Michael Campion: So let's loop that back to the three P's of positioning, personality and purpose. How will we be using positioning, personality and purpose to touch those emotional triggers?

Bob Sheard - So positioning, the components of positioning, are really important, and the mistakes brands make with their positioning is they try and have a broad positioning to cover as many consumers as possible, as many geographies as possible and as many products as possible. And as they stretch their positioning across all those things, the brand becomes more opaque, it becomes less logical, it becomes less understandable. So really, what we urge brands to do is really narrow their positioning, to broaden their appeal, and the position is a function of the brand world. What's the world that the brand occupies? That defines the brand sector. The second piece is the brand's authority, which is the compelling expertise or knowledge that the brand has to be in that sector, that it knows of itself. The third thing is then the reason to believe. What's the reason that consumers will believe that that brand has a rightful position in that sector? That's connected to its authority. Then the next few things are kind of important. We have to understand that a brand can't win everything all at once, so it has to do some things the same as others, as good as others, and some things better. So that's what takes us to the brand essence, which defines the compelling brand difference, and we then have to then move to what's the product essence that defines the compelling product difference, and then understanding the sector hygienes. What are the sector hygienes that are our points of parity, that we do the same as the sector, and then what are the critical differences, the single thing that we're remembered for that's different. And once we get the brand world, authority, reason to believe, product and brand essence, points of parity and points of difference articulated for a brand, then that gives us a positioning. That positioning can become compelling because that will recruit revenue. If you narrow the focus, it will broaden its appeal. The brand where we worked on in 2007. Where that really came to the fore was the French outdoor brand Salomon. In 2006/7 it had been sold by Adidas to a Finnish holding company called Amer, and Amer realized that they had a really powerful brand turning over 300 million at the time. But it was a brand whose people were somewhat lacking in confidence. They'd been through multiple sale processes and i t had lost its way. It was pivoting off a lifestyle proposition called fuel your instincts. The communication design had just been done on a photo shoot in Iceland using models, creating a kind of lifestyle proposition to fuel your instincts. And what we said actually in our research that this is a brand that lives in the French Alps. It's a brand that has over 1000 people that live and work in the French Alps and they're designing products for mountain sport innovation. In its archives it had over 8,000 patents for mountain sport innovation and when we researched that, that was four times more than Adidas that had just sold it and it was twice as many as NASA. So absolutely extraordinary amount of innovation and what we understood was it was also a brand that did soft goods and hard goods. It operated on both the front side of the mountain in formalized skiing, such as the Olympic ski races, but also on the backside of the mountain, in snowboarding and backcountry skiing, and it existed there in every season of the year. So it was truly the mountain sports company. So positioning it as the mountain sports company, moving away from a lifestyle proposition and saying "this isn't lifestyle, this is their life. Then we were able to see it transform and it went from in 2008, with a turnover of 300 million, to 10 years later, almost touching a billion at 900 million of revenue. So just showing that you can win the battle without firing a shot. It doesn't need the big ad campaign, but get the positioning right. It's anchored in the truth of who you

Michael Campion : Totally, and so often as business has combination hands in terms of ownership, they drift further and further from their essential truth, which at, Salomon, was not that they're a lifestyle brand, as you put it, but they're far more of an innovation and tech company, with all those patents that they held. It goes against every instinct as well, doesn't it, of every single business owner out there. When it comes to the total addressable market, everyone wants that to be as big as possible in their pitch deck, don't they? They're very unwilling to sacrifice any addressable market, but, as you said, it's so important, isn't it to sacrifice something, to, as you say, narrow your pitch, that you can broaden your appeal.

Bob Sheard: Well, in some ways you have to, you have to create if a brand gets stuck it has to create the space to be able to move in and out of opportunities and challenges. The thing with a brand like Salomon and it's so common in other brands is a goldfish can't see its own water. So if you look at a goldfish, it's in, it's in a goldfish bowl and it can't see its own water. It's only when you're outside the goldfish bowl, looking in, that you can see the water. That supports the goldfish's life and actually seeing it from that context, when you look at a brand like Salomon and they don't really see as being extraordinary the fact they live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, they ski when it snows, you know, they create these most wonderful products and they have this amazing culture of innovation and communal support for the company that they can't see it because they're in it, and it sometimes takes someone from the outside to actually say that what you believe is ordinary is extraordinary. The way you live is extraordinary and that's something that you don't need to create an artifice of. It just exists. You don't need to create a lifestyle from it because it is your life. You just need to repotage it and let the world into it, and that's what we did with Salomon. It's a phenomenal company.