Michael Campion: So let's dive a little bit into the personality component. How do you deconstruct personality for the brands that you work with?

Bob Sheard: It's basically the fundamental question is what's the emotional effect we're designing? What do you want your consumers to feel when they interface with your brand, whether they interface with your brand by wearing a product or whether they see a piece of communication, what's the single thing that you want them to feel?

Once we understand that feeling that is universal, we can move back from that feeling and say who is the right narrator to tell the right stories to generate that feeling. So what we're looking at is the effect. So what we ask is, first of all, what's the emotional effect that's going to shape an addiction to the cathartis that a brand creates for its consumer? So when someone interfaces with a brand, they change condition.

A brand in many ways represents the bit that's missing from their character, that they wish was there. And so before they interface with a brand, they're one condition, and once they've interfaced with the brand, they're another condition, and that's the emotional effect. So once we understand that emotional effect, we know we're onto something where we can shape an addiction to this level of cathartis of change. And that takes us to the brand role.

Why that's so important is that takes us to the values of a brand. Now, the values of a brand, you can divide into two. There are the rational values of a brand that talk a lot to the product and there are the emotional values that talk to a lot to a brand's character. Now, it's the rational values that shape the addiction to need why do we need that product and it's the emotional values that help shape the addiction to want why do we want that product, why do we want that brand? What we also try and do is we try and design a high level of charisma into our brands, and what we have to do for do that is we're designing a idea around being addicted to conviction and an idea around being addicted to charisma.

How we do that is we try and articulate what a brand stands for. So when we're articulating what a brand stands for, we really are shaping the consumer's understanding of the brand's conviction. And then, when we're articulating what the brand stands against, that's what we're articulating in terms of a brand's charisma. Stand for and stand against are very important because they, like a human being who is charismatic, show you that the brand can stand up and stand out for something can lead. We follow leadership, so that's why those are really important. And finally, the brand role takes us to three really important territories that enable us to activate with the consumer. No brand owns all the places in a consumer's life. No brand owns all the time of a consumer's life. No brand owns all the rituals, but you can own one.

And so when we define a brand role, it takes us to the key place that you own in the consumer's life how we can get addicted to that place. So that might be the place of getting ready, or it might be the place of inspiration, or it might be the place of creativity, but it's a specific place. It then takes us to the time in a consumer's life as well. We don't own all their lives, but we might own a certain time of the day or a certain time of the week or a certain ritualistic time.

And then there's the rituals, which are where we start to interface and the brand becomes inculcated in our daily lives, daily rituals. So that might be the ritual of transformation in the bathroom, it might be the ritual of preparation before you go into the sports pitch, but it's really important that we define the place, the ritual and the time, because that's when we're defining the role of the brand in the life of the consumer. So, brand role, which is driven off the brand effect, takes us to the rational values for need, the emotional values for want, charisma driven by what we stand against, conviction by what we stand for, and then the place, ritual and time that we own in the life of the consumer.

And once we've got those, then that creates an addictive personality for the brand. The one that we really worked hard on is another super brand from Vancouver called Arcterix, and we were able to create a personality for Arcterix in 2011. They were around 100 million in revenue and we wanted to create the emotional territory of trust that this was a brand whose magic was in its products.

This was a brand who lived in balance with nature, but this was going to be a brand that we had to create addiction to, and we did through the place of creation, through the rituals of creation and the time of creation, and we were able to transform its revenues from 100 million to 650 million by 2020 through getting an addictive relationship to its personality and that relationship being on the narratives of trust through the lens of the craftsman as a role.