Michael Campion: Talk to me about reflections and aspirations. If we can call this brand protocol number three.

Bob Sheard: Yeah, the really important thing for those out there that are designing a brand is to realise that, in many cases, a brand is not a mirror of the consumer. And this is really important as more and more brands are using user-generated content, which is brilliant in terms of generating community, but they have to understand that that's not all of their brand. A brand is not a mirror of the consumer's life. A consumer wants to be a better version of themselves. That's what they're striving for and they're striving to use brands to express that better version, that better trajectory, that ambition for themselves. So a brand must be an aspirational reflection of that.

So you know, the reality is that I'm not sure if Calvin Klein actually had a six pack or not, but most of the people that wear Calvins don't, but they want to, and so, as a brand, that's a really strong, very rudimentary piece of communication that reflected an aspiration, and what's really powerful about that is when we've done it is with Arc'teryx.

We knew that Arc'teryx was not going to be a happy reflection of consumers enjoying happy days in the outdoors. What we wanted  Arc'teryx to be was a brand that was about maximum simplicity at the point of optimum need. So we needed to create an aspirational reflection of that that showed the consumers at the point of impending doom but being in full control of that situation and having the fearlessness to handle the situation with a product that enabled them to do it, made by people that had been in that situation before. So it very much reflected an aspirational aspect of the consumer's ambition for themselves, not the potential reality. Do you want to talk about that Arc'teryx workshop here? Yeah, a kind of key element in the  Arc'teryx workshop was the discussion about whether  Arc'teryx were a craftsman brand or a warrior brand, and when we asked them the question initially, most of the room wanted to be a warrior brand and one guy in the room had his hand up and said we're not a warrior brand. In fact, three weeks before, SEAL Team Six had flown into Pakistan and dispensed of Bin Laden, and I think there were over 40 military personnel on those two helicopters. All of them were using Arc'teryx kit. So Arc'teryx could not lay claim to having dispatched Bin Laden, but they could lay claim to having equipped the guys that did, and so that really told us that they were the craftsmen equipping the warrior rather than being the warrior themselves, and that led to the development of the brand meaning system around craftsman and trust that helps build the brand to become the international icon it is today.