Michael Campion: The next protocol is called for and against. What does a brand stand for and what does a brand stand against? Deciding on this stance and sticking to it is what breathes some charisma into your brand. As the old adage goes, if you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything. Let's hear from Bob.Speaker 2: 0:19

Bob Sheard: Charisma is from the same root word as character. It's about revealing the meaning of a person. And to understand the meaning of a person or the meaning of a brand, we've really got to excavate what they stand for and what they stand against. What they stand for creates conviction. The first emperor of Rome that wasn't a soldier was Cicero, and his mantra was that 'nothing convinces like conviction'. So even if you're wrong, if you've got conviction, people will follow, and so conviction is really important in a brand, and then that's derived from what you stand for. But what you stand against defines your charisma, because what you stand against helps you stand up and stand out for something. Why that's important is take a room of people and ask them their favourite film character. I'd put my house on the fact. No one says Mary Poppins. And the reason why Mary Poppins never comes up when you say "what's my favourite film character is because she's just 'good'. There's no edge, there's no dark side. What does come up is Vito Corleone, Walter White, Tony Soprano, people that have a dark side and an edge. Now that doesn't mean to say a brand has to have a total dark side, but we do need night and day, we do need light and shade. We need the shade to help us understand the meaning of the light, and so we need to understand what brands stand against. And we know, with some of the most iconic brands, they stand against complacency.

You know, Steve Jobs famously made his designers redesign the inside of the computer that no one would see, so that it was as beautiful as the outside of the computer. Because he stood for something like Zen poetry, you know, it's like Nike don't stand for losing. You know they don't stand for mediocrity. Hermes don't stand for mundanity, you know they stand for beauty. So it's very important that we understand what people stand against, but also important that they communicate it. So they stand up and they stand out, and we have to design that into our brands, not just into our communication, but we have to design charisma into product.

So one of the brands that we worked with is 2XU, which was invested in by the LVMH group through L Catterton, and we said that you're a compression brand, you're about recovery, you're about fearless training, but you stand complacency, against complacency complacency in product design, complacency in product development, complacency In training, complacency in performance. You stand relentlessness, for relentlessness relentless innovation, relentless design, relentless training, relentless performance and similarly you see in other sectors, like in beer, most brew dog Red and Bull red bull. They stand against the status quo, you know, they stand for change. So building that into both the product and into the comms is a really important thing. And you can see in Nike, you can see in 2XU, you can see in Brew dog, you can see in Red Bull. That charisma sits at the heart of their brand design, their communication design and their product design. It's unmissable. Totally, totally.

Michael Campion: I think there's also a huge internal culture component to charisma. Isn't there as well what you stand for and what you stand against? Like that example you used of Steve Jobs wanting the inside of the computer to be as beautiful as the outside. No one else will see it, but he'll know. He'll know what it looks like on the inside, and it's hard to fake passion, isn't it?

Bob Sheard: Yeah, and trust me. We've been there. When we did Volvo defence, which lives in France. It's fundamentally a French company in terms of its culture, and we've had the privilege of working for many, many French companies, and one of the characteristics of A French culture is it's quite resistant to change, but it's resistant to it in a unique way, which is If they have a hundred percent. Also, if they have 80% of the information and 50% says change and 30% says don't change. In an Anglo Saxon culture, change. In a French culture, you wait for the remaining 20% to validate the decision. So, in a French culture, is really noble to think about something. Where is, in an Anglo Saxon culture, is noble to do something? So when we did Volvo, we were killing five brands within Volvo defence, massive change, all people whose business cards for 10 years of their life had said either Volvo, Mac, ACMAT, Panhard or Renault Trucks, and we were destroying those elements of Volvo to create a new brand, which was Arquus. But what we were able to do is say, ok, this is a company that crafts defence mobility systems for warriors. So it's a company of craftsman. And so, in turning them into a company of craftsman that make for the elite warriors of the world. We were able to transform the culture into a company of craftspeople so that when we did the measurements on the adoption of the new positioning, it was at north of 98% of French people within that company adopted the new positioning, which is unheard of, because they got a shared meaning system around their role rather than around their company name, and that was a really powerful thing.