Michael Campion: You're listening to How To Build A Brand and I'm your host, Michael Campion. This masterclass in brand design was born of a desire to share, to share the knowledge and expertise that Fresh Britain have developed over the course of 25 years as an agency headquartered in London, helping to shape some of the world's biggest and most iconic brands. Now, not everyone has the budget to engage the services of one of the world's most cutting-edge creative agencies. When you're a young startup, of course, capital is scarce and every dollar counts, and whilst no masterclass could ever completely level the playing field, the hope is that there is some hard-won wisdom here, that meaningfully bridges that knowledge gap between the giant global brands and the young startups that hope to one day rival them. So what do we hope you'll take away from this masterclass? We hope that you'll learn the foundational building blocks of an engaging and successful brand. We hope that you'll learn how to create a brand code that is addictive and valuable and true. We hope that you'll be equipped with more tools and more confidence in your brand strategy. Most importantly, we hope that it will teach you not what to think, but how to think and how to ask the right questions in order to unlock the most compelling brand vision possible. Your guide on this journey is none other than Bob Sheard. Bob is the co-founder of Fresh Britain and is at the tip of the spear when it comes to brand design and brand strategy. What you're about to hear is a curation of several hours of conversations that Bob and I had over the latter stages of 2022. And we begin with Bob answering the question what is brand strategy? I hope that you enjoy this as much as we enjoyed creating it. Make sure you take copious amounts of notes and I will catch up with you on the other side.

Bob Sheard: Brand strategy touches many different facets of a brand or a company. It is the intersection of communication design. It's the intersection of graphic design, product design, commercial strategy design. It touches storytelling, it touches corporate culture. It's really the epicenter of how a company orients itself and how a company uses its brand to interface with the consumer. When we are asked to start a brand design for a company, it's usually catalyzed by four questions, which is; what is our purpose, what are our beliefs, what are our values and what's our story? And we find the answers to those questions by looking at the consumer and defining how they make their decisions. We know that 85% of human decision making is in our subconscious. Theoretically, 85% of human consumption is driven by our subconscious. The reason for that is we feel quicker than we think. We feel that we want something seven times quicker than we are thinking whether we can afford it. So when we're designing a brand and when we're creating a brand strategy, we have to do so in the knowledge that we're creating a story that should already exist in the consumer's subconscious, but it should be a story that not only exists there but they want to be part of. So that's the starting point really for brand strategy and brand design. If we get it right, then it has the almost magical quality of making something like intangible creativity, tangible. If we get brand design right and we make it compelling, then that will recruit people to the brand and to the company. And if you recruit people to the brand and to the company, you drive turnover, because more people come, more people buy things. If we make it addictive, then what we do is we transform the relationship that the brand has with those people so it becomes episodic over time and it becomes serial in nature. So it goes from, say, core products to non-core products and that means that addictive brand design makes companies and brands more profitable. And then if we make it moving and we establish the emotional connection, that will drive value. So, for example, when a company or a brand is wanting to drive value, they're trying to create a financial profile that's oriented around a value creation strategy. They're trying to create a value proposition that's fundamental to their customers and they're trying to fit that within the macroeconomic context that they see within. All of those are very important, but if we can add an emotional layer and an emotional connection to those, then we can do one really important thing, which is to emotionalize the multiple and when brands come to create value, it's a function of the multiple times their profit. So if we can emotionalize the multiple and drive that, then we can have a really transformational effect on enterprise value. So we've created compelling design that's driven turnover, we've created addictive design that's driven profit and we've created moving brand design that emotionalizes the multiple, a nd all of those things drive enterprise value. But there are some really important component parts that go to drive turnover and that's all about the positioning. In terms of driving profitability, it's all about the component parts of the personality and then, in terms of driving the multiple, it's about the component parts of a brand and a company's purpose.

Michael Campion: So before we dive into the positioning, the personality and the purpose, the three P's, if you will, let's go back even one step when you talked about the human subconscious. If 85% of our decision making lives there, what is it about human evolution that makes us natural born storytellers, and how can we engineer brand design to affect the subconscious? Where do those stories live inside us?

Bob Sheard: It's quite simple. It's sort of an immutable fact that we are the only species on Earth that tells stories. So if you take our closest relative, chimpanzees, for example, they are unaware of other chimpanzees outside their immediate community. So, for example, if you have three to 400 chimpanzees in Rwanda, they're unaware of another three to 400 chimpanzees that live across the lake in Tanzania. And so, as a consequence of that unconsciousness of other communities, they don't have the ability to tell stories and therefore they don't have the ability to create unified meaning and then organize. So in human evolution, it's our ability since we sat by campfires to tell stories, to create meaning. That means that we have things in common with people that don't share the same geography as us. So, in a very simplistic terms, a Roman Catholic in West Yorkshire will have meaning systems in common with a Roman Catholic in Uganda. A British person in Northern Ireland will have a meaning system in common with a British person in Cornwall, in much the same way that an American in New York has a similar meaning system or a meaning system in common with an American in California. And so it's our ability to tell stories that create these meaning systems that enable us to organize, and that level of organization has helped us build civilizations with things in common, religions with things in common, companies, nations and even now, brands. So it's the ability to tell stories that enables us to evolve as a species and as civilizations and as nations, and consumers. We're all told stories from childhood, we've all read stories at bedtime. We have all consumed stories through TV, we go to the theatre, we go to the cinema, and these stories and these narratives tend to repeat, such that we're able to look at the ones that do repeat, that become archetypally ingrained in our memories and our subconscious and we're able to leverage off those to create brand stories or, indeed to create other stories that we might consume through culture, through TV or film.

Michael Campion: Absolutely, and you see the same stories and narratives and archetypes, as you say, emerging in different parts of the planet at different times, between and across people who have no awareness of one another, much like the chimpanzees, right? If we go back thousands of years in the course of your research at Fresh Britain, when you are engineering this brand design process, what are just one or two maybe examples of the most interesting examples of cultural archetypes or these kind of a global, global subconscious narratives that emerged?

Bob Sheard: Well, I think it's underpinned by the fact that, doesn't matter where you are on the Earth, emotional language is the same. So I probably share very little in common with a guy in Beijing, but we both feel happiness, we can both feel sadness, we can both feel desire, we can both feel detest. We have the same universal emotional feelings. Now that might be the landing point, but the trigger points can be culturally different. So, for example, we can both feel inspired and we can both feel inspired by, say, a rebel narrative, someone who takes from the few to give to the many. So in my tradition, in Anglo Saxon tradition, that would be Robin Hood. If I'm connecting to someone in Scandinavian tradition, that would be Leninakan and if it's connecting to someone in North America, that person's Geronimo. So whilst the subject of the story may culturally change depending on its region, the actual narrative is the same and the emotional effect is the same. We all feel the same universal human emotions. It's the trigger points that are different and we have to be cognizant of that when we're building brands.