Laura Schultz: Well, welcome everyone to our webinar, Rebranding 'brand' for the C-suite. We're very excited to see you and have a great session today. I'm Laura, I'm marketing director at Lippincott, and with that, I'm going to turn it over to our esteemed hosts, Eric and Dylan. You guys take it away.

Dylan Stuart: Thanks, Laura, and welcome everybody great to see so many of you joining us for this. So I'm Dylan Stuart. I'm a senior partner, based in San Francisco, previously based in London, and worked all over the world. Very, very happy to be here with you, Eric.

Eric Tsytsylin: Hello! I'm Eric. I'm a partner in brand strategy here at Lippincott I started my career in the agency world. Both brand consultancies and creative agencies, and then I also had a 4-year stint as a client. I led the brand team at The Farmer's Dog, a direct-to-consumer Consumer Pet Food Company, so happy to answer questions about both brand building and canine nutrition as they arise.

Dylan: Awesome. Well, you know, just as quick introduction to Lippincott for those who perhaps you know, don't know us and haven't encountered us or worked with us out in the world. We're a global brand experience and marketing consultancy. We've been around since 1943 which is kind of a strange year to start a brand consulting firm. But there you go, and you know, you'll see from our client list. A few of them are up there on the screen, you know. You really can't go very long, certainly, in North America without encountering a brand that we've worked on at some point. So we're very proud of our client list, very proud of our heritage.

And you know today we work on a broad diversity of different topics with our clients from growth strategy through to brand building brand strategy design through to experience marketing, customer engagement and employee and culture. So you know, a huge kind of range of different projects that we help our clients with.

And today, you know, we're gonna be talking about how? You know, we can engage the C-suite with Brand. What's what do we need to do to really get perhaps non-marketing executives? Perhaps the cynics out there, people who aren't used to thinking about Brand as a strategic business asset as something that's worth investing in worth nurturing and taking the long view on. So this is our agenda for today. We're looking forward to sharing it with you and I'll hand over to Eric to get us started.

Eric: Wonderful. All right, we can't have webinar without some interactive polls. So we're going to get things started with this question. We're going to be talking a lot today about Brand as an asset, Brand as an entity in which to invest.

And of course we do that every day with our decisions about what to do or not do with our brand. But there are also these more milestone type moments where we kind of rethink reposition, reimagine our brand. And so we're curious. When, when the last time you and your organization have done something like that just to kind of lay the foundation for our conversation, so we'll give you a few seconds to answer that

Dylan: It looks like a little window has popped up on my screen. So I think hopefully that should happen for everyone else

Eric: But we don't have voting privileges sadly, so we can't. Alright, so interesting we got a bunch within the last year within the last 2 years so fairly recently, and then kind of trails off as we get to a longer and longer time horizons. So that's good. This is a proactive group who's thinking about and investing in their brand as an asset. But I think even those who have who have done so recently especially those, maybe, who have been trying to make the case for a while.

Convincing leaders and stakeholders to give Brand a seat at the table, as we say here, can often feel like a standoff.

Even this notion of making the case, for it is not something many other departments or functions have to endure. But there's something about marketing and brand where we're needing to account for the ROI of every penny spent. And you know. Imagine if you had to do that with every new hire or every new product roadmap. Of course, we do think about these things thoughtfully. But there seems to be this extra standard of ROI and financial benefit that is unique to brand and makes for challenging and often confrontational conversations. And there are a lot of reasons for this, but we wanted to illustrate one important one in particular, through the lens of a real-life example, and through the lens of a brand we all know and love, and constantly, probably still use as an example, and that's Apple.

And you know all this talk of seats at tables and chairs made us think of Tim Cook here, sitting in his desk chair. I'm sure he has a lot on his mind these days, but one of the things we mentioned he's thinking about constantly is the value of the Apple brand, and in particular, like what is the value of the Apple brand relative to that lovely desk chair he's sitting in and that may sound like a silly question or facetious question. But it's actually quite interesting. When you start unpacking this. And through my research, I've uncovered that Tim Cook actually uses a human-scale freedom desk chair with a headrest.

Dylan: This is a rabbit hole Eric went down to find the exact chair.

Eric: You can find a Reddit thread about anything, I swear, but the price varies. But on average it's sort of in the $1,500, $1,200, $1,700 range. It's a really nice chair. And, of course, we have the value of the out brand, which again, there are many sources of brand valuations. We have our own methodology at Lippincott. I'm sure all of you are familiar with the various rankings and methodologies, but some of those methodologies have the Apple brand worth as much as one trillion dollars or a 3rd of its market cap.

So on the surface, it's sort of an obvious answer. Of course, the Apple brand, even though it's sort of amorphous and intangible, is worth more than that measly little desk chair. But you know, as the adage goes, you have to follow the money, and something interesting happens when we unpack these 2 assets in the context of actual financial accounting practices and the accounting and finance reality is that that chair exists on Apple's balance sheet in this property plant and equipment line item.

So a desk chair, a piece office, furniture or office in general, as real estate are thought of as assets to a company's balance sheet. Employees need chairs to sit in, to be productive and to be creative, and to do their job, and to create value for the company. And so, when a chair is purchased. It's accounted for as an asset that you know depreciates in value over its useful life.

But contributes to that total enterprise value of the company. Interestingly, the Apple brand is nowhere to be found on the balance sheet, and it's sort of this strange little quirk in accounting where, because the Apple brand is considered to be internally developed. That doesn't mean that Apple doesn't work with external partners to build its brand. But it's developed internally in that it's part of current operations and wasn't acquired through some kind of transaction. It's not considered. And because brands are both intangible and don't have a standardized method of evaluation. They're essentially kind of ignored and not included.

These financial documents are, in many ways, the source of truth for a company's growth and value. And so the reality, as preposterous as it may seem, is that in the eyes of accounting and of finance and of the standard language and tools of business. That chair is in some sense more real and more valuable than the Apple brand is and we think this explains a lot of the challenge of making the case for and investing in Brand, because the language and the methodology processes of contemporary finance and accounting don't have a standard of truly accounting fit in day-to-day operations and conversations.

There is a little bit of a wrinkle, though, when it comes to Brand in the context of finance and accounting, and this phrase from a Joni Mitchell song, I believe, is that "we don't know what we got till it's gone", because actually, when it comes time to sell off a business and its brand suddenly finance starts paying attention and wants to find a way of putting a dollar value on these precious intangible assets, and, in fact, Apple is another example of this. You may recall back in 2014 Apple acquired the company Beats, which was a manufacturer of headphones, and also a small but growing streaming platform at the time.

And it was about a 3 billion dollar transaction, which was quite large even back then. And interestingly the bulk of that 2.2 billion of it was allocated to a line item called Goodwill and goodwill is typically where acquirers account for that intangible brand value over and above the tangible assets that a company may have. So, of course, beats probably had some cash on hand. They had offices, they had their inventory of physical product, their headphones. But, as we can see from this split of 2.2 billion to goodwill out of 2.6 billion dollars paid by and large Apple realized it was buying something far beyond the tangible goods. It was buying the cachet and love that consumers had for beats at the time. It was the brand you wanted to be seen with.

They were, of course, also paying for talent and the relationships of the founders, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, and also for the future promise of leveraging its software and its brand and operations for its own streaming business.

So clearly, companies do understand that brands have value. It's just kind of a great tragedy of our system that it's only when it's time to get rid of one or bring one into the fold from external sources that we place that dollar value on the brand asset and it's our view that it's this infrastructure that creates a lot of problems and hardships for us as marketers and brand builders, and we'll get to some strategies we think effectively help get around it. But we also hope that there's sort of a groundswell of support to make Brand accounted for in finance and accounting standards, and there are some movements that exist for that to happen.

Another pause for a question. So we've talked about Apple. By some estimates about a 3rd of its enterprise value can be attributed to Brand based on some of those valuations, as we saw from the Beats acquisition. The vast majority of the value was in the intangible. We're curious from everyone in the group what your estimates are. Perhaps you know for sure, if you've done one of these exercises what percentage of your organization's value you'd attribute to Brand. Dylan how much of your worth, do you think is in your personal brand?

Dylan: Goodness me! Close to a hundred percent, probably.

Eric: Not much. There, there.

Dylan: No.

Eric: Let's see, yeah, so interesting to be coalescing around the 10 to 40 kind of hovering around the midway mark. And of course this varies by company and by industry. Even in B2B, though I think you'd be surprised when you look at some of these valuations, Brand can make up a significant portion of the enterprise value, particularly if you consider software and patents and IP as part of intangible value really interesting.

So you know, we know intuitively as consumers. We know from these ad hoc brand valuations that happen. We know from M&A activity that Brand can often be the single most valuable asset that our business has.

And yet it's still really really hard to make this business case, not just for investing in it, but for proactively thinking about it as one would. You know, a desk chair that starts to creak, or a factory that starts breaking down, or an office that can no longer accommodate its workforce properly. We want to inspire that kind of proactive asset, nurturing thinking when it comes to brand.

But one of my favorite quotes, I think, explains why that's challenging. In addition to these kind of financial roadblocks. It's that brands are kind of weird and complicated. Personally, it's why I'm so fascinated by them, and why I entered this industry. But they're fiendishly complicated, elusive, slippery, half real, half virtual things. They do make your head hurt if you start thinking about them deeply. And this is a quote from one of my industry heroes, Jeremy Bullmore.

But you know yes, it's hard, but we kind of have to suck it up and get used to understanding and prioritizing and nurturing the intangible. The reality is the bulk of the S. And P. 500 and most enterprises today are intangible. This isn't just brand, of course, and includes software and IP and patents. But leaders, and CEOs in particular. And CFOs can't deny the power of the intangible anymore when most of our businesses are built around technology. And so it shouldn't be that big of a leap to think about Brand in the same way.

A really interesting recent data point we stumbled upon was this survey of analysts so kind of financial analysts, who evaluate company value in different markets and categories. And even that group you know, all of these are pretty close. But even that group who, you would imagine, are the biggest sticklers when it comes to the tangible, and to putting a dollar value on something, cite the strength of brand and marketing as the number one. Most important thing they look for when appraising and analyzing an individual company or a market. And so we have all of these signals. That brand is indeed a valuable asset that needs to be prioritized. But even if you maybe don't buy the case for investing in it.

We see again and again the case for not investing in it before it's too late. These are 3 out of many, many examples that you know, very slowly, and then very quickly, literally disappeared from the landscape. And of course these are complicated cases. It's not just brand management. Their operational issues, leadership issues, etc. But we firmly believe that if we actually think about Brand properly and proactively, that you could avoid some of these instances of change coming too late.

We may have noticed creaks and cracks in the brands that we're looking at here, and made very tangible changes to the operating model, to the retail model to the marketing and communications model that may have helped reverse the decline. And we think Brand can be a powerful compass with which to do that, assuming, we can make the case that it should be treated as such by the most important stakeholders within business.

Dylan: Hello! All of that said leads us to the conclusion that is the title of this webinar, which is that really, you know, Brand needs a rebrand, and for many of us getting brand a seat at the table is the perennial challenge. Many non-marketing executives still don't recognize brand as a strategic tool and one of the most powerful upstream levers of growth and transformation. and we get it. You know, the CEOs of public companies are in the quarterly meat grinder investing in something that can take years and decades to find its full form and full value is difficult to reconcile with, you know, with short-term priorities. You know, CFOs, look for concrete ROI that can be very, very difficult to quantify in the longer term.

And, as Eric was saying, you know, Brand is often really the, you know, the crasher of finances party, and as fun as crashing parties can be, you know, converting your C-suite to the faith can be very, very difficult. And yet, you know, most executives intuitively recognize the value of a strong branch. I've never met a CEO who said, you know they don't want to build a strong brand, most say. Well, of course, I want a strong brand, of course I see the value. But you know, getting to the point of actually allocating capital means seeing Brand. Is that true strategic business asset. So you know, regardless of what's between the C and the O. In your title, you know, Brand is something that can be extremely helpful and valuable to you and the business. And the challenge is helping executives see that.

So we move on one more slide, one unlock that we found in the work that we do every day is that it's important to level, set on the expansive role that brand plays and create a common language with which to talk about it, because, you know yes, it really is sometimes that executives just don't have that common framing, that common language with which to talk about Brand in a productive way. And it's you know why we often see big transformational ideas get stuck and bottled up in the marketing silo, and never really permeate to other parts of the business. So you know, one really fundamental piece of framing is this notion of brand playing the role of both beacon and of a booster to the business. And you know we promised you some space metaphors, and here they are.

And this is in contrast to how Brand is so often seen, which is as a wrapper. Right? It's not something that propels the business. It's something that kind of you wrap what you do in, and it's you know it's it makes it seem attractive. It's the icing on the cake, but that is absolutely not. What's going to get capital allocated. So what do we mean by a beacon and a booster? Well it's essentially the push and the pull effect. So you know, as a beacon brand really has the power to tension the business towards a future state, you know, and in times of competition, complexity, uncertainty, you know, brands can really serve as that North star to help leaders filter focus capital allocation and prioritize. And, you know, going back to the you know, the slightly hackneyed Apple example. You can imagine the heyday of Apple kind of finding its place in the world and defining its strategy. You know Steve Jobs kind of standing at his whiteboard, gleefully crossing off things he didn't want to do because they weren't the right fit with the brand. And that's exactly what we're what we're talking about here. And conversely, you know, as a booster, a brand can really act as an accelerator. And this is about aligning your internal and your external story to get full credit for who you are today, and what you want to be in the future. You know, many clients come to us, and you know sometimes it's about transformation, and sometimes it's about defining something new and sometimes, frankly, it's the fact that they haven't been able to tell a story that gets them credit for what they're already doing. So that's also a really important dimension of how brand can add value to the business.

So if we move on one more, you know when we think about brand. In this way we realize that it really does have the power to level up almost every aspect of the business, and aligning on this more expansive role is what you know, we believe can really help unlock that leadership perspective, to see the value of brand differently.

And you know there are kind of 6 dimensions. This is not, you know, completely exhaustive, but I think in our experience there are 6 key dimensions where this is true, whether you're transitioning market perception. You know, you're actually trying to shift the way people think about your business, your products and services to drive growth. Whether you're trying to build new credibility. You know, leverage your brand into different areas and innovate in that way enable innovation from an internal perspective. So actually, really like the engine on creating new things, thinking about products and services and experiences in a different way. maximizing portfolio equity. So thinking about the relationships between your brands and the role, perhaps, of parent brands in relation to portfolio brands in ways that can lift all boats: drive strategic relationships, and finally lead as a talent destination. You know the power of brand to actually add value to a person's CV. The power of brand to attract the right talent at a lower cost is again another key reason why it can be so valuable.

So you know, with that said, Let's take a look at a few examples of these levers in action. So you know, one client we worked with relatively recently was Swarovski and they believe they could do more to become a true luxury brand, and our research showed that they really habituated entry-level price points and engaged in pretty substantial discounting of their own products, so unintentionally eroding their market positioning.

And so in working with them, we developed a strategy to really shift that center of gravity upmarket, setting a new vision and consequently transforming every touch point. Whether it was communication, retail strategy packaging, to make sure that they were communicating the right level of value to the consumer. And this is a great story of Brand being a real beacon for the business, setting the agenda, setting the aspiration, and then becoming that catalyst for transformation probably for Nokia if we move on one more you know, for many people Nokia was kind of a defunct mobile phone brand that peaked in the nineties but needed to create new credibility in B2B as a powerhouse that really powered the modern world from a telecommunications perspective. And in the beginning. They needed to tell that story without even having a product.

You know, this was really a case of repositioning a brand with extraordinary awareness globally into something quite different. So you know, by creating that fresh and highly distinct brand and expressing it in a very impactful way they were able to turn their brand, which could have been an impediment into a really powerful accelerant, and their leadership team was one that was very much enlightened to the value of brand and the value of Brand to help enable that shift. And this really wouldn't have been possible unless we had that powerful alignment at the very highest level of the organization.

Delta is another great example, you know. It's funny. I've worked with a lot of airlines in my career, and it's always amazing to me how little degrees of freedom airlines actually have to create differentiation. You know so much of what they do is kind of, you know common across multiple brands. You know, they share infrastructure that they're like 2 different. you know, ticket-issuing pieces of software. They're flying the same metal tubes around the sky.

And so, you know, the challenge in airlines is really finding those degrees of freedom and making the most of them, and Delta would come out of Chapter 11 and needed that North Star for transformation And we created a simple but immensely powerful construct for how to get there around this notion of saving time and enhancing time and that became the filter for everything that that Delta did. From a customer experience standpoint, and we create an entire innovation roadmap for them to transform the experience that really, you know, became a living artifact and is still used today. Most recently we worked with them to create Delta Sync as a new way to think about personalizing the travel experience again around the notion of saving time and enhancing time. But the power of brand there, particularly at the C-suite level, was to say, you know, was to create that clarity around. What is it we're going to deliver, you know. How do we allocate capital? How do we know when we're right?

Because we've got this really clear construct of what it is we want to deliver deceptively simple but incredibly powerful. Danaher, which is a client that both Eric and I worked on and is kind of, you know our baby in some way. Really had the question of how do we align leaders around the power of the Danaher brand to add leverage to a really diverse portfolio of businesses that have been activated with the investment community, but not necessarily with other stakeholders, and for the scientific community in particular, you know. Lack of clarity and awareness had perhaps hindered Danah's ability to excite emerging partners and attract talent and connect the dots across their portfolio. So here the unlock was really to define a brand strategy around this notion of innovation at the speed of life which clarified what the Danaher brand brought to the overall portfolio in ways that you know it never really had before and allowed the organization to build the brand as a clear point of leverage for all organizations within their portfolio. So this was again a story of aligning leaders around the role. The more expansive role that Brand could play that hadn't been. But although the business had been extremely successful, this was one lever that hadn't been that haven't been fully pulled.

Eric: And I think Dylan, with corporate brands like Danaher, we're seeing that investment in the brand beyond, just as a holding company and financial entity becoming more relevant and important these days

Dylan: Totally. So for Nucor, the challenge was really to take a highly differentiated ethos around, reducing the environmental impact of their products and use that to drive closer relationship with their customers. So the unlock was actually in telling their brand story alongside customers in different sectors and unlocking the ability of the brand to be a booster for perception and help them get credit for everything that they were doing in the market. So here Brand was about strengthening those strategic partnerships, as well as telling a more resonance and emotional story in a pretty unexpected category. You know, you don't really associate emotional storytelling with steel. And there aren't many steel companies that end up having a pretty impactful presence at South by Southwest. But that's exactly the kind of contrarian thinking around Brand that was embraced by their leadership team.

And finally Digikey. Which is a fantastic brand you've probably heard of. If you ever tried to prototype a new, a new product or piece of consumer electronics. But you know, they saw Brand as a really great opportunity to create a platform for growth into new areas, but also clarify their talent proposition, and by elevating the essential strength of their people. The passion for helping customers and problem-solving with them. They built their brand around a new tagline. We get technical which spoke to their attitude and ethos as a company as much as anything else. And you know, elevating that aspect of your talent proposition means that the brand really does pass the. You know, I'd wear that T-shirt test. And it's a great example of leveraging that fundamental truth in a highly authentic and resonant way. And again, you know, this was around the unlock of the leadership team around you know. What is it that really makes us special beyond what it is that we deliver every day beyond our you know strategic advantages beyond the moats that we've built? You know, as a supplier in our in our category. What is it that fundamentally makes us special and different. And how do we elevate that in a meaningful way?

So those are some great examples, and we have one more poll, which is to ask you. You know, when discussing the power of Brand with your C-suite. What dimension do you think would most would most resonate with them. When you think about those stories, and you think about using Brand as both a beacon and a booster. What are the what are the topics that you think have the power to kind of breakthrough and lead the conversation

Eric: Our final poll. How sad.

Dylan: All right. Couple more seconds here. Interesting, interesting. So really, you know. I think transition market perception. Obviously the clear leader there builds credibility in new spaces. I mean, that's definitely a kind of key growth agenda outcome that we. You know that we come across every day enabling innovation a little lower. That's quite surprising. That's as low as this. Well, very interesting.

Eric: I suspect innovation and kind of product development is one of those other functions that can sometimes seem not necessarily at odds with brand, but as a separate thing. So I'm not

Dylan: I'm not necessarily surprised to see that one lower down, but we also know it can be a really powerful.

Eric: Filter for innovation and starting point for inspiration.

Dylan: Yeah. And it. And it obviously also depends a lot of the time where innovation lives in the organization that can be sometimes be, if you're operating in a very engineering R&D led environment, brand can often see it seem like a very adjacent thing

Eric: Exactly.

Dylan: Very interesting. So you know, when we invest in and nurture brand to its full potential, you know, I think the big takeaways here are, you know, it has the power to focus and align the business towards reaching for those new frontiers, but also can accelerate the path to get there and create that clarity can create that focus. That allows us to, you know, to kind of you know, to be a booster and also get credit externally for all the things that we're doing. So that that really is the, you know, that really is the power of brand that we would want the C-suite to understand more fully.

And you know, if we look at the data, it's very important to look at the data, you know, having go-to status as we would define it in our brand aperture. Methodology brands that forge both emotional bonds and drive progress in people's lives, can create a great deal of value. So you know you think about connection as that storytelling, the way I perceive the brand, the way I feel about the brand. Do. I love this brand and progress, as you know, brands that kind of help us do things that perhaps we couldn't do before. You know, having that go-to status, can pay real dividends and ultimately deliver really extraordinary financial performance and resilience. It's this durability that we found plays out from a financial perspective across multiple categories across multiple Time series. And so again, while our accounting standards aren't very good at capturing this value as a strategic business asset unless it's in the context of a transaction, you know, unless we're selling something or buying something.

You know, the business leverage that can be gained from building a really strong brand is really borne out in the data and is durable across B2B and B2B as well. So it's a you know. These are kind of aggregate numbers. But you know, you can see that there's a clear financial case to be made as well.

Eric: Wonderful. So just to wrap a few takeaways we wanted to leave you with a simple mantra you know. One thing, I think is clear is that there is no simple answer or one kind of silver bullet metric that's going to make the case for Brand. We hope that we've shared some interesting data points that you can use in your own organizations and some framing and communication devices that can help tell the story of brand in a more compelling and tangible way for various stakeholders. But our mantra to leave you with is recalibrate, reframe, and reinvest.

So really think about how you can recalibrate leaders, expectations about the value of brand and position it in the context of other assets, that they may be more comfortable, wrapping their head around or investing a lot of dollars, and that might be office furniture. Or if you're in a manufacturing business, that might be your factory or even in any product-led business. R, and D, or IP, or patents they should get comfortable recognizing the intangible, and Brand is no different.

As Dylan just talked through. It's then important to reframe the impact of that asset on the business, letting it loose from the marketing department as challenging as that may be for our egos. We need to kind of share the wealth and show and paint a picture of how Brand can move the needle on all metrics for the organization, directly and indirectly, whether that's sales, finance, innovation, talent, or anything else. And when we do that successfully, people see it as an asset and a tool that they can use in their day-to-day roles, and not this thing that's being imposed on them, or that they have to do work to implement because of the marketing department or the CMO. And then finally with recalibration and reframing as the foundation.

We hope that that then creates the conditions to invest and reinvest in brand, to truly unlock its full potential for all of those stakeholders and organizations, and we think the best brand strategies become true platforms, or both blueprints for the entire company and for every employee to do their jobs better and to accelerate the momentum of the entire organization.

So that's all of our content. And we can take some questions. I did see one earlier about kind of stage of company, and how you position brand or invest in brand in sort of an earlier stage venture versus an established company which I find to be a really interesting topic. That's sort of what I faced at the farmer's dog. It was around 25, or 30 people when I joined when I left 4 years later. I think we had just crossed the 450 employee, mark and you know, I would say, if you have the opportunity to advocate for Brand and tell the story of its impact early on in a company's life that is really ideal, to kind of build, shared understanding, to create the right habits, and to establish it from the beginning before you have. You know, the pressures of the public markets and analysts really creates the foundation for success. That's not to say it's easy as we grew. It's still hard, particularly in a direct, to consumer business, to kind of embrace the healthy tension with performance and growth because believed strongly in Brand, and you were able to kind of lay the strategic foundation together. It became everyone's priority and responsibility, which of course, is a little bit harder to do when a company is huge and established to create that kind of alignment. It's possible, but it just takes a little bit more work.

As certain habits or ways of thinking and working cement themselves. Let's see, Dylan, any thoughts on industry, differences, and brand value. I mean, we covered a pretty wide range in our examples from B2B , B2C, but any insight on kind of industry, specific nuances, or tips?

Dylan: Yeah, I think you know it. It's kind of difficult to you know, to kind of generalize by industry, you know, it's often. You know. We see we see some of the challenges, you know, cut across industry, and B2B / B2C, and you'd be surprised how much a chemical company has in common with a CPG. Has, in common with an airline you know, when you really get down to the fundamentals but you know, I see another question here around you know, diffusing prickly COOs or CFOs, who just see Brand as fluffy words, I mean ultimately, I think it goes back to the question of how do we align on a common language and conceptual framing?

And you know, we've all come across plenty of kind of non-marketing executives. Who really do think of a brand as a kind of fluffy, amorphous nice to have, it's the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself. So you know, I would say, think about how you can reframe and restage brand in some of the ways that we've been discussing.

Think about how you can create that common language in the boardroom. That allow you to have a more productive conversation rather than having people immediately jump to "well, when I'm thinking about allocating capital, brand is just kind of the fluff and the icing rather than the cake".

Eric: I also saw a question about leader or incumbent versus challenger brands. And some of the implications of this topic. For those you know. I think the role of brand as beacon and booster applies to both, whether you're gunning for the leader or, you know, trying to maintain or shift your path as a leader incumbent and fend off those disruptors or challengers. Typically, though I think brand as beacon, tends to be more useful in larger established companies, where they may be resting on their laurels and kind of need. A new north star or an evolved North Star to rethink their business, you know, if you think back to CVS, for instance, kind of pivoting and reshifting into a health company rather than you know, a series of drugstores and pharmacy that was kind of that tectonic shift.

They needed to fend off competition and reassert their role as a challenger. I think it. It tends to be more about growth and execution, and their brand as booster can be a more powerful lens where you're telling the story of how Brand can differentiate and accelerate your tactics and executions to win. Dylan any thoughts on unifying the employer brand with the Enterprise brand? I think that's a topic we're very passionate about here at Lippincott. We like to say that you have just one brand sort of a false dichotomy to say you have an employer, brand, and enterprise brand. You have one brand with many different audiences that you need to kind of flex to, and you know, dial certain things up and dial certain things down. So we find that to be a compelling framing. Dylan any other thoughts on how you kind of overcome those 2 things being seen as separate employer versus enterprise?

Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I think the logic of, like the internal culture delivers, the external promise is really true here. And ultimately, you know, you have to think about it in terms of what are people going to put on their CV. What's the story they're going to tell about where they work, what's going to drive their pride in who their employer is. And so, you know, whereas the articulation and the reasons somebody might join an organization you know, can be different to why customize my product or service. Ultimately those 2 things should be. Pretty much 2 sides of the same coin is what we would typically say

Eric: And then I see a question about articulating long-term value and ROI during periods of financial uncertainty when the focus tends to shift towards cost-cutting. You know, I mean some of the data points we've shared like the chart on the right. Here was meant to show how important, continued Brand investment can be in downtimes where yes, everything's going down, but things go down less for strong brands who have that foundation of trust, and stability, and loyalty that are built from ongoing. Brand investment. And I think there, there is also evidence that. You know, brands who totally shut off their brand investment and their brand marketing activity, and in downtimes for the economy tend to have a tougher time regaining momentum and stature when things pick back up.

So again, if we are just thinking about brand and marketing as an expense, it becomes an easy thing to cut but if we can successfully frame and position it as a true asset that hopefully changes the conversation, and it's not seen, as you know, a cost, you can cut in the same way that you know, you wouldn't simply kind of shut down a core kind of product development. Pipeline, for instance. that that could unlock future revenue growth.

Alright. How would you advise a leadership team on prioritizing brand investment when there are material delivery product issues that need to be addressed should Brand come after resolving these things at the same time? That is a great question. The danger is for Brand to become, as Dylan said, kind of a wrapper or a veneer that you know is meant to mislead or hide product issues or lack of product and experience differentiation. So it, I think it. It would make sense to kind of sort out the fundamental. You know, functional operational issues. because, you know, that contributes to and can erode brand value as well. So I would say, sort those out first, or at least kind of in tandem with thinking about what your brand stands for and represents at large. The other point there is that when you have successfully built brand connection and progress, and have that go to status. You get a lot more goodwill and forgiveness from your audiences. Another brand we've worked on is Southwest Airlines. And they used a really interesting data point internally to prove the value of their brand strength, which is they tend to lose about as many bags. I know. Bags on Southwest is a source subject at the moment, but they tend to lose as many bags as other airlines like United, but get far fewer complaints for doing so on. Sort of a per-incident basis. And that's just sort of one small but really meaningful way that brand creates that resilience and protective tissue for the business and the operations at large.

Okay, how do you help marketers see the importance and value of leading the aspects of brand that rest outside their typical purview? So much of brand experience rests in environments, workwear product, HR. And all the other areas. How do you help them lead this transformation through the organization? Dylan? I think you're sort of the brand whisper among many of our clients.

Dylan: It's interesting. I mean, there's kind of 2 approaches to this, you know. One is to say, actually, it's about going bottom up and you know, consulting with all of those different areas, helping them on an individual basis. Really understand? You know what Brand can bring to them, how brand can create alignment and focus. You know, across all of those different functions, and really telegraphing to them the importance of doing so when you think about how the brand is experienced externally. The other way, quite frankly, is, you know, when you have the buy-in of the CEO, the CEO has, you know, in that role can unite people unlike, you know, any other executive in the organization and so, having that really strong sponsorship from the very top is, you know, often the most effective way to align those functions outside of the, you know, outside of the marketing silo. So you know everything that we've said today. I think kind of plays into this idea that having that strong CEO sponsorship having brand, you know, owned by the entire C-suite, not just by marketing is how you start to get that broader buy in.

Eric: Wonderful. Well, I think that is a wrap. Thank you everyone for joining us for your questions and engagement, and we hope we've left you with some things to think about, and some tools and strategies to use, and we look forward to seeing and hearing from you soon. Thank you.

Dylan: Thanks everybody. Have a good day.