Archive
NEWSLETTER ISSUES
Read all previous issues of Healthy Brand Mondays here.
FREE GUIDE: My Entire Tech Stack
Find all the software and tech I use to run my business.
Courtesy of ShieldApp.io
I am at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey and some people have asked me what technology and software I use. It starts with what you want to do, for me as a one man band, I had to acquire tools for me to:
Create content (images, PDFs, podcast etc.)
Collect and send email newsletters
Automate scheduling
Do video calls
Host a podcast
I am pretty certain my tech stack will shift as I build a larger audience and start to create offerings with conversion funnels. In the meantime, as I focus on building a community and delivering value, below are all the software I use with different timestamps so you can see how it has changed over time.
Links with an asterisks* represents an affiliate link 🙏🏽
March 20th, 2023
Some stats so you can understand my scale of operations
LinkedIn Followers: 4,816
Newsletter subscribers: 1,463
Digital revenue: $105 (affiliate)
Paid:
Website: Squarespace
Social posting*: Hypefury
LinkedIn Analytics: Shield App
Email and newsletter growth*: ConverKit & Sparkloop
Podcast recording*: Riverside
Podcast hosting*: Buzzsprout
Scheduling: Calendly
Social video editing: Fiverr
Design software*: Canva
Video conferencing: Zoom
PDF tool: Expert PDF
Inbox and documents: Microsoft Office
Taxes and accounting: Collective (ONE MONTH FREE discount code: HC2158)
Free:
Virtual whiteboard: Miro
Transcription (pay per transcription): Temi
Analytics: Google analytics
Note taking and drafing: Notion
Getting and displaying testimonials: Testimonial.io
Courses:
The LinkedIn OS*: This is THE course that set me on my way on LinkedIn. I bought and implemented the coursework on July 1st, 2022 and in the month of July, I garnered 61,537 views. In June, my content had only 16,159 views… that’s almost a 4x increase. In the 9 months since I’ve implemented the strategies, I’ve gotten 1,049,651 impressions.
August 5th, 2022
Some stats so you can understand my scale of operations
LinkedIn Followers: 2,294
Newsletter subscribers: 72
Digital revenue: 0
Paid:
Website: Squarespace
Social posting: OneUp
LinkedIn Analytics: Shield App
Email:* Mailchimp
Podcast recording*: Riverside
Podcast hosting*: Buzzsprout
Scheduling: Calendly
Social video editing: Kapwing
Design software*: Canva
Video conferencing: Zoom
PDF tool: Expert PDF
Inbox and documents: Microsoft Office
Taxes and accounting: Quickbooks
Free:
Virtual whiteboard: Miro
Transcription (pay per transcription): Temi
Analytics: Google analytics
Courses:
The LinkedIn OS*: This is THE course that set me on my way on LinkedIn. I bought and implement the coursework on July 1st, 2022 and in the month of July, I garnered 61,537 views. In June, my content had 16,159 views… that’s almost a 4x increase, and this is only the beginning.
Ways I can help you
Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands
Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)
How Companies Can Embrace Equity & Inclusion Today & Into The Future with Dr. Félix Manuel Chinea
EP. 17 | Félix Manuel Chinea, MD
Read time: 3 min
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Company purpose still has a place in the world of brand. And it can be very powerful if you want it to be. Think about Patagonia and how its follow through on purpose has made it one of the most successful and iconic brands on the planet.
But the biggest problem for companies is that these efforts are often seen as expenses and when times get tough, they get cut. We've all seen how Chief DE&I officers are hired and fired, and the recent tech layoffs involved many people who were doing equity and inclusion work.
So when I talked with Felix, the head of health equity and inclusion of Doximity, a digital health company (think LinkedIn for physicians) I really wanted to understand how he has made it work there and how it's being embedded into the company.
APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY | STITCHER
Don’t see your podcast player? Click HERE
In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
The definition of DE&I and health equity
Value exchange for long-term impact
The curb cut effect
Culture change is inherent
Consistent actions to bolster the brand
What to look for when hiring for DEI & Health Equity roles
KEY LESSONS
The definition of DE&I and Health equity
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are three values that organizations strive to embody for fair treatment and full participation of all people in the workplace.
Health equity on the other hand applies to health care companies applying the principles of DE&I to the communities they serve.
“In the broadest sense health equity is giving everyone the opportunity to live their healthiest life. There's opportunity to be more specific about it, especially in the space of digital health. What does health equity mean in terms of the sphere of influence that you have as an organization? What is the mission, what are the types of products that you build and how do you make that more equitable?”
Value exchange for long-term impact
One of the most critical challenges for organizations is ensuring that this work doesn't get cut when bad economic times come along. You should not be able to switch values on and off based on external conditions, but that's what you see in some companies.
The reason? It's not a value, it's a program. Worse, it's a fluffy communication tactic. And when media covers all the "failures", we get confusion.
"I had a recent LinkedIn post that asked the question of whether advancing health equity is too fluffy of a term. People losing sense of what does health equity actually mean and what are we actually doing."
When talking Felix, he offers up a unique strategy so the organization doesn't see these efforts as a resource drain, instead, the organization gets value from it. He talks about an example in Doximity where they offer a free service to clinics offering free care and in return, they get very specific feedback about their product.
"A lot of times when we think about a free clinic program, many people will think about this as a charity program. But instead, if you think about this as an exchange of value that really shapes our product in a meaningful way, then it creates a more sustainable process moving forward. "
The curb cut effect
Another challenge we see is the push back in organizations when developing special programs that help one specific group of people. Felix saw some of this at Doximity, but he offers a model that can help address this fear.
He brings up the curb cut effect from the work of Annie Jean Batiste, the head of product inclusion at Google.
"The curb cut effect is this: when we cross the street, the sidewalks have that cut at the curb. And that was actually designed initially for folks in wheelchairs. But then you reflect and you think about who all benefits from that cut in the curb. Folks pushing strollers, folks pushing grocery carts, folks on bikes, folks roller skates or roller blades.. A lot of people benefit from that design even though that design was centered on folks in wheelchairs."
"So the same concept can apply to product design"
So when this is applied to their free telehealth service, the unique perspective and feedback from their free clinic customers allow them to develop features that other users can enjoy and benefit from.
Conclusion
DE&I and healthy equity work is not easy, especially embedding it into the culture of the company. But it is an opportunity to bring energy and vitality into the brand. The opportunity is that most organizations don't do this well, so if your brand can embody these values and make tangible impact, you can truly elevate your brand, not to mention help all those disenfranchised feel a sense of belonging.
There were a ton more lessons and Felix gets pretty deep on the topic: Listen to the whole episode on Apple Podcasts
Learn more about Félix:
Resources
- Michelle Mijung Kim – Book: The Wake Up
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Branding is Not Just Advertising, it's a Complete Experience
2.5 min read - 1 Quote, 1 Lesson, 1 Post
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Read time: 2.5 min
At a glance:
Quote: What is our reality?
Lesson: A brand experience framework
Instagram Post: Idea is not execution
QUOTE
"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced"
John Keats
We can know everything about something, but until we go through it and feel it in our bones, can it truly become a part of us. That video you just watched about cliff diving, it's not real until you jump off that cliff. That promise the brand just made to you, it doesn't become real until you've experienced and felt that promise.
Lesson
Learn the framework to pull through your brand essence across every touchpoint.
By leveraging every touchpoint to build brand equity, you are giving people every opportunity to trust and love your brand.
Most marketers and brand builders fail because they use a marketing funnel that ends when the prospect "converts" or purchases the product or service. That model tremendously limits all activities that could be aligned to the brand.
YOUR BRAND IS NOT A FUNNEL, IT'S A CIRCLE
The framework
Awareness & Interest (educate and help the target segment understand why your product or service is relevant and different)
Comprehension & Decision (make the purchase decision easy by removing all barriers to a yes)
Adoption & Utilization (create a product and service experience that delivers on the promise of your brand so it results in repeat use or new purchase)
Community & Ambassadorship (allow users and customers to become part of a special tribe, leveraging voices of fans to make more people aware of the brand)
Look at every instance where the target segment is exposed to the brand. How is the brand essence experienced? What unique experiences can we provide beyond ads, videos, and content?
Consumer Example:
Fictional consumer brand - Mandalore Pans
Brand essence - "Cookware for the planet"
1. Awareness & Interest
A downloadable iron chef recipe booklet that features dishes that use only sustainably sourced ingredients in your region.
2. Comprehension & Decision
When you buy, you are automatically enrolled into a pan recycling program where you can send old pans to be recycled for free 1 time.
3. Adoption & Utilization
All packaging is 100% made from recycled materials and compostable. The tags and instruction booklets actually have embedded seeds that grow into flowering plants. Just add water.
4. Community & Ambassadorship
Closed group “Mandalore Chefs” to share recipes, cookware care, and other tips on sustainable living.
Health care Example:
Fictional health care brand - “Invisible” hearing aids
Brand essence - More than meets the eye
1. Awareness & Interest
Invisible ink consumer activations - posters, billboards, post cards etc. Looks empty/ benign until UV light is applied
2. Comprehension & Decision
Audiologist and sales rep materials that look very generic on the outside, but a totally different experience on the inside
3. Adoption & Utilization
Packaging and app designed to be more like a premium speaker than a hearing-aid
4. Community & Ambassadorship
Hearing aid parties where only those with “invisible” hearing aids can hear the music
Conclusion
Elevate your branding efforts by using this framework to pull through the brand essence across every touch point. Go beyond messaging and content into experience.
Instagram Post
When you feel like you made progress by having an idea…
Credit: @thomasandvisuals
You get to a brand essence only to NOT execute it. It's such a shame! For those of you building brands, take a swing and bring it home... help those who are ready to LOVE your brand.
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Surviving the Unthinkable, Building Resilience, & the Alignment of Purpose with Geralyn Ritter
EP. 16 | Geralyn Ritter
Read time: 4.5 min
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How do you build resilience when a catastrophic accident upends your life? What does personal resilience have to do with company purpose and sustainability?
In this episode of the healthy brand podcast, I sat down with Geralyn Ritter and we had an honest conversation that connects the dots between brand, reputation, and pain. Geralyn survived near-fatal injuries in the derailment of Amtrak 188 outside Philadelphia where eight passengers were killed and over 150 injured in 2015. She is an author and Executive Vice President of External Affairs and ESG at Organon, a health care company focused on women’s health.
APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY | STITCHER
Don’t see your podcast player? Click HERE
In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Resilience is skill anyone and any company can build
What pain can teach us about perceptions and brand reputation
How to build a personal brand while being an employee
Authenticity is easier when you focus on others and not yourself
Aligning your personal purpose with your company’s purpose
Shaping a company culture of inclusivity and belonging
KEY LESSONS
Resilience is a skill anyone and any company can build
Credit: GeralynRitter.com
One of the amazing things about Geralyn is that she can find the humor and silver lining in just about anything. But she also talks about resilience being a skill that can be built over time. She talks about the power of reframing.
“I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself when it was about three o'clock, and the boys came home from school. Something just clicked. Here I was six months in with who knows how long in front of me, and I was gonna be home every single day when they got home from school. And I thought, you know, I need to treasure that. I called 'em in and they jumped in bed with me. And we watched a movie that afternoon, and I said to myself, you know, when, when have I ever curled up at 3:30 in the afternoon for no reason? It just kind of hit me that I needed to reframe.”
It's a deliberate practice that can help us go through the toughest times.
“Reframing is the heart of resilience, but it doesn't come easy. Like I said, sort of deliberately trying to reframe this enforced slowness and look for the good part of it. I think it's really healthy. It really helped me. But it was hard work”
If our identity is one of resilience, or if we are trying to build resilience into our identity, every time we reframe something bad that is happening, we are essentially making a vote for that type of person.
Every reframe becomes a vote for your resilience.
For companies, resiliency is a brand competence. When the market and the external factors are not in your favor, how can a brand continue to deliver on its promise? And part of the answer is to take a longer-term view.
“ESG is resiliency for companies over the long term. Long-term resiliency to the shocks that are gonna come. Whether it's climate related, social related, change in long-term macroeconomic trends. Preparing now, investing now in programs around equity, around reducing admissions, good governance that considers the perspectives of all your stakeholders. Fundamentally, that's how you build a resilient company over the long-term”
A healthy brand is a resilient brand, and when you start asking some important questions, you will know where to focus
“What are the issues that matter? Where can you make a difference? Where can your company actually have an impact? Or what are those issues that would actually affect your company? That's where you focus.”
What pain can teach us about perceptions and brand reputation
Geralyn had to go through pain. A lot of pain. And the more she dealt with it, the more she learned that pain is perceived very differently by those who are experiencing it and those who see it experienced.
“Fundamentally, pain cannot be measured, you know, in, in some ways it is subjective. And what I mean by that is it's the brain responding to whether the body is in danger. And it may be a signal of tissue damage, or it may not be, you know, many people have heard of phantom limb pain. There are lots of examples where the body is injured and the brain doesn't actually feel pain or the body is not injured, but the brain does feel pain”
“How our brain interprets pain is very complicated, and it is a matter of perception. It's the same thing as we talk about telling our story…perception is reality”
The lesson here is that, like pain, brand and reputation is also a matter of perception, where there is not really a universal truth about pain or reputation. It only makes sense from the perspective of the individual, or a group of homogenous individuals – aka audience segment.
“When you think about reputation, people say, oh, well they have a good reputation. My question is always with who? With who? Does this company have a good reputation? Well, with who? Does the man on the street know them? Maybe, maybe not, but maybe their customers love them and would never go anywhere else. Yes. Maybe they're the darling of Wall Street, but yet, you know a lot of activists or social groups think that they're horrible. What does it mean to have a good reputation? You've gotta go deeper”
Geralyn emphasizes that broad quantitative metrics about reputation is not useful.
“You try to reduce it to a number who has the best reputation. That's kind of meaningless to me”
How to build a personal brand while being an employee
One of the most asked questions about personal brands is how one balances between their company brand and their own personal brand. Geralyn talks about how it needs to be separate.
“When I have purely leaned into trying to get word out about my book, I hired a separate publicist on my own dime…I do try to keep a, a certain separation of church and state but, but keep the two sides informed enough that, that we don't step on each other.”
But at the same time, look for opportunities to leverage her personal story to talk about the company purpose, both internally and externally, because her experience is her identity, and it doesn’t make sense to hide it.
“I am fortunate that part of my job is to talk about our company's purpose internally and externally. And it is very genuine. And the fact that it does connect to a personal sense of purpose, that's not kind of a stretch or strained…So I don't hesitate to draw on that personal narrative as I am talking about the need for more research, for example into women's pain”
In fact, she feels that not acknowledging her experience and disability is disrespectful.
“I don't wanna be train wreck girl, but it's always front and center in my mind, but it in a way that it shapes my perspective, not that it needs to come into every conversation. But at the same time, if you ignore it, if you just never talk to me about it, if you pretend that it didn't happen, you dishonor me that way”
Conclusion
Resilience is an important skill personally and for company brands. Geralyn’s story of not only surviving, but thriving after her devastating accident is inspiring. Listen to the full episode, hear Geralyn talk about her story on your favorite podcast player.
Learn more about Geralyn:
Resources
Bone by Bone by Geralyn Ritter (100% of proceeds go to non-profit organizations that support trauma professionals and trauma survivors)
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
"Atomic Culture": Applying the Power of Habits to Organizational Culture
3 min read - 1 Quote, 1 Lesson, 1 Post,
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Read time: 3 min
At a glance:
Quote: Action creates identity
Lesson: Three-step framework to apply habit principles to culture
Instagram Post: Don't stop, keep going
Resources: Two books and a podcast episode
QUOTE
"Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become"
James Clear
Lesson
I will share a simple three-step framework to help you tap into the power of habits to build a formidable culture.
Because as we all know, culture is one of the most important elements to an organization. It can make or break a company.
But most organizations just put values on the wall or on their website and they call it a day. No one practices those values nor do they make tough decisions based on them.
If you want behaviors that last (habits), you have to focus on identity
James Clear talks about the three layers of change that occurs when creating habits: outcomes, processes, and identity.
Most people start off by saying "I want to lose weight" and that is an outcome. The next layer is by implementing a system or process like going to the gym and ultimately a new identity "I am a person who works out" is where lasting behaviors reside.
Similarly, when organizations are creating a culture, they want people to behave a certain way. For example, they want their employees to collaborate more, that's an outcome. By implementing a system to aid collaboration like cross-functional teams, that's a process. For lasting change to take place, you'll want to establish an identity "I am a person who collaborates".
An example:
Amazon
Outcome: Collaborate for the customer
Process: Two pizza teams
Identity: An Amazonian is obsessed with customer experience, constantly being curiosity, nimble, and experimental
The power of identity comes when someone who works at the organization is personified "Amazonian" or "Googler". This makes it very simple for employees to adopt behaviors at the deepest levels, often times so powerful that these values are retained after they've left the organization.
Here is a three-step framework based on the layers of behavior change as described by James Clear to build a compelling culture.
Envision: Showcase what it means to be a person who thrives at the company. What are the principles, why it matters and why it makes you better. Name it for maximum effect (eg. Amazonian's and their "Day 1" mentality )
Enroll: Help people understand how to live those values. Set up processes and systems that make it easier to live them everyday. (eg. At Zappos, they measure percent of customer interaction on every call instead of number of calls taken per hour - establishing a system of measurement and rewards that deliver the best, not the fastest service)
Experience: Make sure employees feel what it's like to adopt this new identity. This is establishing vocabulary, stories, artifacts, and traditions that immerse employees into the culture.
Creating a culture is about creating an environment for it to blossom. Ultimately if you create the right conditions, principles and values can become part of the identity of your people, making the outcomes more attainable and the new behaviors more sustainable.
Instagram Post
When you are having a tough time deciding what projects or tasks to execute on:
Instagram post from @lizandmollie
We are often impatient for change, but a great reminder is that every mountain is climbed the same way - one step at a time.
Resources
Culture Built My Brand by Mark Miller & Ted Vaughn: Book + my podcast episode with Mark
Atomic Habits by James Clear: Book
(Affiliate links: no extra cost to you, something to keep the newsletter free!)
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Dominate the B2B Industry with Brand: A Raw & Unfiltered Conversation with Jason Vana
EP. 15 | Jason Vana
Read time: 4.5 min
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Why do some B2B companies thrive while others struggle? How should leaders think about branding vs. performance marketing efforts? Jason has real answers for us.
Jason Vana is the founder of Shft, a Brand and content strategy agency focused on B2B companies – helping them become the only choice for their customers. He is also an established thought leader in the world of B2B, with over 50K followers on LinkedIn.
APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY | STITCHER
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
The most controversial topic in the world of marketing and branding
The irony of ironies in the B2B world
The powerful strategy of being different, not better
The fallacy of MQLs (marketing qualified leads)
The three most important things to learn as a marketer
The real Jason Vana, please stand up
KEY LESSONS
Branding is not a marketing function; it cuts across everything
As controversial as it may seem, I subscribe to the same idea. If brand is the feeling and perception someone has about your company, product, or service and branding is the execution of every touch point to create that feeling, how can it be a marketing function?
“Branding has just been confined or just tossed into marketing because marketing is promotional, branding is just this way to promote ourselves. But I think you and I would both agree that if I call into a company and I talk to a receptionist who's rude, that impacts the perception I have of the company.
“And so when it comes to brand, it is far more than just a marketing aspect. It really is built also by sales, by marketing, by operations, by production, by customer service, by your product, by every aspect, every point of contact”
The problem with branding being held in the marketing department is that they don’t have power over the entire organization.
“I don't know any marketers, any CMOs that have that authority. Most CMOs are like, oh that's the COO's job, not my job. That’s the disconnect in B2B…they don't understand what a brand truly is.”
“And it can’t just be the CEO either, because most CEOs are not brand people, they are product people. You need a Chief Brand Officer that sits between the CEO and the other functions.”
When Jason shared this online, it was the most controversial org chart in history, shooting it to virality status.
LinkedIn Post HERE
“The CEO should not be the owner of the brand cuz they don't even know what a brand is or how to build a brand. So if that's the case, then you should have a CBO that everyone reports to because the product and operations are just as much part of brand as marketing is. That's a conversation that a lot of people don't wanna have yet because in most org charts, brand sits under marketing, you've got a CMO, and then you've got like the chief brand marketer and, that is basically a glorified policeman making sure that everything is on brand.”
There are no impulse buys in B2B, branding is the only way to generate sustained demand
The ironies of ironies is that while the world of B2C is admitting that branding efforts have a higher ROI than performance marketing, B2B businesses continue to bet on performance marketing. It should actually be reversed as there are impulse buys in the B2C world, making it a more viable performance marketing candidate than the B2B world, with long sales cycles and drawn out decision making processes.
“Airbnb, Adidas and ASOS, three B2C brands that in the last year, all of them have come out and said we have moved away from performance marketing into brand marketing.
Airbnb made that move in 2019, they dropped their performance marketing started doing brand campaigns. They have had their most successful quarter and their CFO has said it is because of our investment in brand.
Adidas. They thought the majority of their sales was coming from performance marketing. And when they sat down and looked at the data, they found out 60% of their sales actually comes from brand campaigns, not performance marketing.
ASOS spent a quarter I think it was last year, one of the quarters last year, they made 80% of their marketing budget was in performance marketing and sales dropped 105%”
According to Jason, performance marketing is demand capture and branding is demand generation. I tend to agree, it also explains why performance marketing efforts have high initial ROI, then diminishes over time – there is no more demand to capture, the top of the funnel has dried out. Whereas branding continues to fill the top of the funnel. It’s not “either or”, it’s “and”. You need both to win long term.
“Imagine if you, if you sell a hundred thousand dollars service and you have a queue of people waiting to work with you, that's never gonna happen with performance marketing. It doesn't build that kind of loyalty of like, screw everyone else. I'm willing to pay more to work with you. That's what brand does.”
“Different” always beat “better”: lean into what makes the brand unique
Jason states that for a brand to be healthy, it must understand why it is different and I couldn’t agree more. He recalled for us a story about his days in a B2B company:
“One of the first things I did was I created an account pretending that I was a food processor. I went on all the competition's websites and requested information and I just wanna see how they respond
Nine years later, I'm still waiting for a response from some of those companies. Even the ones that did respond, it was one or two days So I said we're gonna make it super easy for people to hear a response. We will have an answer to them in 30 minutes - That is how we're gonna win. We broke the standard and we stole opportunities away from these big companies because of that.”
By zigging while everybody is zaggin, they stood out with a real experience that addressed a pain, not a “promotional” message. It was a tangible fulfillment of their promise. When looking for something unique, you also have to make sure it’s a sustainable differentiator.
“I've heard this a lot. It's our team is what sets us apart. No, it's not <laugh> because your team will be completely different in 20 years. So if that's your differentiation in 20 years, you're done. You know, like what actually makes you different?”
Because if you are not, you just set off the biggest nuclear bomb in the market, driving it down, down, down.
“If your customers can get the same thing from all your competitors, you are no longer competing on something unique, you are just competing on price.”
Conclusion
Branding is demand generation and when done well with performance marketing, you can truly dominate in the world of B2B, because no one is really doing it that well. The same in true in the world of health care, build a brand and your customers will line up around the block to choose you. Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast player for all the truth bombs.
Learn more about Jason:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Poetry, an Action Priority Matrix, & Silent CEOs
3 min read - 1 Quote, 1 Idea, 1 Tool, 1 Article
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Read time: 3 min
At a glance:
QUOTE: The importance of rational and emotional thinking
IDEA: Is it really a tactical ask?
TOOL: Use this to prioritize projects and tasks
ARTICLE: CEOs are silent on societal issues... now what?
QUOTE
“Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
I think about this quote a lot. As a strategist, there is so much we do that's at the intersection of rational and emotional thinking. Too often, the rational proof points, features, and benefits are prioritized over the emotional part of the story.
This quote reminds us that both the rational and the emotional have a role to play and they are equally powerful.
IDEA
Throughout my career as a strategist, I can't count the number of times the client was asking for a tactic (eg. website, brochure, social post etc.) but after further inquiry, they realized help was needed further upstream -> Strategy.
There was not an established brand strategy to create any content or tactics that would move the needle.
Something to think about: what do you actually need? Do have a firm grasp of what problem you are solving for? Is the solution really a tactic? Or is there foundational brand strategy work that needs to first get established?
Some questions to ask:
What is the brand's positioning?
Is there a defined voice and tone?
Is it crystal clear across the organization?
Do we know the singular message for each tactic?
Do we know exactly the barrier we are trying to overcome for each tactic?
These questions can help to point you in either direction. Tactic or Strategy?
TOOL
When you are having a tough time deciding what projects or tasks to execute on:
There are usually more things to do than the time or resources required to do them. This matrix works really well when you are trying to decide what projects NEED to get done vs. those that SHOULD get done. With this matrix, you (and your team) can start to stratify and strategically prioritize what are the projects you need to plan out, which ones can be quick points on the board, which ones you may execute opportunistically and which ones to stay away from.
It's very simple, but a highly effective way to help any team figure out what to do when they have a laundry list of things to tackle.
ARTICLE
America's CEOs have gone silent on national tragedies
2 min read on Axios here
Human rights issues, societal challenges, the recent death of Tyre Nichols - CEOs are quiet.
As brand builders, executive communications are very important. The take away is that the power of employees has somewhat diminished from 2020 and because of the economic recession, many companies have laid off their DE&I departments.
Two things that struck me:
We need to redo DE&I in organizations, it can no longer be a side hustle, it needs to be embedded into the organization and its business (through product development and building a brand around all purpose driven efforts.)
Companies don't have DE&I as part of their purpose, or their purpose is just a plaque on the wall, purely for decor. This makes it hard for leaders to take a stand.
I believe companies can and should speak out, especially those who seek to do good while doing well.
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Stories That Shape the Trillion Dollar Biotech Industry with Dan Budwick
EP. 14 | Dan Budwick
Read time: 4 min
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How do Biotech companies raise millions of dollars just based on a concept? How do they convince physicians and patients to try an unproven treatment? Dan shares what it takes to build a successful brand based on hope.
Dan Budwick is the founder and CEO of 1AB, a communications agency focused on early stage Biotechs – helping them tell stories and build their brands. He cut his teeth in the world of media relations, working with the top journalists and brazen CEOs to bring the most important stories to the public.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:
Weathering the failures of science with brand
Simplifying the scientific story
The compounding power of relationships
Social media as a vital channel for communications
Integrity and ethics in the world of biotech
How to build a company where people love to come to work
KEY LESSONS
Withstand inevitable failures by building a trusted brand
The world of Biotech is ridden with failures. It’s a natural outcome when the boundary of science is pushed to its limits, exploring, and uncovering potential cures and treatments that can conquer devastating diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Dan has seen his fair share of hard times.
“I was with a company who had phase three clinical data failures and have had to make layoffs and go back to the drawing board. And it's tough. They’ve poured their heart and soul into it.”
Trust is built through the way data and evidence is announced. The keyword Dan said was “tempered optimism”, you never want to come across as chest beating, because you never know when things can go south.
“Sometimes it's just about the way that you make an announcement…sometimes you just have to state things straight and walk away and keep your head down and keep going. I was talking to a client this morning about an interview that they were doing, and this is what we talked about, just play it straight, state the facts. The data looked great but just don't make too much of it. Tempered optimism is a good way to approach things.”
“You're playing ultimately a very long game. And so your reputation with those guys as being a straight shooter when things are great, but things are not so great, I think goes a long way towards really solidifying those relationships and, you know, being seen as those people that those reporters need to call”
And a big learning from Dan was that companies need to start building trust and cultivating ambassadors before they need them. Don’t wait until there is some big announcement to reach out to journalists and reporters.
“We have clients that have invested a lot of time over the years ahead of those milestones to establish and cultivate those relationships. They look at media, the way they, they look at investor relations. It's a process. And those are the ones I think that have ultimately benefited the most.”
Simplify the scientific story to reach a broader audience
In the world of biotechnology, the science can get really complicated and it might seem counter intuitive, but some founders are worried that a simple message can come across as simplistic. Dan was adamant that if the science is too complex, no one will know their story and they will miss out on reaching a broader audience and gaining that momentum.
“Honestly, some of the content was so dense that you would read it and pass out like three sentences in… find ways to grade it up or grade it down depending on the level of technicality of the audience”
“The use of a great on point analogy is powerful. We've also had clients that totally bombed on analogies and it's actually been really embarrassing…having the right one can really bring things to life in a way everybody can understand”
As a communications and brand professional in the health care world, you don’t have to know everything about the science, but it does require that you know enough to be able to explain it. Dan talks about his approach.
“Take me through this like I'm a dog <laugh>, like I'm a small animal. These people that we work with day in and day out are some of the most brilliant people within their line of specialty. But you still have to put it on a website. You still have to put it in a press release. You have to be able to see it in an article and have it make sense. So it does require you to break things down.”
Invest in the compounding power of relationships
When Dan started his company, 1AB Media, he immediately had a few clients. How? He had developed amazing relationships over decades of working with in the Biotech industry.
“Oh man. I am not here without my relationships… my time at Pure, the relationships that I built within that Cambridge ecosystem and what that did for me”
He recalled when it all began and how the importance of relationships was ingrained in him by his first boss.
“In 1999, my first boss gave me the best piece of advice I've ever gotten. We want to move you into health care. And he took an envelope and he slid it across the table at me. I opened it up and I saw a green Amex with my name on it. And he said, I want you to go out and I want you to form relationships with every reporter that covers health care. I want you to get to know everything there is to know about them. I wanna know what they like, what they don't like, what their editors expect of them. I wanna know if they're married or single. I wanna know what sports teams they like. I wanna know what gum they chew.”
Building relationships is often not a priority for those early in their careers and that’s a missed opportunity. If you start investing in it early, it will pay dividends over time.
“You can be the most junior member on a team. It doesn't mean that you can't develop relationships because the person that you have a relationship with within that company who may also be young is gonna grow up and is gonna go somewhere and is gonna be somebody.”
Conclusion
The power of stories and communications is palpable and it’s especially evident in the world of Biotech where investments are made when there are no products and requiring many years for a treatment to get to market. The flow of billions of dollars - all based on how well the stories get told.
Learn more about Dan:
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The Art, the Science, & the Practice of Generating Insights
3.5 min read - 1 Quote, 1 Idea, 1 Tool, 1 Article
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Read time: 3.5 min
At a glance:
QUOTE: Everyone might see the same thing, but you can think something different
IDEA: Insights are not observed data
TOOL: The bridge between the problem and the strategy
ARTICLE: What does an insight look like in your brain?
QUOTE
“Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
TBH, I had to read this quote a few times. But the more I read it, the more it was revelational for me. This quote IS an insight. It brings me back to when I was working at a big agency and whenever we were in a pitch, we were scouring for data no one else might have so we might present insights that wowed.
And every single time, when the data came back, we always said, “there is nothing new here.” We then proceeded to come up with different hypotheses and eventually landed on something that is deeper, more controversial, all without new data.
This quote puts into words what we did without knowing what we did.
Takeaway? When generating insights, try looking at it from a different perspective instead of spending time digging for new data.
IDEA
Visualizing the quote in a slightly different way would be this 👇🏽
Data comes in all forms: interviews, survey results, desk research, analytics, modeling, etc. And what is really important to understand here is that no matter what the data presents, it won’t give you the insight.
Data = What is explicit
Insight = What is implicit
An insight takes a leap of creativity, creating a revelation and an “aha” from the patterns we see and experience.
Here are some examples:
Data = Apple falls from the tree straight down onto the ground
Insight = The force that makes the apple fall and that holds us on the ground is the same as the force that keeps the moon and planets in their orbits
Data = Shaving ads for women look all the same
Insight = Companies are afraid to show hair on women
Data = Patients choose where to get care using physician reviews
Insight = Unlike retail, location matters less in health care, people place experience over convenience
TOOL
A simple framework is the insight funnel. It shows how a problem is solved through an insight. It’s a simple way to communicate a solution or a strategy you arrived at.
This framework also shows the process of getting to the solution. From a problem, there is the Conscious Submersion phase, where you gather all the data, do some analysis, start to read and dissect anything that is relevant about the topic, rally submerge yourself into that world.
After being thoroughly soaked, you enter a stage of Subconscious Creation, where the mind start to make connections and generate ideas, often the insight appears during a shower or on a walk. So don’t fret during this phase, it’s a natural part of insight generation. In fact, take the time to step away.
Once you’ve landed on an insight, there is a Conscious Emergence stage, where you start to translate how that insight leads to a specific action or solution.
ARTICLE
This is a downloadable chapter of a book titled Toward Super-Creativity. The chapter is called The Aha! Moment: The Science Behind Creative Insights by Wesley Carpenter (you can read it online or download it by registering)
Want to see what an insight looks like in your brain?
The image on the left shows a topographic distribution of gamma-band activity during an insight and the image on the right shows area of activation corresponding to insight effect during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
In this study, participants were presented with three words (e.g., potato, tooth, heart) and they were asked to think of a single word to create a familiar two-word phrase for each word. (e.g., sweat potato, sweet tooth, sweetheart). Once they arrived at a solution through an insight, they were asked to press a button. This specific type of problem was used because one can solve it analytically OR through insights.
Maybe we’ll have to hook up our strategists to an EEG and fMRI and take the images to qualify their insights 😂
This chapter is such a fascinating read, but to save you time, I’ve summarized the key points here:
Insights are but one method of problem solving
Insight problem solving involves unconscious processing to arrive at that “aha moment” that merges into one’s stream of consciousness. Analytical problem solving on the other hand is systematical and involves logical reasoning.
Each method has its own pattern of errors
Analytical: errors of commission (i.e., incorrect responses). Analytical approach may have one fixated on irrelevant information as a looming deadline approaches.
Insights: errors of omission (i.e., timed out). Insights is typically an all or none approach.
Solving a problem through insights allows loosely connected ideas to be surfaced
Imaging and electrical activity in the brain shows that insights are preceded by a weak activation of a broad semantic field, allowing remote associations of knowledge to stream into consciousness.
Removing visual distractions can help your brain create insights
Before an insight appears, a burst of alpha waves and then gamma waves happens. To lay people like us, what does that mean? It suggests that the brain is limited visual distractions and focusing the energy inwardly for remotely connected knowledge elements to contribute to the “aha”. Whereas an analytics method is focused more externally, where alpha waves are decreased in the visual cortex.
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How to Propel Your Brand Forward Using The Power of Your Culture with Mark Miller
EP. 13 | Mark Miller
Read time: 5.5 min
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Why is it that some organizations build the most amazing brands, but some fail to create anything compelling? Mark has an answer for us.
Mark Miller is a co-founder of Historic Agency and leads product strategy, marketing transformation and brand. He has rebranded nearly 100 organizations and specializes in all things strategy including brand, product and marketing. He is also the co-author of the Amazon bestseller “Culture Built My Brand."
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:
What led to the writing of “Culture built my brand.”
The six elements of building a thriving internal culture
Most prolific examples of cultural elements seen in the wild
Culture can be built no matter the size of the organization
The untapped opportunity in health care
The agile approach to branding
KEY LESSONS
Culture is the main reason behind brand success or brand failure
When Mark and team asked themselves the question “why is it that some clients would take off after our rebrand, while some would go back to the old brand or not even launch at all?” They had a hunch.
“There was a pattern that we started to see with clients that were struggling to be successful in their own brand and owning their own brand - that was all cultural issues.”
A brand is typically thought of as the way others feel and say about you, but Mark helps us make the link between the external and the internal.
“There is something deeper to your brand and how you operate as an organization or a company. We found that really culture has more to do with your brand, then just what other people think. Because how you hire, how you fire, what you, what you prioritize in your budget, what decisions you make, what values drive, all of that ultimately trickles down to the customer experience and your product which is what people think about you”
And culture shows up not during the good times, but when things get rocky. Mark shares a personal story about Historic when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit.
“Almost 40% of our revenue was gone in two weeks. the first two weeks of covid, people just said, we're gonna cancel, and it doesn't matter the fees, some members of the management team didn't resonate with the values that we had as a company and the expectation on leadership and those kind of things. And so we were forced to make some decisions. We had to let some people go.”
And how prioritizing culture played a key part of their growth in a trying time.
“We wanted to refocus our culture…align to the things that were important. And it was amazing to see people step up. And people will perform better when they're in a culture that they connect with that makes sense to them… and they will step up for organizations because they love where they work.”
Culture is not just posters on the wall – there are six elements to building a thriving culture
Often, when you bring up culture, companies will point to the values they embody, often on their website or on the walls of the office. That’s certainly a starting point, but certainly not the end. Mark talks about the six different elements they’ve found in their research that organizations can use to create an environment for culture to thrive.
1. Principles
“Everyone has values, but principles are behaviors. They teach your team how to actually work. Like how to behave, how do they treat each other? How do they treat customers?”
2. Architecture
“That's the organizational systems process. If anyone's had a submit a expense report that spends more time doing that than it does actually making the charges on your expense expenses that's a problem, right? What are the systems, the things behind the walls that you don't actually see, like plumbing and electricity.”
3. Lore
“Those are the unspoken or sometimes spoken stories that the organization tells about itself. And sometimes that is intentional, right? From leadership or from marketing or communications. Sometimes it's water cooler talk that senior leaders and executives don't know. What we found was organizations (who had thriving cultures) were really intentional about shaping and influencing that”
4. Rituals
“The things that we do as an organization that highlights or embodies the brand. So an example in the book we give is NASA's pumpkin carving contest. It's grassroots, it's not paid by government taxes, you know, tax dollars. It's all subsidized by the employees. Their pumpkins are really crazy, some of 'em actually lift off and explode”
5. Vocabulary
“Vocabulary is the being intentional about the language you use. So Netflix is really famous for this. They have a bunch of internal words they use, like “sunshining”, which is when you share a failure so that the rest of your team can learn from it. Or the “keeper test”, which is for managers. If you have an employee whom you would fight to keep, if they were gonna leave, then they should be on your team.”
6. Artifacts
“Infusionsoft, which is now Keap, has a football field like AstroTurf in their office, and that's for one of their values – “leaving in it all on the field” And so they have staff meetings on this AstroTurf as a reminder for people to leave it all on the field. So that would be an artifact.”
Design experiences and processes that reflect the company’s values
When culture and brand is reflected in the experiences and the processes of the company, it can be so powerful. The same can be said when nothing is reflected – powerfully terrible.
“No one really thinks about organizational systems as part of their brand, right? But if your expectation is you want a nurse to have great bedside manner and be efficient and super smart and be like an operator, a Navy seal essentially…Yet every interaction with the software and HR and parking is a nightmare, that is gonna bleed out into the way they interact with doctors and with the way they interact with the patients and what information they put into systems and which ones they don't.”
This is also especially true for younger generations, who are more and more part of the workforce.
“Generation Z and millennials have have really good BS meters, right? Whereas older generations, it was duty, tradition. And so there's this cultural shift that's happening right now. And so we gotta be transparent. We have to have a brand that isn't just, you know, paint on the outside of our building, but is something that actually is an expression of who we are and how we operate”
Mark also reminds us that it’s not just the big organizations who can walk the talk, aligning values to action.
“The barbershop that I referenced in, in my book Nico’s barber shop, is they, they take I think once a month time to do haircuts for those in need, right? So sometimes it's a like a, a boy's home, sometimes it's a homeless shelter. Sometimes it's low income people who are, are getting interviews like, or sometimes it's teaching kids how to do barbershop haircuts and all that kind of stuff. That has generated rapid, rapid growth - from a haircare product line to multiple stores.”
Indeed, purpose driven branding, a core idea from David Aaker remains very relevant for organizations big and small.
Conclusion
You can’t rip culture apart from the brand. By addressing the cultural challenges head-on, you give the brand a boost in authenticity, laying the foundation for a brand that’s going to fulfill its promise every single day.
Learn more about Mark:
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Branding is Everything, a Bulletproof Strategy Framework, & More
3 min read - 1 Quote, 1 Idea, 1 Tool, 1 Article
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Read time: 3 min
At a glance:
QUOTE: Trust and relationship building does not belong to just one function
IDEA: Branding is everything
TOOL: Campaign strategy framework
ARTICLE: Brand marketing works
QUOTE
“Brand relevance, relationships, trust, should not be left to marketers and communicators and brand experts. That should be the core of any leadership team”
There is so much wisdom behind this quote. Organizations typically silo their functions, but when something like reputation and brand relevance is involved, the entire organization needs to be aligned.
Look at what happened to Southwest Airlines. Culture and branding was probably siloed and left to the marketing and HR functions, because in order to truly fulfill their brand promise of LOVE (their latest campaign being “GO WITH HEART”), it really should mean having the best technologies and systems to make that a reality, which we all know was their downfall over the holidays, canceling over 16,700 flights and forecasting a loss of $875 million.
Trust and relationship building does not belong to just one function.
IDEA
This one illustration garnered 265K views on LinkedIn. I think one of the reasons why it achieved viral status was that it spoke a truth that most understand and feel, but never talked about in the open. Amidst organizational politics and fiefdoms, who dares to claim branding (typically a function of marketing) is everything?
But understanding this one thing has far reaching consequences. How does an entire organization align around fulfilling that brand promise?
TOOL
A simple but highly effective way to frame up any marketing or communications program is the BUSINESS-TO-BRAND STRATEGY framework, adapted from the Nested Strategy from Julian Cole, an ad strategy trainer.
BUSINESS GOAL: What is the business trying to achieve? (eg. Gain 5% market share in 1 quarter)
BUSINESS PROBLEM: What is the business problem we are trying to solve? (eg. Competition winning new accounts)
BUSINESS STRATEGY: What is the business strategy to tackle the problem? (eg. Focus on new accounts where we have a foot in the door)
HUMAN GOAL: What is the decision maker/ target customer trying to achieve? (eg. Physicians are trying to get through the day without total burn out)
HUMAN PROBLEM: What is the underlying problem that is preventing them from reaching the goal? (eg. Being high achievers, they are not willing to half-ass anything)
HUMAN INSIGHT: What is a revelation that no one talks about? (eg. The right technology can half the time without sacrificing their identity)
SINGLE MINDED PROPOSITION: What is the one thing we want the audience to take away? (eg. Show that ABC technology can help them achieve everything without sacrificing anything, including themselves)
ARTICLE
This is about a year old, but the message is very clear: brand marketing works. Early 2022, Airbnb’s CFO talked about their financials from 2019 to 2021. They decreased performance marketing spend by 44% and increased brand marketing spend by 119%, and saw their losses turn into positive profit over a 2 - 3 year period.
My takeaway is that brand marketing works, but it also needs to be balanced with performance marketing tactics. In addition, brand marketing results take time, so set up your measurement and start tracking efforts over the long term.
Ways I can help you:
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SPECIAL EPISODE: Biggest Ahas from 11 Healthy Brand Builders
EP. 12 | SPECIAL EPISODE
Read time: 15 min
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This is a special episode to wrap up the year. So instead of bringing a guest where I grill them and uncover the value bombs and the gems, I share my four biggest ahas from the 11 previous guests that I brought to the show.
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THE FOUR BIGGEST AHAs
#1 Silos are comfortable, but dangerous
When what you do can change the way the enterprise does business, it can't be left to a function. Branding can't just be left to brand experts. Communications can't just be left to communicators. And it's the same with marketing and DE&I.
“You think the battle's over… I just had this epiphany just a few months ago, you know, disruptive innovation, branding is left in the sideline, you know, and to a large extent, social programs and combating society's scary issues and problems. Branding is not where it should be at all. You've got all these people running around with grants, volunteers, energy goals, nothing is branded. It's all aimless. Without brands you not only don't have something that can guide, that can inspire, but can communicate. It's impossible to communicate all that stuff without branding. So you disappear into a cloud of sameness, and as a result, people are saying, you know, maybe we should cut back on these grants and volunteering because it's costing a lot of money and we're in tough times. We gotta survive as a company. So, you know, then you think, oh, we really there yet?”
“Brand relevance, relationships, trust, should not be left to marketers and communicators and brand experts. That should be the core of any leadership team, right? That, I mean, look at, look, I was watching something the other night, it was a documentary on Boeing, and it was about the 737 Max where they had those, you know, really, really tragic accidents. Hundreds of people passed away unfortunately, and the company was denying it up till the end. They kept saying, our mission is safety. And people were dying. I mean because the brand, the purpose, the efficacy was nothing more than a word. It was a statement nobody was relating it to, to the reality, right? I'm not blaming anybody in this regard. I'm just saying that it can get lost quickly when you leave branding to the brand people or the marketers, right? Purpose can get lost quickly. When you leave it to just the communications people, right? Communications people, brand experts, marketing people. Our job is to infiltrate those things into the company. I tell them all the time, we're not here to communicate for the company. We're here to help the company communicate.”
“You know, I, I went from, like I said, consumer product goods companies, which is all marketing. Everyone is thinking marketing from the CEO down of what is the value proposition for this, this opportunity. Who are our customers? Who are our biggest customers? What are they, how are they going to respond to these, you know, products and offerings? And constantly listening and creating a feedback loop and improving and just having your finger on the pulse of insights, community insights, your company insights. There's a loop of communication within those consumer brands that is unlike anything I've ever seen. So everyone is lockstep together, moving forward to produce products that will make people's lives better or more efficient. When I went into healthcare and what I saw from all over the world, traveling to some conferences and hearing this from other individuals, healthcare as an overall, what I saw was they really look at marketing as a tactical kind of resource group”
“To tactically implement a handful of completely disconnected items into the marketplace. There doesn't seem to be a strategic understanding of marketing at the table in order to identify and share insights back and forth with all of your cross-functional teams and a part of engaging the entire leadership team to create strategies. So there really isn't it, and I've seen multiple healthcare strategies. Marketing is a part of every single one of them, but I don't necessarily understand or think that leadership understands that, that, so, so the, the biggest issue I saw is that healthcare leaders leave marketing to just marketing. It's almost carved out. It's a separate thing. You go to them when you need something creative or a new flyer posted or, you know, you wanna create some employee engagement and have a picnic. And that is the least of what marketing is. In fact, that's not marketing whatsoever.”
#2 Action beats everything
Whether you are working on bringing the purpose of an organization to life or faced with a tough decision, the most important thing is to take action and start learning. Because every moment we don't is a missed opportunity to get better.
“There's just so many things that, that you learned by just, by just doing. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I'm a huge believer in that learning by doing Trump's trump's learning by kind of reading or seeing all day long, right? You just don't, there's so many sort of unknowns whether known or not, right? That you just don't, you don't, you won't really fully appreciate until you start actually doing. And so it's so that, that's another kind of thing that I'm a, I'm a huge believer in now even at like, even even with decisions that we're making at like fast wave and Crossfire, is that if you're, if you're 80% sure about that, right? We, we all work with enough smart people that have given us a lot of thought. If we're 80% sure, we just like, action trumps everything, right? We need to see momentum and action versus, you know, getting caught in a death spiral of, of, of paralysis by analysis”
“Community health workers on a motorcycle going hut to hut to hut giving people the drugs they needed. And when you see that happen, I mean that, that kind of, of innovation and willingness to think creatively and, and all funded by the US and we turned, we and other countries eventually participated too. But there's no question the US led the effort. We turned HIV in these places where it was always fatal into a chronic condition. It was transformative. But for me, standing there and seeing that, seeing what we were able to do in one of the poorest places on earth, we built the infrastructure, delivered the drugs, transformed healthcare. Cuz once you built the clinic, right, you didn't just treat h hiv, you could treat child mat, you know, children's health and maternal health, right?”
“It's infrastructure. All of a sudden, you, you transformed healthcare. So I'm standing there in the middle of nowhere, Uganda <laugh>, one of the poorest places on earth. And I, I remember just saying to myself, if we could do this here, there is no reason why we can't have a healthcare system that works in America. We've got the wealthiest country in the history of mankind. We, we have resources that are just, it, it, it's, it's hard to even count the zeroes behind how much we can spend. And yet we're d yet our healthcare system doesn't work for everybody. That's not acceptable. That can't we, we just can't let that go on. And I, and then I say to myself, ABNA, you can talk about this. You can, you can moan about it and, and talk about it or you can do something about it. Here's your choice. Moan and <laugh> and, and, and, and vetch about it or do something about it. And that's when I decided that I was gonna start what has become same Sky health. Cause I said I can't, it's not enough to talk about it. That, that we need to do better. We, we need to actually do better, right? So I want to be part of, of doing better and that's what I'm trying to do with SameSky Health.”
“There's someone, there was someone who once told me the nannies come from Trinidad. So don't tell people you're from Trinidad. Just tell them you went to school in Canada, cuz that sounds better. It's like amazing the thing, the microaggressions that like you see in it here. But I mean, I kept on trucking because my mother famously said to me before she died, when I experienced something terrible at work at the time, she was like, one of these days, your haters will be your waiters. Just keep that in the back of your mind. And so that's one of the things that has just also kept me going. You know, I also truly believe in leaving a legacy for those who are also coming up behind me, right? Because I was like, if I fail, what does that say and mean for the people who are more junior to me?”
#3 Your brand is not about you
It's what the audience wants. It's who the customers want to become. When you focus outwardly on those you serve and wish to influence, your stories will start to matter and your brand will start to gain true fans.
“And so when you study the science of influence, you realize that you have to communicate a couple things really well. One, what you make, absolutely what do you make? How is it better? What are the functional facts, features, benefits. But you also gotta communicate what you make happen. And what you make happen is a feeling. And for so long as strategists and as creatives you'd see on the creative brief, we want people to feel confident, we want them to feel empowered. We want them to feel peace of mind. And to execute against that was, you know, these are like bankrupt words that we see every brand. Chances are every healthcare brand wants their target audience to feel empowered, peace of mind in control. And so what we did was we dug deeper and we realized who really knows how to influence people, role models, role models, know how to influence people. And when you know how to role model something, then people don't just wanna buy you, they wanna be you. That's the goal. So then we said, okay, well how do we role model? We have to go a step further. What do you make? Yes. What do you make happen? Yes. What are you gonna role model is based on your target audiences fantasy self.”
“You know, the challenge is your goal from a company point of view is to have your story and your wording and phrasing used by the journalist. And journalists don't want that. You know? As a journalist when I was at Bloomberg, you know, I, we had, I had four screens in my desk with headlines constantly streaming up. And my goals were at a story or a headline. So amazing that you stopped your tracks and clicked on that story and shared it with your friends. And so a journalist wants a story that hasn't been written before, or an angle or a perspective that hasn't been told. Because, you know, it's like, say you pitch a story to your editor and they just google the topic and there's like a hundred their stories or the exact same thing. It's not really interesting, right? So they're gonna say, well come up with something different.”
“So the challenge is for, for companies is how do you, you know, give journalists something unique and special at at when they're interested in it? And again, you know, as a journalist, I was kind of loathed to do profiles of companies cuz it felt like we were fawning over them. You didn't wanna wanna be seen as in the tank for a company or, you know, wanting to support a company. You wanna be neutral. So the other kind of thing challenge I see is from a comms point of view versus a journalist's point of view. This, a lot of times the journalist, I'd write a story that thought was really balanced and a showcase a company, but it talked about that quote unquote to be sure paragraph. We always had a Bloomberg where, you know, this sounds awesome to be sure. Some people say it sucks, you know, or it won't ne it'll never happen to give balance. And a lot of companies at pr, people I was friends with coming after go, we thought it wasn't worth doing the story because of this to be sure paragraph. So I think, you know, it's important to set expectations like, look, you know, you can get a story in a media, but it may not come out like you want, or it may have, you know, your opposite or or competitor mentioned. So if you're, you know, not fine with that, you have to rethink your approach”
“When they've gotta go out and raise 20 million or they need to attract employees or they need to sign on to vendors who don't have space for them, but they need their capacity in order to get their work done. Even in the early stage, even before patients, before you have, you're in humans. And then don't even talk about like, then you're recruiting investigators and you're recruiting patients and the families of patients to wanna come on and put and i I and take a pill that no human has ever taken and you're already sick. Like, just think about that, right? Like, what does it take to be willing to do that? So I think there are, and, and of all those people, of the investors and the employees and the potential investigators and the patients and the vendor partners, all of those stakeholders, sure there may be some that are just laser focused on tell me about the atoms and molecules and tell me exactly about how this science works.”
“And I will with a completely cold heart determine whether that science appeals to me or not. I'm sure there are people in that system that I just described that don't need to have a feeling, but I would argue that most of those people need to have some level of trust to give us their money, give us their bodies to test things on, give us their capacity and space, which has an opportunity cost for other clients that these vendors could have give us their livelihoods as an employees. That is not nothing. And it is very rarely completely on the like front part of your brain that you make those decisions. There's a do I fundamentally trust these people? Do I feel good about being attached to these people? How will I think, how will people see me if I'm in, you know, standing in the same room as, as this group of people? Well then how are, how is everybody seeing this group so I know what kind of halo effect I will or will not have as I'm connected? I mean, I think that's just human nature.”
#4 Take the opportunity before you and ask what if
We have a tendency to wait, wait for the right role, the right problem, the right opportunity, then we will really do what it takes. But time and time again, learning from my guests, one thing is certain, don't wait. Use the opportunity in front of you and make it what you will. The limits we artificially place on ourselves are the limits of the opportunity in front of us.
“Wow. You know you, you, you move your family there to launch a product which is, which everybody was super excited about. And then the FDA doesn't, you know, doesn't accept the file. So that that forced our team to figure out, you know, how do we survive? You know, how does the business survive? How are we gonna keep our employees? How are we gonna keep our customers? What, what are we gonna do? We're just gonna lose market share. That's a whole nother, that was a whole nother experience that wasn't a lot of fun when it first happened, but probably wow, probably the most probably one of the most valuable lessons I've learned by, by having gone through it. And it was about a five to six year technology gap.”
“When I started out, I was making no money. I had an entry level job wire cable company, a thousand people upstate New York get in there and I, they, there's a four page newsletter and they say, Gary, you know, this is, you gotta publish this every month. It was bowling scores and all this other stuff. And I started walking around the mill and I realized within, you know, two or three months, it's like nobody talks to each other. These people hate leadership. Leadership doesn't like them. There was a union involved. There was strikes every two years. And so I did two things which changed the company. I, I basically redesigned the newsletter to be. We, we sent it to the home instead of just distributing it. We became 12 pages. I talked about the business, I talked about competition, talked about the marketplace, how we priced products.”
“I gave profiles to people. I took pictures. I mean, we, we were, we were producing 3,000 copies for a 1,000 person workforce because people wanted extra. And then the other thing I did is I got a grant from the federal mediation and conciliation service to, to form a labor management committee. I was 22 years old and the Labor Management Committee was, was every month we sat down outside of the contract, 12 union people, 12 management people on each side of the table. And we talked about everything but the contract, safety, communications, you know, not, you know, all the things outside quality. And within what maybe 18 months they signed their first six year contract. They, there was no more this side was labor. They, they were actually intermingling. They were, we had holiday parties together. We broke the barrier because we discovered each other. I was only 22. I'm not saying I'm smart, I'm just saying all, all I'm saying is communications can, can do that.”
“It's a lesson I'd learned later, but I think, I wish I had known it earlier. And that is that every person that comes into your life has something to give you. And you've gotta be humble enough and open enough to acknowledge that and to receive it and to, to see people as sort of opportunities to learn and to grow that they have something to give you. And if you haven't figured it out, that's on you. You need to keep, you need to figure it out. I think I missed a lot of opportunities and didn't take advantage of them in the way they should because I didn't understand just the importance of people in your life and that they have something to give.”
“Businesses are in a position where they can help regardless of industry. And it's just as long as it's aligned with your values, it's aligned with what your employees believe in, what your CEO, what your executives believe in, it can be beneficial. You say we're not Patagonia, why can't we be Patagonia? Yeah, you're right. We're not Patagonia, we we don't make clothing, we make medicines, but that doesn't mean that we can't go beyond what we're doing from a medicine standpoint, as you rightly pointed out. Why not? Why can't you? And I think it's just, it's broadening the thinking and really digging in to think about what your brand is, not only internally, but what it means externally and what you're putting out there. And I think that saying we're not is obviously an obstacle. And I'm always asking people why, why, why can't we do that? Who else do we need to involve? Why, why can't we have these crazy ideas?”
Conclusion
It’s been incredible to interview leaders in marketing, communications, branding in the world of healthcare and learn from their experiences. I hope you've enjoyed this special episode and took away something that can help you build your brands and your career.
Ways I can help you:
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13 lessons in 2022 that I'll take with me forever
4 min read - The 13 lessons learned through breakdowns and breakthroughs
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Read time: 4 min
The year has been hard. I was let go in the Spring and I was the main earner in the family. My wife was (is) still coming back from her concussion and that was only the beginning. We had to muscle through two surgical procedures and COVID this year. OOF!
But as the saying goes, "Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs", I was able to replace my income with consulting work and reach 995,811 views on my LinkedIn content this year. I was even able to bring David Aaker, hailed the father of modern branding onto my newly launched podcast.
So here are the 13 lessons I've gained along the way:
1. People are gifts
The good interactions leave you energized and maybe even become a life long relationship. The bad interactions help you grow. No matter what happens, when people come into your life, see them as gifts and be open to receive them. I have gained so many "friends" from LinkedIn and my podcast this year. It's been 🔥.
2. You are not your job
Our identities are so wrapped up in our work and rightfully so, we spend so much of our time working. But when I was let go, I had to find myself again, recover what was repressed or set aside.
3. Everybody starts from 0
Gaining followers, building email lists, selling my services as a consultant... every endeavor starts with a first step and we are all on our own journeys to get where we need to go. So instead of being disheartened, know that there is no race, just the acting of running.
4. Everything can be figured out
Starting a business can seem daunting, but like everything else, any problem can be tackled as long as you take the time to figure it out. There is an abundance of resources to help us through anything. I mean, I fixed my dishwasher by watching a 2 min youtube video... amazing!
5. Nobody is paying attention to you
We are self-centered beings in the end, our reality seems like the reality of others, when in fact everyone is consumed with themselves. After being laid off for 6 months, I still have people saying - oh! I didn't know you left the agency? So keep telling your story.
6. Everyone is making it up as they go
It can seem those who have "made it" got their shit together. The truth is, everyone is trying their best, making it up, trying, failing, learning and trying again! So make it up, just GO.
7. If you don't own your time, others will
As a solopreneur, my time is mine to structure, but that has not been the case for decades. If I don't schedule time for the most important things to me, it will get eaten up, leaving me with the scraps of time to spend on what matters to me.
8. Everybody puts on their pants one leg at a time
We tend to put our idols on a pedestal and be anxious about talking to those at the pinnacle of their careers. But the truth is they are just people, their public personas are just that. It really hit home when I was able to get David Aaker on my fledgling podcast. A dream come true and a stark reminder.
9. Things can seem impossible until they are done
Starting a business, supporting a family as a consultant, it can seem daunting and impossible, but once you've passed that goal, it seems so ridiculous that we doubted ourselves in the first place. Keep going for "impossible".
10. Your emotion and creativity is what differentiates you
Our skills are replicable, AI will get better and better. Our secret sauce is our emotions, our passion, how we interact with others, the way we make others feel. It's the crazy ideas and the big swings.
11. Shedding what's embedded in my mind is a constant process
We are programmed from a young age on what we are "supposed to do", how we are "supposed to think", and what success "supposedly is". Why should we be working long hours in order to feel like we're productive? Why should making more money mean sacrificing more family? It doesn't. Un-think it.
12. When you help without expectations, good things will happen
Give and expect nothing in return. By virtue of you being a little farther along means there is something valuable you can share. Karma is real, and good things will befall you - I've had many serendipitous things happen, one of which is appearing on the cover of Freelancer Magazine!
13. There is an abundance of problems to be solved, choose wisely
There are countless companies and individuals who need help. Many problems to be solved. What you need to do is to pick the problems you want to solve, are great at solving, and the wealth will come your way, along with joy and fulfillment.
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
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Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Unleashing the Power of Consumer Marketing & Branding in Health Care with Carrie Lewis
EP. 11 | Carrie Lewis
Read time: 5.5 min
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What happens when a consumer marketing veteran gets into health care? Expect drama, sparks, and transformation.
Carrie Lewis is a lifelong marketer in the consumer space, leading marketing for global brands like Sherwin Williams and Stanley Black and Decker. Most recently she pivoted and became a CMO at Metro Health System in Cleveland. Today, she works as a fractional CMO as part of Chief Outsiders. In our conversation a few weeks ago, we get real about what it was like to take her marketing chops into health care and her counter intuitive strategies she uses to turn around and generate $2 Bn in revenue for a struggling community hospital system.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:
As a new CMO, start with curiosity, humility, and share why you are there
Use the power of personal stories to give patients hope
Health care organizations typically have marketing carved out - that needs to change
Show the executive team what is marketing, never tell them
Be a cheerleader for the CEO and help them reach their goals
Close the great divide in provider organizations through marketing and watch the culture improve
Take the first 100 days to digest all research and learn everything you can
KEY LESSONS
Embed marketing and branding into the entire organization, bringing together the “great divide”
Marketing is typically seen as a peripheral function. Especially for health care organizations, and companies, whose leadership are typically clinically trained or grew up in finance and operations. Carrie contrasted that to her experience in consumer brands.
“Everyone is thinking marketing from the CEO down about value proposition for this opportunity. Who are our biggest customers? They are constantly listening and have their finger on the pulse on the company, the community, and their customers.”
When Carrie arrived at Metro Health System, she observed an issue which was front and center “Health care leaders leave marketing to just marketing. It's a separate thing. You go to them when you need something creative or a new flyer posted, and that is the least of what marketing is.” My perspective is that this doesn’t only exist in health care providers, it’s pervasive within the health care industry.
The other important observation is the “great divide” between clinicians and leadership, where the power struggle between groups lead to contempt and an extremely misaligned organization, which is almost always felt by the employees, the community, and the patients. Carrie found a way to bring them together by heavily highlighting the physicians as the individuals and the service leaders that they were. It created trust and bolstered employee culture, which started to bring the two groups together. Moving from a world of “what can you do for me” to “what can we do together”.
Personal stories are incredibly powerful, they bring hope to patients and can rally an organization
Carrie Lewis and late husband Andrew in a cab going from New York to Columbia for chemo.
Carrie’s story about why she entered the health care industry as a marketing executive is extremely personal. “I was with Sherwin Williams as Vice President of marketing for their consumer brands channel, and he had passed away when I was there. When you lose your husband at 40, you need a moment. A moment to reflect. A moment to digest that. I took a year off… I did anything physical I could to have silent moments of just pure reflection - where did I go wrong? What could I have done better? Like divine intervention, I got a call from a local hospital… they said, help, we need a real marketer.”
And when she started, she was incredibly humble, curious, and shared her story with physicians and leaders of the health system, “I'm here because I want people that were in my situation to be able to know exactly what this team can deliver them, and they don't”
When asked what was THE thing that health care organizations are missing out on in terms of branding and marketing, Carrie didn’t hesitate – hopeful patient stories.
“I really truly believe that my job as a caregiver to Andrew and what got him from two years to 10 years was his endless idea that there was hope. I needed him to have a placebo of hope wrapped around him. Stories shed light on very specific human experiences that the healthcare enterprise has with patients… Those are stories and messages of hope that individuals, caregivers, and patients that are ill cling to.”
She also acknowledges how hard it is, but that’s why these stories are special.
“Writing those stories, having that amount of content to constantly generate and produce, get them into the right platforms so that people can find them. That's a marketer's nightmare. But that's what needs to be done and that's why it's not being done”
Gain trust from the executive team and get more budget for marketing by showing, not telling
As a new CMO to a team that doesn’t get marketing and branding, you don’t start educating folks.
“Show them. Don't tell them a thing. I'm a huge advocate of pay by the drink funding. You carve out a little bit of funding, you do something, you show incredible return… After a while, your CEO comes to you and says, how much money do you need to make this incredible return even more incredible?”
And a secret strategy Carrie use is to make sure she allocates a percentage of her priorities to achieving the goals of the CEO.
“Your number one job is to be the CEO’s cheerleader. So what I secretly do is to divide myself by maybe 80/20 making sure the CEO’s goals are being delivered, that’s my 20%”
If she is faced with big negative voices, Carrie runs toward them, instead of avoiding them, an effective but counter intuitive tactic.
“A squeaky wheel that hates marketing? You're my first guy. Because when you flip that guy and he goes, oh my God, marketing generated 30% new patient prospects for me. That guy starts to tell your story, and every single department chair comes to you”
There is no marketing hack – results require a stringent process and an ecosystem of tactics
When talking to Carrie, I asked her about her process and what she tends to do first in every engagement. And while she feels that every project is different, she follows a familiar approach. It all starts with data and insights.
“In my first free 100 days before they can fire me…is insights, complete saturation of insights, customer insights, every single patient insight. I want data, I wanna understand the competitors. I wanna understand every single thing that they're bringing to market. Anything that they've talked about bringing to the market. Their ups and downs, their weaknesses, their specialties. I wanna understand our company. So I meet with every single senior leader executive to try to understand their purpose"
Next, she dives into strategy development, understanding the market place and the opportunities for growth before them. After that, it’s getting into positioning and all the foundational branding elements right. The last step is activating on the tactics, and this is where Carrie offered up a story as a green marketer putting her all her eggs in one tactic, thinking it would be the unlock to revenue growth, but alas, a costly mistake.
“It was a very expensive, I mean, this would be a year to create all of this data and content… it’s horrible, I think it was like $380,000 of iPads”
Conclusion
If you want to get the behind the scenes look at how a consumer marketer sees health care and the strategies and stories of how she helped generate a whopping $2Bn in revenue for a struggling health system, download and listen!
Learn more about Carrie:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
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Want to Get Promoted Faster? Bring Strategy Into Everything You Do
3.5 min read - Have you ever been told to be more strategic? Or your manager telling you that the reason you haven’t been promoted is that you aren’t strategic enough?
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Have you ever been told to be more strategic? Or your manager telling you that the reason you haven’t been promoted is that you aren’t strategic enough?
Well, let’s put their money where their mouth is.
So what is strategy anyway?
The Oxford dictionary defines strategy as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim”
And various gurus have given us some thought provoking quotes about strategy
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” Michael Porter
“Tactics without strategy is the noise without defeat” Sun Tzu
“Fitting in is a short-term strategy, standing out pays off in the long run” Seth Godin
They tell us why strategy is important and what strategy needs to be, but it doesn’t tell us how to get more of it.
My definition? Strategy is a series of decisions based on insights that sets the direction to overcome barriers to achieve a goal. It means that if it’s something you must do as a business or as a brand, it’s not strategy.
To be more strategic, you need to understand all four parts:
1. Goal (What are you trying to achieve?)
2. Problem (What’s in the way?)
3. Insight (What gives us an idea about our direction?)
4. Strategy (How will we move forward?)
After over a decade of strategy work, I’ve compiled thirteen ways for anyone to be more strategic
1. Understand the bigger picture
- How does your company activities relate to the overall category?
- What is the context of the company’s offering and brand in the current culture?
- Are the tactics pushing us in the right direction?
2. Look for patterns and connect the dots
- When looking at data or hearing from participants in a workshop, ask yourself – what is common?
- What seems to be a recurring theme?
- How might disparate ideas be weaved together?
3. Know the why behind the tactics
- Why these channels? Why this content? Why this cadence?
- Why are we executing a social media campaign on Instagram?
- Why are we developing an explainer video for the website?
4. Deliberately decide what you are not doing
- What are the strategies you are considering?
- What insights give you a sense of what you should pursue?
- What are the strategies are you NOT pursuing? Why?
5. Drive towards insights, not just data
- What does the data tell you that is not typical?
- How can you leverage everything you know and make a leap from what you see from the data to arrive at an insight?
- Ask so what, so what, so what to arrive at a unique insight that makes you say “aha!”
6. Step into your audience’s shoes
- What will my audience think, feel, do about this?
- What do they buy? (Hint: it’s not “what we sell”)
- How does your message, your offer stack up against everything in the audience’s world?
7. Appreciate the impact to the business
- How does anything you do affect the business in the short term and the long term?
- How do the tactics point back to the business objectives?
- How are we strengthening or weakening our positioning in the market?
8. Have a toolkit of frameworks
- Business strategy (SWOT, BCG Growth-Share Matrix, Porter’s Five Forces, GE-McKinsey Nine-Box Matrix, OKR etc.)
- Brand strategy (Brand architecture, Brand pyramid, Aaker’s Brand Equity Model, Brand positioning, 5 Cs etc.)
9. Be curious about human behavior
- How is the irrational mind contributing to the problem?
- What is “under the surface” that we need to solve?
- What does emotion and relationship have to do with the situation?
10. Write with simple language that inspires
- What words can I remove from my copy?
- What words can I use that get an emotional reaction?
- What buzzwords can I replace with simple words?
11. Seek and deliver clarity
- Is it direct?
- Do I have to mentally figure it out?
- Can it mean something different?
12. Drive priority and hierarchy
- Which is more important?
- Are there three key things instead of a list of 20?
- If there is only one thing to remember, what would it be?
13. Find commonality in dimensions and denominators
- How can you avoid using a mix of nouns, adjectives, and verbs when describing processes, stages, or categories? (“Insight, Strategy, Execution” vs. “Insight, Strategic, Execute”)
- Are you able to group or cluster information?
- Is there one theme across everything?
There is no one way to be strategic. But following these prompts can help you step out of the tactical and think more strategically.
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
The Untold Truths in Strategic Communications & Business Transformation with Gary Grates
EP. 10 | Gary Grates
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What comes to mind when you hear the word communications? When people hear “communications”, they might think PR or they might think of it as a non-critical function. But they could not be more wrong…
In this interview with Gary Grates, a globally renown strategic communications expert and C-suite whisperer who has worked with the world’s biggest brands from Pfizer to United Airlines, we uncover the hidden truths in the world of comms and business transformation. This episode will change the way you build company brands forever.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Communications is not just about communications, it’s everything
Business transformation often fails, start with the brand in mind, not the business
Forget your title to determine what is the real problem to solve
Never let your job description stop you from doing what the business needs
When working with the c-suite, stop selling and start listening
Careers are not a vertical progression, careers are for learning
Develop a point of view or be replaceable
KEY LESSONS
Communications will fail if it’s just about communications
Everything communicates. This is something that stuck in my head after talking with Gary. If you want something to be successful, you need to communicate well.
“Communications touches everything. You could have the cure for cancer. You could be the smartest dude on the planet. If you can't connect and communicate and convey and listen and interact and collaborate. It doesn't matter. All that stuff doesn't matter. We (communicators) are the oxygen that keeps life moving.”
Gary tells a story in the podcast episode about his first job as a communicator, in charge of an internal newsletter. Instead of just being a newsletter editor, he used that as a vehicle to bring manufacturing and management together, changing the way business was conducted and the atmosphere of the company. Think about that for a second – from owning a newsletter, to changing the entire culture of the company. That’s communications.
To perform this type of miracle, Gary was adamant that you can’t stay in the lane of communications, you need to understand the entire company.
“A lot of communications people feel, oh I don't belong there. I was in manufacturing meetings, design meetings, brand meetings… I wanted to be in every freaking meeting. You’ve got to finagle your way into the conversation. That’s the only way you’re gonna make a difference.”
He also talks about how if communication is left to just communicators, it will all fall apart. It should really be the core of any leadership team.
“Purpose can get lost quickly when you leave it to just the communications people. We're not here to communicate for the company. We're here to help the company communicate.”
Start business transformation with the brand in mind, not the business
Gary has helped many businesses transform and his advice? Start with the brand. How is the transformation going to impact the purpose, identity, and the people? Then align the business against that.
“We have always looked at business transformation, again, through the lens of the business side, the financial side, the operational side, the structural side. And 70% of business transformations fail. And they fail because we start there. But if you start with the brand identity, which nobody does in business transformation. Here's who we and what we are. Here's our relevance, here's our reputation, here's our promise, here's our identity. Here are the things that we've done with all our key stakeholders over the years to establish our personality. Now let's talk about what do we have to do as a business to ensure that that's still gonna happen, that's still relevant. Then the transformation becomes much clearer.”
It's counter-intuitive because most of the executives in charge of transforming the business aren’t trained in communications or brand. This is the exact conversation I had with David Aaker in Episode 8 where branding is usually never mentioned in disruptive innovation or social program discussions, because executives aren’t trained in these disciplines. They are usually operations or finance trained. Gary laments:
“I think it comes down to sheer ignorance. And I don't mean that people aren't smart. That's not what I mean. These people are very smart. I'm talking about ignorance about communication. I sent an email, I communicated. I put a poster up, I communicated, I created a logo, I branded my company. I created a theme, I gave my company some type of personality”
And so our job is to insert ourselves into transformation meetings to positively alter the trajectory.
Forget your job description to figure out the problem to solve
If you approach your work as a communicator, as a branding person, you’re going to miss the boat. Because if all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. You might be focusing on something that is not helpful to the business. Gary shares his experience in his first company:
“We were focusing on the numbers, and we weren't focusing on how to get the numbers. How to get the numbers was the people, how to get the numbers was the process, how to get the numbers was the priority. That's how you got the numbers. But we focused on the numbers. We were up, we were down, we were sideways.”
Often, when communicators are brought to the table, leaders may think it’s a communications problem, but if we approach it as a neutral participant, we might start to realize it’s anything but.
“Start with what are you trying to solve? That's number one. Cause that's basically altruistic, that doesn't take sides. That doesn't go after it as a brand issue or communications issue. Is it a communications problem? If everything's a communications problem, you're chasing symptoms. I see this in politics. It's a communications problem, no, no, no, the policy sucks. The communications people should be working with leadership to figure out how they need to reconstruct the policy or the decision”
His personal experience is a very powerful reminder that if you’re looking out for your company, you can be sure your job will never be limited and you will be valued.
“I never looked at a job description in my life. Never did. Even at GM. My goal was to figure out what we were, what the company needed and any company that I worked with, it was never about - you're only supposed to do these things, you report to that person. I never let that get in the way.”
When working with the C-suite, stop selling and start listening
As a C-suite whisperer, I couldn’t forego the opportunity to ask Gary how he approached the highest levels in an organization. He has two specific pieces of advice for folks like me:
Number One: Listen intently
“One is - always listen intently. Cause you're trying to figure out what they're saying, but also what they're not saying. You're trying to look for the shadow behind the person.”
Number Two: Never go in with an answer
“Never go in with an answer. Always go in with a set of questions. Everybody wants to be a hero with the CEO. Everybody wants to go in and say - I think we should do this. I've never done that. I've always gone in, as I said before ask, how smart and engaged do you want your people to be? Where do you see the organization? You guys have been changing so much over the last five years. Can you tell me what business you're in? I mean, having provocative questions that stop the CEO in a way that says, Hey, this, this person's paying attention.”
And never sell them, instead have a conversation and see where it goes.
“CEOs hate salesmen. And yet so many people go in with a PowerPoint. I've yet to see a CEO react to a PowerPoint. It's always the discussion. You want to have a conversation and walk away where you can say, hey, there's a mind meld here, let's see what we can do.”
There is so much more to our conversation, and this is one of those episodes where there will be something new every time you listen to it. It’s jam packed with learnings from decades of experience in the field of strategic corporate communications. I really do hope you enjoy it and it changes the way you build your company brands, making them the healthiest brands on the planet.
Learn more about Gary:
- Website
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A Framework for Getting What You (Your Company) Wants
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal setting and management tool created by Andy Grove. And it’s been used at companies like Google, Allbirds, Netflix, and many others.
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Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal setting and management tool created by Andy Grove at Intel and taught to John Doerr. Doerr coined the term OKR and was the one who introduced the philosophy to Google’s founders in 1999.
Since then, many companies have adopted the OKR model to simplify and clarify what they were doing and how they are going to get there.
So what are the components of an OKR?
The model is simple -
Objective
An objective is what you need achieved over the course of a year or even longer term. They should be significant, concrete, and aspirational. It serves to align a company, department, or for individuals.
Key Results
What needs to happen? Key results are specific, timebound (usually a quarter), aggressive, and measurable/ verifiable. As work progressed, they can be revisited and restated.
Each set of OKRs should be held accountable by one person, and each key result can be assigned to another accountable individual if appropriate. As long as it brings clarity to who is doing what to reach the OKRs, the framework is doing its job.
WHY OKRs?
There are many benefits to use this framework, and John Doerr always talk about the five that matters:
F.A.C.T.S.
Focus: OKRs help a team to do a few things really well instead of a lot of things poorly
Alignment: OKRs, when used across the organization, points everyone in the same direction that is critical to execute on the business and brand strategy
Commitment: OKRs push teams and individuals to sign up for specific outcomes, sticking to the agreed upon priorities
Tracking: OKRs are meant to track progress and uncover when tactics need to be changed instead of failing at the “end”
Stretching: OKRs help teams do more and aim for something bigger. And because OKRs are not tied to compensation, sandbagging is not as prevalent, allowing the organization to make more significant progress and changes.
THE FRAMEWORK
If I were to write an OKR for this blog post, it would this:
This is a simple framework for crafting OKRs, but as you can see, we can make it clearer and more measurable:
How many benefits?
How many common mistakes?
How long should the post be?
As with any framework, it takes practice to fill it up and make it as useful as possible.
EXAMPLES
In this example, I show how a high-level objective of the CEO can get translated down to each of the department heads. The objective to “Serve as many patients as possible for as long as possible” becomes a rallying cry for the rest of the organization, and the Key Results of the CEOs in turn become the Objective for the management team members.
You can easily imagine how it can go as many levels as it needs to go to penetrate the entire organization. What is your specific objective if you are Brand Strategist working for the CMO who works for the CCO?
Another example is for a Chief Marketing Officer responsible for a rebrand effort.
You can have more than 3 Key Results and you probably guessed that bigger objectives will probably have more of them than very specific objectives.
COMMON MISTAKES
Writing OKRs can take time to develop and every set of OKRs should have some sort of a feedback and iterative process so everyone is absolutely committed.
Here are a few mistakes to avoid
Too many objectives (aim for no more than five)
OKRs written in jargon that no one understands (they should all be self-evident when it has or hasn’t been achieved)
Treating OKRs as KPIs (Key performance indicators, or KPIs are measures of “health”, and not an management framework for change)
Status quo OKRs (OKRs are meant for boosting the business above what’s commonly done)
I hope you start to use OKRs in your business and in your team. It should help bring clarity and a sense of commitment to something meaningful. And remember that if you/ your team fail to reach certain Key Results, it’s meant as input to refine the next set of OKRs - it should never be seen as a failure. If it is seen as a failure, then the organization will start to “sandbag” and aim lower and lower each time there is an OKR exercise.
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How to Tell Brand Stories That Reporters Want, and Audiences Repeat with Ryan Flinn
EP. 9 | Ryan Flinn
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The term storytelling has been thrown around quite a bit over the last decade, but how do you actually get the stories you want in the media landscape?
In this interview with Ryan Flinn, a former Bloomberg journalist and now a communications leader at health care and biotech companies shares his lessons from the trenches so you can better tell your stories that reporters want and audiences can’t wait to repeat.
In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
It doesn’t matter how many people you reach, it only matters reaching the right ones
Communications is never done, especially after publication
The intrinsic conflict between what a company wants to say and what a reporter needs to write
Jargon and complexity are death in storytelling
The dramatic rise or falls lead to the best stories
Build relationships when starting your career, it pays dividends for life
KEY LESSONS
Always think about the audience first
It may seem obvious, but most brands forget that stories are meant for their audiences, not for them. A story that doesn’t get retold is a dead end, underleveraging the power story. Hence, we all need to follow our audiences and stop assuming what may work. Ryan reminds us that vanity goals like appearing on a top tier publication doesn’t mean a home run.
“Who is the audience we wanna reach? Is it patients? Is it physicians? Is it KOLs or people at universities? Maybe it is a New York Times story, but whatever it is, where are they spending their time reading and how can we reach them? I think generally found that, not everyone reads the top papers.”
When thinking about the audience, it’s also an important realization that there is no silver bullet in communications – a comprehensive approach is needed.
“The top papers don't necessarily drive conversation as much as owned media does. So understanding that you can put out your own social media posts that can get to your audience better than pitching a journalist who may not cover you or may not write the story you wanna write is important. I do think it's important to have a comprehensive approach to everything.”
When talking about audiences, Ryan pointed out that most companies want to keep silent when there is bad news, but audiences want and need information, especially during these situations. Companies need to prepare for crisis by having a playbook of what information to provide instead of following their natural instincts to keep quiet and let the critics drive the story and perception of the brand.
“I think companies always get in trouble when they didn't address a really bad situation. They would do no comment or we're not gonna talk about it. Like in life, it's hard to accept failure and acknowledge failure. But as a company, I think being able to acknowledge failure, and yes we're gonna look at it and try to find out a solution. It allows you to at least seem kind of human versus, you know, kind of a stone cold, no comment. Cause then the loudest critics are the ones that are always the ones that are driving the story”
Always ask the question – what do my audiences need to hear?
Communications doesn’t stop after the story is out
It’s natural to stop once the story is out, assume the published story will speak for itself and the work is done. But in today’s media landscape and aligning with the expectations of the public, putting something out there is only the beginning.
“Nowadays reporters are more successful when they do end up as a PR person and promoting their own story. Continue the conversation gets more engagement.”
Ryan reminds us that audiences have their own agenda and even if you are delivering bad news, it may be attracting a group of people who have no other options. He recounted a story when he was the head of communications, addressing a bad situation and he expected the end in the process after publication of the release, but he was wrong.
“We put out a press release talking about these patient deaths, I get a call from a mom who saw the release, saw my name on it, and said, hey, my kid has this disease, how do I get into the trial? Because again, they're so desperate. There's no other treatment or cure, you know? Um, so I, I think understanding that there'll be different motivations for the audience is important”
Find the intersection between what the journalist needs and what your company wants
There is an intrinsic conflict between what the company wants to communicate about the brand and what journalists needs in a story. Ryan shares his perspective during his time as a journalist.
“The challenge is that your goal from a company point of view is to have your story and your wording and phrasing used by the journalist. And journalists don't want that. When I was at Bloomberg, I had four screens in my desk with headlines constantly screaming up. And my goal to write a story or headline, so amazing that you stop your tracks and click on that story and share it with your friends. And so a journalist wants a story or an angle or a perspective that hasn't been told.”
What you need to do is develop a relationship with the journalist and really understand the type of stories and angles they are interested in, while aligning it to a broader trend that’s hot. Not something easy to do, but that’s why media relations and PR is as much an art as it is science.
“It's important to set expectations that you can get a story in the media, but it may not come out like you want or it may have a competitor mention. So if you're not fine with that, you have to rethink your approach. But how do we get journalists interested in stories? The key is understanding who they are as a person. Uh, I always tell people to think of it as a relationship and not a transaction. If you only go to a journalist with a press release and say, I want coverage, that's not gonna work, right?”
Ryan shares an example of bringing up a brand and what they are up to in a different and fresh way.
“I was on this feature beat at Bloomberg where everyone covered Apple and Google. I was trying to find stories that they wouldn’t pass and at the same time be a good feature. And so when Apple put its phone out every year, the Apple reporter will cover the Apple iphone and the event. For me, I got a story once about what happens to these old phones that are being thrown away. And so we did a whole story about the companies that were buying the used phones from consumers and reselling them. And it, it wasn't like a big known thing back then. So again, that's like a unique angle to the Apple phone release”
Tell stories that are simple and have the biggest rise or fall
Our discussion around stories had us laughing about how jargon is used so much in healthcare – “end-to-end solutions”, “first in class treatment”, “innovative products”… the list goes on. And while stories are about relaying a message, Ryan was clear that a story’s job is to make the audience emotionally attached and be retold. He also helped me visualize the key to a good story.
“The key thing to all stories is change over time. So if you think about an XY graph and change is one axis, and time is the other axis. A story is the biggest delta between two points. So typically you think about what was the most change I got to success and what was the moment when I thought I was going to fail?”
A practical way he used to test his stories are by telling it to his kids and try to maintain their attention. It’s a high bar, but it works to see if the story is attention grabbing, easy to understand, and simply shareable.
“Wired has this thing - six conversations. They take a topic like black holes, they have an expert explain black holes to a kindergartner, a middle schooler, a high schooler, a college student, and then another expert. And you can see the lenses they put on in the conversation. How do you explain a complex topic to someone who's not in the space? And this where I practice on my kids. When I'm story mining, I'll sometimes present to my children who are in middle school and if they can understand, if I keep their interest, which is hard. I know they're doing a good job explaining a complex topic.”
Communications and storytelling in the world of healthcare is not easy, but done well can really help to build an audience who is emotionally invested in the brand.
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Brand Activation Clock Model
Brand activation is not just ads and promotions, run through the clock framework to see how you can build brand at every step of the customer journey.
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When people think about brand activation, it is usually restricted to advertising. That’s significantly under-leveraging the power of branding.
One of the most powerful frameworks you can use to fully capture the branding opportunity is using the Clock Model.
Professor Scott Galloway of NYU has taught the Clock Model in his brand strategy classes for years and here I will dissect it in the lens of a health care brand.
The model is simple - three segments of the clock
Pre-purchase
Purchase
Post-purchase
I’ll walk through the model using a fictional health care brand, selling a sleep apnea prevention device that has to be prescribed by a physician called SLEEPZ.
PRE-PURCHASE
In this section of the clock model, it’s all about prospecting and nurturing, getting potential customers (physicians and patients) to learn about the device, consider its use, and make a purchasing decision.
For SLEEPZ, they are thinking of targeting consumers and for this section of the clock, they will be using digital ads on sleep apnea related articles. For paid search, they will focus on key words that allude to potential customers looking for a solution beyond CPAP machines. In addition, they will be working with a handful of micro-influencers who have sleep apnea and will be reviewing the device. Their compelling content will help to spread the word in the social sphere.
Since one of the micro-influencers has a really interesting story, it will be pitched to a local TV station in hopes for potential coverage.
All these activities are usually considered marketing and communications, and the extent of branding typically ends here.
PURCHASE
SLEEPZ however, wasn’t going to stop at pre-purchase. They are a #HealthyBrand! 😎
In order to get more physicians to experience SLEEPZ, they have an onsite hands-on demo program at a sleep apnea center of excellence for any physician that is affiliated with a clinic who has decided to sign a contract with SLEEPZ.
For consumers, there is a quick insurance checker on the website to see if their insurance covers the device and for those who want to skip going to a trained physician at a clinic, they can opt for an e-appointment and get a prescription that way.
Purchasing a medical device has never been this smooth…
POST-PURCHASE
This part of the clock is about creating brand loyalty. After the purchase is complete, most companies forget that they have a captured audience to build true fans.
SLEEPZ understands this. Once a physician has signed the contract, they are immediately signed up to a high-touch training and onboarding program, espousing the values and beliefs of the brand through the way its scheduled, executed, and followed-up. No note-taking required, everything is available through a portal and an app, all feedback recorded and pushed to their dashboards, which also acts as an inventory management system, ordering new products, promotional materials and even a way to customize social posts.
For patients, unboxing the device revels the Apple experience and a smart phone app walks them through how it works with an AR experience. The device is controlled through the app as well, simply designed and delightful to use.
Companies and brands don’t have to invest resources in all of the segments. In fact, most brands don’t.
I hope this clock model serves you well, as you build the healthiest brands on the planet.
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Purpose-Driven Branding: A Strategy to Do Well While Doing Good with David Aaker
EP. 8 | David Aaker
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Social and community programs are often kept at arm’s length from the business, taking a defensive checklist approach rather than a brand building endeavor. In his latest book, The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding, David Aaker, hailed the father of modern branding and currently serves as the Vice Chairman of Prophet shares a strategy that challenges convention.
In this interview with David, we chat about why there is still so much work to be done espousing branding, why purpose-driven branding is crucial for society and business and his journey in the world of brand. David Aaker has written 18 books in the area of brand and branding, has sold well over a million copies around the world and an inductee of the American Marketing Association Hall of Fame, among other prestigious awards.
In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Branding as an indispensable path to successful disruptive innovation
Branding allows social programs to positively impact the business and avoid being dispensable
Look beyond the business and to core values to inform a signature social program
Brand strategy is not a “fill in the box” exercise
Follow your interests when building a career
BONUS:
The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding free e-book download
Resources and mentions:
The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding by David Aaker - buy HERE
Owning Game-Changing Subcategories by David Aaker - buy HERE
Blue Ocean Strategy by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim - buy HERE
The Innovators Dilemma by Clay Christensen - buy HERE
Competitive Advantage by Michael E. Porter - buy HERE
Affiliate links – zero cost to you and a little something goes to support the Healthy Brands podcast 🙏🏽
KEY LESSONS
Branding is indispensable to successful disruptive innovation
Branding is often left out of books regarding innovation and growth, and Dave feels that it is an unfortunate oversight. And I vehemently agree. Dave laments “I look at all these books, there are dozens and dozens of important books, written by influential people like Michael Porter, Clayton Christen, The Blue Ocean Group. And there's no mention of branding in those books. None at all. The word brand is not even mentioned.”
Dave doesn’t see a world where branding is not needed when disrupting a marketplace with innovation that is sustainable.
“To become an absolute exemplar for the new subcategory, you've gotta position the subcategory, which is very much like positioning in a brand, but at the same time, quite different. You've gotta scale the subcategory, not necessarily the brand, the whole sub-category. You've gotta make sure it wins out in the marketplace. And, and then you gotta build barriers so that you are the most relevant brand within that subcategory. And those are all, enabled by branding. Without branding, you can't do any of those things”
Branding allows social programs to positively impact the business and avoid being dispensable
As we started to talk about the need for social programs, no matter the size of the organization, Dave feels that “doing good” is no longer a “nice-to-have” – society needs it, and employees are starting to demand it.
But the problem is branding is not being brought into these endeavors, ESG programs and volunteer projects are run without any branding expertise, resulting in a failure to leverage it for the good of the business.
“I think that's one of the reasons that branding is underleveraged in this context. The way you add business value is by enhancing the business brand, by enhancing its visibility and energy, by giving it an image lift, by giving it engagement opportunities. I've seen nobody do that”
An extremely important but often disregarded point is that branding is not just for marketing, it’s the basis of communication, and Dave drives the point home. “Everybody understands how important communication is, but you cannot communicate something without a brand. A brand is almost indispensable for communication, otherwise you've got a million facts and descriptions.”
And when social programs are not branded, they are not only underleveraged, they are at risk of being cut.
“So you disappear into a cloud of sameness, and as a result, people are saying, you know, maybe we should cut back on these grants and volunteering because it's costing a lot of money, and we are in tough times. We gotta survive as a company.”
Look beyond the business and to core values to inform a signature social program
Organizations might find difficulty finding a social program that’s directly relevant to their business. But if you look at the core values of the company, you may find a way to stand up programs that are deeply authentic.
See episode on How a Biotech Brand Can Live Its Purpose Beyond Medicines for more inspiration.
Dave offers a B2B example “Thrivent, for example, is a financial services firm that's adopted Habitat for Humanity as their signature program. My goodness, it gives their employees and their 2 million customers a chance to engage…They've delivered 6.2 million hours of volunteering. Just think of the engagement that those customers and employees have that have gone through that experience. Just think what a brand community that's generated. You can't do that talking about financial services.”
How did they land on this program? It might not seem like a natural fit, but it aligns with their values. “There's no connection between financial services and building homes. None whatsoever. But if you look back at the heritage values of Thrivent, they were formed over a century ago to provide insurance to Lutheran congregations in the Midwest. And they were all about giving back. Now Fortune 500 company, they’ve retained that and continue to give back”
Brand strategy is not a “fill in the box” exercise
What has always been apparent to me was David Aaker’s approach to brand strategy. It doesn’t dictate exactly what was needed in a brand strategy document, instead providing a framework to think about how to establish one.
When we discussed it, he was immediately impassioned “They would have these fill in the box models. What is your brand personality? What are your benefits? What are your attributes? What is your audience? And they would give everybody, no matter what industry, no matter what stage they were in the brand building process, you had to fill in these boxes. And so I <laugh> didn't want any fill in the boxes. My take was, you ask yourself, what do you want your brand to stand for? And don't worry about boxes. You create your own boxes for your own brand.”
There you have it, don’t worry about boxes, as long you understand the principles of building a brand, you can create the foundation required to support it.
Follow your interests when building a career
David has had a broad career, and looking back, he realized that it’s only because he was learning and working across so many disciplines that he was able to do what he does. “One of the interesting things about my career is that I was so all over the map…if I wouldn't have spent those 10 to 15 years going in all directions I would not have been able to do what I did in branding.”
He recounted a story to illustrate his point “Charlie Draper who spent, I don't know, 10, 8 years as an undergraduate. He took every engineering course there was at MIT and people laughed at him. He was just a perpetual student. He would never mount to anything. And he invented inertia guidance, without which we couldn't have airplanes. And he did that by pulling together stuff from all these different disciplines - he's a poster child for being broad.”
Follow your curiosity and interests, he says and I very much agree.
Where you can find Dave:
Ways I can help you
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand