could do away with the need for human writers, but I don’t know that it could do away with the need for human editors.

Rohit Bhargava: We’re not using AI to replace the writing. We’re using it to make the writing better, and I think that’s the opportunity when it’s used well.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS: fresh perspectives on the business of advertising. Produced weekly by Bigeye: a strategy-led, full-service creative agency, growing brands for clients globally. Hello. I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Today, we’re going to look at the impact of artificial intelligence-based tools on marketing and creativity. ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, was estimated to have received a hundred million monthly active users, just two months after its launch in late November last year, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. ChatGPT is part of a rapidly expanding marketplace for AI-assisted productivity tools and plugins. The excitement and momentum around all things AI helped chip maker, Nvidia, attain a trillion-dollar market capitalization. Mark Read, CEO of agency holding company WPP, recently announced that it will be building on NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform. It aims to produce content using generative AI tools from Adobe and Getty Images, trained on licensed data using NVIDIA’s Picasso engine. In January, I spoke with Katie King, CEO of the consulting firm, AI in Business, and the author of the Bigeye Book Club selection, AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing. I asked Katie how AI is currently being used to support marketing communications and sales functions.

Katie King: So you’ve got many marketers using AI-powered tools so that they can craft their social media messages, their email marketing campaigns, their web copy. So on the sales side, it’s helping organizations to come up with a pitch to a potential customer to keep the pipeline of leads warm with prospects. There are tools like Concured and Phrasee, and it’s saying to people, “How do I tailor my message to a specific audience so that I can offer the best value proposition every time?” So contrary to what people think of big, shiny robot coming taking our jobs, this is mass personalization. So I like to talk about augmented intelligence. That’s what AI can give us, whether we’re in Comms, PR, Marketing, Sales, CX. It’s a series of tools that we need to invest in that can give us big data insights on all different aspects of what we do, and that might be analysis. It might be, like I say, lead generation or lead scoring. It could be Brandwatch and it could actually be automating some of the more monotonous tasks that we do of creating reports and so on. But one of the keys is identifying trends and sentiment analysis and crunching data at volumes and speeds that our, albeit incredible human brains can do, but maybe across multiple languages all over the world, you know, and so on. That’s really the benefit at the moment of AI in the sectors that you mentioned.

Adrian Tennant: We often discuss shopper marketing on this podcast, so I asked Katie about the adoption of AI in the retail sector. 

Katie King: Retail’s such an interesting place right now. I mean, the pandemic changed a lot of our habits. But, we haven’t given up on our old ways. So we’ve got some retailers struggling with, are we going all in on digital or are we holding onto some bricks and mortar? And so, what we’re doing is we’re seeing AI applied in a hybrid manner. So physically, you know, it might be delivering digital experiences to customers. They’ve come to expect that, and then it might be bringing something into the store, you know, for more of an omnichannel experience. So maybe the AI is part of the website for personalized product recommendations, and then maybe in the store it could be a sensor. So you’ve got artificial intelligence, but then you’ve also got the Internet of things. So these sensors could be used to track footfall, assessing which products customers are gravitating towards, so that we can offer them push messages and offers, and so on. And then, you’ve got smart mirrors and other kinds of areas. Even wastage, it might be a food retailer and the AI might be really predicting with great accuracy how many people are going to dine in that store or purchase that amount of perishable goods. So, you know, really, really useful information that is making us as retailers greener, and more able to offer our customers what they require and food producers and CPG brands aren’t any different. So, one that springs to mind is Nestle, and they’re using AI across their business from marketing to manufacturing to product development. So, you know, for organizations like that, for retailers like those, it’s about AI helping develop better products, safer practices, as well as insights into what customers really, really want. And I think in the long run, what we’re looking at here is a better, more efficient supply chain, less waste, and a better product offering. 

Adrian Tennant: Our featured Bigeye Book Club selection for March was Next Generation Retail: How To Use New Technology To Innovate For The Future, co-authored by Renee Hartman. I asked Renee for her take on AI. 

Renee Hartmann: There’s so many different parts of artificial intelligence and I think what’s getting a lot of press right now obviously is things like ChatGPT, and like these types of virtual intelligence, and artificial intelligence, and how that’s getting involved. But I think there’s so many different things we’ve seen, you know, we talk about the core framework which is everything from communication to optimizing pricing, to rationalizing inventory, and then creating experiential retail. And I think that’s something, you know, that we’re seeing quite a lot. Whether it’s things like chatbots and every time you go online being able to get that quick customer service and the way that consumers are engaging with brands and virtual assistance personalization that’s coming through. I was actually just at a euro shop and I saw there is a company that was using AI to optimize pricing and grocery stores based on the expiration date. So I think you’re even seeing things like, how do you use dynamic pricing? How do you take data to make better decisions and optimize things like supply chain and inventory?So there’s so many different ways. I think there’s the kind of fun and creative ones that get the spotlight, but actually when you get back into supply chain and some of the real data intensive ways, it’s how do you take immense amounts of data and then how do you process it intelligently in ways that maybe humans couldn’t do before. I think that’s where a lot of the power comes from, really, disrupting the retail environment.

Adrian Tennant: Renee’s book includes several case studies of how well-known retailers are applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to their operations. I asked Renee if there were one or two that really stood out. 

Renee Hartmann: There’s so many great ones. I think, you know, one of the ones that  resonated with me- I’ve just been renovating a house and just moved and I think a lot of people during the pandemic did as well. One of the ones we talked about was Wayfair having a visual search where you could submit photos of items that you like and then find similar items on Wayfair. So when you think about retail, so much of it is the seeing and the exploring and sometimes it is hard as a shopper, I think, to know exactly what you’re looking for. It’s not necessarily something you’re searching for. And that’s something where browsing online sometimes can be a little bit different than say, like, when you’re walking around a retail store and having that sense of discovery. So I thought that was a really fun way to take AI and look at it from a visual standpoint, almost using different senses that you would use from online shopping. So I thought that was one just personally resonates to me because it’s something I’ve been doing a lot of is walking around furniture stores and vintage stores and trying to find fun things. You know, and then I think obviously one that everybody has used a lot is those chatbots and, the ability to even when I’m just online shopping and things like that, whether we talked about Lowe’s and Kroger’s and Nike. But, being able to create that really quick response and being able to answer people’s questions and really streamlining the customer service experience for consumers is ways that I think are really making everyday shopping a lot better for people.

Adrian Tennant: Making his third appearance on the podcast, writer and entrepreneur Nick Wolny joined me in January to discuss the creator economy. I asked Nick about his impressions of ChatGPT as a writer, and what his first prompt was. 

Nick Wolny: Of course the first prompt I entered was: “Write me an article about how to write better.” It’s like just to completely see ‘Okay, what’s happening here?’ But yeah, I think it’s really exciting. Here’s the analogy that I’m working with, just when I’m talking to people about it, is that about 10 years ago you had a tool come out called Canva. Which a lot of people are really familiar with, right? And so Canva, which has over 50 million users now democratized graphic design for people, right? It was just one of those tools. It’s kinda like Instagram suddenly made everyone a good enough photographer. It is a similar thing. Canva made everyone suddenly a good enough designer. And, from that though, Canva did not replace good designers. If anything, it increased the appetite for really good design because people got in there and they were able to work for a template, but you’re like, “Oh, you know what, this, I still suck at this” Right? And so I think that’s what’s gonna happen with ChatGPT as well, is that the people who were writing bottom of the barrel stuff, they’re gonna get automated out, for sure. But, I think also what will happen is people will begin relying on this automation and they’ll realize that the writing is just still not that good. Another point I like to make to people about ChatGPT, it can’t crawl the Internet. It’s not a search engine. So anything it writes for you, it will not be able to pull in any context, anything like that. So in terms of replacing journalism, replacing editorial, I don’t think it’s anywhere close to that. It might get to that direction soon. But, I think the other thing too is, as you just mentioned, journalism has already been experimenting with AI for quite a while. Most notoriously, this is so Jeff Bezos, but Jeff Bezos, when he purchased the Washington Post. One of the things he did was, let’s create an AI that can take care of all of the really simple local reporting that’s just kind of mindless. And so, they have an AI called Helio Graft that was proprietary that they built, and Helio Graph will do things like, it will take the scores of the local high school football game and it will just put them into a recap article. Think about that sports recap writing. There’s no actual, there was no interview being done with the lineman who made the tackle. None of that’s being done. It’s just a recap of what happened based on the numbers. So all of that gets produced automatically. And so as a result, the Washington Post is able to grab you, it’s interesting. It’s almost like Amazon, right? So that’s why I just think it’s so funny that it’s Jeff Bezos who implemented this, right? It’s just taking the Amazon playbook and basically applying it to the Washington Post. I really think that’s what happened there for a while. The Washington Post jumped over the New York Times in terms of traffic, which is pretty incredible. And it was because of this sort of long tail strategy. We’re gonna talk about everything, but a lot of these just simple recaps and stuff is gonna be totally automated out, just produced instantly. So it’s scary, but I think for many people it’s the first time they’ve interacted with an AI writing tool. And so I think everyone should get on it, everyone should tinker around with it. I think it has real implications for things that are very black and white, like seen examples checking code for errors. Adrian, I was a computer science minor for six weeks and I literally dropped out of the minor because I could not find the extra comma in one of the lines of code. And this was back, you know how it is. This was back when we had to etch it into a stone with a chisel. But, you know what I mean? It’s like I could definitely see helpful implications there, I think that’s an incredible use of AI. I think it’s gonna change the conversation about written content because so many people will just be interacting with an AI who have never interacted with one before, and they’re just gonna get curious and excited about it. So yeah. 

Adrian Tennant: I asked Nick if he thought tools like ChatGPT could ever replace the need for human authors and whether writers should fear these AI-driven technologies. 

Nick Wolny: I think it’s something to definitely watch and to keep an eye on. I’m not, not paying attention to it, I’ll say that. I’d love to not pay attention to it cause it’s everywhere right now. But ,I’m monitoring what’s happening. I think AI could do away with the need for human writers, but I don’t know that it could do away with the need for human editors. Right now. And that’s what I think is the distinction there, is that, when I receive an article draft from a journalist, or from a freelance writer, I go through that and I edit it based on obvious things like grammar syntax or context or whatever. But then also based on some of our internal objectives, and that’s what many other people do who own a business, who run a website, are gonna and do something like that. And so I think if you can get good at taking what ChatGPT spits out at you and cleaning it up and then getting online, then I think it’s quite a force to be reckoned with and I’m curious to experiment with that. I’m gonna experiment with that personally. If I had ChatGPT write the draft and then I brought my editor’s eye to it, is it quicker? And also the ethics of that. You know what I mean? If ChatGPT wrote it, but I edited 90% of it, who wrote this article? It’s interesting to sort of think about from that perspective as well. I just also think that people are starting to look for other more dynamic ways of getting the information that they want to get and be interested in. So yeah, if someone is just writing, they never do any editing, they never think about what they’re writing, then I think AI is gonna automate out those jobs or stuff that’s very dry and doesn’t need context, like policies and procedures that just have to be very highly accurate. Like I could see AI automating a lot of that out, maybe like instruction manuals and stuff like that. But, I think it’ll be a while before the intelligence gets to a level that it can automate out an editor who’s gonna be the person giving context or connecting it to sales objectives or, or whatever you’re trying to do with that content that you’re taking the time to produce and publish.

Adrian Tennant: In March, I spoke with Rohit Bhargava, co-author of The Future Normal, a book featuring ideas and consumer trends that could shape the next decade. One section of the book poses the question, “What if artificial intelligence could make humans more creative?” I asked Rohit how AI can change how we approach creative tasks. 

Rohit Bhargava: Well, I think the first thing we have to say about AI is that it could do these things if we use it in a certain way. And, and that’s one of the fundamental things that I think a lot of people and a lot of stories sometimes miss about the power of AI. That it really is driven by how we choose to use it. And as we started using it, which, you know, we’ll definitely get into, one of the things that was quickly apparent is that when you put garbage into it, you get garbage out of it. And when you become good at putting information into it, you actually get something pretty good out of it. And what that meant to me, pretty apparently, is that it’s going to become a skillset to learn how to use AI, for creative tasks or for mundane tasks. And, and I have examples of both of those things that I could share with you. Right? So it’s not only, look at what AI was able to do in terms of generating a painting or generating art or generating images or generating faces of people who don’t exist based on extrapolating facial features from pictures of people who do exist. It’s also, how can it make these tasks that we all need to do that sometimes we maybe don’t want to do, like writing a letter to get out of a parking ticket… How does it make those sorts of things easier for any one of us to do as well? I would consider those to be low stakes moments versus kind of high stakes or something that you put out there that has your name on it, right? Like ghost writing a blog post, for example, that has your name on it that just uses AI, and when you put it out there people are like, it doesn’t really make sense.

Adrian Tennant: I asked Rohit how, for The Future Normal, he used AI tools in the design of the book. 

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah. Not just the design, but the writing too. What we didn’t use it for was to write the book or to write any parts of the book. But what was interesting about it is we used it in a couple of use cases. So if you do get the physical copy of the book, you’ll see that we have 30 trends in the book, and each one of them has an icon attached to it. And so as we were sourcing icons and finding them and deciding what icons to use, there were some chapters where we kind of hit this mental roadblock. “What should the icon be?” Right? Brainstorming roadblock, we’ve all had those. And AI was really interesting to use as an idea generation tool in that case to say, “Here’s the text of the chapter, can you suggest what some icons for this chapter might be?” And it would write some of the suggestions and we would go in and say, “Oh, that suggestion’s actually kind of interesting.” And then we’d start going and looking for it. And in some cases, for some icons, what AI had suggested inspired what the icon actually was. So AI didn’t design the icon, but it helped us to find it. That was one example. Another example that’s more on the writing side was we’d written a chapter and we put the chapter into ChatGPT, and we asked it to write a negative one star review of that chapter and identify why the chapter wasn’t good. And what it came up with in terms of spotting gaps in our arguments was actually useful for us editorially, to be able to say, “Oh, this point that we were trying to make wasn’t entirely clear. We need to go back and revise the writing.” So in this case, we used it as a critique of the writing, but then we did the writing ourselves and we used it as a layer to say, “What would AI spot as a gap in our argument that we now need to go and fix?” So that was another example where it was quite interesting what it came up with. We’re not using AI to do the creative or to replace the writing, we’re using it to make the writing better, and I think that’s the opportunity when it’s used well.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

Adrian Tennant: Each month, in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, The Bigeye Book Club features interviews with authors who are experts in consumer research, retail, and branding. Our featured book for June is The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix the Future by Solitaire Townsend. Featuring compelling stories from top entrepreneurs and businesses, the book showcases how Solutionists are addressing our planet’s greatest crisis through sustainable innovation, highlighting transformative examples, including plant-based foods, net-zero technologies, and circular platforms. IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25 percent on a print or electronic version of The Solutionists by using the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all Kogan Page products and pre-orders and applies to their free paperback and e-book bundle offer. Shipping is always free to the US and UK when you order direct from Kogan Page, and it helps the authors too. So, to order your copy of The Solutionists, go to KoganPage.com.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. You’re listening to highlights from conversations with IN CLEAR FOCUS guests about artificial intelligence and its impact on marketing and advertising practice. In addition to creative applications, artificial intelligence-based tools are also emerging in the consumer research space. In March, I spoke with Dave Kaye, an expert in smartphone-based ethnography and the co-founder of the qualitative research platform, Field Notes. I asked Dave for his thoughts on the role of AI in the design, collection, and delivery of consumer insights. 

Dave Kaye: Yeah, it’s a question which is on everyone’s lips at the moment, I suppose, but it’s definitely making an impact in online smartphones qualitative. I can answer this question by basically saying what impact it’s already had for us as a platform. So, you know, we are still very early days of all of this and OpenAI’s ChatGPT has already impacted the way we do things. So, at the end of this month, we’re actually changing our transcription service completely and moving it to an AI driven transcription service, which is called Whisper. And we’re very excited going into that and working with them. And basically the quality of the output that we’ve seen, and we’ve already got it on our staging server, is phenomenal. It makes a massive difference. You’re looking at it. And you are, sadly, questioning whether transcription agencies are gonna not have a hard time of it in the near future. Human transcription has always been a massive role for it in research, but as this technology’s improved, you’ve got away with not using human transcription on a few. What we’re seeing now is that the level of transcription is becoming phenomenal. That’s also true of translation. So, you know, whenever I talk and give tips on how to run an international smartphone qualitative project, I always say, “Don’t get burned by translation because you’re not sure how much you’re gonna have, how much it’s gonna cost. It spirals outta control.” That’s where the hole is when it comes to managing it. And this, with the improvement in transcription, is allowing for, I think, really cost effective translation to come on the horizon. And I don’t think that’s gonna be as good. It’s a harder thing to essentially deliver, but it is still giving you a massive opportunity. I mean, it’ll be massive, massive differences in transcription and translation. We’re already seeing it as so in our business. And then finally, the other thing that’s already happening within our business is, once you’ve got all of that AI driven transcription in place, you can then start to begin to ask the tools to provide you with summaries of the actual content. So you are looking at, say 10, 15 minutes of video from a participant, which as a researcher would take you 10, 15 minutes to go through and then take notes, understand it. Take time on it. And now the click of a button, you can have a summary there of, 200 words or whatever, bringing to life in written text, exactly what happens in that video. And the quality of that, people say, you know, “How good is it? How effective is it?” I think the best way of thinking about is, it’s like having a junior, an extra junior team member, working with you for somebody who needs support, somebody who needs to, have a little bit of supervision in terms of what the output looks like, but fundamentally is doing a really good job getting through it. And that, if you think of the man hours when it comes to like going through all the content, it’s gonna save a huge amount of time. So, it’s gonna go way beyond that, I think. But just in the last three months, those are the developments we’ve seen on our own platform and I think it’s a really exciting time. I think people are gonna work differently. New jobs are gonna be created when it comes to analyzing the content, understanding what best to do with the AI. So I think it will evolve and it will change, we’ve already seen that. I think just technology has changed the role of research, but it’s made it much more accessible to a lot of people. 

Adrian Tennant: AI in consumer research was a theme I also discussed with Martin Oxley, Managing Director of buzzback Europe. Here’s a snippet from our conversation from just a couple of weeks ago. 

Martin Oxley: Well, we’re immersed in this with chatGPT and interestingly, the very much it seems a second to ChatGPT, Bard. Who’d have thought that Google would be second in anything related to technology? But, we seem to be talking about ChatGPT, rather than Bard. I must admit when I first came across it and I was first exposed to it, I struggled to get out of my seat. Not through tiredness, but through fear and trepidation and, “Oh, my word, what is this going to do to the world that I’ve lived in?” But, since I’ve settled a little bit more about it, I realized that it can be a huge asset and a huge opportunity for us in the world of asking questions to convert asking questions into asking good prompts. And I’ve even seen now there are jobs out there for prompt writers, which in market research terms is question writers. We’re really good, and should be really good, at asking questions. Instead of asking consumers, we’re asking the digital masters that are ChatGPT, and asking them for their views and summarized views. So, we should be really good at it. We should be really good at iterating our questions. You ask the prompt and then you keep prompting until you get a fine tuned perspective that then you can go on to test with consumers. But the other reason I’m very excited, what’s completely missing from the whole AI conversation, is the lack of emotion and the lack of ambition. The machine itself doesn’t have emotions, it simply doesn’t care. It doesn’t have any ambition, other than what you tell it to do. And, if I’ve learned anything in the increasing number of decades I’ve been in research, is if you don’t understand emotions, and you don’t understand motivations, and you don’t understand ambition, you rarely understand anything. And this is for me, a really key point, which is there is a huge opportunity for us to use this as a tool. Just as the people in the pre-industrial revolution in the UK used to smash up the threshing machines because they thought it would take their work, when in fact, the machines generated more work. Yet to see that, but I’m quietly confident that once we get our head around it will use this as a real help for us to do our agile research. So don’t fear it, understand it. As someone said on LinkedIn the other day, I’m sure you’ve seen this quote, which is, “You shouldn’t fear AI. You should fear someone who knows how to use AI.” 

Adrian Tennant: In February, I spoke with Paul Sloane, the author of the Bigeye Book Club selection, Lateral Thinking For Every Day. I asked Paul if he thought AI could ever rival human ingenuity.

Paul Sloane: That’s a very interesting question, and I think the answer is yes, it will. We’re getting there slowly, and at the moment, what I say to people is the one thing that computers can’t do is ask intelligent questions. They can give answers, but your job as a creative marketing professional is to ask really smart questions, and searching questions, and questions that other people aren’t asking, and that will help you come up with creative ideas. But, ultimately, I think AI will come to that level where it can ask really smart questions based on masses of experience. And what you’ll do is you’ll give it a problem, global warming or inflation or something else and say, “What ideas have you got?” And it can model all sorts of different things in great detail in a way that humans can’t do. So if we raised interest rates and we raised taxes, what would happen? So it can model all of these things. And similarly, in a marketing sense, it will eventually be smart enough to create models of consumer behavior. Which says if we raise the price and double the pack size or whatever, what would be the effect on our sales? So, I think artificial intelligence is gonna be an amazing addition. 

Adrian Tennant: As you’ve heard, artificial intelligence-based tools have been top-of-mind for many of our guests so far this year. For a final perspective, we’ll return to my conversation with Katie King. After discussing the rapid adoption of tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, I asked Katie if marketers and creatives working in advertising agencies should fear AI. 

Katie King: Not fear it. Not fear it in terms of it’s going to take away all of their jobs, but if they aren’t using it, then they’re going to get left behind quite quickly. So of course I’ve seen all the discourse on it and yes, it’s amazing what both can do, but they still are fairly limited. That’s the reality. They operate within the parameters we give them. So ChatGPT, they can only write what you tell it to. And DALL-E can create what we tell it to create. So we, the creatives, we are required to come up with the ideas, to analyze them, to be the person that interacts with the client about it. So, you know, AI is great at producing the insights following our lead, but it lacks that well-rounded knowledge to truly grasp what this information is about. How do we transform those insights into a strategy? Now, it’s interesting when you think about creative strategy. AI is not sentient, it isn’t creative, but it can turn creativity into a process. For example, IBM Watson working with Lexus luxury car brands and the AI studying many, many years of award-winning TV adverts, and then understanding what is it that makes it award-winning. Is it the setting? Is it the wording? Is it the people? Is it whatever it might be, the colors, the imagery? And it can then break all of that down and come up with an award-winning TV advert. So yes, we do need to be mindful of being left behind and not using these tools and our competitors will, and others might turn to them as a result. So I think we have to get on board with it, we have to continue enjoying maybe more of the strategic aspects of what we do, and leave the AI tools to do more of those analytical data driven tasks that we can then oversee. And I think it’s a very exciting space to be in and not to be feared.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks to all the guests who’ve joined us on IN CLEAR FOCUS so far this year. In this episode, you heard Katie King, Renee Hartmann, Nick Wolny, Rohit Bhargava, Dave Kaye, Martin Oxley, and Paul Sloane. You’ll find links to these contributors’ books, biographies, and contact details in the transcript accompanying this episode. You’ll find it on our webpage at bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘podcast’ from the menu. And a reminder that you can save 25 percent off print or electronic versions of the books by Katie King, Paul Sloane, and Renee Hartmann, when you order direct from Kogan Page. Use the promo code BIGEYE25 at the checkout. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.