Managing Marketing: Branding And Brand Building In A Pandemic World

Rich_Curtis

Rich Curtis, CEO of FutureBrand Australia talks about what attracted him to brand strategy and branding following an earlier foray into media and advertising agencies in London and Bangkok. He shares his passion for developing brand strategies and implementations that have long term growth impacts on businesses and extend beyond visual identity to all aspects of customer and stakeholder experience. He also discusses how change is often the trigger for rebranding in a world going through massive global changes.

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Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast, where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

Today, I’m sitting down with Rich Curtis, Chief Executive Officer of FutureBrand Australia. Welcome, Rich.

Rich:

Hello, how are you?

Darren:

I’m very well. And look, thank you for taking the time because the industry talks a lot about brand, and not talking about the advertising, media, and marketing industry. Brand seems to take up huge amounts of columns, centimetres of websites and things. There’s always someone at a conference that talks about brand.

What’s your perspective on the way that brand gets used in the industry generally?

Rich:

I think it gets used in myriad different ways. You know, some more effective than others. But it can often be a bit of a catch-all and certainly, our perspective is to specialise absolutely on brand. And I think it’s important to distinguish between developing a brand and then delivering it and executing it.

And I think a lot of the conversation is at the more executional end of the spectrum. And I know there’s been lots of conversation around kind of short and long-term horizons around this kind of thing, but I think more and more people are looking at the long-term horizon.

And I think all too often, when we’re talking about PR or sponsorship or even advertising, at times, as important as a role as they all play, it’s a shorter-term focus because it’s driving a campaign outcome. Whereas a lot of what we do is on a longer arc, and that’s because brand is a long-term asset. And so, you need to be able to manage it in a way that has that longer-term perspective.

So, I think it’s great that there’s so much discussion in and around brand. And certainly, we spend a lot of our time helping people understand what is the role of the brand in their business and how does it generate value and therefore, how can you leverage it as a business asset, rather than just here’s a shiny new logo, because logos will only get you so far just like ad campaigns will only get you to the next quarter.

Darren:

Yeah, it is interesting, isn’t it? When there’s so much about, “Oh, here’s the new corporate identity for our company” and then there’s all this discussion about, well, they’ve just really changed the font slightly or whatever.

But, look, Rich, I want to go into brand a lot more, but before we do, just to set up — because one of the things I found fascinating is that you didn’t leap out of university or wherever and go straight into a brand company. Interestingly, from my perspective, you actually s dipped your toe into the media and advertising space, with some internships and early jobs before you landed on brand as a career.

Rich:

Yes. So, internships are important for me in my development. I honestly can’t tell you at what point I thought a career in advertising, media, marketing, branding, whatever you want to call it, might’ve struck me as a good idea.

But I avidly pursued internships during my summers at uni. And I was more than happy to work for free to get the experience. And if anything, my goal with all of those internships was … typically, you might get two or four weeks. And my goal was always to be the one intern that would get an extra fortnight because he was a good kid to have around.

I know at the minute, there’s been for a while a lot of discussion about working for free and whether you’re taking advantage of people and what not. But the experience I got working at places like Court Burkitt and Co, and Lowe Howard Spink and Carat was invaluable. Getting a feel for how those places worked, and what advertising and media actually were.

Some of those jobs were a little bit tedious. So, spot-checking TV ads the day after, or the morning after that the ads had gone out the night before, making sure those spots had actually gone to air. But once you understand those inner workings, the nuts and bolts, you can build up from there. And if you show enough enthusiasm and willingness, you get to do some interesting things.

I remember at Lowe Howard Spink specifically, they had a big pitch on, and they must’ve had about five or six creative teams on it. And I remember I sat quietly in the corner of the room one afternoon. And I felt extremely lucky to even be in the room as that ECD went around the teams one by one and critiqued all their ideas. And it was a real eye-opener in terms of what it was that went into an ad campaign.

So, I feel very lucky to have had that experience and certainly, I’m keen for us to offer any kind of junior burgers that window into the world of branding because it can be a little bit difficult to find your way around our world at times. So, yeah, invaluable experiences.

Darren:

Yeah, I think it can be impenetrable if you don’t have sort of some family connection or you know someone or your parents know someone and you get that sort of introduction, which is one of the issues that add to the lack of diversity because the industry seems easy for people that have a connection, but incredibly, difficult sometimes if you don’t.

Rich:

Yeah, definitely, definitely. So, I only got one of my internships out of nepotism, but it’s definitely… that does weigh on me. I’m a white private school educated, tertiary-educated male. So, I appreciate that I have had a leg up in ways that many other people might not have done.

And it does weigh on me in terms of how do we make our industry more open and accessible, or even build a very basic level of awareness that this even exists for people who might not come from the kind of background where you can just get a walk-up start.

I honestly don’t have any great solutions for that, but it’s definitely something that I’d like for us all to be able to explore. And if anyone has any winning ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Darren:

You’re open to it. It’s also interesting what you said about internships generally, because I think as you said, two weeks, three weeks over the summer break or whenever. But I think it’s when people start turning someone into an unpaid employee; three months and hang in there.

They dangle a carrot that never appears, and they basically drag it out until the person just gets so frustrated, they walk out the door, that is where the abuse happens. But I agree with you that if it’s a very defined period and it’s structured in a way that the person gets the exposure or is at least given the opportunity for exposure.

But just to go back to the chronology, because then for a boy from the UK, you went to the far east and ended up in Bangkok, didn’t you? With Dentsu Y&R.

Rich:

Yes, I mean, ending up in Bangkok makes it sound like I took a wrong turn at the airport, doesn’t it?

Darren:

It’s like the Hangover, I woke up in Bangkok; a tattoo and a tooth missing.

Rich:

Exactly. It was a big pitch, it was a big pitch. So, look, I had the privilege of going to Oxford University and most people, many people — I don’t want to over-generalise or oversimplify. But essentially, I didn’t want to live south of the river and get an apprenticeship job at a law firm or accountancy firm.

I wanted to take myself out of the ordinary or the typical and just do something different. And my brother was at Cambridge, my course was four years, his course was three, we were only a year apart, so we finished at the same time. And so, we went out to live in Bangkok together.

And he was lucky enough to get a job at a finance company, which is what he wanted to do. And I was lucky to land myself a job at Dentsu Y&R, which was a weird stitch up, kind of a weird JV, a big American company like Y&R, and then the Japanese, Dentsu. So, it made for a slightly curious culture.

Darren:

Cultural clash, and then you add that into Bangkok because the Thai culture is totally different again.

Rich:

Yeah, and look, what was really — I mean, it was a paid role, I was doing my job, but I was very much a fish out of water there. So, I was the only person that they’d hired locally. So, there were other foreigners in and around the place, Americans, Japanese and what not.

But they’re at a senior level, whereas I’m on the shop floor as an account exec. I’m at the bottom of the bottom. And so, obviously, everyone around me talks Thai. And so, I’m trying to learn advertising at the same time as trying to learn the Thai language, at the same time as trying to understand the culture and how things work around here.

You’ve got to be careful what you wish for, but it was a massive learning curve, but I really enjoyed my time there. And that certainly got both my feet under the desk in terms of a creative agency and I got to work on a mix of big global clients, like Star Alliance and Nike, as well as local things like Boon Rawd Brewery, Singha Beer, and Ovaltine. So yeah, it was good fun, but it was a wild experience.

Darren:

Okay. So, looking at your career, that seems to also be a pivotal point. We’re talking early this millennium, you’re in Bangkok, you’re working in an advertising agency, and then the next decision is to go very much focused on brand and developing brand strategies and brand executions, beyond advertising.

Was there some sort of pivotal moment that you just went well, look, advertising’s very nice and I’ve tried media and … what was it that got you to focus like that?

Rich:

So, there were a few things that happened and one of them was indeed pivotal. So, a beer one night with my boss in Bangkok, and we were talking about Landor’s rebrand of BP, and somewhat tongue in cheek, trying to equate the change to the identity with the amount of money that had supposedly been charged.

And that conversation — not necessarily equating the value to the task, but that notion of an organisation’s identity and sense of self and how you might create a brand around that — that conversation over beer has always stuck with me.

And it was pretty much there and then or at least it was that conversation that inspired or influenced, or at least informed my decision to put myself in a more strategic role. And that was always the attraction.

That world of branding seemed at least to me, based on my experience, to be at the more strategic end of things versus the experiences that I’d had in advertising and media. So, that definitely triggered my interest in branding and specifically, Landor.

Then I went back to the UK. For reasons we don’t need to get into here, I decided that I wanted to be a film director, music shorts and film clips and ads. And so I was a runner for about 18 months around Soho, which is literally running around Soho. But that was super fun and got me enough money to buy beer and cigarettes, but that was probably about that.

And then I met a girl and decided that it would be a good idea to go follow her back to Australia because it was way too cold for her in the UK. And so, that then landed me in Australia. So, a little bit of a circuitous route.

Darren:

So, in some ways, so close in Bangkok to Australia, but yet so far.

Rich:

Indeed, indeed, indeed.

Darren:

And then you backed up and then came forward again.

Rich:

So, then I got to Australia and essentially, made a beeline to Landor, made it my mission to get myself a job there. And six months later, I did. And that’s very much where I grew up as a brand strategist and I learnt my craft or trade or however you might want to describe it.

And so, that would have been 2002. And it was my absolute focus to get a role as a brand strategist, I suppose, to get some other role and try and move laterally. I absolutely wanted to do brand strategy.

Darren:

It’s interesting that conversation you had with your boss in Thailand about the rebranding of BP because it resonated so much with me over the years, how many times agency people, including myself, are just agog at the sorts of money companies will put into rebranding because branding occurs in the advertising world as comms and campaigns and things like that.

Now, you went from Landor into brand and now, you’re running, and in fact, you own the Australian operation of FutureBrand, and we’ll get onto that later. But during that time, what do you think — in your experience, what is it that makes branding/gives branding the value that it does?

Rich:

Because it’s driving people to make decisions. And if you run a choice model study or some kind of analysis on what are the purchase factors, there’ll be a number of them; price, distribution, service features, and brand will be one of them.

And so, brand will account for anywhere from 0 to 100% of that decision. It’s different for different sectors or industries, different categories, even for different brands and organisations. But brand plays a role in helping people to make a decision.

And so, you have to be thinking about how do you manage that. And how do you manage it in the context of those other drivers, because you can’t necessarily unbundle the relationship between brand and distribution and service and price and so on, and so forth?

And you can’t just leave it to manage itself. So, you have to be an active participant in how you grow and develop, and perhaps, even transform your brand because it’s a large part of the reason whether it’s B2C or B2B, whether you’re talking about your customers or whether you’re talking about your employees, or whether you’re even talking about investors in the market at large.

It’s part of the equation for why people might take an interest in you and buy you, work for you, invest in you. So, you have to be managing it. Otherwise, you’re just leaving a super valuable asset sit there on the table, doing nothing.

Darren:

It’s interesting you say that because from my perspective (and this is an outsider looking in), that these big brand exercises are not often commissioned or engaging marketing. That it often goes from corporate strategy all the way through the organisation but has a huge buy-in from CEOs.

Marketers can be involved, CMOs can be involved and often are. But it’s actually a decision often that’s driven by the business rather than the marketing function. Is that reasonable or a more generalising term actually?

Rich:

No, I think that is a reasonable observation. So, I would always say, and in fact, I said it to a client this morning — we get involved at points of change. There’s typically something that’s changed about an organisation that invites a re-evaluation of the brand. It might be a new CEO, it might be a new strategy, a new product, a new market, a new something. That something has-

Darren:

A change in the marketplace that they’ve had to adapt to.

Rich:

Or indeed, a change in the marketplace. There’s something that’s changed about the business. And in my brutally simplistic logic, if there’s a change in business, then there’s a change in brand whether you like it or not. And it’s an opportunity for that brand to adapt or indeed, to signal the ways in which you might be adapting.

So, to come back to your point, it might be a merger or acquisition. You know, it might be a new strategy, but invariably, it’s something about the business. And so, we tend to take a whole of business view because the brand has that kind of influence across everything, all the ways in which you might operate and go to market.

I think the savvy CMOs and marketing directors can see it coming and understand what the opportunity might be. But yes, it’s 50/50, whether it’s a Chief Exec or a CMO who might call us up.

Darren:

Because from an agency advertising perspective, their focus is connecting businesses through marketing with consumers. But in actual fact, the branding and brand goes beyond just the consumer perception to the way that the employees think about it, that government relates to it, that investors and shareholders think about it, doesn’t it? That brand actually has a larger audience than just customers and consumers.

Rich:

Absolutely. And brand is the one tool — and I mean that word quite purposefully; it is a tool that you use. It’s the one tool that you have to connect with all those different audiences or cohorts or stakeholders, or however, you might describe them. And a good example of that is language.

I’m forever talking to organisations around the opportunity for language to bring their brand to life. Kind of the joke I always make, and it never fails to amuse, is that the two most popular words in branding are lorem ipsum. It’s just underdone in terms of recognising the value of language.

And so, if you’re talking about a sales team, they’re not going to slip out into the back room and knock out a quick DL flyer and make sure the logo’s placed properly, or that the PMS refs are right on the colour. But what they are going to do is they’re going to use language.

And so, language as a tool for building your brand is really important. And not just language, as you mentioned, employee engagement. There’s a great stat from IBM and the Head of HR, or at least she was Head of HR until the end of last year. When they look at their employee engagement scores and their client Customer Sat scores, there’s a correlation between the two. And their employee engagement scores account for two-thirds of the Customer Sat scores.

And so, you need those things working in harmony. And all too often, the brand inside of the organisation is left as an afterthought, and employees become a little bit like second-class citizens. Whereas they’re the ones that need to deliver that experience. And you can’t expect you’re going to have a great customer experience if you’re not going to have a great employee experience.

And then in terms of CX again, back in the BP days, I remember vividly, there was a brand universe as it was very grandly called, which was pretty much every touchpoint that they had. And it was perfectly consistent, yellow and green, everything in its right place.

And that was fine for them because we lived in a world of certainty. Whereas there’s so much ambiguity and uncertainty and just myriad places and spaces in which brands show up. But you can’t have that perfect consistency anymore. And it would cost you squillions of dollars to kind of brand a customer experience in that way.

And so, you need to be thinking about signatures. Hospitality does this really well in terms of what might those brand signatures be that deliver the customer experience without a logo in sight. It’s a behaviour. It’s something that people might do.

Whether it’s the discretionary money that a Ritz-Carlton employee might have to spend on a guest in order to fix an experience, or whether it’s Maccas and two-part greetings, “Hello, how are you? Goodbye, have a nice day.” Talking to the child at the counter, not the parents, to ask for their order.

There are all those little nudges and signature cues that are essentially kind of free. It’s not another thing to do over the top. And to come back to a point you made earlier, I think all too often, we see in the media how much X brand or Y rebrand cost. And a lot of the time that cost is overhauling all the touchpoints that they might have, right?

So, if you think about a beer company rebranding, that is a lot of umbrellas and awnings on pubs all across the country. They can’t rebrand almost because it would just cost too much money. So, we’re talking about that kind of CapEx if you like.

But there’s a lot of stuff that you can do that is free essentially. You’re going to be talking to clients, you’re going to be having huddles with your team. There’s a variety of things you’re going to be doing. And it’s how do you integrate the brand into that as opposed to it being an intervention, like another thing I need to think about.

It’s about how does that brand fit within that experience and help people make a decision to choose your brand.

Darren:

It’s interesting you say that because there’s a story from quite a few years ago where an agency was pitching to Qantas. And part of it was we’re going to put the “u” back into Qantas was the concept. And the CMO at the time said, “Do you know how much money it will cost for us to repaint every aircraft in the fleet?”

And it’s one of those interesting things because just visual … and I’m just talking visual identity. The bigger the organisation, the more costs, but also the more time and the logistics. Could you imagine like the Marriotts of the world trying to roll out a framework of customer behaviours that are on a brand?

Rich:

Yeah, it’s a huge endeavour.

Darren:

And the tone of voice; the language and the tone of voice in that language to cover across all of the touchpoints that we have today. Everything from your own media or our websites to the actual, the point of accommodation, the point of where the customer stays.

Rich:

It is a huge endeavour whichever way you look at it. The point you make about Qantas is spot on. So, we’ve done a lot of airline work and airlines typically rebrand when there are new fleets when they have to paint the planes anyhow. So, let’s think about whether we might paint them differently than we did last time.

But while that might sound superficial, there is a commercial thing that sits behind that, which is we’ve invested in a new fleet. So, let’s tell the world about it. And that might typically go hand in hand with operational investments as well.

So, Amadeus, for example. So, you might have an airline that’s going, “We’ve invested in new planes, we’ve invested in new technology and systems, now, unless we do something with our brand to signal that change, people might not notice.” And so, that’s where there might be an underlying commercial reason for making that change.

But the other point is Apple has done an incredible job of conditioning us all to versioning. And in my experience, I think Telstra, in a previous role, Telstra probably the last time I was involved … and maybe it was the last time anyone was involved in a rebrand that happened overnight, where it was, let’s all change lock stock and barrel overnight.

But that rarely happens these days. We’re all conditioned to versioning. And so, you don’t have to change over everything overnight. People understand that if they go to that Marriott Hotel, there might be some signature experiences or some kind of key moments or key aspects of that experience, where they’ve placed their priority.

So, it might be the room and it might be the concierge experience and maybe check-in, and there’s kind of a digital check-in. And they’ll get to the rest over time, but nobody can afford to do it overnight. And it becomes much more of an organic process.

I think the other thing is when you’re looking at large employee populations, it can be very overwhelming to think about just how many people you might have to touch. And a neat trick — I say, trick that makes it sound like it’s a-

Darren:

A bit sleight of hand.

Rich:

No, but it’s not a sleight of hand, but a neat way of thinking about that is pivotal populations. In any organisation, there will be a pivotal population who over-index on their influence.

The classic example I always give is supermarkets and store managers. You might have a hundred thousand people working in a supermarket, very difficult to reach a hundred thousand people, especially when half of them are casuals.

But once you realise that a pivotal population is the store manager, that might be 750, 800 people. It’s much easier to engage that quantum of people, knowing that they’re a pivotal population and can then influence everyone else.

Another kind of good way to think about it is one up from the bottom. So, if you launch a rebrand, no one’s going to call up the Chief Exec and go, “Hey, Charlotte, what’s all this about?” They’re just going to ask their contact centre team leader.

And so, if you go one-up giving them the message or at least the confidence or comfort to know what this is all about, you stand a much better chance than purely going top-down.

So, there are insightful ways in which you can chunk down any kind of a rebrand to make sense for your organisation. And also, to think about, well, why the change in the first place, and to follow that logic through for how you might then roll out your rebrand without it costing you the earth.

Or especially, these days kind of ripping your organisation apart in terms of the resource onus that it might place on your organisation at a time where everyone’s already quite stretched operationally as a consequence of COVID.

Darren:

It’s also interesting listening to you because we’ve seen quite a few major rebrands, and I’m talking about primarily visual identity, where it’s ended up being quite a small change. A significant change, but still relatively small. But is that because part of this is working out what to keep and working out what to change is enough to flag that there is a change?

Rich:

It’s interesting. So, there are lots of conversations that I’m sure we all have in the marketing world around, “Oh, no, we couldn’t do that. That would be too bold. That would be too different” and so on and so forth.

But there’s an equally important conversation, which is “What if we change and no one notices” because to that exact point, because the change is so small as to be kind of … you just wouldn’t notice it. And I think that we all spend a lot of time inside of organisations and we see the same brand day in, day out, and our customers don’t necessarily think about it quite so much.

Darren:

They’re not as obsessed with whether that’s a narrow or a normal font.

Rich:

They’re not as obsessed, but I do worry that there’s a lot of aesthetic changes that happen that don’t necessarily make a meaningful difference to the experience or a financial difference or commercial difference to the business. And I think you do run the risk of it being changed for change’s sake.

So, it’s, it’s definitely a watch-out. But I think if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it properly because it’s going to cost you the same amount of money to change over all those various touchpoints. You know, whether you go from blue to dark blue, or whether you go from blue to pink.

Darren:

And you mentioned before, often rebranding is about changes. We’ve gone through possibly the largest set of changes with this pandemic in a hundred years. Do you think that the pandemic itself and the changes that are occurring in business and with consumers is going to drive more rebranding in the future? Is this an opportunity for FutureBrand?

Rich:

I think it was interesting what happened straight off the back of lockdown. So, we had a series of strategys as everyone did, had a whole lot of projects in the pipeline. And it was interesting to see some of the more strategic, more significant ones become more important for those organisations than pre-COVID.

And that was something those organisations recognised quite quickly and were almost quite relieved that they had something in the works to reevaluate and/or reassert their purpose and what it was that they weren’t all about.

And so, I think it certainly strengthened their resolve to make sure that they did have a clear purpose (whether you give that a big P or a small p) and a clear narrative around who they were and what they’re doing and how they do it.

I think a lot of other organisations got found out for not necessarily living up to the promises that they were making in the market. And I think it was equally interesting to think about some of those organisations that were more or less resilient, and were able to move to remote working more quickly, and actually almost strengthened the culture because they had a keener sense of ways of working, whereas those that didn’t necessarily live that brand within the organisation.

And it doesn’t take much once you’ve got a superficial sense of your identity as an organisation. It doesn’t take much once you’ve got that and maybe some tech challenges for the wheels to fall off, or at least things to get a little bit wobbly.

So, I definitely think … I’m not sure whether it’s a big opportunity necessarily. Wouldn’t want to be an ambulance chaser.

Darren:

Time will tell.

Rich:

But I think now more than ever, organisations have taken a good, hard look at themselves and what support they might provide their people and how they might go to market in ways that might be different to how they might’ve done before.

Darren:

Now, you had your own inspirational change during COVID. And you launched Thirty:3, which I remember you shared on LinkedIn and got a phenomenal response. Are you happy to share what that was about?

Rich:

Yes, yes. So, that surprised me as much as anyone else. And I need to give credit to Dave Cairns, one of the team, whose idea it was over lunch just as we were kind of headed towards lockdown. And the thought was that seeing I wasn’t going to commute every day, I live up on the Central Coast, and so my commute’s about 90 minutes or so every day into Sydney or wherever I might be going that particular day.

And so, to repurpose that 90-minute commute by giving that time to people who might need brand and marketing help for free. And so, I posted out on LinkedIn and it went absolutely gangbusters, which wasn’t what I was expecting. And I think I posted it Tuesday or Wednesday lunchtime, and then it got to the weekend and I was deluged with trying to manage diary bookings for 7:30 till 9.

And so, I got some help to build a website and then integrated that with Zoom and Calendly so that people could book my time. And it would automatically put a meeting in our diaries and send out a Zoom link.

And so, I’d just wake up every morning and click into 7:30, 8 and 8:30 conversations with whoever happened to book my time, and help essentially, or at least try to help. And as much as it was about helping other people, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it was an amazing way to start my own day.

Not only being able to help others and being grateful to be able to do so but just the intellectual challenge for someone to say, “We’re launching this product, it’s about XYZ and it’s a little bit different from what we currently do from a brand architecture point of view. Can you give me some pointers about how we ought to be thinking about this?”

Or, “We’re launching a new product and we’ve come up with the shortlist of names, can you give me any feedback on which of these might be a better or worse name?” And it went on for a fair while. There’s now still a few that I do. They pop up now and then. But it was a time at which everyone was trying to.… play their small part in, in being helpful.

And my wife has always been at me for being useless with my hands. If the washing machine breaks or the toilets on the blink or whatever it might be, I’m absolutely useless. And she is forever reminding me about it. So, I felt this was my opportunity to show my value.

Darren:

Look, I have to say that I’m personally grateful that this giving approach that you’ve taken and demonstrated has extended to the Marketing Mentor Program because you’re a mentor in that program that we’re running. So, really appreciate it, and thank you for doing it.

Rich:

Absolute, pleasure. And going back to the internship conversations earlier, I got a lot of help and support as much as I might have rattled the cage a lot as well in order to put myself in that position. So, it needs to be a little bit of a two-way conversation. I’m more than happy to help people. If I can, in some small way.

Darren:

Look, we’ve run out of time. I really appreciate you dropping by and having this conversation. I find it really interesting because I find there are so many words in our industry in the broader sense that get used without any real sort of intention to what they really mean.

And I think what you’ve shared today around branding and brand is fantastic because it does go beyond visual to all sorts of things, from customer experience to language, to colours. So, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Rich:

No, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I love talking about this stuff as you’d expect. And my parting word on that would be, I think we use a lot of different words to say the same thing. And ultimately, we’re just trying to get someone to do something as a consequence of brand marketing sponsorship, PR whatever it might be.

I think we have lots of different words for all of those things. But fundamentally, we’re just trying to achieve the same thing. So, I tend to have quite a simple view of the world. You know, a brand is what a brand does. And I think brands just need to do a heck of a lot more.

Darren:

Well, on that, Rich, is there a brand that you just would love to get your teeth into either because they’re doing really badly or you think they’ve got so much opportunity, that is just going unrealised?

Ideal for marketers, advertisers, media, and commercial communications professionals, Managing Marketing is a podcast hosted by Darren Woolley and special guests. Find all the episodes here