A new logo never fixed a broken brand

Pleasure. Good, thanks. I'm gonna be very British and start with the weather. It's turned cold. Not in terms of your cold, but in terms of our cold it's cold. But otherwise, all good.

Other way round, I was I was at I was at Dragon before turquoise, but yeah.

I mean once I stepped now I learned. Yeah. I think we used to do this particularly at Dragon, you get used to so as a partner and and later group managing director, when you're in an agency or a consulting firm, it's like an engine with four cylinders or six cylinders, and you usually have three or four or five of them working, but never all of them at the same time. And that's okay, because one of the issues you have when you're running a consulting business like that is peaks and troughs. You know, you you go crazy for new business, you start working on projects, someone goes, shit, we put we have oops, excuse me, where we haven't had time to get into the new business. So you go from a peak down to trough and and the trick is always to try to smooth out the peaks and troughs to get something which is more stable and predictable. It it very rarely happens, but that's the idea. when you work on your own, You don't have all those other cylinders, you just have your own. So the need to keep things going all the time is massively amplified. So, you know, keep conversations, keep keep yourself visible, keep yourself active, because no one else is going to be around in the same business to do it for you. So I think that's I think that's really important. The second thing I think probably comes out of that is Really understand what it is that you do. Okay, so you can work in a brand consultancy and you think brand is, you know, obvious to everybody. Well, it isn't. But you might have some other people helping you, and you might have a long case list of case histories that support you and you know sort of articulate that for you. When you step outside on your own round or you're starting, you need to think really carefully about what you do and who you do it for. And You can't be especially on your own, you can't cover all the bases. You can't go to thirty one countries. You can't have six seminars running at any one time. So you can't be, as we say, all things to all men. So be really clear about what you're what you do and understand that in terms of the contribution it makes to your clients. Because the the background work won't do it for you. You have to be really clear and be very clear about who you should take that to. Yeah, I think it's Think it's a military term, land and expand. So you said land in a territory and then grow from there. Try to do that, you know. what do you mean by brand? What have you done for businesses? How have you made that contribution to your clients? And then where else might that be applicable and useful? But don't think you're going to solve every client's problem across the face of the earth. Be really clear about who you're, who you're for and what you do for them. That's what I would say. So targeting, segmenting. be realistic, but be active. Don't no one else is gonna do it for you. you might take things for granted when you're working inside a place with 50 colleagues or something, you don't have them. But what I did find useful was there are there are other people like you or there are small businesses, so there's lots of informal networks and partnerships of complement complementary skills. So I, for example, picked up a huge piece of work in Singapore with a group of people based in London who literally didn't have someone like me in the building. I'm not saying no one as good as me, I'm saying nobody who did what I did. They were all front-end UX designers, UI designers. They didn't have anybody who could do that thinking. So there was a useful partnership between for them to do something that I couldn't do so I could introduce them to clients I I knew and and vice versa. So that sort of complementary partnership I think is very important to look out for. Sorry, long answer, short question, long answer.

can we expand from twenty minutes to two hours? so I work firstly B2B, only business to business. Okay, so I've never been able to understand how to do things like shampoos and confectionery. I I I just I work with clients whose people are the brand, whose service is the brand. So that sort of categorizes me straight away and and they're quite different worlds. so typically, I mean I I think I As I look back, and that's something I've recently been writing about, usually those problems that clients come to, normally it's because they've seen something. Okay, there's something that's needs fixing in the business. Cause I'm working with leadership teams, CEOs, COOs, corporate affairs people. Something's wrong in the business, something we're not doing this. And it used to come down to, if I look back, one of three, which was. We either need to fix our performance, or we need to fix our culture, or we need to fix our reputation. That's a big sort of overview, but it tends to hold up. If I look back and say we always started in one of those three buckets, our performance is off. There's lots of different ways of checking that. We need to shift the culture here. We're out of, we're out of step, or people just don't get us properly. so I've tended to start in those areas, but what I have realized is that. they all impact on one another. You can't really separate and culture drives performance. Performance drives reputation. Sometimes reputation drives down the c culture because it's people aren't getting the right thing about you. So I I tend to start in those three areas, but the trick is what I call coherence, bringing those three to alignment. So they all support and reinforce one another. When they start to pull apart, the business is really in trouble. how you know how does that manifest itself? You know, it might be Losing market share, it might be we've got a new managing director, it might be we've got a merger and acquisition which isn't working, or we're planning one. How do we best do that? It might be that in a professional institute is losing members, how do we turn that around? There's something somewhere has has has initiated a we need to fix this, and the where we can start might be a little bit fluid. but it's important in those first conversations before even before you even write a proposal to work together, that you've understood really what the critical issues are and where the interdependencies are.

Come across. well, the word brand is one of the most overused, misunderstood, b yeah, exactly, terrible. Okay, so I mean I've I've I used to do seminars where we would say there's a difference between the word brand and the word branding. You do the brand before you do the branding. And the branding is what I think a lot of people still think brand means, you know, logos, colours.

typography, that sort of stuff, imagery. if you do the brand, now it's not my definition. I came across it a long time ago and I wish I'd come up with it. But for me, the best definition of a brand is a promise kept. Okay, so if you start with that to say, what does that mean? Particularly, you know, as we just discussed that I'm working in B2B where the people are the brand. So a promise kept means it has to come from the inside out. It has to be a truth, otherwise it's going to be found out. You have to build it from the inside out because nobody's going to keep a promise that's made on their behalf or imposed by some flash consultant from outside. So f the the biggest problem hi historically, and it still exists in a couple of sectors, like in professional services, you know, lawyers, accountants, they tend to think brand means you know, the logos and pretty colours type stuff. It absolutely doesn't. So I think that's the the first issue. And I think the second issue because of that. I had a framework, I think I first drew it up probably 25 years ago, if I can s if I can admit to that, which I called the three Ps. And the three P's were physique, personality, presentation. And my point in the seminar was you develop your brand in that order. You look at the physique, the physical attributes, you know, what do we do? How we organize? Where are we? what are our skills? how much do we charge? All the physical, tangible things you can read in an annual report, what do we want those to be? Do we want to be a company or a group? Do you want to be a federation and or a business? That that get that stuff. Then the second P, the personalities, flows from that. So for example, if you just want to be a big group or conglomerate, you can have different personalities, you can have different cultures. So long as your financial performance is hitting the mark, that's fine. The closer you want to be, the more in in keeping you want your behaviors and culture to be. But you'd have things like, you know, your values, your culture, your style, your management standards, those sorts of things being the second P. And then my pitch is only at that point can you even think about the third P. So only when you've sorted those things out can you find out how you need to present those. If you start with the presentation, you can't go the other direction. Hey, we've got a new logo. Let's act differently. Hey, we've got a new logo, let's organize ours organise ourselves differently. It doesn't work. So in those in that order. So that really was sort of overcome the biggest misconceptions or problems, getting the definition of the brand and what it can do, and a good framework for getting people to take them through the process, if you like. That makes sense? Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, and you have an expectation and yeah, and it and if you have a good a strong brand gives you two simple things. One is preference, because it's a competitive market anywhere. So why should someone prefer you? And the second thing is, it sounds negative, but it isn't, it's the benefit of the doubt. So if you buy a pair of Nike shoes and one of them just tears or rips or gets a hole, you don't think that's me done with Nike. You go That's not like lucky, I'll go back and get another one. if you have a weak brand, that first problem or disappointment can make you defect or give up. So it it comes together in a word commitment. If you have preference and you have benefit of the doubt, you've got a strong brand and you'll get commitment. And that helps you with things like premium pricing. It helps you with things like innovation. You have a strong brand, you've got more license to innovate. Don't worry about ruining it, you've got more chance of succeeding because people believe in you. Make sense?

Ha ha ha. I see it at the moment as it's a bit of an evil, I think. It's e it's making people very lazy. It's making people it's tempting people to be very lazy. you know, hey, look at this, I can get a strategy document out of AI in 30 seconds. R well, you can't, because I think AI is full of generics. AI is only capable, I mean any AI model or algorithm is only capable of producing something. Based on its inputs, it can't project forward. It's got new intuition, it's got no feeling, it's got no qualitative aspect. and I'm thinking some of the my favorite work that I've done with clients over the years, no, and AI couldn't have come out with it. AI wouldn't have, it's it's too nuanced. So, you know, I worked with an insurance company, and they're As I you know, I I went around the organization, did a lot of interviews with people. back when the World Trade Centers were demolished with September 11th, they were the lead insurer on the Twin Towers. So they were in for much, much money payout. And then the president said, This is an act of war. And insurance wording, you would typically say, It's an act of war, we're not covered. Well, this this client said. Despite that, we think we have a kind of integrity, we need to honour our commitment. So they basically challenged the market and said, Well, we're meeting our obligations. Okay. And everyone was really sort of proud about that. And as I put that together with talking to the way their underwriters were targeted and the way that they were asked to work, and I looked at their claims pro their claims process was summed up with a phrase you're not allowed to repeat outside the company, which was if it's grey, we pay. So there was no kind of, well, you know, the hide behind this won't pay. The more more I looked at that, I I sat with the chief executive in London and said, I don't think you're an insurance business. And he had a particularly English way of answering that with a couple of Anglo-Saxon words, which I won't repeat, but he said, Well, what are we then? And I said, I think you're a company that creates certainty. And he looked back and he said, Well, talk to that. And as he looked at me, he said, You're right. I said, Yeah, I am right. Now I don't think an AI model would have made that kind of nuance projection forward. It wouldn't have been able to rewrite that because it wasn't in any data point that it might have reached for before. So I put that as a personal example, but I think there's an awful lot of examples where you can spot on LinkedIn, right? You can spot an AI written piece. It has the same structure, it has the same sentence structure. You haven't got a this problem, you've got a that problem. Da da da da da. If you see the word quietly, I know people talk about the dash, but if you see the word quietly, that's been written by AI. And everybody's sort of jumping on it. And my feeling is, and it's a bit of optimism and hope, that it won't be long before clients start going, We've forgotten all the basics, right? We've forgotten about differentiation, we've forgotten about positioning. Actually, in this rush to get things done in a quasi efficient way, we've stripped out all the bits that made us better and good. And I I think people will come back to let's go back to some of the basics now. I saw a piece by McKinsey earlier this year where they'd done a lot of interviews with CMOs across Europe, and they were saying the number one task for this year and beyond was brand building. And I think underneath that is a we've all become a bit generic, we've all followed the same processes, we've all ended up sort of in a similar place, and it's not good. That's That's my belief and a hope.

Yeah. Agree. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I I I used to feel the same thing about best practice. Whenever I used to hear the words best practice, say, well, everybody's doing the same then. If that's best practice, everybody would do the same. Otherwise it's not best practice. So I think you're right and I hope you're right. I think I mean clearly AI has got some use and and it's a huge amorphous subject, but you know, in terms of

you know, cutting through some of the drudge and and scooping up. But you still see at the bottom of every screen this can make mistakes, do check. I think it I think it might help in terms of cutting through a lot of the drudge and taking away some of the more menial stuff, but I would never trust his judgment. It doesn't have any. It doesn't have any. But it it's clearly big. It's clearly attractive because if if you can say to you know an enormous company like and a Coca-Cola produces its Christmas commercial or by AI. Well, isn't that a lot cheaper than you know hiring a big global advertiser agency to do it for you and the production cost and distribution costs and Yeah. but it will end up being brown plasticine really. All the colours will just merge into dirty brown. and people to start to unpick it, unravel it and go back to some of the basics. They have to.

They do. Yeah, I think I would have made I mean if I'm starting today or when I go back to when I started like thirteen years ago. or it doesn't matter.

I think what I said before about making sure you're having all those conversations, I I didn't. I didn't. perhaps working harder at establishing and then maintaining those complementary fits and partnerships I was talking about. So, you know, the the UX design team that I worked with here, research I've worked with research companies who do research but can't take it anywhere. So I think probably formalising, not in the sense of can we have a legal financial, but let's let's do something which writes into every two months or something. We get together and we just think about what could be done next. Be much more sort of I don't like to use the word proactive, but I've just done it so much more sort of proactive in that in that sense. having having been in some big consultancies, I didn't really want to start employing people. So I think I I made that Once you start to manage people rather than projects, you're into a different space altogether. So I think keeping the focus on clients and new thinking was right. But I think do more in terms of keeping that visibility. You know, you talked before about having a visibility in your presence, actively working really hard at that and not taking anything for granted because you know, clients move or they retire, or you know, if I do my job well. client shouldn't need to talk to me for another five or six years until something major in the business is moving again. So I think I think I would go back and make sure that I did what I just said at the beginning a lot better.

With me, they can go to brandwell.uk.com or they could hit Keith.wells at brandwell.uk.com or find me on LinkedIn. I you know, a a very long time ago when I was working at Dragon, I used to write all the brochures when we still printed brochures. I'm really aging myself now, and I wrote a line there which I've always believed, it shows how old it is, because I wrote Our door is always open. Your checkbook doesn't have to be. And what what we meant by that was we just call us or just we're not going to charge you for a conversation. and I still think that's true. I still think that's the way to do it. So don't imagine I I'm not like a lawyer, right? Answer the phone, click the meter, it starts running. I'm going to charge you for those six minutes. happy, happy to have a conversation about anything really. and who knows what comes out of it.

There you go. Yeah. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for the time. It's been really enjoyable.