Bob Sheard: So understanding the effects, you can see that starts to define the role of the brand or the role you adopt. So the role you adopt is really the core personality of the brand. It's what shapes the brand's character and addiction to that character. So examples for that are within personality.

A great example is the work we did with Renault Trucks. Our observation with Renault Trucks was that the truck driver loves their job but hates the fact that everybody on the road hates him. So they do amazing things, but they love their job. They hate the fact that everyone hates them and they also hate the fact that their role and their job had a high degree of freedom and independence. They were the first ones to leave the village to step over the horizon, but now the big guys; Scania, Mercedes and Volvo were doing everything they could do to automate that profession. So they were completely monitored and recorded when they went for a bathroom break at HQ. So they hated the level of restrictions. But what we said is actually we should be venerating the driver. Everything, your coffee in the morning has been delivered by a truck driver. Your beer in an evening has been delivered by a truck driver. The stage that you go and watch at a festival, the culture that you go see, everything on that stage has been delivered by a truck driver.

More fundamentally, if you're in hospital, the medicines have been delivered, the construction materials to build that hospital have been delivered by a truck driver. If you're in a maternity ward, all the equipment has been delivered by truck drivers and it's been delivered during the evening, when you're asleep, when you're resting they're at work. It's a very honourable profession and we should venerate it. We shouldn't be building a product that automates the truck driver, because if they could, they would.

At Renault, we said we should go against that. We should challenge that convention and we should honour the truck driver. We should celebrate what they do. We should take our responsibility to communicate the power and the positivity of what they do that enables us all to live the lives that we live. We should design a truck that makes them proud to be a truck driver, because if we design a truck that makes them proud to be a truck driver, they'll drive that truck better. There'll be less servicing, they'll stay in their job more, so there'll be less recruitment and less training and effectively, that truck becomes a profit centre for the haulier. With motivated truck drivers, our job at Renault was to get them from number five to number four, and we did that through that positioning and through that personality. The challenger role that challenged with the great product, and it challenged the convention of the status quo.

We achieved a similar effect with a whiskey brand called Nc'nean, where we understood that this was a brand that had an amazing founder in Annabelle Thomas, who was a woman that wanted to challenge the conventions of the whiskey establishment by creating a whiskey that was inclusive, that didn't follow the masculine codes of the whiskey establishment and that would create a difference and that would be more accessible to all sorts of people, including women. We didn't want to go in the same way as Renault, as hard, but we wanted to be different.

We wanted to be outside the culture of whiskey and change things from the outside. In doing the research, we realized that actually distilling was brought to Scotland through a marriage, via the Queen of Antrim, to one of the Scottish clans in the 11th century, and with her she brought distilling that the clans of Ireland had brought over from the Middle East, and so therefore, actually distilling was introduced to Scotland by a woman, the Highland Queen of Spirits, who we called Nc'nean that was a shortening of her name, which is Ncnea Shalom, and so we branded it Nc'nean Highland Queen of Spirits, and we built the role around the purist, so using all the authentic botanicals that went into the product, the herbs etc and the aromatics. We designed those at moonlight because it was going to be a biodiverse product, so it was going to be sensitive to Mother Nature and it was going to create a more accessible drink, the first organic distillery I think it was. Anyway, it's won every award going since its launch and it's just shows an alignment of personality and role to create the effect of authenticity and it's done really well.

You know, the other most valuable company in the world in its day, maybe still is, is Apple. Again, it's role as challenger. It's now currently the establishment, but it grew up as the challenger and it being a gesture of difference and through the campaign 'Think Different' shows that actually you can, through your choice of role, effect a powerful effect on the consumer, which in their case was inspirational. So the personality and the role is really, really important because it drives the emotional content of the consumer which we can then start to explore with the other components that come within the personality.

Michael Campion: I can see how the emotional effect that one is trying to engineer affects the role that one should adopt. Question for you - Do you think that a lot of your clients, when you first engage with them, are even aware that they're chasing an emotional effect? No. No, I would imagine. A lot of the time it's almost a byproduct and it's not the starting point.

Bob Sheard: No, it's because and then, in not acknowledging that they're designing an emotional connection, they are closing half the toolbox to help generate revenue, profitability and value, because half of what we do is driven by our emotions. Half of how we evaluate things is emotional as well as rational. We feel as well as think. So in not acknowledging the emotional component of their brand and their product, then they're shutting down feelings and they're shutting down beliefs. Those are hugely powerful things to marshall if you're trying to tell stories.

Michael Campion: Completely, and with Renault, especially in the flipping of the narrative surrounding truck drivers is great. For me, this is all about finding the profound and the profane and the mundane. Again with Nc'nean, similarly, it's anthropomorphizing brands and we relate to people. We don't relate to product. So I think putting the truck driver at the centre, putting the female distiller and the Highland Queen of Spirits at the centre, is something that adds huge amount of value to a brand.

Bob Sheard: Yeah, and it's left brain, right brain stuff. So when we talked about emotionally venerating the truck driver and the haulier is like "why", and it's like “it's going to save you money, mate, it's going to save you money because you're going to need less truck drivers because they'll stay in their jobs longer. They're going to drive their truck much more carefully, which means less servicing, them in their jobs longer mean you don't need to train as many truck drivers. It means that you don't have to spend money on maintenance. It means that actually when you come to sell that truck it will be worth more because it's been driven more, with more reverence. So actually your truck becomes a profit centre”. That's why you need to get your arms around the driver and so you could see where you the interplay between the emotional narrative and the rational narrative is really important.